She was being discarded as not important enough to invest any more time on.
Just as her parents had been.
She had been forced to stand back and watch her parents lose their tea gardens when the money had run out and the powers that be had refused to wait until the tea could be harvested and sold before pulling the plug.
A one-family tea-growing business had not been a priority customer. Not worth their time. Not worth their money. Not worth spending time to get to know who they were and how they had invested everything they had in that tea garden.
She had been a teenager back then and struggling to cope with the relentless exhaustion of training in a professional kitchen after she’d left catering college, powerless to do anything to help the people she loved most.
Her parents had come through it. They had survived. But their dreams had been shattered and scattered to the winds.
Well, history was definitely not going to repeat itself when it came to her life.
Nope. Not going to happen. Not when she was around.
What made it even worse was that it was Sean who was giving her the big brush-off. What had happened to the man who’d been happy to give her a cuddle only a few hours ago after listening to her life story? Now that same Sean was only too willing to pass her off onto an underling to deal with, so that he could get rid of her and get back to his real job.
No doubt there was some terribly important business meeting that required his attention and he could not possibly waste any more time with the simple matter of a conference booking.
It was such a shame. Because, standing there in his fitted suit, pristine shirt and those cheekbones—lord, those cheekbones—he looked delicious enough to eat with a spoon and a dollop of ice-cream on the side.
Shame or no shame, she recognized the signs only too well. And if he thought for one second that he could get rid of her that easily, he was badly mistaken.
‘Oh no,’ Dee said in a loud voice which echoed around the reception area, making several of the men in suits glance in their direction. ‘Big misunderstanding. I obviously have not made myself clear. No business card; I am not going down that route.’
Then she tilted her head slightly to one side and shrugged before carrying on in a low, more intimate voice, confident that she now had his full attention.
‘You screwed up. Big time. So now I have to reprint all of my promotional materials and contact loads of exhibitors to let them know about the new venue. Posters, flyers, postcards to tea merchants and tea fanatics. All have to be done again. Then I have to go back to all of the tea shops and online tea clubs with the new details with only a week or so to go. That’s a lot of work to get through, and I have a full-time job at Lottie’s.’
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. ‘Prakash is a pal, but he does not have the level of authority to spend the cash and resources to make all of those things happen and happen fast. It seems to me to point one way. I am going to need that five-star Beresford service from the man at the top.’
Dee fluttered her eyelashes at his shocked face and there was a certain glint in those blue eyes that was definitely more grey than azure. ‘You are not off the hook yet, Mr B. In fact, I would say that this is only the start of the project. Now, here is an idea. Shall we talk though the next steps on the way back to your office? You must be very excited about this opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to customer service. And there is an added bonus: we will be working together even longer! Now, isn’t that exciting?’
* * *
Sean shrugged into his coat and double-checked the long string of emails before popping his smart phone into his pocket. Apparently the Beresford hotels around the world did not have anything so urgent that he needed to jump on a plane and take off at a minute’s notice. So, no excuse. He glanced back towards the conference centre.
Dee was still talking to the scariest office manager in the company, and from the laughter coming out of her office they were getting on like a house on fire.
It was first time he had ever heard Madge laugh.
Almost six feet tall and built like a professional rugby player, his very well-paid, über-efficient and organized manager terrorised the reception areas on a daily basis, ruthlessly checking every guest bill, and even his brother Rob had been known to hide when he heard that Madge was chasing up his expenses.
This was turning out to be one hell of a day of firsts and it was not over yet.
Of course, he had tried to convince Dee that he was already committed to making her event a success.
Sean had introduced Dee to three of the full-time conference organizers who took care of event management, and both of the office admin ladies who provided the VIP business concierge service. They had demonstrated their fax and photocopying equipment; their digital scanners and super-fast laser colour printers; their spreadsheets and floor plans; their menu cards and delegate stationery.
And Dee had smiled, thanked them for their time, promised each of them free tea samples and refused to budge one inch.
In fact, if anything the list of items she had written out in her spidery handwriting on the conference pad she had snatched from his desk was getting longer and longer by the minute.
Madge would sort it out, he had no doubt about that, and he had already asked her to make it her top priority.
But there was no getting away from the fact that Dee Flynn was not a girl who gave up easily.
Sean chuckled low in his throat and shook his head. He could not help but admire her for having the strength to stand up and demand what she believed he owed her.
Problem was, from everything he had seen so far, she had no intention of making his life any easier. At all.
In any way.
Because, every time he looked up and saw her with Prakash or one of the team, his brain automatically retuned to the sound of her musical voice and the way she jiggled her shoulders when she got excited. Which was often.
And when those mesmerising eyes turned his way?
Knockout.
Of course, Dee was not the only reason he found it difficult to settle at the Riverside.
It was always strange coming back to this hotel where he had found out the hard way that washing frying pans and loading dishwashers in a kitchen that could serve four hundred hot meals was not for wimps.
