by Amy Garvey
“This isn’t a typical afternoon,” Olivia said, and realized she was actually wringing her hands. That was bad. No more hand wringing, she admonished herself. It was a dead giveaway. “Not at all.”
Stuart’s response to that was a snort, and Olivia took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to panic. Or cry. Even if she really, really wanted to.
Most afternoons at the Coach and Four were lovely. Dinnertime, too. It was never too crowded, for one thing, and it was…friendly. Comfortable. A bit like family, really. Which wasn’t what Stuart seemed to think a hotel restaurant should be, but Olivia liked it that way. Some nights the hotel’s permanent residents ate together, taking one of the big tables in the corner, and on really quiet evenings Frankie Garson sometimes played the old baby grand piano and everyone gathered around to sing show tunes and old standards.
When she was a child, her father used to play that piano the same way.
All right, she was wringing her hands again. She had to somehow move from this spot, and more importantly move Uncle Stuart from this spot. To Siberia, preferably.
“I’m so sorry about this,” she said after another deep breath. Wow. The man had eyebrows like a villain out of a silent movie, she noticed. Black and bushy and somehow malicious. “Can I take you to lunch somewhere? My treat.”
“I highly doubt you have the funds to take me anywhere but the corner deli.” He rolled his eyes and folded his arms over the neat gray pinstripes of his suit jacket. “I’m not particularly interested in lunch, in any case.”
“Well, we can talk in my office,” she said. Pretending the idea didn’t make her want to run screaming from the room. “It’s quiet in there.”
“Yes, I’ve been there,” he said with something uncomfortably close to venom in his voice. “It was your father’s office, too, as well as your grandfather’s.”
There wasn’t really an answer to that, since it was true. It didn’t explain why he seemed so angry about it, of course, so instead of answering she simply swallowed hard. Any minute she would be back to wringing her hands. Or very possibly hiding under the piano.
“Well?” Stuart demanded, spreading his hands in impatience. “Let’s go on with it, shall we?”
Oh, there were no words for how much Olivia didn’t want to do that. Nothing Stuart could say now would be good. How could it be? No one looked that frightening when they were about to tell you they’d bought you a pony, after all.
So she sucked in another deep breath, aware that she was probably overdosing on oxygen, and said, “Yes, let’s go into my office. I’ll have the kitchen send in some tea.”
But when she turned to head for the door, she saw something so strange it took her a moment to process it. It was Rhys, gorgeous, funny, rock star Rhys from this morning, with Yelena on his arm. Her pulse gave a startled little kick and she heard, as if from far away, her own gasp of surprise.
That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be him, could it? With Yelena? Maybe this really was a dream. A bad one, yes, but a dream nevertheless. Only in a dream would Yelena flutter her fingers at Olivia while Rhys winked, slouched in the door with the tiny little ex-ballerina hanging onto his arm.
She didn’t have time to consider it any further, though. Just then Josef came storming out of the kitchen, bellowing, “I quit! Yes, quit! Is lunacy, this place! Wahnsinn!”
For an instant, there was complete silence as every head turned to look at him, standing in the chaos of the dining room, broken crystal at his feet. His chef’s hat was bunched in his hands, his coat was smeared with chocolate frosting—and then he was making a beeline for Olivia.
Beside her Stuart took a step backward as Josef huffed to a halt in front of them, but it was too late. Because Rick was pushing through the swinging door behind Josef, doing his own ranting. His hat was gone, too, and his face was the color of an overripe tomato. And in his hands was the disputed cake.
“I’m crazy? You’re crazy,” he shouted. A woman at the closest table dropped her fork in surprise, and it clattered against her plate. “It’s just a cake! A bad one!”
Josef whirled around to face him, which Olivia guessed Rick had been counting on. Because in the next moment the remains of the cake were sailing through the air—and smacking Uncle Stuart in the face with a wet, heavy splat as Josef ducked.
Olivia desperately wanted the next noise she heard to be her alarm clock’s horrible shriek, but instead it was an outraged grunt from her uncle.
