He glanced at the building. Callender House. A hotel, it looked like. He’d never even heard of it. A bit down at heel now, if you asked him. All faded old brick and stained brownstone. Even the sign over the entrance was crooked. Olivia needed a better travel agent.
She wasn’t wearing black either, was she? Wouldn’t suit her, he decided as he stared at the revolving door of the hotel, where a young doorman was whistling under his breath. She was too…dreamy. As old-fashioned as her name was. All that curling brown hair, and those enormous brown eyes, like something out of a Kate Greenaway illustration. She’d blinked so prettily at him, her cheeks blooming with mortification, and that lush mouth ripe for a kiss. He smiled, despite the sticky remains of his drink on his shirts and hands. The woman had him spouting poetry.
He should have asked for her number. Or at least her last name. But he’d found himself staring into those sleepy eyes instead, and then she was gone. Funny, that she was so shy. She looked about near nervous collapse when he’d simply asked for her name.
Which made following her into the hotel a truly bad idea. Not at all the thing. She wouldn’t like it, he’d lay money on that.
But in his head, he heard her tentative voice. Olivia.
And he realized his feet were already carrying him through the hotel’s revolving door, which groaned as if he’d wakened it, and into the dim hush of the lobby.
Of course she wasn’t there, conveniently waiting for him. So he strolled off to the right, in search of the bar, running an idle finger along the red velvet banquette in the center of the lobby’s marble floor as he passed it.
The bar was empty. It was a bit early, of course. And Olivia didn’t seem the type to swill down a cocktail before noon. When he walked back into the lobby, no one was waiting at the pair of lifts, either, both of which looked as if they’d come straight from a theatrical props department, filed under “obsolete.”
Bloody foolish notion anyway, following her in here like a stalker. He’d been in Manhattan for all of an hour and he needed a hotel room himself, since he never bothered to make a reservation in advance. Limited your options when you tied yourself down to a strict plan, didn’t it? It wasn’t as if he had anything particular to do anyway. Fork in the Road was through filming until the first week in November, which was when he’d need to get himself back to L.A. for the finale. And cook up a sodding storm, if he wanted to win the competition and the two hundred grand that came with it, but he wasn’t especially worried about it. In the meantime, he had enough dosh in his bank account to last for a while, and no better ideas than following a pretty woman into a hotel.
He glanced around the bedraggled lobby. He felt as if he’d stepped back in time, but that wasn’t a point for the plus column in this case. Crikey, there was a vintage wall of mail slots behind the desk, fitted with tarnished brass doors and miniature keys. It had probably been built when the hotel first opened. Olivia should count herself lucky if her room had a loo instead of a chamber pot.
And just then, as if he’d conjured her, she walked into view. Without thinking about why, he stepped behind a giant fern and watched her. She’d come not from the ladies’ room or the bar or the lift, but from a door behind the front desk. Strangest of all, she’d stopped there and reached for a piece of paper under the counter before pushing that cloud of glossy hair behind her ears.
He strained forward to listen when the young girl at the desk, outfitted in a rather severe black jacket and a brass nametag, smiled at her. “Two new guests scheduled for this afternoon, Olivia,” she said.
Olivia’s smile was sudden and surprisingly sunny. Her whole face lit up when she smiled, and something inside him warmed to the sight. “See?” Olivia said, with a happy little shrug of her shoulders. “I knew it. I’ve got a staff of worrywarts. Josie was just complaining about the registration numbers this morning.”
A staff? The pretty little bird with the shy smile and the big eyes had a staff? He leaned in an inch too far, rustling the leaves on the plant, and had to grab them to silence the noise when Olivia glanced across the lobby in his direction. Sod it all. There was a reason he was a chef and not an MI6 operative.
“It’s your hotel,” the desk clerk said with a firm nod of her head. “You’ll show ’em.”
It was Olivia’s hotel? This time, Rhys was lucky he didn’t knock the fern over completely, because he stumbled forward in shock as a bell went off in his head.
He frowned. Chances were it was an alarm. A “bad idea, mate” alarm.
Didn’t matter, he thought, a grin spreading. So the place was down at heel, and he wasn’t at all looking forward to getting acquainted with that suspicious-looking lift. He’d stayed in worse places. But none of them had been owned by a soft, curvy woman with brown eyes and a mouth he wanted to taste about as much as he wanted to draw his next breath.
Yeah, he’d just found his digs for the next little while. Right here in Olivia’s strange old hotel.
Chapter 2
Two hours later, Olivia realized it was going to take a lot more than daydreaming about a flirty British guy to get through lunch. The way things stood at the moment, lunch for anyone was only a distant possibility.
“Josef, it’s all right,” she said gently, patting her chef’s arm. Beside him on the long stainless steel counter were the ruins of a German chocolate cake. “Bake another one.”
“Bake another one, she says.” The older man rolled his eyes to the ceiling, his bushy black brows meeting in a frightening line. “So simple, yes? No! Is not so simple!”
Olivia cast a pleading look at Rick, Josef’s sous chef, but he was no help. Arms folded over his chest, he lifted his chin and snorted.
“All right,” she said, vaguely aware that in the back of her mind something was knocking, only a faint, distant sound so far. Panic. She ignored it. If she ignored it, it would go away. There was no time for panic today. Anyway, Josef was simply in one of his moods. Happened all the time. “Why doesn’t someone tell me exactly what happened?”
The cavernous kitchen exploded with voices. Josef, Rick, Jesus, one of the line cooks, Willie, one of the servers—all of them chimed in with their version of the Great Cake Disaster.
“The man is insane. Like, certifiable. I’m just saying.”
“Sous chef? This is what you call a sous chef today? Bah.”
“You know, this kind of atmosphere is exactly the kind of thing that they write about when it comes to toxic workplaces.”
“I didn’t know the butter was bad! Who left it out?”
Olivia took a deep breath and stepped back as she checked her watch. Ten minutes to one. Uncle Stuart would be here any minute, and she had mutiny in the restaurant kitchen.
Which wasn’t surprising, or even uncommon, but it was one more reason to put Monday—this one, at least—on the list.
She couldn’t get angry. Not really. Josef Vollner had been the head chef at the Coach and Four since she was ten, and she had more experience sneaking into the kitchen for pieces of Linzer torte and leftover pasta than in treating him like an employee. He was pushing seventy, he was notoriously sensitive, and for a man who claimed he would never feel at home anywhere but Berlin, he loved Olivia and the restaurant with remarkable loyalty.
“I didn’t do it,” Rick was saying, shaking his head. “I don’t do pastry. That’s Jesus’s job.”
“Hey! I don’t make the frosting, I just put it on the cake!”
“Amateurs!” Josef railed, stomping his foot so hard Olivia jumped. “Forty years in this business, and I work with