Room Service Page 10

  Christ, he was getting a hard-on just thinking about it. He shifted onto his elbows and glared across the room at her. Instead of waking up to her naked body, he’d woken to Olivia…writing a novel? Writing letters to everyone she’d ever known? Plotting a bloody overthrow of the government? What the hell was she doing?

  When he flicked off the comforter and swung his legs out of bed, she glanced up at him. Her cheeks were pink with excitement, and she scrambled up out of the tornado of paper to cross the room. A silky bit nightgown clung to her hips and her lovely full breasts, which appeased him a little bit.

  “Morning, love,” he said, holding out his hands until she took them. Without warning, he pulled her onto his lap. “What on earth are you doing there? And why at this godforsaken hour?”

  “Did the coffee wake you?” She frowned, sitting so primly in his lap he felt a bit like a dirty old man. “I was afraid of that. But I couldn’t wait to make some for myself, and I thought it might be nice for you to wake up and find a cup right on the table, so I left it there, but I should have thought about the smell, since you are a chef, and your olfactory senses are probably extremely developed—”

  He put his hand up to her mouth. Good lord, he’d broken her. She was wound up like a penny toy from the High Street. “Olivia, love? What did you put in the coffee? Airplane fuel?”

  She rolled her eyes so dramatically he had to laugh. “Of course not. I’m just…Well, I’m strangely wide awake this morning.” She looked up at him from under her lashes, a fetching combination of shy and flirtatious. “Maybe good sex will do that for me.”

  “Apparently.” He pulled her closer and kissed her before he asked, “So it was good, yeah? You’re telling me I was brilliant, and you just don’t want to swell my head, I suppose. But you did say good—”

  This time she put her hand to his mouth, but she was smiling just the same. “Drink your coffee. I was thinking of making you breakfast, but I wasn’t sure what you’d like.”

  “You are wide awake, aren’t you?” He frowned when she climbed off his lap, missing her warmth—and a bit apprehensive about her offer. “Weren’t you telling me just last night that you were famous for burning water, love?”

  “Well, to be honest, yes.” She sniffed as she settled down in the storm of paper again. “But I thought I would give it a shot anyway.”

  “Looks like you were thinking about something else, as well,” he pointed out, standing up to join her on the rug. She flushed a bit when she realized he was still naked, but at least she didn’t protest. “What exactly are you doing here, Olivia?”

  “Planning.”

  He waited, but she was already scowling at a list she’d written earlier and searching for the pencil she’d dropped. “Planning …?”

  “How to fix this.” She gestured vaguely at the room. “How to beat him. How to win.”

  For someone who claimed to be wide awake, she sounded suspiciously as though she’d drifted into a fugue state. Still frowning, he glanced into the kitchen and found his jeans hanging off the counter. She’d smoothed them out, and they looked dry enough, so he tugged them on. This seemed like the kind of conversation that required pants.

  “Olivia?”

  She looked up and smiled at his jeans. “You found them! I put them in the oven for a little bit, since I don’t have a washer or dryer up here.”

  In the…? He shook the thought away and crouched beside her on the floor. “Winning what, love? Beating who? Not to put too fine a point on it, but what the bloody hell are you on about?”

  “The hotel.” If she’d added duh in punctuation, he wouldn’t have been surprised. She stared at him as if this should have been obvious. “Uncle Stuart’s threats. I can’t let him get a hold of this place. I won’t let him. So I’m throwing a party.”

  Hiring a hit man to dispatch Stuart, selling the place to the highest bidder, renovating the building from top to bottom—any of those plans he could have understood. But a party? What on earth would that accomplish?

  She sifted through a pile of papers and waved a sheet at him in triumph. “It’s all right here,” she announced with a proud smile. “A Monsters’ Ball.”

  He blinked. “A what now?”

  “A Monsters’ Ball. You know, a costume party for Halloween.” She cocked her head to one side, regarding him thoughtfully. “Do you have Halloween in London? Are you from London originally? Or another part of England? I don’t think I ever asked.”