“You see, yes?” Josef barked to the room at large, spreading his arms wide. Despite the fact that an innocent bystander was covered with German chocolate cake, and his sous chef had fled into the kitchen—probably for some rotten eggs, Olivia thought with another vague stab of alarm—the chef was positively triumphant. “A lunatic!”
Well, yes. Apparently it was going around.
Even further than she’d thought, too. Because as Uncle Stuart managed a muffled “Mmmppff!” she felt an arm slide around her waist, and looked up to see Rhys beside her.
Her mouth fell open, but nothing more coherent than Stuart’s outburst emerged.
“Here you are, sir,” Rhys said to her uncle, pressing a clean linen napkin into his hand. “So sorry about that, really. We were supposed to have the run-through for the dinner theatre later. Mixed signals, yeah? What can you do?”
Those dark gray eyes of his were wide and busy, she noticed as she stared up at Rhys in amazement. They were darting around the room, in fact. Probably because it was difficult to make up an enormous lie like the one he’d just told off the top of his head.
“Dinner theater, yeah,” Rhys continued, as if he weren’t facing a furious man with chocolate frosting all over his face and his suit. “Hasn’t Olivia told you about it? Interactive, we’re thinking.” He grinned, a bright flash of amusement that lit up his whole face. “Maybe not so interactive as this, you see, but with the customers participating. It’s all the rage in …in the West End. Of…Manchester.”
Olivia bit her bottom lip as Stuart raised his sticky eyebrows. As liars went, Rhys was pretty awful. But the fact that he was doing it at all was…well, confusing, for one thing, but sweet. So very sweet.
The feel of his strong arm around her was something different, though. Not sweet. Hot was the word for that. Tempting.
And dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
“You expect me to believe that this…this pandemonium,” Stuart sputtered, “is going to be a regular feature here?” He wiped another glob of icing from his chin and a glistening cherry from the top of his head.
“Well, regular is a relative term, yeah?” Rhys squeezed Olivia closer when she opened her mouth. “More of a special event, I’m thinking.”
If Stuart raised his brows any higher, they were going to end up on the back of his head. “And you are?”
Oh, this should be good, Olivia thought with a distant flutter of panic.
Her unlikely rescuer didn’t miss a beat. “Rhys Spencer.” He stuck out his free hand, and withdrew it gracefully when Stuart simply stared. “Friend of Olivia’s.”
“I see.” Stuart tossed the smeared napkin on the closest table and brushed off the front of his suit with distaste.
Olivia had a feeling “I see” didn’t mean what it usually meant. And in the sudden ringing silence, she had an even more frightening feeling that the next words out of Stuart’s mouth weren’t going to be anything she wanted to hear.
But Rhys was still beside her, his arm draped around her as casually as if they’d known each other for years. As if they were, in fact, friends. As if stepping in to save her from horrifying situations was the thing he’d been waiting all his life to do.
That was silly, of course. If she was honest with herself, she had to wonder about a complete stranger barging into her life and taking over. He was probably unbalanced. An escapee from a local mental hospital, even if he was a gorgeous, unbelievably charming one.
She should really move away from him, gently untangle his
arm from around her waist, and take Uncle Stuart into her office. Call the police. Or the men with the butterfly nets.
But the truth was, standing next to Rhys felt…right. Perfect, in fact. Even if that delicious aura of danger hadn’t completely faded.
Maybe she’d gone crazy, too. Today, it didn’t seem impossible.
“This is exactly what I warned your father about,” Stuart said. He looked ridiculous—still faintly smudged with chocolate, cake crumbs on the front of his wrinkled suit coat—but there was nothing ridiculous about the tone of his voice. “This hotel is a dinosaur and you have no idea what to do with it.”
He laughed then, shaking his head as he surveyed the room. The people who hadn’t stormed the maitre d’s station for refunds stared at him, forks in midair, drinking glasses halfway to their lips. Maybe because his laugh was more of a bark, and gleefully nasty. “Do you know what this place is worth?” he said, turning back to Olivia. She stiffened, and felt Rhys’s arm tighten around her. “Millions, Olivia. Millions. Every year, I’ve waited for you to give up, to understand that you can’t make a go of this place. Your father could hardly do it, after all, and he actually had business sense.”
