HATING AND DATING YOUR BOSS WITH STYLE!

Chapter 1

Phoebe

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but no, I can’t call the president of the Whitley Hotel and demand that he give you the room you reserved.”

I tried to keep my tone polite and professional as the woman sucked in a breath to scream at me.

“I reserved that room months ago! This is absurd. You have to help me. I want to talk to the manager.”

The woman’s family members, gathered around the desk, glared at me angrily.

And you thought working at a fancy hotel was going to be a glamorous experience.

Not that The Maxine was a super nice hotel. She was like an elderly dowager aunt who was down on her luck but still liked to slip you expired candies she kept in an ashtray. More importantly, The Maxine was in desperate need of revenue. Every little bit helped. That was why I couldn’t just tell the crowd in front of me to stuff it and go somewhere else.

“I unfortunately can’t do anything about the fact that the Whitley Hotel gave away your rooms to the Dutch ambassador; however, we here at The Maxine Boutique Hotel are happy to welcome you to our historic premises,” I chirped. “We also offer complementary sangria and, of course, cocktails and snacks in the evening. But we understand if you wish to find other accommodations.”

The people grumbled but lined up to book a room.

Three of the kids with the woman were running around the lobby and jumping on the furniture. I winced and hurried around the front counter.

“Let’s please try and respect the furniture—it’s historic!”

Not to mention we literally cannot afford new couches.

The woman turned on me to bark, “Don’t talk to my kids! That’s not your job.”

Ah, entitled hotel guests. My favorite.

The large front door of the hotel swung open, and a tall man in a suit walked in. He only had a briefcase with him.

I loved a mysterious guest. Was he a spy like James Bond? He certainly had Daniel Craig’s dirty-blond hair and rugged good looks. Where was his suitcase? Maybe he lived here in Manhattan but was escaping from a crazy girlfriend.

“Just a moment,” I said to the woman at the counter. She continued to berate me, and her kids started pulling the buds off the flowers arranged in a large brass vase.

“Can I offer you a sangria?” I poured the man a glass from the pitcher that had slices of orange and grapefruit and added a sprig of mint.

The handsome mystery guest reacted like I was trying to poison him.

“Did you buy a box of this?” he asked, lip curling up.

I bristled. “No, sir, I did not. I made the sangria myself, and that mint is from our greenhouse.”

He made an incredulous noise. “Doubtful.”

Honestly! My hotel might have been going through a rough patch, but there was no way I was serving boxed sangria. For one, I couldn’t afford it. Wine by the barrel was fairly cheap if you knew where to buy it, and it’s not like it was difficult to mix in sparkling water and a cinnamon stick. Also, mint is basically a weed, and my little ad hoc greenhouse was overrun with it.

The mystery guest surveyed the lobby with a scowl as I helped the irate tourists and their children check in.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” I assured the handsome man as I herded The Maxine’s newest guests past him to hand them off to Horace, the ancient elevator operator.

“I’ve been waiting for five minutes,” the handsome guest said in a clipped tone and checked his watch.

“More sangria?” I offered weakly, creeping back to the front desk.

He hadn’t even touched the glass.

I felt slightly frazzled. I’d dealt with difficult guests before, but this guy was putting me on edge.

I flipped through the large leather-bound book that I did my record keeping in. The Maxine wasn’t fancy enough to have a computer system. I noted room vacancies carefully by hand.

A shadow fell over the book as I was poring over it, trying to calculate if we even had a room open and, more importantly, if it was a nice room. The man looked like he was going to be very difficult, and I could not give him the room with the painting covering the hole in the plaster because he would for sure be moving all the furniture around.

“That is a very inefficient system you have,” he said.

I looked up to meet gray eyes.

“It works for us.”

“It clearly doesn’t,” he replied.

I pulled out my emergency cookie tin for particularly bad guests. “Would you like a macaron? I made them myself. We do apologize for the wait.”

He frowned. “I could just go somewhere else, since you clearly don’t want my business.”

“It’s a free country,” I retorted.

He leaned forward into my personal space. “That’s no way to talk to a guest.”

“You’re not officially a guest,” I said, snapping the book closed. “And we don’t seem to have any vacancies. I suggest you try the Brookview Hotel a few blocks away. Good day.”

I walked out of the lobby abruptly and headed to the service stairs. I almost ran into Daria coming down with bags of laundry.

“Did you just throw out a guest?” my best friend asked, wide-eyed.

“He’s not a guest yet,” I said, feeling guilty. The hotel did need the money.

But that guy—I did not want him in my safe space, and the hotel was my safe space. In fact, it was my only space. Sure, it didn’t live up to my childhood fantasies of being an adult Eloise who lived in a fancy hotel, but The Maxine was home.

I jogged up the stairs to the fifth floor and started to collect the breakfast trays several guests had left outside of their rooms.

