“Could you put the wedding off a couple of extra months...or could he return for a July wedding?” All of these possibilities were better than rushing the wedding plans and heading to the coldest part of the state.
This wedding was supposed to be her best yet. The comeback wedding to show that despite her own circumstances, she was still the best choice to plan that special day. Liz’s wedding guests presented a gold mine of opportunity. This wedding was too important to rush.
Liz toyed with the Prada logo on her purse. “We’d rather not wait.”
Translation—she wanted to lock this man down as soon as possible. Preferably before he headed to Greece to film a movie with a cast of sexy actresses. Kate could understand that. Not that she believed a ring on a man’s finger was any guarantee against affairs. This was Hollywood, after all.
She shook her head. She’d been spending too much time with Hayley, her brother’s fiancée, who was a divorce attorney. Unlike Hayley, she was in the happily-ever-after business, she reminded herself as she tried to think of a way to talk Liz out of this rushed event, while still convincing her to sign the contract.
“If you don’t think you can do this...” Liz started.
Oh, she was doing this wedding. Somehow, some way. Kate waved a hand and smiled as warmly as she could muster. “I can totally do this,” she said. “I was just confirming that you were sure. After all, we want the day to be what you’ve always dreamed of.”
“I’m sure.” Liz nodded emphatically, then hesitated. “You’re sure you can pull this off?”
“Without a doubt.” Actually with about a dozen different doubts, but she would make it happen and it would be amazing.
“Thank you so much, Kate.” The woman’s look of relief was brief before she was all business, as she pulled out the Belle Affairs contract and signed it.
That was fine with her. She had six weeks to pull off the impossible. Getting started right away on a new plan was absolutely necessary. She dropped all pretense of having somewhere else to be as she opened the couple’s file. “Okay, so venues in Big Bear...” That could pose a challenge. Log cabins and tackle and bait shops. She hid a shudder.
Liz stopped her, rummaging around in her purse. “Wait, we have a venue in mind, actually.”
Kate cringed. Big Bear was a dream for winter enthusiasts but hardly the place for an elegant, Hollywood-style wedding. If this venue had wood paneling on its walls, she might be forced to walk from the whole thing. She needed this wedding to prove she was still the best in the business, not put the final nail in the coffin.
“Here is Scott’s business card,” she said, her voice tight. “He owns West Mountain Resort.”
Kate couldn’t decide whether Liz hated the lodge or Scott, but her tone suggested this venue might not be her idea. She’d get to the bottom of that later. First, she needed to get a visual. Turning to her computer, she typed the name of the place into Google.
“Oh, don’t waste your time. The resort doesn’t have a website.”
“I don’t understand,” she said as the search failed to provide any matches. “How does a company not have a website?”
“The place just reopened in the fall...”
“My company’s website was up before I even had my certification in wedding planning.” She turned the no-doubt homemade business card with the perforated edges around in her hand. “Scott Dillon—owner/operator,” and a phone number. Not even an email address? Come on, Scott! She’d give his business a year, tops.
“Scott is fairly old-school, and he does things his way.” It sounded as if the words were said through clenched teeth. “My company is actually designing a site for him, but it’s complicated.”
Okay, so it was definitely Scott Liz had an issue with. “Liz, have you even seen the place?”
The bride-to-be shook her head.
Great. They were supposed to choose a wedding venue, sight unseen? No freaking way. “So why have you settled on this place?” She tossed the card aside. “Just because he’s family?” she guessed.
“He’s Derek’s brother, and Derek really wants to support Scott’s new venture.” She rolled her eyes.
Clearly Liz did not. Kate hesitated. She had two options. She could launch into her spiel about how the wedding day was really about the bride anyway, so Liz shouldn’t settle...or she could take this small gift from the wedding planning gods and run with it, hoping that the place could be turned into the perfect setting...at least in photos. She really didn’t have time to book another venue, especially during the long weekend. “Okay, then we can certainly make this work.” She would just call this Scott guy and see if he could send her some details and photos of the lodge. If she had to hire a decorating crew to transform even one room of this resort into the backdrop Liz would be happy with, she would. She was in the business of fairy tales and miracles, after all.
“I know it’s a far cry from the original plans...” Liz said, looking nervous again.
You think?
“But I just really want to marry Derek...as soon as possible.”
Yeah, Kate had caught the urgency. She forced a smile as she reached across the desk and touched Liz’s hand. Reassurance was her first responsibility as a wedding planner. “Don’t worry, everything will be perfect.”
They had a willing groom, at least.
2
SCOTT DILLON SCANNED the reservations system for the month. They were still sitting around the 40 percent capacity, and the upcoming summer months didn’t look any better. He didn’t understand it—the five-star, multimillion-dollar establishment he’d renovated and reopened the year before was located just west of Big Bear’s major ski resort. Guests gushed about his resort’s amenities, and his review in Traveler’s Weekly had named West Mountain Resort the best place to stay in the area.
So why weren’t they full? The other lodges were turning people away, which thankfully had helped him fill some rooms that winter. With the ski season winding down, he feared things were going to get worse, not better.
