by Dani Collins
“Dad wants to keep as much of the original décor as possible, but I’m open to more economical choices.”
Devon shook her head. “Don’t ruin it. This place was built with love. Someone brought old-world craftsmanship to a new-world dream. Whoever threw carpet on that parquet was a monster.”
Glory glanced back to the dining room, where she could see dingy hardwood around the edges of the even dingier carpet. “Is that a lot of work to refinish?”
“Yep.”
The weight of expense settled on her. Unless Devon refused the job, in which case Glory could sign with the Monsters Union and carpet the crap out of this place.
She tried again to read Devon’s expression, but the woman was much taller than she was and moved to the edge of the gallery, tipping her head back to study what might have been a chandelier, but was more lately a bat roost.
“Bathroom works,” Glory’s father announced from below, waving up at them from the lobby with his folded newspaper.
Terrific. Glad to hear it, Dad.
Devon’s gaze dropped to her father, then fixed on the broken balusters in the rail. She gave one that was intact a small caress. “Hand-turned. Really nice work.”
“That means matching it will be impossible, doesn’t it?” And what did it cost to try?
“We can do anything.” Devon started down the stairs.
“What do you say, Ms. Lewis? Diamond in the rough, isn’t it?” Glory’s father said with pride, waiting at the bottom for them.
“In the right hands, Blue Spruce Lodge could be more than accommodation. It could be a destination.”
“That’s what we want.” He gave her his You’re brilliant! air jab with his finger. “Visiting should be an experience. Money is no object.”
“Money is an object,” Glory hurried to argue. “I firmly object to costs being abstract.”
“She’s very nuts and bolts, my Glory. No imagination or appreciation for artistry.” He touched the side of his nose.
I have an imagination. She’d spent the morning with fake people, hadn’t she? They’d had sex. Insanely good sex. Try telling her that was real.
“So, which one of you wants to hammer out the fine print?” Devon looked between them.
“Me,” Marvin said.
“You’ll take the job?” Glory didn’t know if she was relieved or wanting to check for fever on Devon’s high, smooth brow. “Because we’d need you to start as soon as possible.”
“Yeah, I had a job in Ohio, but the client wasn’t paying his draws. I do not work for free,” she said firmly. “If you pay on time, every time, my crew finishes on time, on budget. One phone call, and they’re on the road, headed here.”
“Great. Then, um, Dad, I’ll take lead on this.”
He made a noise. She turned her back on him and led Devon toward the room halfway down the hall behind the registration desk.
“Can you come into… I haven’t even set up my office yet.”
Glory entered the manager’s office only to discover it was swept, the windows were washed, and it held a battered desk set up with a computer monitor and a laptop in the dock. A new, ergonomic chair stood behind the desk and two of the less filthy chairs from the lobby had been pulled in front of it.
“Okay. Huh. I guess we’re good to go.” She closed the door and sat behind the desk, then nicked a pad of lined paper from a desk drawer, along with a really nice pen, so she could take notes.
An hour later, as Devon stood and shook her hand, she said, “You sure about this? You’re looking really green.”
“I don’t mind paying for quality. I don’t,” Glory insisted. She had learned that with her mother’s business. People did judge a book by its cover so it had better be great. “I’ve just never handed that kind of money to a stranger.”
At least they had Wi-Fi. The password had been on a sticky note hanging off the bottom of the monitor. Glory had logged into her phone and transferred the deposit to Devon’s account. She felt fairly sick about it, but Devon made it clear her time was not available for wasting, which was oddly reassuring. Their meeting had been productive and, despite how scary this was, she believed in Devon’s no-nonsense attitude enough to lock her in.
Devon left to catch the midday shuttle back to civilization and start organizing things on her end. Glory leaned against the desk and sighed, taking in that this was really happening. That spring squall of snow was her workday view and this desk—
Seriously, who did this guy think he was, moving into her office like this?
She turned his pen in her fingers, liking the weight of it. The top was silver, the bottom brushed gold, the black ink a true joy to slide across the page. She was a geek for office supplies, but had never heard of Pelikan. It had a matching mechanical pencil, both showing signs of long use.
You’re a pelican, she wanted to say to him. What was he trying to prove, using elegant phallic symbols like this?
“Yes?”
“What?” She jerked her head up.
Rolf stood in the doorway, rugged and virile, wearing a glow of exertion.
Yeah, she had just been fondling his pen, thinking of dicks. So what? Shit. Now she was blushing again.
“Why are you here?” he asked with slow care, kind of suggesting he was talking to someone who didn’t speak English. His gaze dropped to the pen she still held.
She slapped it onto the desktop. “I was meeting with Devon. Why are you here? I mean, why did you set up in here? This is my office.”
“Not yet.”
She blinked. “What do you mean, ‘not yet?’ I need a place to work.”
“So do I.” He moved past her, trailing a scent of pine and snow and man sweat. He sat down and clicked to wake up his laptop, then typed in a login code. “Your father said I could use it.” His tone dismissed her.
“Use it? Or rent it?”
“It’s not unusual to comp a workspace when someone takes a block of rooms.”