“All right then, you—” Rhys began, but Olivia tugged him back, even though her heart was pounding so violently, it was hard to hear anything past the roar in her ears. A fistfight wasn’t going to improve this situation. Even a real prince on a white steed wouldn’t improve this situation.
“If I needed any more proof that you don’t know what you’re doing here, I got it today,” Stuart continued, unruffled, ignoring a grumble of fury from Rhys. “If you don’t know it by now, you should. And you’re going to learn it before the year is up, I guarantee you that.”
Olivia opened her mouth to respond, even though she had no idea what she was going to say, but this time Stuart was the one to stop her. He raised a hand with weary disgust.
“Don’t bother.” He brushed off his suit coat one last time as he started out of the room and threw his last words over his shoulder. “This hotel will be mine.”
Chapter 3
I t was hard to think straight during an adrenaline rush, Olivia decided as Rhys steered her into a chair. And that’s what she was probably feeling—adrenaline zooming through her bloodstream, pure and simple. Fight or flight, panic response, there were probably a dozen terms for it.
But she really didn’t care what it was called, she thought as she stared at a star-shaped piece of chandelier on the carpet not three feet away. She felt as if someone had slapped her, hard, and it was all too clear that no matter how weird this day had been, it was definitely not a dream.
“You all right?” Rhys said, leaning in to offer her a glass of water.
She stared at it, wondering where he’d found the glass, and said without thinking, “Ella Fitzgerald once sang to Mayor LaGuardia under that chandelier. I don’t remember what song, but I know it’s written down somewhere.”
He seemed to consider this for a minute. “Uh, yeah, that’s brilliant. What happened here anyway?”
She sighed and took the water from him, checking for broken glass before she took a sip. “Nothing good.” Then she smiled up at him. “Except for you. That’s the second time you rescued me today. Or tried to.”
“I can still take a swing at him, you know.” He winked at her, and lounged back in his seat. “Old guy like that can’t run very fast, I warrant.”
There it was again, that thrilling flicker of arousal.
Which was just as surreal as everything else about this moment. The glittering bones of the chandelier on the carpet, the sound of renewed shouting coming from the kitchen, the diners who were no longer even pretending to eat and were staring at her instead.
It would be so much better if this really were a dream.
Rhys was still watching her, she realized, raking his fingers through his hair restlessly. He’d changed his shirt—Mick Jagger was gone and the word “Arsenal” had replaced it, whatever that meant.
“Who was that bloke?” Rhys said suddenly, narrowing his eyes.
Who was he? That was the question Olivia wanted to ask. But before she could answer him, Josie’s voice broke the silence and Olivia saw Josie and Roseanne heading toward the table, Josie’s auburn ponytail bouncing over her shoulder and Roseanne’s graying brow knitted in concern. Her heart lifted, just a little bit, which was good since it had sunk so low it was practically down at her ankles.
Josie raised an eyebrow at her, and gestured toward the fallen chandelier. “I thought I told you no more wild parties.”
Roseanne squeezed past Rhys and took the chair beside Olivia, winding an arm around her shoulders. “Oh, leave her alone. What happened, honey?”
Roseanne was in charge of bookkeeping, and she had worked at Callender House since Olivia was a baby. Any minute now she’d be petting Olivia’s head the way she had when Olivia was still in kindergarten, and Olivia wasn’t about to argue.
“Should I start with the cake or the chandelier?”
“Start with Stuart,” Josie insisted. “I saw him marching through the lobby. Weren’t you supposed to have lunch?”
“That was right out after the cake in the face,” Rhys put in with a naughty smirk. “Lost his appetite, he did.”
Josie was horrified. “You threw a cake at him?” she asked Olivia.
“Of course not!” Olivia sighed. “Unfortunately, Rick did. Actually, he didn’t really throw it at Uncle Stuart, but Josef ducked.”
“What does Josef have to do with it?” Roseanne asked, glancing back at the doors to the kitchen as if either one of the chefs would come charging out any second, armed with more baked goods.