With fifty rooms, our hotel wasn’t big, but it was cozy. It also needed some renovations. I grabbed an errant luggage cart and piled the trays on it as I walked down the hall.

I tried not to think about the mystery not-guest. I shouldn’t have thrown him out. My stomach sank. What if he was an inspector? I had been trying to get the hotel to be awarded a three-star rating. I would love for it to be a five-star hotel again, and I always tried to offer five-star service. I looked around at the cracked plaster, that sconce that was flickering, and the worn patch in the carpet. I took a moment to move a rickety end table to cover it, thereby revealing a different worn patch. The Maxine was clearly not up to five-star standards.

“He’s not an inspector,” I assured myself, trying to ease the anxiety as I dropped off the breakfast trays in the kitchen. Not that we had any staff. I was the staff. Future me would have to clean those.

The phone was ringing, and I raced back into the main lobby, only to crash face-first into a very hard, very muscular chest.

“Oof!”

I clasped a hand to my nose and sank to the floor, eyes watering. “I think it’s broken!”

If this were a movie, the mystery guest would have been all over me, asking if I was okay, offering to grab me ice cream, then whisking me away to his multimillion-dollar penthouse to recuperate.

But the tall blond man just peered down at me with a scowl as I winced and delicately tapped my nose.

“I thought you left,” I said, irritated. “You can’t just lurk and be a workplace hazard.”

“Disorganized, rude, terrible service”—he ticked off on his fingers—“it’s astounding that you’re still in business.”

“Annoying, judgmental, unpleasant—it’s amazing that you’re still here in my lobby,” I said shrilly.

“Your lobby?” the man said with a smirk. “You don’t own this hotel.”

My face grew hot.

“No,” I muttered, “but I run it, and the current owner promised it to me if I proved myself.”

The blond man sneered, “And I’ll add naïve to your list of disqualifications.”

The phone was still ringing, and I clambered up to answer it. Of course, Mr. Mysterious Asshole didn’t offer to help me up.

“The Maxine Hotel, Phoebe speaking! We provide top-notch history and top-notch service.”

The man snorted.

I gritted my teeth, twisting my grip on the antique rotary phone.

“I’d like to book a convention. I saw your ad.”

The Maxine had a pool with a removable floor, a ballroom, and several small meeting rooms that were meant to be salons when the hotel had been built in the early 1900s. Obviously, we weren’t going to host a Comic Con–level convention. But conventions were how hotels made money, and The Maxine took in the real bottom-of-the-barrel events.

“I am the president of the New York convention of guerilla crocheting,” the woman on the line informed me.

“That sounds like fun,” I said, writing down the details in the large leather-bound ledger. “We had an iguana-sweater-knitters’ convention here a month ago.”

“It’s not knitting.” The woman on the other end of the line was irate. “It’s crocheting.”

“Could you come into my office?” Stan asked, poking his head around the corner. He was the hotel’s actual owner, though all he did was come in late, eat the food, complain, and leave. He stole a fistful of cookies out of the emergency tin while I finished making the notes in my ledger for the upcoming convention. Then I followed Stan down a narrow hallway to his office. In the small space were packed Daria, Horace the elevator operator, and several of the housekeepers.

“I have some wonderful news for The Maxine Hotel family,” Stan said around a half-chewed cookie. “As you all know, I’m getting on in years, and I’d like to spend time with my family.”

“He means gambling,” Daria muttered under her breath to me.

I tamped down a giggle.

“So that comes to the question of the hotel,” Stan continued. “While I love each and every one of you…”

Yeah, right, that’s why he never paid us a decent wage.

“I don’t want to leave you all high and dry; that’s not what family does. So I’ve decided to sell The Maxine. It is going to someone who cares very deeply about historic hotels and providing five-star service.”

Oh my god, I thought, my hopes starting to soar. This is it! I’m going to be the new owner of The Maxine!

When I had first started on as the hotel’s general manager, Stan had promised me that I would be getting the hotel one day so long as I accepted below-market pay and worked hard. For the past few years, I had been scrimping and saving my meager paycheck and investing what didn’t go toward paying my astronomical student loan debt back into the hotel. Now all my hard work was about to pay off.

“The Maxine needs someone who really cares about the hotel,” Stan was saying, “and who knows the ins and outs of hotel management.”

Daria was giddy beside me. I grabbed her hand.

“And of course, it didn’t hurt that he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

He?!

Daria gave me a confused look as Stan opened the door to his office.

In walked the mysterious guest.

“Everyone, let’s give a warm welcome to Mike Svensson, your new boss!”

Chapter 2

Mike

“Oh, hell no!” Phoebe was furious.

Stan seemed oblivious to her ire as he handed me the keys.

“Just got confirmation that the payment went through,” he said, slapping a khaki-colored baseball cap on his head and picking up a bag. He shook my hand. “Pleasure doing business with you and Greyson Hotel group!”

