“Oh, you’re testing my self-control, Nella-bella,” he murmured against her neck. Then he wrenched himself away from her, with a twisted grin for the effort it took. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”
Sometime in the night, the flood warnings for Okanogan County were relaxed and the highway below Champagne Cascades was listed as open. Nell hit the workday running.
By some small miracle, Jessalyn had been released from the hospital the day before. She answered Nell’s phone call with a gush of gratitude for her supervisor’s kindness and promised to go straight up to the site to report on any damage and how quickly it could be opened for bookings.
“Uh, you’re not at — where are you now?”
“I’m at my mom’s place in Chelan. She didn’t want me to be living on my own with this gestational diabetic thing in case I have another seizure. But I can drive up right away.”
Nell wanted to throw something. Would it be wrong to chuck an eraser at the wall? “Jessalyn, are you… sure this job is still a good fit for you right now?” Site managers needed to have initiative for things like going up to the site as soon as the roads were opened, without waiting for specific instructions. But she couldn’t snap at Jessalyn for not thinking, not when the poor woman was just coming off a concussion.
Jessalyn gasped. “Oh, please, I need my job! Especially right now. No one would hire me, pregnant like this, and I need the benefits.”
“I know.” Nell pitched her voice to be reassuring. “It is a live-in position, though. You need to be onsite. Call me when you get there?” This isn’t going to end well.
She let out a long sigh after she ended the call. Shook her head. Picked up the eraser she’d been eyeing before and rocketed it at her corkboard, knocking a couple of Tommy’s Post-It notes to the ground.
A familiar masculine laugh drew her eyes to the doorway, and there was Eamonn, chuckling to himself. He’d apparently seen her throw the eraser and was enjoying her little loss of temper. “What?! Also, did you just get here? It’s after eleven.”
“Uncle Tommy doesn’t care,” said Eamonn, with a shrug. “Hey, I brought you this.” He plunked a Starbucks cup down on her desk, gave her a look like he wanted to say something more, then strolled out the door. Moments later, she could hear him moving around in his office next door — the shoddy thin walls let every sound through. She sniffed the drink, then looked at the cardboard sleeve around the cup. Yes. A half-sweet coconut milk chai latte, the same thing she’d asked for as they were heading out on their road trip. He remembered.
And just like that, her day brightened.
When Nell got back from her lunch break the next day, she found one of Tommy’s yellow Post-It notes on her desk: My office — 2:30 pm. She stuck her head into Eamonn’s office, announcing her presence with a quick rap on the doorframe. “Tommy wants to see me this afternoon. You don’t happen to know what he wants, do you?”
“No, sorry. He stopped by to give me some of Aunt Betty’s lasagna, that’s it.” Eamonn gestured toward a Tupperware container on the corner of his desk, which held a half-eaten slab of lasagna with a fork stuck in it. “He probably just wants you to reassure him that the bubbles will continue to be profitable.”
“The bubbles? Oh, you mean Champagne Cascades.”
Fortunately, the resort had been spared the worst of the flooding, due mostly to its placement on higher ground but also some sheer luck. Jessalyn had called in the landscaping service and cleaners, François was back in charge of his kitchen, and the existing bookings for the weekend did not have to be canceled.
Maybe she could salvage her figures for the month. It’s only the thirteenth, still lots of time, she told herself. But she had a bad feeling about Tommy’s summons, and even though she tried to believe that you could make your own luck with perseverance and positive energy, the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach persisted.
Instead of making tea and returning a call from Stu about the laundry service at Secret Creek as she’d planned, she printed out the Champagne Cascades bookings for the month and whipped up a quick analysis of what the closure had cost in lost revenue, vouchers, and person-hours, along with bookings and revenue for the same time period over the past three years. There hadn’t been a similar flood incident at Champagne Cascades in June previously, but there was a much longer closure recorded at the end of May two years before, so she printed out a report on that, and statistics on flooding across all Wildforest properties going back ten years. It was a regular occurrence at the riverside and lakeside properties, and the numbers bore that out, no matter how badly Tommy would like to lay blame.
Armed with a folder full of data, as prepared as she could be, Nell headed for Tommy’s office. Project confidence. But he’d make it personal; he’d find a way to criticize her. I hate my job.
“You wanted to see me, Tommy?”
“Nell.” He looked up at her in the doorway, then glanced at his watch, almost ostentatiously, pretending he’d lost track of time. “Right, it’s almost two thirty. You’re… three minutes early.”
She gave him a neutral smile to mask her frustration with his little power games. If she’d been right on time, he would have made a joke about it. “Do you need me to come back in three minutes?”
“No, you can come in. Oh — close the door, please. And have a seat.”
Close the door? Doors were never closed at Wildforest.
As she stepped into the office, she realized there