He hadn’t ‘taken’ them yet and, “There’s only this one office.” She moved to the other side of the desk to put space between them, then realized she had ceded the territory. She closed her hand into a fist. “I can’t work from my room. It’s on the third floor.”
“I understand there are seventy other rooms.” He started to put his earbuds in. He, actually, really did that.
“Rolf.” She hated confrontation, but: “I need to be on the main floor. I can’t be walking up and down a flight of stairs a hundred times a day. I’ll arrange one of those other rooms for you.”
He flicked his glance into the vicinity of her hip and said, “I have to head down to the base a few times a day. I need to be here.”
Did he think her ass was too fat or too thin? It was actually pretty tight, thanks very much.
She looked around, not seeing enough room to share this space without tripping over each other.
“Use the room off the dining room,” he suggested.
“It’s a windowless pantry.”
He sighed as if to say, This sounds like a ‘you’ problem.
“You’re not even going to be in here if you’re going to be at the base all day,” she argued.
“I have to rebuild a road so I can get the supplies in to build my office there. I’ll be making those arrangements from this desk, so—” His sweep of a hand invited her to leave.
Prick.
She left to find her father, expecting zero support, which is exactly what she got.
*
For the next two weeks, Glory rose early and went to Lazy Suzanne’s, where she enjoyed Suzanne’s quietest hour and unassuming hospitality. She wrote her little heart out. When Rolf walked in with his heavy boots and air of superiority, always at seven-thirty on the dot, she rose and left to shower and get her butt out to the shuttle.
Devon’s crew was self-contained. They parked two fifth-wheel trailers and a cargo trailer full of tools in the pullout at the bottom of the mountain. They were first on the snowc
at every morning and if they weren’t actively working, they were having a team meeting about a job. They even brought their own snowmobile so they could make a run to the bottom if they happened to need something they hadn’t brought up in the morning commute.
Rolf had his own handful of men he ordered around, disappearing with them and Nate for hours at a time before stomping into the lodge to say something charming like, “Is this coffee fresh?”
At which point her father would come find her in the effing pantry and say, “Rolf wants fresh coffee. Can you show me again?”
She mindlessly went through the motions of running the big grinder into the basket, then jamming it into the vintage Bunn-o-matic, while her father paid zero attention to the fact she was demonstrating. Again. Today, he was busy chatting up two of the locals installing a new fridge and dishwasher behind the bar, because Rolf wanted soup and sandwiches available to his crew every day.
It wasn’t a terrible idea and he was paying for it, but she hated being at his beck and call. At least Suzanne was kind enough to prepare everything, but Glory had to lug it to the cat, bring it in, set it out, and clean it up. She also had to keep track of who took what and prepare a bill for Rolf.
She would delegate all of it to her dad, but feared he would give the sandwiches away for free. He was in his element, getting each person’s life story, assuring them if they needed anything, “Anything at all,” they should come to him.
Then he would say, “Glory, this young man needs…”
At least he wasn’t afraid to put his back into the straight-up work of stripping rooms and other hard labor tasks. Devon’s specialist had determined there was no asbestos to worry about, which was a miracle, so her father worked alongside men half his age. He suited up with a dust mask and coveralls and ripped up carpet, carrying all the discards to the growing pile of scrap in the parking lot.
“I need a new belt,” her father told her after flashing her his butt crack one morning.
“Then buy one.” She was going to have to double-sterilize her contacts this evening. Geez.
For her part, she did a lot of scrubbing and chasing of invoices, learned a basic payroll software and wound up installing a low-end hospitality management software so she could begin assigning rooms as soon as the first beds were delivered.
Her own room got a fresh paint job, a new toilet thanks to Devon’s plumber, and an area rug she bought herself. A special trip with the snowcat brought a half dozen rollaway cots and the next morning she checked out of the motel in Haven and checked into Blue Spruce Lodge.
It was weirdly satisfying, even though she didn’t have anything but a crappy night table and the original desk that smelled musty and looked worse. She covered it with a green and yellow sarong, made herself some shelves out of cardboard boxes, unpacked the two suitcases she’d been living out of into them, and left her toothbrush in a cup beside her sink.
She even set up the small coffeemaker she’d dug out of their cargo trailer. Once she realized she wouldn’t be visiting Suzanne every morning, she had ordered ten pounds of her favorite Seattle brand online.
Oh, it was going to feel good to wake in her own sheets, with her old pillow, rise and mainline real coffee, then write until she had to walk down two flights of stairs to work.
She was itching to write now, but had to leave her laptop on her desk and get downstairs. They’d graduated to also setting out morning muffins and bagels, a proper hot lunch, and afternoon snacks. All of that came up in the morning cat and she was damned well hiring someone to deal with playing serving wench today.
She walked out of her room thinking of Pandora and what she would think of this makeshift diner arrangement. Pandora had been stuck taking all sorts of work at different times, getting herself in and out of fixes, never able to go back to her mom and ask for help. But why?
The door across from Glory’s opened and Rolf walked out. Behind him, his jacket was draped over the back of a chair.
They were sleeping…that close? She was going to open her door to see him all the time?
Did someone order a big sausage pizza?
