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 her 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