I opened my Michael Kors carry-on bag and started stuffing dresses and shoes inside. I already had a few upscale resale shops in mind. Might as well tear off the Band-Aid and put on my big girl panties.
After a phone call to update the temp I’d hired to run my business in London, I ventured out. Three trips later, I had enough cash for a few weeks at an extended stay hotel for business travelers in north Boston. It wasn’t the suite I’d been living in. I didn’t have room service or a massive tub.
I guess at least I had a bathtub and I wasn’t washing up in a gas station bathroom like back in the day.
Now that I had a new home, I didn’t sit on my ass though. I checked many places, from the Suffolk County property records to the Veterans Benefits Administration. None of them had any information for Frank or Patricia Hall, either. Go figure.
As the days passed, my money supply slowly went down. Which means it’s time for me to hustle.
Compared to a few of my affluent customers in the U.K., I wasn’t afraid of hard work. Matter of fact, I thrived on it. Asking my friends for help was out of the question, so I checked my sources to see if anyone in my network needed an assistant for a brief period of time. A few phone calls led to nothing.
“As much as I’d love to work with you, dear, I’d need you out in California,” one said. Or they’d say Seattle or New York City, or some other location that wasn’t Boston. I was hungry for work, but I’d pushed off finding my parents for too long.
Now was the time.
So I did what anyone would do when they had run out of options. I went to a temp agency. I was usually the one finding work for other people, but sometimes you gotta go find the folks who need workers. I might wear Louboutin heels once in a while, but I was never above working as a cashier, an administrative assistant, or things like that. I’d met too many overprivileged brats with their attitudes stuck so far up their asses they wouldn’t survive a nuclear winter if their butler ran away.
So I went to the temp center and the interview didn’t exactly go as planned.
“So I see on your resume you own a concierge company in the United Kingdom. How nice.” The lady behind the desk, who appeared to be about fifteen going on sixteen, tried to sound like she knew what she was doing.
I nodded and smiled. You should always smile. “Miss Fields, I can do anything from event planning to management of finances or errands for clients.”
“I see.” Miss Fields’s bright orange cardigan made me squint a bit as she adjusted her red and green glasses. “We don’t have anything in event planning, but we’ve had a position that keeps reopening that might fit your needs.”
Reopening? That was never good.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She shrugged as if it was nothing. “Oh, the last temp said something about her boss being crazy, but I see this as a great opportunity to jump in as an assistant to someone who oversees fifty employees.”
I kept nodding. And smiling.
She continued, “With a resume like yours, you seem like that someone who’d tackle the job with ease. You know, take the bull by the horns.”
Of course. The bull by the horns.
“I’ll see if I can get you an interview and we’ll go from there,” she chirped.
Three hours later, I had a phone call and an address. Now that was fast. I had to catch the bus now since I wasn’t downtown anymore and taxis were out of my budget, but the trip was nice.
With a spring in my step, and my last pair of Louboutins on, I bounded up to the building. Only to freeze in my tracks.
I was right outside a recent construction: the Goodfellow Tower Hotel.
On any other day, I would’ve marched right in there so I could kick some ass at the interview, but like a fool I imitated a tree on the front steps.
You need cash, Carlie. Have you ever let a man get in the way of your hustle?
Never, I told myself firmly.
I took a step forward.
What if you see him?
I wanted to smack the shit out of myself for thinking that.
If you see him, you ignore him. We had one night together. We got a quick screw out of our system and he was doing his thing and I was doing mine. Like we always do.
I was closer to the building this time. With each step, I told myself I wasn’t going to fold like I had in the past.
For all I knew, he was probably out of the country. He was an international hotelier and, at that moment, he was probably living it up with some snow bunnies on a slope in Switzerland. Tomas rarely hung around after we hooked up.