“He was mad about the cake,” Olivia said, brushing more crumbs from the tablecloth.
“So he…pulled down the chandelier?” Josie asked.
“No!” Olivia sagged against Roseanne’s arm, but she couldn’t help smiling when Rhys bit back a laugh. The whole thing sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous. Except for the part where she was pretty sure Stuart meant to take the hotel away from her.
“Someone start from the beginning, yeah? Because I still don’t know who that sodding bloke was,” Rhys said.
Josie turned confused eyes on him. “Who are you?”
“Rhys Spencer,” he said, offering her a hand. “Friend of Olivia’s.”
Both Roseanne and Josie raised their eyebrows at this in a silent plea for explanation.
“I met Rhys this morning,” Olivia said, glancing up at him as her cheeks heated. Again. God, why wasn’t there a cure for blushing? “Outside.”
Then she stopped, mouth still open. She didn’t even know the rest of the story, and certainly not why or how he’d appeared in the restaurant out of nowhere.
“I’m a new friend,” Rhys said smoothly, and winked at her.
More raised eyebrows. It was an epidemic.
And also a little insulting, Olivia realized as she sat up and shrugged off Roseanne’s arm. As if she couldn’t have a friend who was gorgeous and sexy and had the most delicious British accent she’d ever heard.
Just because she’d never even met a man like Rhys before didn’t mean anything. Much.
“Very new,” she added pointlessly, and was rewarded with another wink. So new she didn’t know anything about him, but Roseanne and Josie didn’t need that little detail.
“Wait a minute,” Josie said, holding up both hands. “You’re on that TV show, the cooking one. You’re the British chef all the fan sites are rooting for.”
Rhys gave Olivia a sheepish smile as her mouth fell open in surprise. He was on TV? Now?
“Yeah, I’m that British chef,” he admitted. “Show’s on a break until we film the finale a month from now.”
“I thought you looked familiar,” Roseanne said, clearly sizing him up with even more appreciation now, but Josie was unimpressed.
“Reality TV aside,” she said, “what happened in here? It looks like the place got
raided.”
“Josef and Rick were arguing about a chocolate cake that got ruined, and then there was a crash, and then Helen rushed into the kitchen to say the chandelier had fallen down, and then Stuart showed up, right on time as usual, and then Stuart got a cake in the face,” Olivia said with a weary sigh. “I think that about covers it.”
“Not quite, love,” Rhys put in. “There was that nasty bit about the hotel at the end.”
Roseanne bristled, and sat up straight. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth,” Olivia admitted. Suddenly crowded by the questions, she got up and paced a few feet away.
Which only attracted more attention from the noneating diners. Except for Yelena, who was chatting up Willie from her usual table in the corner, turban bobbing.
“Maybe we should take this discussion elsewhere,” Josie suggested when she followed Olivia’s gaze to the interested patrons watching from their tables. “I’m thinking the bar might be appropriate.”
“Brilliant,” Rhys said, and got up to slide his arm around Olivia’s shoulders. Just the weight of it made her tingle with awareness. “Lead the way.”
The bar was deserted, which wasn’t unusual for a Monday afternoon. Still, it was a little too deserted, she thought as she pulled a stool away from the polished length of mahogany and sat down. Where was Tommy?
“No barkeep?” Rhys said, leaning over the counter to scope out the selection of bottles. “And no Grey Goose? I think the occasion calls for some quality spirits, love.”
“I don’t usually drink before dinner,” Olivia protested, wondering if she should tell Rhys to come out from behind the counter before Tommy appeared and waved his offended dignity around. Rhys had flipped open the bar’s hatch door and walked right in as if he belonged there, and was even now taking glasses down from the racks.
“Who is this guy?” Josie whispered fiercely in her ear as she pulled up another stool. “I mean, aside from some random reality TV person?”
“I don’t care,” Roseanne said before Olivia could answer. “I sure like to listen to him. Imagine if I brought him to the next Renaissance Faire with me. God, can you picture him in leggings?”