He could barely afford to keep the place running in their current state. The phone rang, and the reservation light lit up.
Where was Cameron? She must be covering another station. In recent weeks, he’d been forced to let go two front-desk staff and a bunch of housekeeping. Work just wasn’t there, and neither were the funds to pay salaries...but now he had the remaining staff pulling double duty on their shifts. It would only be a matter of time before they flipped him off and found jobs elsewhere.
The phone rang again.
Cameron, his hotel manager, had forbidden him from answering the phone, because he struggled with customer service skills. But he couldn’t just let a potential paying guest go. Sighing, he answered. “Hello—I mean, thank you for calling West Mountain Resort, how can I help you?”
“You need a website,” a female voice said.
Great. A sales call. This was exactly why he hadn’t put his direct line on the business cards Cameron had insisted on making for him. “That’s an odd way to start your sales pitch, and I’m not interested,” he said. He was about to replace the receiver when the woman’s laughter made him pause.
“I’m not a website designer or trying to sell you anything, I’m just annoyed that your resort provides nothing online to people considering staying there.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d heard the complaint. The website was in the works...sort of. He’d unfortunately had to lay off the only employee tech savvy enough to deal with the unending design questions from the staff at HighRes Media, and he certainly wasn’t going to deal with them directly. Getting Liz Sheffield’s company to design the site had been his brother’s doing, not his. Another one of Derek’s futile attempts to “bring the two of them together.” But Scott had no interest in being friendly with Liz.
“It’s coming soon,” he said, not in a position to piss off a potential guest.
“Not soon enough,” she mumbled.
“Can I help you?” He rested his elbows on his desk, his mood worsening as he noticed the stack of invoices piling up in his inbox. Second and third notices from the power and water companies that he still couldn’t afford to pay. Guests were going to be a little more than upset if the water got shut off.
“Yes. I’m Kate Hartley from Belle Affairs. I was looking to speak with Mr. Scott Dillon, the owner.”
“That’s me,” he said distractedly, opening one of the envelopes and frowning at the amount owing.
“Oh, I thought this number was the reservation line.”
“It is.” How could the bill be so high when they were only running at 40 percent capacity? Could he limit guests to one shower per day per room?
“You’re the owner and you run the front desk? God, how small is this resort?”
“Is there something I can do for you, Ms. Hart?”
“Hartley.”
“Whatever,” he said under his breath, still fuming over the amount of the bill. He needed to figure out ways to cut back on the water usage...take laundry home or something.
“I was given your business card—if you can call it that—by Liz Sheffield.”
He paused. “Liz Sheffield.” His jaw clenched as he spat out the name of his soon-to-be sister-in-law.
“That’s right. Apparently Ms. Sheffield and Mr. Dillon—your brother, I take it?—wish to hold their wedding at your resort. I’m sure you are aware of the details already, so I just need some information for planning purposes. For example, how big the ballrooms are, how many guests they can accommodate, the resort restaurants’ catering capacities and the waitstaff available for that day...”
“No.”
Silence, then, “Excuse me? No...what?” Her voice was cool, confident, calm. A true professional. And a true pain in the ass, he suspected.
“I’m not hosting the wedding here.”
Silence met him on the other end of the line. He waited. Those who speak first lose.
She cleared her throat but still didn’t speak. He didn’t say anything, either, a grimace forming on his lips. If she was waiting for an explanation, she’d be waiting a long time. He leaned back in his chair and swiveled to and fro. He couldn’t believe Liz actually thought holding a wedding he didn’t want any part of at his resort was a good idea. Just the thought of her made his stomach drop. He hadn’t seen her in almost two years, and he wasn’t in any rush to change that. Having her at his resort...for her wedding... He shook his head. No chance in hell. Though he knew it was Derek’s idea.
He hated to disappoint Derek, but refusing to host the wedding was the least of Scott’s offenses.
When an agonizing amount of time had ticked by on the clock above his desk without a word from her, he hung up. He stared at the phone for a moment, but when the reservation line didn’t ring again, he shrugged.
Good. That solved that problem.
And he wouldn’t be answering the line any time soon. Turning to his computer, he logged into his bank account. The meager amount in the business account wouldn’t go far, so he paid the water bill from his personal account. He’d be paying his employees from his own pocket next.
The intercom buzzed. “Did you just answer incoming reservations?” Cameron didn’t even try to hide her annoyance.
“Yes, but it was nothing. Just a sales call.”
“Didn’t they get the memo we have no money?” she muttered.
“Smile, Cam. You’re still here.” Thank God. He had no idea what he’d do without her. She’d worked at the resort for years before it had been shut down by its retirement-age owner. She knew the place and how to run it better than anyone. If she quit, he was screwed.
“For now,” she said. “Anyway, I was just checking inventory, and we need a produce run...”
Perfect. Any excuse to get up in the air.
He shut down the computer then stood and grabbed his winter coat. The predicted snow had just started to fall, although it was mid-April, the mountain air was still frigid. “I’m on it,” he said.