Rob’s fault, of course. From the very moment that his older half-brother Rob had announced that he wanted to follow his passion and learn to cook professionally, their father had insisted that he should learn his trade from the bottom up, starting in the hotel kitchens and going to the local catering college. No free rides. No special favours or dispensations from the award-winning chefs the Beresford hotels employed, who had learnt their trade through the classic apprentice system, working their way through gruelling long hours at kitchens run by serious taskmasters.
If that was what his eldest son and heir truly wanted to do, then their father had said he would support Rob all the way. But he was going to have to prove it in a baptism of fire. And, where Rob had gone, his little brother Sean had wanted to follow.
Somewhere in the London house their father had a photograph of Rob in his kitchen whites, standing at a huge stainless-steel sink sharpening a knife on a steel, with his brother Sean at his side scrubbing out a pan as though his life depended on it. Rob could not have been more than nineteen at the time, but he looked so deadly serious. Skinny, unshaven and intense. There were only a few years between them in age but sometimes it felt a lot more.
They had both come a long way since then. A very long way.
The sound of a woman’s laugh rang out from the office and his body automatically turned as Dee and Madge strolled down the corridor together.
Now, there was a killer team. Dee was probably five feet and a few inches tall in h
er boots, but looked tiny compared to Madge, who towered above her in smart heels.
Amazing. Madge even smiled at him after shaking Dee’s hand and waving her off as though they were best pals who had known one another for years.
Dee seemed to accept this sort of miraculous behaviour as completely normal, and a few minutes later she had found her jacket and they were outside the hotel and heading for the taxi rank.
Only, before the doorman could hail a black cab, Dee rested her hand on Sean’s coat sleeve and asked, ‘Do you mind if we walk? The rain has stopped, the sun is coming out and I am so busy in the tea rooms I just know that I’ll be cooped up for the rest of the day.’
Sean made a point of checking his wristwatch. ‘Only if we go a different route this time. I make it a rule not to go the same way twice if I can avoid it.’
‘Fair enough,’ Dee replied, shuffling deeper into her jacket. ‘And, since you’re my tour guide, I shall rely on you completely.’
‘You didn’t give me a lot of choice,’ he muttered, but she heard him well enough.
‘You can stop pretending that you are put out by my outrageous request for personal attention. You love it! And I love your hotel. It is gorgeous. Lucky girl; that’s me.’
Sean nodded. ‘You were very lucky to find the two-day slot you wanted at this much notice. That is certainly true.’ He gestured to a side street and they turned away from the busy street down a two-way road lined with stately white-painted Regency houses. ‘But, as a matter of interest, what was your back-up plan in case of some emergency? Your Plan B?’
Dee chuckled and shook her head. ‘I didn’t have one. There is no Plan B. No rescue mission. No back door. No get-out clause. No security exit.’
Sean blew out hard. ‘I don’t know whether that is brave or positive thinking.’
‘Neither,’ she replied with a short laugh. ‘I don’t have anything left in the piggy bank to pay for a back-up plan. Everything I have is in the tea rooms and this event. And I mean everything. If this festival doesn’t bring in a return, I shall be explaining to the bank why they won’t be receiving their repayment any time soon. And that is not a conversation I want to have.’
Then she threw her hands in the air with a flourish. ‘That’s why I was having a mini melt-down last night. But no longer. Problem solved. I only hope that Prakash enjoys his job long enough to stay around.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was only talking to Prakash for a fairly short time, but it’s obvious that he feels like a tiny cog in a big machine where nobody knows his name or what he wants from the job. It seems to me that you and your dad and brother have created a training system which is incredibly impersonal and cold.’
Then she paused and twisted one hand into the air. ‘Not deliberately. I don’t mean that. But you are all so busy.’
Dee gave a small shrug. ‘Maybe you could take a few tips from a small business and talk to Prakash and the new graduates one to one, find out what they need. It would make a change from a big, flashy presentation in a huge, impersonal lecture theatre. It might work.’
‘That’s an incredibly sweet idea, Dee, and maybe it would work in a cake shop, but we have hundreds of trainees. It would take weeks of work to get around all of them and then process the responses. It is simply not doable. I wish it was. But that’s business.’
‘No, Sean. You can talk to your graduates for days and give the all of the motivational speeches you like but when they are back in their jobs they have to want to do their best work and be inspired by you and your family. Because you motivate them. Not because they feel they have to perform to bring in a pay cheque. Totally different.’
Then Dee shrugged with a casual smile that left him speechless. ‘And who would have guessed that your Madge is a total tea addict? And that girl knows her leaves! Only the finest white tea for her. I am impressed. And I hope you don’t mind, but I did give her a voucher for a free cream tea if she came to Lottie’s.’
‘Mind? Why should I mind if you give away free samples?’ Sean replied as he dodged a kamikaze cyclist who served around them. ‘But you should try our traditional afternoon tea. It is very popular with the guests—and you seemed to enjoy our desserts.’