Phoebe seethed as I turned back to her.

I’d done hundreds of these takeovers. My juggernaut hotel group made billions buying up small, struggling hotels, renovating them, and turning them into the hottest boutique hotels in the area. We made a killing.

It was the same every time. The long-term staff went through the stages of grief—shock, denial, guilt, anger, depression—and then I fired them.

I didn’t do it to be mean. I was a businessman first and foremost. If there were any competent people working at the hotel, they stayed on. However, the hotels I bought were always in poor shape, and a large reason was because the staff was incompetent. The staff at The Maxine was no exception. It was amateur hour at The Maxine Hotel, and once I got the lay of the land, everyone in front of me was gone.

Phoebe wasn’t going without a fight.

“You don’t deserve to own this hotel,” she yelled at me. “You’re some soulless corporate ghoul. The Maxine has heart and love and people who care about the building. We all”—she motioned to the ragtag team of staff—“have dedicated our lives to the hotel and the people that live here.”

They have people living here?

“And we’re not going to let you ruin its character. So you can just rid yourself of any ideas of turning this place into a cheap Disneyland Resort knockoff, because you’re going to have to go through me first.” Phoebe was defiant. 

I took a step across the room to stand directly in front of her. Maybe it was too close to be considered professional—after all, I could smell the sweet cinnamon and orange scent of her—however, I had learned from experience that it was best to set the tone on day one and draw a very clear line in the sand.

“Your hotel? Let’s make one thing clear,” I said with a soft snarl. “This is not your hotel; this was never your hotel. It’s my hotel. I am the boss. You work for me. You do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it.” I smirked at her scowl.

“You think you’re intimidating with your little puffed-kitten routine? Guess what. I’ve taken over hundreds of hotels, and every time, it’s the same. They all try to fight me, and they all crumble. If you can’t handle that, then please go ahead and quit.” I stepped away, pivoting on one foot to sweep my hand to the office door.

“It’s a free country after all. I hear the Brookview Hotel down the block is hiring. I should know. I own it.”

“I’m not going to quit,” Phoebe said after a moment, tone surly and not at all subdued.

“In that case,” I replied, adjusting my cuff link, “since you’re the general manager, you can show me around my new purchase.”

She glared at me, and I followed her out of the room.

“Try and keep up,” Phoebe said as she walked quickly down the narrow hallway to the lobby. She grabbed a large leather-bound book and a fountain pen from the front desk.

“This is the lobby,” she said, making a grand gesture, “with staircases designed by the same architect of the set in the Titanic. They offer a dramatic entry point to the rooms. The glass dome above is the perfect Instagram moment. Of course,” she added, “we also have an elevator. When the hotel was built in the 1910s, the elevator was a big selling point, both for guests and the staff.”

An ancient man that I recognized from the meeting narrowed his eyes at me.

No way are we keeping the elevator operator. I made a mental note.

“Horace, third floor please,” Phoebe said.

Still giving me the evil eye—and yes, it truly was evil, because one of his eyes was fake and looking in a whole other direction from his real one—Horace closed the creaky metal gate of the elevator and mashed the glowing button. I settled back against the mahogany-paneled elevator wall as we slowly crept up to the third floor.

“On this level,” Phoebe explained as she walked toward a locked door, “we have the ballroom and meeting rooms. The Maxine does several dozen conferences a year. They are a big source of revenue for us.” She unlocked the door.

I stepped in and was hit with the scent of mint.

“This is where we have our kitchen gardens. And if you’d actually tried the sangria,” she said sharply as I followed her into the indoor jungle, “you’d have tasted how this mint was grown with love.”

The whole large room was flanked with floor-to-ceiling windows. In the center of the room rose the frosted-glass dome that was visible from the lobby below.

“Tricky Edwardian architecture,” I remarked as I walked around the room. For the dome to glow, it needed light. The daylight came in from the large windows surrounding the room, bounced off the white walls, and illuminated the dome.

Phoebe busied herself with picking a few dead leaves from one of the bushy mint plants and sending me death wishes through the greenery like a demented nymph. After I made notes to rip out Phoebe’s illegal greenhouse because I was sure it was attracting bugs, we headed to the next stop.

“The amenities are on the next floor,” Phoebe said as I followed her up the narrow wood staircase that let out into a wide hallway with a threadbare Persian rug.

“We have a swimming pool with a beautiful mosaic,” she said as she opened two double doors.

“There isn’t even any water in the pool.” I frowned.

“Very observant, Mr. Fancy-Pants Billionaire,” she said. “Maybe since you’re the new owner, you can invest some money to fix up the pool.”

I inspected it. The pool had a removable floor so that the room could be used as a ballroom. In my other hotels, we had a hydraulic floor that sat on the bottom of the pool and could be raised with a touch of a button. This one was old school with huge, heavy tiled pieces that would take four men to lift out.

“This is insane.”

