“How do you know I don’t know what I’m doing?”
“This is your first visit, and I have to keep you safe.”
She wasn’t sure she was buying it, but she had work to do. And her hair was going to be a wreck when she took the dumb thing off. “Fine. Just show me the hotel.”
“There’s not much to see down here. We’ll just get in the way.” He stepped aside as a worker carried a ladder past them. “I’ll show you the grand ballroom.”
He started past the elevator doors. Kendall hurried to catch up, her eyes stubbornly darting to him—that long and lean frame that looked good in, well, everything she’d ever seen him wear. And especially good wearing nothing. Sawyer in jeans was not what she’d prepared for today. Judging by his wealth and privilege, he did not strike her as a man who would get his hands dirty. It was more than a little bit sexy.
They turned down a wide hall and the construction noise faded.
“Busy morning?” she asked.
“I was going over the restoration of the metal overlays on the elevator doors. A lot of the original art deco features were lost over the years.”
“I researched the hotel last night. Everything in the older photos was so grand and luxurious.”
“It was once considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the city. I’d like to have it be seen that way again.”
It was indeed gorgeous in the pictures, but Kendall found the history she’d dug up more interesting than the architecture—it read like a tabloid magazine, salacious tales of events that she’d thought only happened in movies. The Grand Legacy had seen mobsters roll up in Bentleys with beautiful women in mink stoles, high-stakes poker games between politicians and Hollywood elite, and New Year’s Eve parties that made Times Square look like a church social.
Sawyer led them into to a large open room like a reception area, with a chandelier wrapped in plastic and five sets of double doors. Sawyer fished a large ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked one set. “I’m glad you got up to speed. Shows me you’re serious about the project.”
“Isn’t that the appeal? The secrets of the Grand Legacy Hotel?” She followed him into the dark room.
He grinned and nodded, then flipped on the lights. “It is.”
Kendall’s eyes were immediately drawn upward, to the barrel ceiling. High above them, a procession of intricate geometric patterns in white and blue glass, trimmed with gilded metal, ran the length of the room. A soft light glowed through the panes. “It looks just like it did in the pictures. It’s lit from the other side, isn’t it?”
“It’s meant to look like moonlight is shining through, but in reality, the fourth-floor rooms are above it. It took months to clean and repair. Entire sections had fallen during the fifteen years the hotel was closed.”
“Right after you inherited it.”
Surprise flickered across his face. “You did do your homework. I was seventeen. I wasn’t in a position to run a hotel. But I sure wasn’t going to let my dad get his hands on it either.”
“I was curious about that. He really thought the building should be knocked down?”
Sawyer gazed up at the ceiling, shaking his head. “He still thinks that. Can you imagine all of this, gone forever?”
Kendall admired his profile, and the way he got lost in the details. This meant a lot to him. She could hear it in his voice. “It’s going to look incredible in a magazine or newspaper. We’ll get a photographer in here right away.”
“If you think this looks good, let me take you up to the main bar.” He locked the ballroom and they traversed the reception area to a metal door. “Ladies first.”
Kendall stepped into the dimly lit stairwell. “The fire stairs?”
“Only way to get there right now. They’re working on the wrought-iron railings of the grand staircase.”
She began to climb the concrete steps. “How far up?”
“Third floor.”
“Have you been this hands-on through the entire project? Or is it just because you’re behind schedule?” Sawyer was directly behind her. Was he doing what she’d been doing earlier and ogling her backside? He shouldn’t be, but part of her wanted to think he was.
“I’m here all the time. There are so many tiny details and they all have to be exactly right. I spent enough time here as a kid to remember most of it. Everything else I research in my great-grandfather’s records.”
“Don’t you have an architect to do that?”
“I take the lead. No one could possibly care about it as much as I do.”
Kendall stopped on the third-floor landing. “So you’re a control freak.” She didn’t mean it as an insult. She admired his dedication. How many men in his position cared about the details?
He reached past her to open the door. Inches apart, they faced each other. His presence resonated through her body, memories of his skin touching hers impossible to fend off. “I prefer methodical, but sure. Call me a control freak. That’s how you get what you want.”
She held her breath, recalling exactly how much control Sawyer had taken during their one night together—the way he’d gathered her wrists in his hands and pinned her arms to the mattress as he trailed kisses along her jaw, her neck, then across her collarbone and down the centerline of her chest...
Now she was happy for the construction helmet. She’d save herself a tragic head injury if he continued to plant these thoughts in her head and she fainted.
They entered a service hall and found yet another door hidden away around a corner. How anyone would ever find this was beyond her. He opened it and she stepped inside, the odor of fresh paint hitting her nose. Sawyer again flipped on the lights, revealing a room that put the ballroom ceiling to shame. She had not seen this room in her research.
A long, ebony bar lined one side of the room, with leaded glass pendant fixtures pooling light on the gleaming surface. The other side had more than a dozen intimate booths, with dark leather seats and ornate black and gold metal screens separating them. In the wall at the far end of the room was a massive circular frame, tall enough to skim the ceiling and graze the floor, and just as wide. It was shrouded in paper, but sunlight filtered through at the edges.
“A window? On the front of the building?” Kendall asked. “I don’t remember this.”
Sawyer nodded. “It was an original feature, but it was taken out in 1919. I had it rebuilt from the first photos of the hotel.”
“Why would anyone close up a window?”
“It’s a bar, and it was Prohibition. The entire thing was closed up, at least from the outside. In fact, the Grand Staircase led to nothing but the third floor elevators at that time. As far as the outside world knew, this didn’t exist. But if you were in the know, it was the busiest place in the entire hotel.”
“A speakeasy?”
He smiled with a hint of mischief. “You know, my great-grandfather bought the hotel with money he earned from bootlegging. The speakeasy is how he found out about it in the first place.”
“So that’s true? The Locke family fortune came from running liquor?”
“My family comes from very humble beginnings. But my great-grandfather had big ideas.” There was a fondness in his voice that warmed her heart. She hadn’t expected him to be sentimental. “It makes my father crazy. He’d prefer to think of the Lockes as upper crust through and through, but that’s just not the case.”
“You can’t change family history.”