I’d never been here before, but if the hotel looked this amazing on the outside, the inside had to be gorgeous. Three massive letters in gold, GTH, sat in a fountain in the front. All of it was a testament to Tomas’s wealth. You couldn’t be a businessman without knowing the Goodfellows.
And I had an interview here.
After speaking with someone at the concierge desk, I took the elevator up to the second floor. As the doors snapped shut, my heart fluttered. Would I run into him?
I was filled with relief when I reached a quiet floor filled with dark-blue cubicles and modern desks. Plants peppered the corners. This was just another hotel business floor for management. I left the elevator and walked up to the reception desk.
“Are you Carlie?” the receptionist asked softly.
“That’s me.”
“You must be the new victim. I’m Stephanie.”
Hint number two that this place was gonna swallow me whole.
“Welcome to the Goodfellow Tower Hotel,” Stephanie said. “Let me take you to Roland Butts. He’s the chef concierge and oversees the customer relations department for our premier clientele.”
“Is that my supervisor’s name?”
“Yep, and I wouldn’t get it wrong if I were you,” she whispered. “Ever.”
Stephanie led me down the corridor between the desks toward a closed-off office. The only one in the room. The leather chair for Mr. Butts’s assistant sat empty and the desk had a layer of dust thick enough to resemble a blanket of snow. Not a good sign.
The door to his office was closed, so Stephanie knocked softly on the door. I barely heard a mumble from within and then the receptionist entered with me on her heels.
While the desk outside this room appeared abandoned, this room was well lived in. From one side of the narrow room to the next, the walls were covered with built-in bookcases. None of the books were casual reading materials, either. A quick glance revealed cookbooks, protocols for foreign countries, even books on basket weaving in the Maldives. My gaze flicked to the tall, bearded man sitting behind the immaculate desk. He wore a perfectly pressed navy blazer, along with an Hermès handkerchief tucked into the pocket. The guy sat straight enough to make me question my posture.
“Would you like a fresh coffee, Mr. Butts?” Stephanie asked softly.
He glanced up from his Mac computer. His perfectly manicured short fingernails were typing away. “I could’ve used a refill ten minutes ago. I got my own.”
Stephanie’s smile faltered.
I stepped forward and extended my hand to end the awkward moment. “Hi, nice to meet you.”
Instead of shaking my hand, he said, “Thank you, Miss Gaines. You may leave now.”
He turned to me the moment she hightailed it out of there. “I think we should make things clear from the get-go so that there aren’t any misunderstandings.”
I tried to keep looking at his face, but the way his hands hovered over the keyboard as if he was in the middle of a thought and planned to continue typing unnerved me. Wasn’t I here for an interview?
Mr. Butts continued, “I expect perfection. I work with exclusive clientele and every single person who was hired to assist me was unable to tell their rear end from their mouth.”
Nice. He wasn’t a bullshitter. Now this was an employer I could get behind.
He typed again for a moment, clicked the enter key, and t
hen dabbed some lotion on his hands. Without looking, he placed the silver bottle in the exact spot he’d picked it up from.
This guy was no joke.
Since this was such a high-end hotel, I expected Mr. Butts to be extremely professional, but then again, if I oversaw a place like this, I wouldn’t have any room for burnt ends. It had been a while since I’d worked in a hotel, but the quality of the staff was all in the hands of the management. Piss-poor management equated staff reading their cellphones instead of handling customer problems.
He stood and I waited until he moved toward the door. “Just because you’ve worked in both the U.S. and the U.K. doesn’t mean you’d know how I expect things to be done at the Goodfellow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not your sir,” he said crisply.
I was taught to respect my elders. Apparently, being a few years older than me had gone to his head.
“My apologies, Mr. Butts.”
He opened his door and I swiftly followed. We’re moving, people. “On your resume, I noticed you’re not fluent in any foreign languages.”
Now that was one strike against me. Unlike my best friend Sophie, who also owned a personal concierge business here in Boston and spoke fluent Japanese, I hadn’t mastered a foreign language. I had rudimentary skills.