“You can’t change it,” Phoebe said hotly. “It’s historic.”

“What else is on the amenity level?” I had one of my younger half brothers interning at Greyson Hotel Group for the fall semester. He was supposed to have researched the hotel. However, it was starting to become clear to me that he had not done that good of a job.

“We have a workout area,” she told me, leading me to another large room. “It used to be a squash court, but we put some gym equipment in.” There was a solitary sad treadmill, a stationary bike, and some weights.

On the treadmill lay a collapsed woman.

“Call an ambulance!” I ordered Phoebe, rushing over to the lady.

“Oh, don’t mind her,” Phoebe said nonchalantly and walked over to the woman.

“I told you, Mrs. Jackson,” she said loudly as the woman snorted and sat up, “you cannot sleep in here.”

“But—”

“Yes, I understand you and your husband are having some marital problems,” Phoebe told her as she handed me the heavy ledger and helped the middle-aged woman up off the treadmill, “but you can’t sleep in here. You need to go to your room, or you are welcome down in the lobby. We have sangria.” Shaking her head, Phoebe gathered up the blanket as Mrs. Jackson wandered off.

“She’s supposed to be checking out tomorrow,” Phoebe told me, grabbing the book from me.

“What kind of clientele do you have here?”

“Aside from the sleeping”—Phoebe grimaced—“she’s probably the least of our worries.”

The next set of double doors opened to a library. It resembled a scene out of Beauty and the Beast, the movie my little sister Ophelia seemed obsessed with lately. It had tiered mezzanines, a large fireplace with a roaring fire, and several comfortable chairs. A small elderly woman with a pouf of white hair sat in one of the chairs, a blanket over her lap, reading a book with a half-naked Viking on it.

Phoebe curtseyed to her. “Mr. Svensson, this is the Princess Alice. She is a resident here at the hotel.”

For fuck’s sake.

Phoebe prodded me. “You have to bow. She’s royalty!”

“I’m not bowing to a crazy old woman,” I hissed at her.

“I presume this is our new hotel owner,” Alice said, peering at me over the tops of her reading glasses. “He certainly offers a better view than the last owner, isn’t that right, Phoebe, darling?”

Phoebe shot me a dirty look. 

“No,” she said petulantly.

“Now,” Alice admonished me, “we need you to assure us that you won’t do anything that will take away from the charm of this hotel. This is my home, and I won’t have you destroying it.”

What the hell?

“Ma’am…”

“Princess,” Phoebe corrected.

I pressed my lips together. “I’m running a business and can’t—”

“Phoebe!” a woman cried as she ran into the library. “I need towels. What kind of establishment are you running? I live here.”

What the fuck…

“How many people live here?” I demanded.

“Just the Princess and Max and George,” Phoebe rattled off. “And of course, me and Daria.”

I did a quick calculation in my head.

“You have twelve percent of this hotel’s capacity taken up by permanent residents?” I practically yelled. I was going to kill my little brother. How had that piece of information not made it into his report?

“Oh, no,” Phoebe explained. “Daria and I aren’t in one of the hotel rooms. We live in the attic like Cinderella! They have servant quarters up there. No heat or AC but, you know, it’s free. And George travels a lot for work, and Max is his cat. Also”—she turned to the irate woman, who, on second glance, did not look like the type of person who could afford to live in a hotel, even one as on the ropes as The Maxine—“Crystal doesn’t pay to live here. She’s a squatter. And no, since you aren’t paying, you don’t have access to the amenities!”

I was going to have a stroke.

“You have squatters here?” I hissed at her. “Are you going to tell me you have bedbugs next?”

“Of course I don’t have bedbugs in my hotel, Mr. Svensson,” she raged. “How dare you! This hotel is very clean!”

She grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the library and up another rickety staircase that I felt like I was going to crash through any minute. Phoebe hauled me out onto a floor lined with dark mahogany doors, shabby carpet, and wallpaper that was peeling in spots. Everywhere I looked, I saw dollar signs disappearing.

“The Maxine is a boutique hotel,” Phoebe said as she unlocked one of the rooms. “As such, we strive to provide unique service to our guests. This room has just been freshly prepared. And you will notice, no bugs.”

I inspected the room. It was spacious, with large windows. It did need a bit of a face-lift. The style was very old-money shabby, like a three-hundred-year-old English manor house. The bathroom looked as if it hadn’t been updated since 1925. The mosaic tile was cracked around the clawfoot tub. There were fresh fluffy white towels on the brass towel rack and little soaps and lotions displayed on a mirrored tray.

“Those are heated towel racks,” Phoebe said proudly. “They were very state-of-the-art for their time.”

All I saw was a potential lawsuit when someone burned themselves.

The four-poster bed was freshly made. On the coffee table at the small seating area by the window was a bowl of oranges. Phoebe took out her phone and snapped a few pictures.