  He blinked again. “Are you sure you didn’t doctor up the coffee, love? Add a bit of Jolt Cola to the brew?”

  “Rhys.” She was really quite adorable when she rolled her eyes at him that way, like a schoolmarm secretly fond of her naughtiest charge. “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  Her shoulders slumped in defeat, and she leaned back against the loveseat, where Eloise regarded him with suspicion. “I think you need to drink that coffee. You’re not really awake yet, are you?”

  “Love, that coffee tastes a bit like you brewed it a week ago and added a dash of motor oil to it this morning.” He shrugged when she glared at him, mouth open in outrage. “I’m just being honest, Liv. And I’m quite awake now, thank you. I’m just having a bit of trouble following your train of thought. Which seems to be of the Silver Bullet variety.”

  She sighed. “I was asking about Halloween. Because the party I’m planning is to celebrate Halloween. It’s huge here in the city, for adults as well as kids, and I thought it would be the perfect way to get the hotel back in the public eye.”

  “So who’s invited?” he asked, settling back and picking up pieces of paper at random. Her neat, round hand was all over each one in black ink, lists and jotted ideas, menu items and bar needs. She really had been planning this morning. He was still unclear on the details, of course, but given her present mood he had no doubt she would fill him in.

  “No one,” she said absently.

  No one. Right. He stared at her until she looked up.

  “I mean, no one in particular. Although we could invite some celebrities, couldn’t we? A few people guaranteed to come, and to draw a crowd!” She beamed. “Isn’t that a good idea?”

  “I don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about!” Crikey, he was going to have to drink the murk she was calling coffee just to keep up with her.

  When she stopped cold and smiled at him, the same warm, sweet smile he’d begun to expect from her this week, he felt like an ass. She was altogether too forgiving.

  “I’m going too fast, I know,” she said, moving aside the piles of papers and her coffee mug to slide closer to him. She sat with her hands folded on her lap until he tugged her to his side and put his arm around her. “It’s just that my brain is going so fast this morning. I woke up so early, and you were still sleeping, and then I realized that I should have been thinking about ways to save this place years ago—” She stopped short. “There I go again. Anyway, I thought a Halloween event would be something we could throw and open to the public. They would have to pay for tickets, of course, but I thought if we planned something really fabulous, and kept the tickets fairly cheap, we could attract a huge crowd, and get written up in the paper.”

  Huh. It was a workable plan at that. He rested his chin on the top of her head as he thought about it. “Or you could invite all the swankiest celebrities in town, gratis. Then you’d really make a splash in the papers.”

  “I don’t think we can afford to do that.” She rested her head against his shoulder. “I don’t think those types would come anyway, you know? They’ve probably got much better things to do than show up here for a party.”

  “Hey now! Where’s the Callender House cheerleader I met just this week?”

  “She’s gone into retirement.” Her tone was laced with sadness, which hurt him to hear. “If I’m going to turn this hotel around I need to be more realistic, not blindly loyal.”

  She was right, of course. Still, it was a bit disappointing to find th
at dreamy fondness gone from her voice. “Probably, yeah.”

  Without warning, she wriggled away and stood up. “So here’s what I’m going to do,” she announced, and paced the length of the room with her hands squarely on her hips. “I’m going to enlist Josie and Roseanne and everyone else who wants to help, and we’re going to brainstorm a budget. And a menu. Then decorations, of course, because we should probably have a theme more specific than simply Halloween. I’m thinking zombies, since this is all about bringing Callender House back from the dead. Plus, you can do a heck of a lot with cheesecloth and fake spider webs. Then we need to figure out where to advertise, and who the most likely attendees would be—the Village Voice or the Times? Then we have to think of our own costumes, of course…”

  Rhys glanced longingly at the empty bed as Olivia barreled on. Somehow he didn’t think she was quite in the mood for another lush, leisurely shag at the moment.

