“Financial reward. This ring is worth a large sum. I appreciate the lengths you went to in order to return it to us. It is . . . greatly significant to my family.”
I watch Eric’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, and despite myself I feel my eyes brim up. My dad was nothing like Eric—he was warm, open, ready to laugh. But I can’t help thinking of Dad. The ring he gave me for my twenty-first birthday, now lying at the bottom of the sea after a stupid drunk swim in Brighton on my twenty-second birthday. I touch my necklace, the gold chain Mum gave me for my twenty-first—Something different from each of us, you know what we’re like, can’t agree on anything!
“That’s incredibly kind of you, sir,” Lucas says when I fail to answer. He shoots me an odd look before returning his attention to Eric. “Can we invite you to stay for a drink with your son?”
I shake myself. “Yes! And actually . . .” I look at Charlie as he steps forward and takes the ring reverently from my palm. “If you’re looking for a gorgeous location to propose, you’ve found the perfect place.”
He looks around the hotel as if noticing where he is for the first time.
“Huh,” he says. “That would be cute, wouldn’t it? Given Mum’s ring was here all this time.”
“We can meet to talk about that now, if you wish,” Lucas says, smelling profit, no doubt. “I’m available.”
“As am I!” I say, already mentally composing a message cancelling my evening plans. I suspect Charlie is going to do his proposal in a big way, and that disposable income is not a problem for his family, which means that right now, I am Charlie’s number-one fan.
“Perfect,” Eric says, making his way towards the bar. “Charlie! A drink before our meeting.”
Charlie follows after his father in a daze.
“You’re not getting the credit for this, if that’s your plan, muscling in with your ‘meeting,’?” I say to Lucas. “The Ring Thing was my idea.”
“You hardly expected this to happen,” Lucas scoffs.
That grates on me, so I smile. I know this smile winds Lucas up. It’s my most obliging, most engaging one—the one that always makes guests calm down when they’re angry. It has the opposite effect on Lucas. I suspect he knows that when I smile like this, really I’m thinking, You’re an idiot, and I’m going to be so nice to you, you won’t even notice that I’m getting my way and you’re not getting yours.
“If you think you can swan in now, and then tell Mrs. SB and Barty that you got this reward for the hotel . . .”
Lucas pulls his chin back slightly, eyes flaring. “Is that what you think I’d do?”
I pause. His acts of sabotage aren’t generally that dishonourable, admittedly. But if he’s not planning to take the credit, why is he helping?
“I care about this place, too, you know,” Lucas says.
I tilt my head, like, Really, though? I know Lucas likes this job, but I’m not sure the man has it in him to really love something the way I love Forest Manor.
“Whatever,” I say. “I need to get changed back into uniform if we’re doing this meeting.”
I’m in a white knitted jumper that hangs down to my knees over washed-out jeans and my baby-pink trainers—I love this outfit, but it’s not very professional. I hike my bag onto my shoulder and head for the lost-property room. There’s space in there now that we’ve cleared it out a bit—or, as Lucas put it earlier, “moved the contents of this terrible room into the lobby where everyone can see them.”
I slip out of my jumper and trainers and then bend to yank my uniform back out of my bag. I like the Forest Manor uniform—it’s just a simple white shirt and black trousers, with the hotel logo on the left breast, but I feel good when I’m wearing it. It’s like slipping into the person I am at work. At the hotel, I’m not overstretched, I’m not exhausted; I’m nobody’s tragic anecdote. I’m the one who . . . what did Mrs. Hedgers say? The one who brings the sparkle.
“Oh, Izzy, I wanted to ask about this box of—oops!” says Poor Mandy, barging through the door behind me and then clocking that I’m in nothing but my jeans and bra.
I turn. Lucas is standing on the other side of the desk behind Mandy, and for the briefest of moments, before Mandy shuts the door, we lock eyes.
These days, Lucas tends to look at me with a sort of flat, weary regard, as though he’s just waiting for me to annoy him. It’s grown harder and harder to believe that I ever saw anything more than that in Lucas’s gaze when he looked at me. But right now, as our eyes meet, something shifts. He’s not completely in control of himself, and what I see makes my skin tingle. For the first time since that humiliating screaming match on the hotel lawns, Lucas da Silva is looking at me like he wants me.
The door slams shut and the moment’s gone, but my skin still glows from his gaze.
God. I hand the man my heart, tell him to meet me under the mistletoe, then turn up there to find him kissing my flatmate. I call him out for being a thoughtless dickhead and he tells me I’m making drama. He spends all year making this job as hard as possible for me, refusing to compromise on anything, even after what he did last Christmas.
And still he can turn me hot with one single glance.
Lucas
“Explain it to me,” Pedro says in Portuguese, coffee machine whirring behind him. “You hate her because . . .”
“It’s complicated,” I say, eyeing the coffee as it streams out of the machine into my favourite mug, the tall grey one with just the right-sized handle.
I’ve been frequenting Smooth Pedro’s Coffee and Smoothie Bar for almost two years now. Pedro and I met at the gym—I heard his accent across the weights zone, and it was like breathing in and suddenly smelling home. He’s from Teresópolis and has been in the UK for a few years longer than me. He gives terrible advice but makes excellent coffee.
“I can do complicated,” he says, and then, at my dubious expression: “Go on, try me. Allow me to surprise you. Wasn’t I right about putting avocado in your smoothie?”
This feels slightly different, but I humour him. “Last year, we were flirtatious, but she was always seeing someone, and it never really came to anything. Then, at the hotel Christmas party, I kissed this woman who turned out to be her flatmate. It was under the mistletoe, not even a real thing. But Izzy got so protective. She dragged me out onto the lawn and yelled that I had behaved like a pig, and that, hang on . . .”
I wrap my hands around the mug of coffee as I try to remember her exact wording.
“You’re not good enough for her anyway, you cold-hearted, shiny-shoed robot-man.”
“Whew. I am seeing some warning signs here,” says Pedro.
“I know.”
“Do you think she was jealous?”
“Izzy? No. And that would be crazy anyway. We weren’t together, we’d never even kissed . . .”
“Hmm,” Pedro says, unimpressed. “So she just didn’t think you were good enough for her friend?”
“Exactly.”
I swallow. I have enough self-insight to know that not good enough is something I struggle with. But it’s more than that. I liked Izzy. I respected her opinion. Knowing that she thought Drew shouldn’t be kissing a man like me had done more than just hit an old nerve—it had reminded me that wherever I am in the world, women always see me the same way. You don’t have a heart, so don’t tell me I broke it, my ex had said on her way out of the door. When she had first confessed to cheating on me, Camila had seemed genuinely surprised to see me crying. I honestly didn’t know you had it in you, she’d said.
I close my eyes, sipping my coffee as Pedro gets the smoothie bar ready for opening. I’m off today and tomorrow, but I will be working here in my favourite seat at the window—my laptop is already packed in the bag at my feet. I am behind on my course, with an essay due on Friday, and on top of that, Izzy talked Charlie into proposing to his boyfriend on Thursday, and promised all sorts of bespoke elements that we now have to organise on a tight budget. I need to stay focused.
And I absolutely must stop thinking about Izzy Jenkins in nothing but jeans and a pink bra.
* * *