“Isn’t it just wonderful? I love this hotel,” she gushed then narrowed her eyes. “And I’m not letting it be destroyed.”

“This,” I said slowly, “is not how you run a hotel.”

“You don’t know how to run a hotel,” she said, hands on her hips. “You sit in your office lording over the people who actually do the work. You don’t get to come in here and start dictating how I run my hotel!”

“My hotel,” I corrected.

Though now that I had seen my new hotel, all I wanted to do was nuke it from orbit.

Chapter 3

Phoebe

I was antsy after Mike left in a huff. I banged around in the kitchen, doing dishes and prepping dinner and the snacks for cocktail hour that evening. I was making crostini with smoked salmon, cream cheese, dill, and capers and serving watermelon mojitos for the cocktail. I had gotten a good deal on watermelons that summer and had preserved fifty of them for cocktails and other desserts.

The guests were all gossiping in the lobby when I came out with the trays of food on the wood cart I used. Daria was there helping Princess Alice into her favorite chair to preside over cocktail hour.

“Our handsome new owner didn’t want to join us?” she asked when she saw me.

“Did you scare him off?” Daria asked in concern. “What if he’s on his way to rent a bulldozer and tear the hotel down?”

I chewed on my lip. “Maybe I could have been a little nicer…”

“You should have been much nicer,” Princess Alice chided, accepting a glass of the pink cocktail enhanced with generous cubes of rum-soaked watermelon and, of course, mint. “You should have given him a blow job in one of the hotel rooms.”

I inhaled one of the crostini I was eating.

Daria slapped me on the back.

The princess calmly fed a sliver of smoked salmon to Max, the cat who belonged to one of our residents. The gray-and-white cat purred as Princess Alice stroked his fur.

“You need to ingratiate yourself with Mike, get in his good graces,” Princess Alice told me. “Otherwise, we’ll be out on the street.”

“I’m not letting him throw us out on the street,” I said, snapping pictures of the cocktail-hour spread for Instagram.

“Let me see,” Daria said, grabbing my phone. “You need to post the cat. People like cats. Oh! And you need to post this one of Mike. Tell everyone this hunk is the new owner.”

“That is an excellent photo of him,” Alice said, taking a bite of a crostini with a snap of her white teeth. “Your photography skills have greatly improved, Phoebe.”

Daria gazed at the photo. “I think Mike’s just super photogenic.”

I wrinkled my nose. “If you ignore the part where he is a self-absorbed corporate sociopath, then sure, he’s attractive. But we need to keep our eyes on the prize. We’re trying to save the hotel.”

“It’s good he’s attractive,” Princess Alice insisted, “because then you don’t have to try as hard to make him fall in love with you and give you the hotel.”

“That is not happening,” I said, taking out my notebook to make a list because there’s nothing in life that can’t be solved by a good list.

“How to save the hotel from Mike Svensson,” I said as I wrote. “First, make him quit.”

“You need to make him think the hotel is haunted! Then he’ll sell it at a loss to keep the ghosts from getting him,” Daria said. “Write that down!”

I rolled my eyes and wrote it out in loopy cursive on the paper. “Any other ideas?”

Alice opened her mouth.

“Besides blow jobs,” I warned.

“You can’t discount a good roll in the sheets,” the older woman said. “Whole wars were won with sex.”

“Which wars?” I countered.

She shrugged elegantly. “We don’t know, because the sex prevented them.”

I sighed and wrote, Make Mike want to sleep with you. I drew a frowny face.

“No, dear,” Princess Alice said, peering over my shoulder. “You want him to fall in love with you. Unless you are an extremely skilled courtesan, Mike isn’t going to give you a whole hotel. You want to use the sex to make him fall in love with you.”

I dutifully edited the note: Make Mike fall in love with you.

“It seems awfully difficult.”

“No,” Princess Alice said, sipping her cocktail. “Hard mode is ‘Find something he loves and hold it hostage in exchange for the hotel.’”

“Sounds illegal.”

“At least you’d probably have a bigger bedroom in jail,” Daria offered.

“I think,” I said, making another note, “that the best way to make him quit is to make the hotel seem like a bad deal and too much work.”

“Then he might just bulldoze it!” Daria cried.

“No,” I countered, “he won’t want to spend the money and time securing a demo permit. He’ll write it off as a tax loss and move on. We have to hit him hard and fast.”

“That’s the ticket!” Princess Alice said.

“No, not like that!” I waved my arms. “We’re going to really show him the ugly underbelly of The Maxine.”

“I still think the haunting is better,” Daria said as she typed on my phone. “How’s this for the post on Insta? ‘Not only do we have this handsome gentleman’”—the cat meowed—“‘but we also have a new one. Meet the new hotel boss!’ And I put a little cat emoji with it and hashtag ‘hotel hotties.’”

“You can’t post that!” I jumped up and tried to grab the phone.

