“Right.” Archie stood firm.
“But those new wives looked at it and saw dark, dark, dark. And, they saw their mother’s house. No one wants to live in their mother’s house, they wanted light and bright and new. They wanted something different. And it didn’t stop there. Those same women who painted over their woodwork had families, raised them, and those daughters moved to the suburbs and wanted new and different. The ranch was born. Wall-to-wall shag carpet. Rec rooms, oddly enough with wall paneling, although this time it was thin veneer designed to be glued to the existing wall. Then those women had kids and their kids ushered in the age of mauve and my personal favorite, the wallpaper border. I can’t tell you how many homes I’ve redone covered in wallpaper border. You should’ve seen my kitchen in Sausalito when we first bought that house, good God. My point is, Archie, that every generation changes things. Right now, you’re in luck, because everything old is new again and there’s such an honoring of history right now. It’s hip to have old things, repurposed and reimagined, but old. So we’re going to make some changes, but they’re changes you’ll be able to live with. Changes that’ll be so seamless with the original design of this hotel, changes that will honor the integrity and inherent beauty of a place like this, changes that, when I’m done, you’ll swear you couldn’t have imagined it any other way.”
Damn. She was good.
“Damn. You’re good,” Archie breathed. He looked back and forth between the two of us. “Good God, if you two ever got together you could take over the world.”
“Oooh,” Caroline and I both breathed at the same time, and Archie threw up his hands in defeat.
“Forget I mentioned it.” He laughed, but then looked serious again. “Everything you’ve said up until now has been very impressive, but I’ll need to see examples of what you’ve done, and what you’re planning to do, before I approve anything. I’m sure that’s something we can all agree on, yes?”
“Of course,” Caroline said, and walked over to shake on it.
He looked at her a moment, assessing, then at me, then shook her hand. “I look forward to it.” Shifting his gaze from Caroline to me, he said, “Ms. Morgan, a word?”
“Of course, Mr. Bryant.” I nodded, walking over. “Caroline, don’t start the taking over the world plan before I get back.”
“Of course! I’ll need a dirty martini before I can start planning that.”
I grinned and followed Archie out into the hall. He waited until I closed the door before rolling his eyes. “Where the hell did you find her?”
“San Francisco,” I replied.
“She’s going to be able to bring this in under budget?” he asked, looking over my shoulder.
“She says she can,” I answered, looking over my shoulder as well. No one there.
“And she isn’t allowed anywhere near my wood paneling.”
“You got that right,” I breathed, taking a step closer to him. Instead of stepping closer to me, though, he looked over his shoulder. “Is Walter stalking you or something, what the hell?”
“Don’t mention Walter to me right now,” he muttered, pulling a key from his pocket and slipping it into the lock of the room next door.
“What are you doing?” I asked, as he whisked me inside quickly. “Where did you get that key?”
“Skeleton key, I can get into anything in this hotel anytime I want,” he said, shutting the door behind me. In an instant, I was up against the wall just inside the door. “And right now the only thing I want to get into is you.”
“You’ve got to be kidding, we can’t—fucking hell, Archie,” I moaned, as he flipped up my skirt with one hand and covered my mouth with the other.
“You’ve got to keep your voice down,” he warned, his voice muffled, his head being under my skirt and all. “You don’t want your new friend to hear you.”
I stepped out of the room, smoothed down my skirt and my hair, and headed back into the room where I’d left Caroline. She was measuring the inside of the windows, and stacks of blinds were strewn across the bed.
“Sorry about that, little crisis that blew up out of the blue.”
“Oh, no trouble at all,” Caroline said, calmly handing me the measuring tape, then walking over to the opposite wall. “You get everything worked out?”
“Hmm? Oh yes, yes, crisis solved, everyone was satisfied.”
She smiled. “That’s good. You know, I was thinking, even though I’m pretty sure that the plaster is fairly thick, you might want to have some insulation blown in, you know, just to pad the walls a bit? They’ve done wonders with insulation these days, we can have it added through a small hole down in the base, wouldn’t cost nearly as much as it would’ve even ten years ago, and you’d be amazed what it can do not only for helping to regulate the temperature, but also how it can cut down on the noise.” She looked me dead in the eye on that last part.
“Noise?” I asked, my voice higher than normal.
“Mm-hmm,” she said, making a fist and thumping on the wall. The wall I’d just been on the other side of. “Thin walls, you know.”
Mortified. I was. Mortified. Trying hard to keep my voice level, I stammered. “Oh. Y-Yes, I can see how that could be . . .”
“Clara?” she said, snapping her tape measure back open.
“Yes?” My voice had climbed three octaves. Mariah would be so proud.
“Don’t worry about it.” She extended the measuring tape about ten inches or so. “I’ve got one just like him back at home.”
“I don’t understand, what are you telling me?”
“Look, right now, you know what I know. No one’s talking, at least the ones who actually know something. The rest of us are left wondering what the hell is going on. I wish I had more to tell you.”
“But there’s a possibility that this merger isn’t actually going to happen?” I asked Barbara, my mind reeling as I tried to process everything she’d just told me. She’d been suspicious for a while—senior management hadn’t been as forthcoming as usual, forecasting had been skewed, and there’d been mid-level human resources types sniffing around the last week or so, allegedly brought in by the board to ascertain the efficiency of each department, but our own internal HR department wasn’t aware of it beforehand. Add to that the rumor that The Empire Group, New York City’s top marketing firm, which had an entire department dedicated to brand awareness with a strong hotel division, had recently been entertaining the idea of scooping up some of the smaller boutique firms on the East Coast—exactly like the one I worked for—and there you go. Corporate merger as a possibility suddenly became an idea that was firmly rooted in reality.