‘Oh, the food would be amazing. That’s not the problem. It’s the tea you serve.’ She winced as though there was an unpleasant odour. ‘It’s very nice—and I know the warehouse where you buy it from, because I used to work there—but for a five-star hotel? I have to tell you that you have been fobbed off with stale old tea that has been sitting in those boxes for a very long time. It’s certainly not up to the standard I expected. Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Fobbed off? Is that what you said?’ Sean replied, coming to a dead halt.
‘Now, don’t get upset. I just thought that I should point it out. For future reference.’
‘Anything else you would like to mention?’ Sean asked in a voice of disbelief. ‘I would hate for all that great free advice to be burning up inside without an outlet. Please; don’t hold back. Fire away.’
He ignored her tutting and tugged out his smart phone; his fingers moved over the keys for a second. ‘There. The food and beverages director has been alerted to your concerns. And Rob Beresford is not a man who lets standards slip. What?’
Dee was standing looking at him with her mouth half hanging open. ‘Wait a minute. Beresford; of course. I never made the connection. Are you talking about the celebrity chef Rob Beresford? The one who runs that TV programme sorting out rundown restaurants in need of a makeover?’
‘One and the same. And it’s even worse than that. He is my half-brother. And the man may look laid-back, but underneath that slick exterior he is obsessed with the quality of everything we serve and as sharp as a blade.’
A ping of reply echoed out from the phone. Sean snorted and held the phone out to Dee, who looked at it as if he were offering her a small thermonuclear device. ‘I thought that might push his buttons. He needs your mobile number. Expect a call very soon.’
Dee stared at the phone and shook her head very slowly. ‘I don’t have a mobile phone. Never had one. No clue how to use one.’ Then she looked up at Sean and chuckled. ‘I could give him the number for the cake shop, but Lottie would probably put the phone down on him thinking it was a prank call. Would email be okay?’
Sean stood in silence for a few seconds.
‘No mobile phone?’
She shook her head again. ‘I live above the shop and rarely travel. My friends know where I live. No need.’
‘Tablet computer? Or some sort of palm top?’ She rolled her eyes and mouthed the word ‘no’.
Sean took back his phone and fired off a quick message, then laughed out loud when the reply came whizzing back.
‘Have I said something to amuse you? My life’s mission is now complete,’ Dee whispered and looked up and down the street as Sean bent over his phone as though she were not there. Then she spotted something out of the corner of her eye just around the next corner, glanced back once to check that Sean was fully occupied and took off without looking back.
Sean did not even notice that she had walked off until he had exchanged a couple of messages with Rob, who thought that the whole thing had to be one huge practical joke, and couldn’t believe that a girl who was willing to criticize his tea supplier didn’t have a phone. So he came up with another idea instead.
An idea so outrageous that Sean was sure Dee would turn him down in a flash, but hey, it was worth a try.
‘Well, it seems that you were right, it really is your lucky day. I have a rather unusual request from my brother. Rob is flying in on Friday for... Dee?’
Sean turned from side to side.
She had gone. Vanished. Taken off. Left him standing there, talking to himself like an idiot. What was all that about?
The girl was a mirage. A mirage who he knew had not retraced her steps to the hotel—he would have spotted that—so she must have gone ahead.
One more thing to add to his new client’s list of credentials: impatient. As well as a technophobe.
Sean strolled down the street, and had only been gone a few minutes when he turned the corner and walked straight into one of the local street markets that were famous in the area. Once a week stallholders selling all kinds of handmade goods, food, clothing, books, ornaments, paintings and everything else they had found in the attic laid out their goods on wooden tables.
A smile crept unbidden across Sean’s face.
His mother used to love coming to these markets and he used to spend hours every Saturday trailing behind her as she scoured the stalls for what she called ‘treasures’. Her collections: postcards of London; Victorian hand-painted tiles; antique dolls with porcelain faces; handbags covered with beads and sequins, most of them missing; cupboards-full of old white linen bedding which had always felt cold and scratchy when he was a boy. But to her eyes, glorious items which were simply in need of a good wash and a good home.
Each item had its own story. A silver snuff-box must have been owned by someone important like Sherlock Holmes, while a chipped tin car had once been the treasured toy of a refugee who had been forced to leave everything behind when his family had fled. Just as she had done when she’d escaped persecution when she’d been a small girl, arriving in London with her journalist parents and only a small suitcase between them. Simply glad to be safe from the political persecution from the new regime in their corner of Eastern Europe.
The horror of being forced to flee from your home to avoid arrest was one thing. But to start again and make your life a success in a new country was something special. Sean admired his mother and his grandparents more than he could say. They had taught him that hard work was the only way to make sure that you were never poor or hungry again. To build a legacy that nobody could take away from you.
Trouble on Her Doorstep Page 8