“I can greet and help customers in Spanish, French, and Portuguese. I’m not fluent by any means, but I’m more than capable. I’m quite familiar with the interpreters available in the Boston area.” I probably couldn’t throw a rock without hitting an interpreter.
“Most of our clientele is from Europe, but every now and then we have businessmen from Asia and Africa.”
I nodded, paying careful attention to every word.
The elevator doors closed behind us and I held my breath. My ears always painfully popped, no matter what I did.
“Do you know American Sign Language?” he asked.
“I am proficient in fingerspelling.” My head hurt a bit from nodding so much. “I’ve assisted blind and deaf customers before.”
In my previous interviews, there’d been no tour of the facilities until I had the job, but it looked like Mr. Butts was offering me one. Hope filled me and buoyed me upward. I kept smiling, hoping and praying we didn’t pass Tomas.
“Mr. Goodfellow believes our customers’ privacy is of the utmost importance,” Mr. Butts said. “Ever since the Tower opened last year, we’ve had a policy in place to ensure that everything that takes place in our hotel is private.”
I nodded yet again. If he only knew the secrets I’d kept in the past while I’d worked in NYC or the U.K., the blond hairs on his head would go white. The madness ranged from week-long parties with foreign call girls of dubious legality to ushering elderly gentlemen to the hospital because they took a few too many purple pills to keep their peter in action.
It was simple, in my opinion. I had a job to do and I did it. After Mr. Butts showed me around the customer service floor, he gave me a full tour of the hotel. The whole place seemed brand new, but with the classic Boston charm of a gilded age. The furnishings were all of a classy 1940s motif.
When the interview ended, I stood waiting for his verdict.
Mr. Butts looked me over, perhaps searching for a flaw. “I’m interested in working with you because of your membership in Les Clefs d’Or, Ms. Jason, but only on a trial basis. I have thirty-five souls as concierge staff for the premier clients at the Goodfellow. Just because you’ve worked with clients in the U.K. doesn’t mean you have the skill set to work in a hotel again.”
As he spoke with the utmost confidence I’d fail, I forced myself to keep a straight face. I’d been working full-time for the past six years in the service industry and he thought I might be out of touch? At least my membership in the elite Les Clefs d’Or hotel concierge organization showed merit.
“I have full control over hiring the assistant chef concierge and I expect all my clients to have the utmost care. I’d prefer someone who spoke at least five languages, but…” He looked me over, maybe expecting me to flinch, but I didn’t.
“Are you up to the challenge?” he finished.
“Yes, Mr. Butts.” The only direction was up, right?
He turned to enter the elevator, but stopped before I could get on. “Then I’ll see you bright and early at six A.M. tomorrow.”
Chapter 6
Carlie
Fogginess dulled my brain as I tried to tug off sleep. And failed utterly. One day I was going to wake up on time. Three alarms clocks beeped, sang, and chirped respectively. My fourth alarm, one with the annoying shrill of a tornado siren at full blast, vibrated the whole bed.
At least something worked.
Without an alarm, I slept like I was dead to the world. Except when I woke up in Tomas’s bed, but that was a place I couldn’t wait to escape.
In five minutes, I was dressed in the standard staff uniform of the Goodfellow Tower Hotel: a dark-blue pencil skirt—hitting right above the knee—a white blouse, and a black blazer with a golden GTH stitched on the front pocket.
Right before I’d left the building, I’d picked up my clothes and signed the employment forms at the security desk. No warm greeting from my coworkers or anything else. Mr. Butts was a piece of work, I tell ya.
The stack of papers I had to sign included a lengthy nondisclosure agreement. I’d seen plenty of those in my line of work, so the legalese wasn’t a surprise, but the consequences of breaking the agreement bordered on extreme.
I signed without letting that batshit crazy documentation bother me. If Tomas’s company was willing to pay me well to keep secrets, I didn’t care. The sooner I found my parents, the sooner I could return overseas and get back to running my own business.