  He sighed. He’d gone to bed with Sleeping Beauty and woken up with Wellington.

  “They didn’t.”

  “I’m telling you, they did.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Hector was there, he saw them!”

  Josie narrowed her eyes at this piece of news, and leaned back in her chair. If Roseanne was right—and really, when wasn’t she where this place was concerned?—Olivia was probably either having morning-after regrets or gearing up for another go at the horizontal mambo with Rhys Spencer.

  Who had been, if Roseanne’s account was accurate, making dinner for her in the hotel kitchen before something set off the fire alarm and the sprinklers.

  Roseanne raised her eyebrows knowingly when Josie glanced up at her. She’d arrived just moments ago, straight from the kitchen, with a bagel in one hand and a mouthful of gossip, and parked her ample bottom in Josie’s guest chair to spill the news.

  “Still,” Josie said carefully, “you don’t know that they spent the night together. Just because they went upstairs together doesn’t mean…”

  Roseanne shook her head. “Rhys isn’t in his room. Unless he sleeps like the dead, that is. Or is dead, I guess. I sent Katja to bang on the door, which she did, and he didn’t answer.”

  “That was a risky thing to do,” Josie chided her. “What if he had answered? What was Katja going to say?”

  “That she had the wrong room, so sorry, sir.” Roseanne waved the problem away with a hand adorned with at least eight silver rings. “Happens all the time.”

  Josie sighed. “Well, it shouldn’t! It doesn’t, in other hotels!”

  “Focus, woman,” Roseanne said, leaning closer and widening her eyes. “We’re talking about Olivia and the British lothario, not what goes on in the Plaza.”

  “Lothario? Really?”

  “You don’t think he’s a lothario?” Roseanne argued. “Have you read the papers? People magazine?”

  Josie reached out to snatch half of Roseanne’s bagel off the corner of her desk. “Of course I think he’s a…lothario. It’s just that no one but my grandmother uses that word. In fact, I think I heard my grandmother call George Clooney a player just the other day.”

  “Will you be serious, please?”

  Josie shrugged. “It’s never worked before, but I can try.”

  Roseanne glared at her and reached across the desk to snatch the bagel back before Josie took a bite. “He’s too fast for her, is all. Too…worldly. I just don’t want to see her heart broken. She’s got enough problems already.”

  Yes, well, there was no denying that, Josie thought. She wasn’t even supposed to be working on a Saturday, but Rob had called from the front desk at eight o’clock to say that his replacement had called in sick. No one treated Callender House as an actual place of employment. More like a halfway house where they could spend the day if they felt like it.

  A halfway house for lunatics.

  And she was one of them now, Josie realized. The truth was, she would rather be here than slouching around her messy little apartment waiting for the phone to ring or for something to happen. At least something was always happening here. Something interesting, too. Even if it was happening to someone else.

  And when the someone else was Olivia, she couldn’t help but be a little bit concerned. She’d never met anyone as purely innocent as Olivia. She didn’t seem to exist in the same century, much less on the same planet. Chances were Olivia didn’t even know who Britney Spears was, or that Red Bull existed, much less what the blogosphere had said about the newest cell phones.

  Sinking back in her chair and eyeing Roseanne with sympathy, she sighed. Olivia was probably better off for it, too.

  She was so insulated, and apparently so happy, here in her own little world. A strange, rundown world, of course, with a cast of characters that Josie had privately decided would be considered too weird even for reality TV, for that was beside the point. Olivia didn’t know anything about men like Rhys Spencer.

  Especially since Rhys Spencer in particular was a culinary nomad and hadn’t stayed in one place longer than eight months in the last four years. He was due back in L.A. in three weeks, and who knew where he would go from there? Nope, he was not the sort of guy a girl should set her heart on, that was for sure.

  And Josie was pretty sure Olivia didn’t set her heart on anyone without picturing a happily ever after straight out of a fairy tale.