“Too late!” Daria said, holding the phone out of reach. “The cat posts always get a lot of likes.”

“Undo! Undo! Delete!”

“Mike will find it flattering that you’re posting pictures of him.”

“I want him to feel our hostility,” I wailed as I grabbed another crostini.

“Those are for the guests,” Daria reminded me.

“She needs to keep her strength up.” Alice patted my arm while the cat pawed me for more salmon.

“I need to go start dinner,” I mumbled. I was not running a restaurant. Our guests could pay to eat what I had prepared that evening or not. Though I did post enticing photos of the food I had made and tried to plate it nicely, it was not enough to draw people to the hotel just to eat.

“I think this is a very nice schnitzel,” I said after I had fried several. I took a few photos of the glistening, golden fried pork.

My phone started chiming as Daria came into the kitchen to help me carry out the plates.

“What are people saying about the post?” she asked in excitement as we carried the trays out to the sparsely populated dining room. In its heyday, the hotel restaurant had boasted three Michelin stars. The old sepia photos had shown the dining room packed with guests in elegant evening attire. The small stage at one end of the room had live music every night.

Now Max the cat was napping on the vent on the stage. The restaurant only had a sparse handful of diners, mainly elderly guests.

After serving everyone, Daria and I bent over my phone.

“Oh my god!” she said as I scrolled through the comments.

The Maxine Hotel had a small but dedicated fan base who liked my photos of historic architecture, books, libraries, cozy gardens, and of course, Max. But it wasn’t those fans who were commenting on the Instagram post. Instead of tasteful remarks about period architecture or the care and keeping of old books, there was a lot of OMG, I’d hit that, So hot!, and lots of eggplant emojis.

“Lordy,” I said, fanning myself as we scrolled through the comments.

“Oh my gosh, one of the big gossip Instagrams reposted your photo of Mike,” Daria said breathlessly, scrolling through her own phone. “It’s on the big tabloid websites! Holy shit, our boss is going to flip out when he sees this!”

A slow smile spread across my face.

“Yes, indeed, he is.”

Chapter 4

Mike

“I never should have let you convince me to purchase that hotel, Tristan,” I said loudly as I walked into the conference room of the Svensson Investment tower on the eighty-seventh floor.

I tried to relax my jaw. I was going to develop inner ear problems. I should have just gone home to my pristine condo after dealing with Phoebe and that disaster of a hotel she was running. Instead, I had to deal with my family.

While all of us were the products of a polygamist cult-leader father and his many wives, my full brothers were all assembled in the conference room today. Leif Svensson’s genes were strong, and he also only took blonde women as his wives. As a result, my brothers and I all looked eerily similar. Our existence was one of the great ironies in my father’s life—in a polygamist cult, girls were preferred for obvious reasons, but my father seemed to be able to produce only sons.

Fortunately, he was in jail. And even better, our little sisters had been rescued and were a few floors down in the tower building their mini empires. Unfortunately, we didn’t have all of our sisters. But I wasn’t going to rest until all my siblings had been rescued.

It might be easier to do if I didn’t have my family constantly in my business. Greg was the worst offender. Arrogant and self-important, he managed an investment fund, the size of which was only eclipsed by his massive ego.

The next oldest was Beck, who did wizardry with numbers and operated in an ethical gray area when it came to finances. Then came yours truly, who was the only reliable Svensson in Manhattan. After me came Walker, who I only slightly disliked, mainly because he was either stupid enough or reckless enough to take digs at Greg. After him came Liam, who was portioning out piles of pizza rolls and spreading crumbs everywhere. Then there was Carl, who worked as an account manager at Svensson Investment and was, as all youngest brothers were, useless. He wasn’t even cute anymore. 

Not like my younger half brothers who lived with my older half brother Hunter in the small town of Harrogate. I tried to limit my time with the younger brothers but couldn’t escape the college-aged ones. They were periodically shipped to Manhattan to learn how to run a business. Except that one of them had just cost me millions.

“What the hell am I paying you for?” I snapped at Tristan. He paused mid-bite of a pizza roll.

“We’re family!” he protested.

“You’ve only been an intern at my company for three weeks, and you’ve already cost me twenty million dollars.”

“You spent twenty million on that hotel?” Beck frowned. “Greg, you gave him the money for that?”

“Of course not.” Greg scoffed. “Don’t be histrionic, Mike. You only spent eight million on it.”

“And I’m going to spend the rest of that money making it habitable,” I said flatly. “Tristan didn’t do a shred of real research. Not only is the hotel in complete disrepair, but the manager and another of the workers actually live on-premises along with a mentally deranged old woman who thinks she’s a princess and a man with a cat. All of these people have tenant rights and will not be able to be removed easily. Also, did I mention the literal squatter? Who knows how long this woman has been living in the hotel not paying a dime. Not me. And apparently neither do you, Tristan, seeing as how you didn’t include it in the due diligence report even though”—I pulled up my emails—“you had weeks to do it and could have easily found out the information since the general manager talks a mile a minute and probably would have just told you if you’d asked.”