Thanks to my money supply issue, I entered the subway car with the rest of the commuters. North Boston around the Cambridge campus wasn’t too bad. Everyone around me looked about my age. Mid-twenties graduate students on track to teach or work research jobs after they escaped college. During the subway ride into downtown, I’d look at each face, from the short girl wearing scrubs to the bearded man who dictated into his phone, and imagine their lives were my own. In another life, I’d attended a four-year college, and now I worked for a living.
In my imaginary world, on weekends, I called my parents and they complained about how I never made time for them. A smile touched my lips. I was busy taking over the world, after all.
That was the life I’d lived for the past few years, and now no matter how much I focused on each step toward the Goodfellow Tower Hotel, I was still Carlie Jason, orphan, hermit, and the girl who wanted this emptiness inside me to fade.
Entering the hotel at the staff entrance, I was excited about the possibilities. I was on the front lines again and I might learn a thing or two.
The last thing I expected was to find a Hispanic couple arguing in the hallway the minute I reached the service level. The man, who had an enormous brown stain across his shirt, silently fumed while the woman across from him tried to argue in hushed tones.
“Is there anything you can do right?” she snapped. “It’s your third day and you’ve already stained your clothes.”
I kept my gaze forward.
She continued, “Just turn around and go home.”
“No one will notice.” Even though he was a bit shorter than the woman, he appeared to be quite resolute to take the punishment and not argue about what happened. Were they married?
“No one will notice? How about the coffee smell?” she hissed.
Oh, I noticed it. Starbucks Mocha Latte with Vanilla and Cream. Yep, it had gluten. What I wouldn’t give to suck the evil outta that drink so I could pump the creamy, caffeine-filled goodness into my veins.
I almost walked past them. If I helped I’d be late, but then again I wasn’t the kind of person to just stand there and let fate smash someone’s job into the ground.
“Hey.” Both of them turned toward me. I got the look I’d s
een countless times in NYC. A single raised eyebrow, head tilted to the side, and a downward turn to the mouth: namely mind-your-own-business, lady.
“Just trying to offer a hand here.” I saw the name YOLANDA on her name badge. “Yolanda, most departments have backup clothes.”
“Like they are going to let us use them for free.”
“We’re working in a hotel. Accidents like spills are going to happen.” I took a step closer. I had their attention now.
“So what do we do?” she asked.
I held in my groan. “Follow me.”
They had to rush to keep up; I didn’t want to be too late.
“Harry, c’mon!” Yolanda said.
“Who is your supervisor?” I asked.
Yolanda fired off a name I didn’t recognize, but I’d learn everyone’s name soon enough. I knew exactly where to go. Last night I’d gone over the materials I asked for from security: a map of the entire facility, the services the hotel offered, nearby restaurants. All of this was my arsenal.
In record time, we reached the floor with laundry services, which was right next to dry-cleaning services. The whole place was impressive. Instead of placing the dry-cleaning services in a corner, Tomas had devoted an entire space to dry cleaning. I scanned the room, noting the state-of-the-art garment press and washing machines. Not bad, Goodfellow.
I quickly found the backup uniforms among the shelves of folded clothes and grabbed what I needed.
“Can I help you?” one of the maids asked.
“Harry needs another shirt. He had a mishap on the way in. A patron spilled her latte on him.” I grinned. “I’m Carlie Jason. I’m working with Mr. Butts.”
The ladies around us laughed. “So you’re the new victim,” one of them said.
Should I be concerned everyone thinks that? “Guess so.”
Once I left laundry services, I found the couple in the bathroom. They were still arguing.
I handed the shirt to Harry. “Once you’re done with it, turn it in. It’s that easy.”
“How did you know his size?” Yolanda glanced from me to Harry, who shrugged while he donned the fresh shirt.
Surrender to You Page 4