A filthy tingle of awareness went through her, awkward and lurid as she thought about Brock, about putting words in Brock’s mouth, about putting Brock’s mouth—
Rolf closed his door with a firm click. None of them locked yet, which made her anxious about her precious laptop, but he left his downstairs all the time, so she was just being paranoid. Everything on it was password protected anyway.
“Good morning,” she said sweetly to his back as he walked away, then curled her lip as he went to the end of the hall and down the service stairs.
If it killed her, she decided, she was going to be nice to him. And she was going to get him to be nice to her.
She followed him downstairs, set out breakfast, then went to her office—conveniently located adjacent to where everyone was eating—and sent an email to the local job board for a server slash bus-person slash dishwasher. Then she sorted all the invoices that were going to Rolf, including a bill for the room he was now occupying, and stuck a sticky note on top.
Due at the end of the month, please.
She walked it through the dining room to the lobby, made a left at the empty reception desk, and stopped at the door to ‘his’ office. When she knocked, she accidentally pushed the cracked door inward.
“Oh, shit, be careful—!” someone said.
A knee-high, black beast with white markings leapt on her, paws shoving into her stomach so she buckled with an, “Oof!”
“Murphy. Down!” Trigg tried to grab the dog by his collar, but Murphy was controlled by his wagging tail and the springs in his white legs.
Glory shoved herself against the wall across from the door until Trigg caught the dog and at least got him onto four feet. “Chill, dude.”
“Well, aren’t you a warm welcome,” she said to the dog.
Murphy cocked his head. His black ears, longer than a mule deer’s, stood up and rolled together to make a triangle on top of his head. A white stripe went from his muzzle up his forehead between his big brown eyes. His pink tongue hung out about a mile long. Little flecks in the blue-black on his white chest made her think there was some border collie there, with maybe some black Lab for people skills and something tough that gave him muscle in his shoulders. His black tail looked like the tip had been dipped in a bucket of white paint.
She lifted her gaze to Trigg, who was eyeing her with male appraisal, then Rolf, who looked severely unimpressed.
“Hi,” she said to Trigg. “These are for you,” she told Rolf, walking the file to set it on his desk. “I didn’t know you were here,” she told Trigg.
“Just got here. Not staying long, but I wanted to get Murphy moved in before—”
“You are not leaving that animal here.”
Glory bit her lip, thinking there must be health regulations to consider, but seeing Rolf bent out of shape was just too precious.
“How old is he?”
“Vet said around eight months. Someone abandoned him.”
“A rescued mutt. The best kind. And look at those paws. He’s going to be big.”
*
Rolf narrowed his eyes at the Cormer woman. She was pretty disdainful of getting her hands dirty, running around with paperwork and hiding in her room all the time, but apparently she was a dog person. She bent to shower affection on the latest evidence of his kid brother’s stellar ability to make dumbass, impulsive choices.
Her oversized sweater du jour rode up as the overexcited dog pawed at her.
She chuckled and tried to force him to sit, bending so her ass went up nice and high. She usually wore loose jeans or bulky cargo pants. Today her jeans fit snug and lovingly to a surprisingly sweet ass.
Who knew such a firm, clutchable pair of curves had been hidden under there? That triangle of shadowed heat at the top of any woman’s thighs was his fatal weakness. Hers was especially intriguing. His cock woke up and stret
ched, pointing there. Like it was true north. Go. Now.
“Dogs spread the love, man. Who can say no to that?” Trigg drawled.
Rolf shot his gaze to his brother. He’d forgotten he was in the room. Forgotten everything in a haze of abrupt lust. He read the laughter in Trigg’s expression and scowled a Fuck you at him.
“It’s a work site,” Rolf said. “He can’t stay here.”
“In the lodge?” Glory straightened. “He’ll mostly be with you in here or down at the base, won’t he?” She kept that innocent look on her face through his good, long, very silence-willing stare.
“No,” Rolf said clearly. “Because he’s not staying.”
“Dude. I gave up my apartment in Denver. Had to, because of him.” He nodded at the dog. “I’ll only be gone a few weeks, then I’m here for the summer.”
“Until you go south to train.”
“So I should let them put him down? I took him because we have this now, a place where I can have a dog.”
“I’ll let you work this out amongst yourselves.” Glory gave the dog a final pat and said, “No, you stay here with your dad.”
Rolf didn’t miss the passive-aggressive smirk on her mouth as she closed the door behind her.
“What…” Trigg thumbed toward the closed door, one brow quirked in speculation “…was that?”
Rolf shrugged off his moment of weakness with a muted jerk of his shoulders. His dick was feeling the isolation. It had been a while since it had been wet, but if he went for any woman on this hill, it would be Devon. They got on like two houses on fire that burned their own walls and left each other the hell alone.
“Buy a place in Haven. Hire a housekeeper to look after him,” Rolf told Trigg.
“You’re using him as an excuse to keep me from being part of this. This hill was my idea. I’m living here.”
The hill was their father’s idea and Trigg damned well knew it, but Rolf hated repeating himself. He rubbed the back of his neck, glaring when the dog came around—tail wind-milling—and shoved his wet nose against his wrist.
“Live here, then. But not with him.”