“I quit! Yes, quit! Is lunacy, this place! Wahnsinn!”
For an instant, there was complete silence as every head turned to look at him, standing in the chaos of the dining room, broken crystal at his feet. His chef’s hat was bunched in his hands, his coat was smeared with chocolate frosting—and then he was making a beeline for Olivia.
Beside her Stuart took a step backward as Josef huffed to a halt in front of them, but it was too late. Because Rick was pushing through the swinging door behind Josef, doing his own ranting. His hat was gone, too, and his face was the color of an overripe tomato. And in his hands was the disputed cake.
“I’m crazy? You’re crazy,” he shouted. A woman at the closest table dropped her fork in surprise, and it clattered against her plate. “It’s just a cake! A bad one!”
Josef whirled around to face him, which Olivia guessed Rick had been counting on. Because in the next moment the remains of the cake were sailing through the air—and smacking Uncle Stuart in the face with a wet, heavy splat as Josef ducked.
Olivia desperately wanted the next noise she heard to be her alarm clock’s horrible shriek, but instead it was an outraged grunt from her uncle.
“You see, yes?” Josef barked to the room at large, spreading his arms wide. Despite the fact that an innocent bystander was covered with German chocolate cake, and his sous chef had fled into the kitchen—probably for some rotten eggs, Olivia thought with another vague stab of alarm—the chef was positively triumphant. “A lunatic!”
Well, yes. Apparently it was going around.
Even further than she’d thought, too. Because as Uncle Stuart managed a muffled “Mmmppff!” she felt an arm slide around her waist, and looked up to see Rhys beside her.
Her mouth fell open, but nothing more coherent than Stuart’s outburst emerged.
“Here you are, sir,” Rhys said to her uncle, pressing a clean linen napkin into his hand. “So sorry about that, really. We were supposed to have the run-through for the dinner theatre later. Mixed signals, yeah? What can you do?”
Those dark gray eyes of his were wide and busy, she noticed as she stared up at Rhys in amazement. They were darting around the room, in fact. Probably because it was difficult to make up an enormous lie like the one he’d just told off the top of his head.
“Dinner theater, yeah,” Rhys continued, as if he weren’t facing a furious man with chocolate frosting all over his face and his suit. “Hasn’t Olivia told you about it? Interactive, we’re thinking.” He grinned, a bright flash of amusement that lit up his whole face. “Maybe not so interactive as this, you see, but with the customers participating. It’s all the rage in …in the West End. Of…Manchester.”
Olivia bit her bottom lip as Stuart raised his sticky eyebrows. As liars went, Rhys was pretty awful. But the fact that he was doing it at all was…well, confusing, for one thing, but sweet. So very sweet.
The feel of his strong arm around her was something different, though. Not sweet. Hot was the word for that. Tempting.
And dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
“You expect me to believe that this…this pandemonium,” Stuart sputtered, “is going to be a regular feature here?” He wiped another glob of icing from his chin and a glistening cherry from the top of his head.
“Well, regular is a relative term, yeah?” Rhys squeezed Olivia closer when she opened her mouth. “More of a special event, I’m thinking.”
If Stuart raised his brows any higher, they were going to end up on the back of his head. “And you are?”
Oh, this should be good, Olivia thought with a distant flutter of panic.
Her unlikely rescuer didn’t miss a beat. “Rhys Spencer.” He stuck out his free hand, and withdrew it gracefully when Stuart simply stared. “Friend of Olivia’s.”
“I see.” Stuart tossed the smeared napkin on the closest table and brushed off the front of his suit with distaste.
Olivia had a feeling “I see” didn’t mean what it usually meant. And in the sudden ringing silence, she had an even more frightening feeling that the next words out of Stuart’s mouth weren’t going to be anything she wanted to hear.
But Rhys was still beside her, his arm draped around her as casually as if they’d known each other for years. As if they were, in fact, friends. As if stepping in to save her from horrifying situations was the thing he’d been waiting all his life to do.
That was silly, of course. If she was honest with herself, she had to wonder about a complete stranger barging into her life and taking over. He was probably unbalanced. An escapee from a local mental hospital, even if he was a gorgeous, unbelievably charming one.
She should really move away from him, gently untangle his arm from around her waist, and take Uncle Stuart into her office. Call the police. Or the men with the butterfly nets.
But the truth was, standing next to Rhys felt…right. Perfect, in fact. Even if that delicious aura of danger hadn’t completely faded.
Maybe she’d gone crazy, too. Today, it didn’t seem impossible.
“This is exactly what I warned your father about,” Stuart said. He looked ridiculous—still faintly smudged with chocolate, cake crumbs on the front of his wrinkled suit coat—but there was nothing ridiculous about the tone of his voice. “This hotel is a dinosaur and you have no idea what to do with it.”
He laughed then, shaking his head as he surveyed the room. The people who hadn’t stormed the maitre d’s station for refunds stared at him, forks in midair, drinking glasses halfway to their lips. Maybe because his laugh was more of a bark, and gleefully nasty. “Do you know what this place is worth?” he said, turning back to Olivia. She stiffened, and felt Rhys’s arm tighten around her. “Millions, Olivia. Millions. Every year, I’ve waited for you to give up, to understand that you can’t make a go of this place. Your father could hardly do it, after all, and he actually had business sense.”
“All right then, you—” Rhys began, but Olivia tugged him back, even though her heart was pounding so violently, it was hard to hear anything past the roar in her ears. A fistfight wasn’t going to improve this situation. Even a real prince on a white steed wouldn’t improve this situation.
“If I needed any more proof that you don’t know what you’re doing here, I got it today,” Stuart continued, unruffled, ignoring a grumble of fury from Rhys. “If you don’t know it by now, you should. And you’re going to learn it before the year is up, I guarantee you that.”
Olivia opened her mouth to respond, even though she had no idea what she was going to say, but this time Stuart was the one to stop her. He raised a hand with weary disgust.
“Don’t bother.” He brushed off his suit coat one last time as he started out of the room and threw his last words over his shoulder. “This hotel will be mine.”
Chapter 3
It was hard to think straight during an adrenaline rush, Olivia decided as Rhys steered her into a chair. And that’s what she was probably feeling—adrenaline zooming through her bloodstream, pure and simple. Fight or flight, panic response, there were probably a dozen terms for it.
But she really didn’t care what it was called, she thought as she stared at a star-shaped piece of chandelier on the carpet not three feet away. She felt as if someone had slapped her, hard, and it was all too clear that no matter how weird this day had been, it was definitely not a dream.
“You all right?” Rhys said, leaning in to offer her a glass of water.
She stared at it, wondering where he’d found the glass, and said without thinking, “Ella Fitzgerald once sang to Mayor LaGuardia under that chandelier. I don’t remember what song, but I know it’s written down somewhere.”
He