  “Look, I agree Rhys is probably not really the right guy for her,” she said finally. “But what are we supposed to do about it? Olivia was a grownup last time I checked. She’s allowed to make her own decisions—and her own mistakes. Plus? There’s something a little too weird about telling your boss, hey, you know that guy you probably slept with last night? Don’t do that anymore.”

  Roseanne’s face screwed up in thought at that, and she lurched out of her chair to cross the room to the window. Resting her hands on the broad ledge, where Josie’s various binders were stacked in dangerous piles, she addressed the bright fall morning outside when she said, “Then we’ll have to hang back, keep an eye on them. See what develops.”

  If she’d added constant vigilance Josie wouldn’t have been surprised. Roseanne looked as if she were ready to march into battle. With a frying pan for Rhys and a bottle of restorative smelling salts for Olivia.

  It was probably much ado about nothing anyway, Josie thought as she stared into her empty coffee mug. Olivia was probably having the best time—and the best sex—of her life right now. Everyone needed a good old-fashioned fling with a bad boy once in a while. She wouldn’t say no to one herself, come to think of it. Her social life, not to mention her sex life, had been sadly bad-boy free for much too long.

  Oh, hell, her life in general had been free of any type of guy for much too long, she thought as she got up to wander into the minikitchen down the hall and find more coffee. If the perfect guy had dropped into Olivia’s lap out of nowhere—even if he was only the perfect guy for right now—more power to her. Josie wouldn’t object to a good man appearing out of nowhere in her life. No sir.

  Which was when she opened the door to the hall and ran smack into Gus.

  Fate, she decided as Gus gave her a shy smile from beneath the brim of his cap, was definitely trying to tell her something.

  Chapter 9

  “Z ombies? Really?”

  “How about werewolves? Werewolves are much sexier than zombies.”

  “Zombies aren’t sexy at all. Zombies eat brains.”

  “Vampires, now …vampires are sexy. I think we should do a Count Dracula thing.”

  “I don’t see why it has to be scary. I hate scary. The monkeys in The Wizard of Oz scarred me for life.”

  “It’s Halloween, that’s why it has to be scary. Who wants to go to a Halloween party that’s all rainbows and puppies?”

  Olivia propped her chin in her hands and surveyed her staff down the polished expanse of the meeting room table. As meetings went, this one was typical, at least when it came to the general chaos and nearly a dozen voices a
ll fighting to be heard at once.

  When it came to the agenda, though, it was definitely different.

  Her idea for a Halloween ball had been met, at least initially, with silence. Silence and blank faces, as if everyone in the room was waiting for the punch line to the joke. Callender House hadn’t thrown an event like this in years—over a decade, probably. Not without someone else paying for it, at least.

  And the Sons of the American Revolution reunion hadn’t exactly been an unqualified success, what with the salmon being spoiled and two of the oldest members duking out a difference of opinion with their canes.

  Maribel Clinton, the head of housekeeping, had finally broken the silence. “A ball? You want to throw a ball.”

  “A ball, a party, an event—we can call it whatever you want,” Olivia had explained patiently. “I don’t care. I just want to get people into the hotel, get some publicity, entice people to come back, or recommend the hotel to their friends.”

  “And you want to do that with zombies?” Roseanne had asked, her brow furrowed in confusion.

  Josie gave Olivia a sympathetic shrug as the conversation devolved into the relative attractions of Halloween monsters, but she didn’t chime in. She was still new, Olivia reminded herself. She probably still thought they were all crazy.

  Which, actually, they were. Now that she thought about it, Callender House had to be a weird place to work after putting in time at the St. Regis. It had to make this place look like a meager step up from a mental asylum.

  And that had to stop, she realized. Just because she’d always treated everyone on staff like family didn’t mean they were allowed to bicker like children. This was a business, and zombies or not, it needed to be taken seriously.

  She stood up, pushing her chair away from the table. At least she’d worn her red sweater this morning. That would get their attention. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”