Tristan ate the rest of the pizza roll.

“My bad, bro.”

“Your bad, bro?” I seethed. “Do you have any idea what a horrible investment this place is? No. No, you don’t, because no one has actually investigated this hotel.”

“Chill,” Archer, my half brother and business partner said. “It’s a historic hotel. What’s not to love? Besides, if Belle thinks it was a good investment, it had to be.”

“And there it is,” Beck said, tossing his pen on the table.

I swiveled to face Greg.

“That’s why you were pushing me to purchase this albatross? Because you wanted to stick it to Belle Frost?”

“I suggested an apology and chocolate,” Archer said, leaning back in his chair. “But what do I know? I’m only engaged to the woman of my dreams who feeds me my weight in homemade donuts every day.”

Liam snickered. “I thought you were looking a little pudgy.”

“Never!” Archer exclaimed, jumping up and starting to unbutton his shirt that was already unbuttoned way more than was professional. Not that it mattered, since he didn’t wear a tie, let alone a jacket.

“Put your clothes back on,” Greg barked. “Honestly, you cannot bring your backcountry, small-town ways here.”

“Harrogate is hopping,” Archer told him, stealing a handful of pizza rolls from Tristan.

“If you think about it,” Tristan said, slapping Archer’s hand away, “just the fact that you got the hotel is a win. After all, Belle stole the last two big contracts from Greg.”

Liam snickered. “That was pretty humiliating.”

“It’s nice that you gave Greg a win!” Walker toasted me with a pizza roll.

Beck frowned and did some quick calculations on his notepad. “You need to just use it as tax loss harvesting. Keep it on the books for a few years then sell it. You’ll make the money you spent back on taxes saved.”

“All of my hotels are profitable,” I growled at Beck. “All of them. They are all five-star hotels, and all have pages of accolades. I can’t have The Maxine Hotel bringing down my reputation.”

“The Maxine’s not that bad,” Archer said, flicking his fingers across his phone screen. “Their Instagram account is banging. The architecture is amazing. And look, they have a cat! Oh man!” He doubled over laughing and handed his phone to Liam. Carl glanced over his shoulder and started snickering.

“Dude,” he said, “Mike’s a star!” He pulled up The Maxine Hotel’s Instagram account on the screen at the front of the conference room.

Even Greg smirked at the photo of me somehow posed dramatically in one of the hotel rooms.

“And you say you hate the hotel. Look at you, playing male model.”

I seethed. “Phoebe set me up.”

“The manager?” Walker raised an eyebrow.

“She’s a messy agent of chaos,” I said. “And if she weren’t living in the hotel, I would fire her tomorrow.”

***

I didn’t see my little sister, Ophelia, when I walked into my condo, partly because it was pitch-black.

“Ophelia?”

 I had stayed at the office to work. Greyson Hotel Group had ten floors in the Svensson Investment tower. Normally, Ophelia and I rode back to my condo together, but she hadn’t wanted to wait for me for some reason. She insisted she had to get back to the condo.

What could a ten-year-old girl possibly have to do that was so important?

I adored my little sisters. I was glad that I wasn’t responsible for all of them at once, however, because they were a lot. Ophelia by herself was a ball of dramatic energy.

“Ophelia, are you here?” I called, trying not to panic. Was she missing?

The integrated stereo system suddenly blared heavy drum music.

The lights on a dimmer started to slowly brighten as Ophelia marched out into the living room wearing a long black cloak.

“It is time,” she declared, “to meet your destiny.”

I stared, flabbergasted. 

“There comes a time when we must open our hearts and our homes.” She paused dramatically. “Welcome the newest member of the Svensson family.”

What the—

The cloak fell, and my little sister held up a fuzzy, chubby guinea pig. “Meet Ralph!”

“Absolutely not.”

“But wait, there’s more,” Ophelia added, coming over with the guinea pig.

I scowled at the rodent in her hands.

“What have you been feeding him?” The animal was like a bowling ball with a little guinea pig head and feet.

My sister smiled up at me. “He’s pregnant!”

Chapter 5

Phoebe

“Yes, I can see that that is what Google Maps said,” I told the irate guests in front of me, “but this is The Maxine Hotel, not the Maximillian hotel, and we do not have a reservation for you on file. The Maximillian is three subway stops down. You can’t miss it; it’s right when you get off.”

“But I need a room!” the older man in front of me said, banging his fist on the top of the front desk. “I have Broadway tickets and dinner reservations. You can’t just cancel our reservation!”

“Sir,” I said, trying to use my best customer-service voice, “we never had a reservation for you.”

“Now, you listen here. I need a room, and I need it now. I don’t want to hear any excuses.” He wagged a finger at me.