An hour later, he sat in the cockpit of his Cessna on the Big Bear City Airport runway, waiting for clearance to take off. Sure, he could order inventory to be shipped to the resort, but he only trusted one place for his business’s needs—Stanley’s Fresh Goods in San Francisco. And they didn’t deliver outside the city. To make the trip more cost-effective, he would also stop at the fish market before heading back.
The ground crew flagman waved him up next, and after the slightest moment of hesitation, Scott headed toward the end of the runway. Checking the plane’s controls and setting his course, he radioed the tower. “Cessna 215 ready for takeoff.” And moments later he was up and on his way. Sweat trickled down his back. Once he’d leveled off, he shrugged out of his coat and forced a feeling of anxiety aside.
It was just him, and he had control.
As he headed south for the twenty-minute run, he broke through a bank of clouds and the sun appeared. He felt himself relax.
A former commercial pilot, he’d only been interested in the Cessna cargo plane when he saw the ad for the resort in the Big Bear daily newspaper. Unfortunately, the resort’s owner, Doug Delaney, hadn’t been interested in selling the plane on its own. The closed, run-down West Mountain Resort and the plane were a package deal.
“You take them together or it’s no deal,” the grumpy old man had said when Scott had gone to see him about purchasing the cargo side of the business. Delaney went on to explain that both businesses had once belonged to him and his late wife. She’d run the resort and he, a retired pilot, had started the cargo business to “stay out of her hair.” He made weekly trips to LA and San Diego to pick up supplies and products for the resort to reduce shipping costs while earning extra cash making deliveries for other local businesses. The idea that the cargo business had an existing client base was also a draw for Scott.
Having lived in Big Bear most of his life, Scott had known about the Delaney family–owned companies, but he’d only wanted to purchase one of them. “I’m really not interested in owning a resort. I wouldn’t have any idea how to run it. I’m a pilot,” Scott had explained.
The man had looked past him to Scott’s old pickup truck parked in the driveway. “Where’s your plane?”
“I don’t have one yet.”
“A pilot without a plane isn’t much of a pilot,” Delaney had said before collapsing in a fit of coughing.
Scott had heard around town that old Doug Delaney was sick with lung cancer and the doctors hadn’t expected him to make it past Christmas the year before. The cargo delivery business and resort were suffering without family to take them over, and the old man wanted nothing more than to rid himself of the burdens and fly south. “Somewhere warm where I can die lying in the sunshine,” he’d told him.
Unfortunately, the sale of the cargo business alone wouldn’t have been enough to fulfill the man’s dying wish, so in the end, Doug had sold Scott both businesses for next to nothing and had died a week later exactly the way he’d wanted—lying in the sunshine on a beach in Mexico.
At first, Scott hadn’t planned to do much with the resort, instead focusing on fixing up and painting the cargo plane with a new company logo—Scott’s On-Time Delivery, specializing in any kind of pickup or drop-off service the residents of Big Bear needed. Doug’s former customers had been happy to rehire Scott, and he’d easily secured several new regular customers, including a few restaurants near the ski resort and a heavy-machinery repair place in town. Within months, he was doing okay.
But then his brother had visited over the holidays and suggested that he flip the resort for a profit. The place had been closed for a couple of years,
but had once been a prime vacation property.
At the time, it sounded easy enough—a fresh coat of paint, some updated fixtures, nice decorative lighting and paintings for the walls...but it had quickly turned into a nightmare renovation project when he discovered a leaky pipe on the third floor had caused water damage to the two floors below it. The electrical wasn’t up to code and the roof was ready to cave in at any moment. Half a million dollars later, the resort was barely recognizable as the same run-down place that had been closed and forgotten for years, but Scott was also so far in the red, he couldn’t let the place go for any less than what he’d paid.
Fix it up and sell it, Derek had said. As if things were that simple. Then again, luck had always been on his older brother’s side. Scott’s own luck consisted of bad and worse, so a year later, all he had was a struggling resort that he didn’t want and not enough time to grow the cargo delivery business that had been his ultimate goal.
He sighed as San Francisco came into view.
And now his brother wanted to use the resort to make the biggest mistake of his life. Scott might not be able to talk Derek out of the wedding, but he didn’t have to host it at his resort.
3
AS SHE TURNED her Escalade onto Highway 330 later that afternoon, Kate was still fuming. What a rude, arrogant man Scott Dillon was. He’d actually hung up on her. After refusing to host his own brother’s wedding? Well, he might be able to hang up a phone or hide himself away with an unlocatable email address and no Facebook or Twitter accounts, but he couldn’t ignore her when she was standing right in front of him.
Though it had been more determined annoyance than common sense that had driven her to leave her office and head to Big Bear. She wished she’d at least gone home and packed an overnight bag. And now, as she made her way farther north, the tiny snowflakes grew heavier and her windshield wipers struggled to keep up. She wondered if maybe she was acting...a tad desperate?
Tempting Kate Page 2
