Callum, who’d spent much of that afternoon with his cell phone glued to his ear while he helped out with the cleanup, was sitting on the registration desk. His brothers were huddled nearby. One of them—Wiley—had his arm around Grace’s shoulder. She looked as exhausted as Arabella felt.
“Obviously, we’ll have to close while the restoration work gets completed,” Callum announced to everyone assembled.
“What’d the insurance company say?” That came from Kane.
Nobody could miss the look that passed between Callum and his brothers. “They haven’t said they’ll deny this latest claim outright, but—” He shook his head and eyed everyone in the room. “I’m not going to lie here. The balcony was tampered with.” His gaze fell on Grace and his brother Wiley. “We can just count our blessings that nobody was hurt worse than Grace with her broken leg. The food tampering at the Give Back barbecue was a passel more of bad publicity. We’ve beefed up security in and around the property. We’ve been trying to advertise the hell out of this place. The commercial we just filmed hasn’t even hit the airwaves yet. We’ve had more cancellations in the last month than we’ve had reservations. And now this?” He spread his arms and dropped them wearily.
Wiley stepped forward then. “We’re not giving up,” he said flatly. “We’re Fortunes and we don’t give up.”
Someone muttered a “hear, hear.”
Callum clapped his brother on the shoulder. “Wiley’s right. Fortunes don’t give up.” His lips tilted slightly as if he’d only needed that particular reminder. “But I wouldn’t be doing my job right now if I didn’t caution everyone here that the future right now as far as the hotel is concerned is anything but certain. So if you want to find a job elsewhere or—”
Brady stood. “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m not going anywhere.”
Arabella popped up. “Neither am I.” She lifted her hands. “If I’m not cleaning rooms right now, then I’ll help paint walls. Whatever it takes.”
“So will I,” someone echoed.
“Me, too.”
Callum’s smile widened slightly. “Well. We won’t go down for lack of fight and support,” he said huskily. “Now, it’s late and you guys have lives to get home to.”
“What do we do tomorrow?” That came from Beulah.
Grace stepped forward. “If I may?”
Callum waved his hand in invitation. “Everyone’s opinion matters here, Grace. Particularly yours.”
“If we could have all of the supervisors and department leads report as usual, we’ll have enough staff on hand to deal with anything that crops up in the next week or so. Everybody else—”
“Will still receive your regular pay,” Callum inserted. “It’s none of your fault this is happening, and we’re not going to pull the rug out from under anyone’s feet.”
“Not without due warning,” Wiley inserted cautiously.
Arabella knew he was the family attorney. Naturally he had to add something to that effect.
“We’ll have an all-staff meeting here a week from Monday,” Callum added without missing a beat. “If you don’t hear from Grace personally or one of the other managers here, then check in yourself for more details on the where and when. One way or another, we’ll have more news by then.” He clapped his hands together once. “Any questions?” He looked over the group, waiting patiently.
“Not a question,” Hallie said, looking around rather nervously. “Just something to say.” She smiled a little crookedly then punched her hand into the air. “Go Hotel Fortune!”
Arabella’s eyes misted. She punched her fist, too, and smiled at Jay, who was leaning against a far wall, his arms crossed over his chest. “Go Hotel Fortune!”
In minutes, the cheer had filled the damp lobby as everyone chanted the phrase over and over and over again.
If a hotel could be saved through sheer enthusiasm, Hotel Fortune would end up being just fine.
Chapter Twelve
Despite the worrisome matter of the hotel’s repairs, the days that followed were some of the sweetest days that Arabella had ever known.
Neither she nor Jay were heads of anything, which meant they had a vacation, forced or not.
They helped Louella harvest strawberries for half the day on Monday and spent the rest of the day in his barn loft bedroom making love.
On Tuesday, Jay talked Arabella into climbing inside the woefully tiny cockpit of a plane he rented.
They flew all the way to Houston—which wasn’t all that far admittedly—and had lunch with his parents. On the return flight to Rambling Rose, Arabella didn’t even remember to clutch her armrests in terror because she was so caught up with teasing Jay over the stories his mother had regaled her with over lunch. “You might have told me you were a child prodigy,” she said. Loudly, because it was the only way he could hear her over the noise of the engine propeller.
“I wasn’t a prodigy,” he said dismissively, and just as loudly.
“You won a piano competition when you were nine! Against people who were three times your age! And you graduated from college when you were twenty!”
He rolled his eyes and pointed at the checkerboard landscape beyond the windows. “There’s the barn.”
She looked out and sure enough, she could see the rooftop of his barn and the water wheel beside it.
“Can we fly over the hotel?”
In answer, the wings of the plane banked slightly.
She whooped nervously and closed her eyes to the sound of his laughter. But only briefly, because it was much too interesting seeing the land below.
On Wednesday, he got her up on Loretta’s back and with him on Waylon, they rode all over his grandmother’s property. Then he heated the water for the tub in the peach orchard and pretended to wash Arabella’s back even though he was a lot more interested in her front.
He admitted that he’d suspected, and now knew for certain, that that tub had always been big enough for two.
That evening, they had dinner at Provisions with Adam and Laurel. Stephanie, who was Callum’s sister and had acted as Larkin’s foster mom for