Fine, I will take your money.

“Would you like a king or double?” I asked with a sigh as the man gleefully handed over his credit card.

I had just handed him off to Horace at the elevator when the large front door opened and Mike, suitcase in hand, stalked over to the front desk. His bespoke suit and the way he moved through the hotel, like he’d done it a hundred times before and expected nothing less than excellent service, was giving me very corporate-travelling-boss vibes. Which was very much my style and why that George Clooney movie, Up in the Air, was one of my favs.

Mike gave me a cold look when he saw me.

I scowled back.

“I’d like a room,” he stated.

“A room, hmm,” I said, making an exaggerated show of looking through my ledger. “Unfortunately, we’re all booked up.”

“No, you’re not.” He frowned. “Also, you need to have a digital system.”

“Our guests enjoy the analogue charm of our current system.”

“I can’t imagine that you have all that many regulars,” Mike replied.

“You’d be surprised.”

Mike leaned over the counter.

I caught a whiff of clean masculine scent, like fresh mountain air and crisp white sheets dried in the Swiss country sun. Not that I’d ever been out of the country, but it seemed like what that would smell like—fresh and woodsy.

“You have a suite open.” He pointed to a line in the ledger.

“That’s for paying customers,” I protested. “You can’t be one of those bosses that just sucks all the money out of a hotel.”

He reached into his pants and took out a leather wallet. Out slid a heavy black card. He set it down neatly on the dark wood counter.

“Check me in like you do a high-profile guest,” he ordered then tipped his chin up. “Make me feel special.”

Fuck this guy, I fumed as I ran his credit card on the card scanner I had on my phone that I had bought with my own money and paid the fees for with my own money because contrary to Stan’s beliefs, you did in fact need to be able to take credit cards.

Mike probably read some article in the latest installment of How to be a Corporate Douche and he’s swaggering in here waving his ego around and is planning on making changes without actually knowing how anything works.

Yes, I needed to make him sell me the hotel, but more importantly, I first needed him to not be living here twenty-four seven. I had a specific way I ran The Maxine, and I did not want Mike Svensson breathing down my neck, making snide comments, and watching my every movement.

“Just a moment,” I told him with as syrupy-sweet a customer-service voice as I could muster. “I’ll just grab the room key.”

Daria was in the adjacent general manager’s office folding towels when I walked in. She paused and whispered, “Our boss can’t live here! He’s going to live here?”

“It’s the worst,” I whispered back as I reached for the key for a nice suite.

“Don’t give him that one,” Daria hissed. “Give him the one two doors down. It has the secret servant access.”

“I’m not sneaking in his room,” I said, horrified.

“We can use the secret entrance to make him think the room is haunted. A few good scares and he’s gone!”

“We are not haunting him. I have a plan,” I said.

Daria snatched the key to the haunted suite from the wall and slapped it in my hand.

“Let’s just cover our bases.”

Mike was waiting impatiently when I walked back out.

“As you check in high-profile guests,” he began with a frown.

Oh, here we go.

“You need to be more pleasant. Make them feel like they’re being welcomed home. At a hotel we just opened in Boston, the guests are offered a drink and food as soon as they walk in.”

“You mean like the sangria I offered you that you pooh-poohed?” I interjected. “And called discount-store swill?”

“I didn’t call it swill,” Mike said mildly. “But yes. You did not offer me any sangria. Nor did you remind me that the concierge desk was available to help me however I needed.”

He continued to lecture as we headed to the elevators. “Nor did you discuss the amenities offered. Another nice touch is to remind guests of events that are happening around the city that they might be interested in.”

“There’s a very nice conference of OCD billionaires that is occurring at the bottom of the Hudson River if you’d like to throw yourself in there,” I offered.

“And that is exactly the type of unprofessional statement that we do not want at The Maxine Hotel,” he said as the elevator lurched us up to the tenth floor of the narrow building.

“Really? I think it was very professional,” I retorted, “especially if it causes you to wash off some of that cologne.”

Mike was horrified. “I’m not wearing too much cologne,” he hissed as Horace clamped down a smile.

“Of course you are,” I lied, forcefully ignoring how the elevator was practically permeated with Mike’s scent that was very much non-overbearing.

“You smell like a cheap drugstore.”

I smirked as Mike seemed to bite back the urge to sniff himself.

His jaw tensed.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said after a moment. “You’re trying to drive me off. But it’s not going to work. I’ve made my billions flipping crappy little hotels like this one.”

“I’m not trying to drive you off,” I drawled as the hotel elevator stopped on the tenth floor.

“You’re our esteemed guest. And don’t worry, we offer five-star treatment at Maxine’s,” I said, unlocking the door to the spacious suite and gesturing him inside. “Along with sangria and afternoon tea, I make sure all our guests get that personal touch.”

I winked at Mike. “All the single guys get a free blow job.”