Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Noah
“Jeannine is a no-show again.” My younger brother, Easton, said after popping into the main office.
“You’re kidding me,” I grumbled, pushing back in the office chair with aggravation. I’d been covering for Jeannine for the past hour. She was supposed to start at eight o’clock. I figured she was delayed from the snowstorm we’d gotten the night before.
“Yup. Texted five minutes ago, let me know that a family emergency came up and she’ll be out of town for a week or two.”
“Fucking great. Just in time for Christmas.”
Christmas was one of our busiest times of the year. Every single cottage and condo we had at Whimsical Woods Resort was booked steadily through the holidays and into the new year.
It was the worst time for Jeannine to up and decide to have a family emergency.
Normally, I would give someone the benefit of the doubt—family emergencies happened, after all.
But Jeannine had used that excuse over Canada Day weekend, too.
Plus, she was regularly late or screwing up reservations.
It seemed like I was always fixing her mistakes or covering for her when she didn’t show up.
“We’ll have to call Damien in. If one of us is managing the office, that means we’ll need more hands-on maintenance to get the snow cleared and the pathways salted.” Damien would be pissed.
“You mean while you’re managing the office,” Easton smirked. “You know I don’t do computer stuff.”
Computer stuff was handling bookings and responding to emails. It really wasn’t rocket science, but my younger brother had always refused to do any of the office work. He’d rather stay later handling maintenance issues than answer a phone call or input a reservation.
Mom used to handle the office before she and dad retired, but now it was on us to run the entire place. They were off enjoying their retirement after years of running Whimsical Woods Resort and raising us three boys.
“Yeah, yeah,” I sighed, massaging my temples to ward off the stress headache I seemed to perpetually have these days. Easton ducked out while I picked up the office phone and dialed our oldest brother’s phone number.
“Someone better be grievously injured, or something better be on fire,” he growled into the receiver by way of greeting. He sounded slightly out of breath and irritated.
“It’s nine o’clock, how are you already this pissed?”
“Because, dipshit. You’re interrupting my favourite part of the day,” Damien said. I could hear Charlotte say something in the background and the rustling of sheets.
“Damn, sorry brother. Didn’t mean to interrupt your morning nookie session, but we have a situation. Jeannine has flaked off again, and that leaves me stuck in the office and Easton to clear all the snow from the cottages, roads, and pathways. We need backup.”
“What we need is to fire Jeannine and hire someone who actually shows up for shifts.” Damien huffed.
“You’re not wrong about that, and we will.
One of the things I plan on doing today is putting up an ad for a new office administrator.
” I sighed, feeling every bit as frustrated as Damien sounded.
I knew we couldn’t go on this way. We needed someone reliable, someone capable of doing the job. Jeannine clearly wasn’t that person.
“Good. Make sure you do that. I’ll be there in an hour and a half,” Damien said, hanging up.
I stood and stretched, then went to the staff kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. If I was going to deal with office work, I’d need all the caffeine I could get.
Being outside was my preference, too. The fresh air kept me invigorated and awake.
Although, unlike Easton, I wouldn’t refuse office work; it had to be done.
I also managed the accounts and made sure all our employees were paid on time.
If nobody was there to answer the phone, check emails and book reservations, and pay our employees—we wouldn’t have a cottage resort.
Our current bookings were important, yes, but the future ones were just as important. They kept the lights on and the business running. My grandparents had started this cottage resort, and my parents had grown it to what it is today. I didn’t want my brothers and I to be the reason we lost it all.
Coffee in hand, I returned to the office in time for the phone to ring. “Whimsical Woods Resort, Noah speaking. How can I help you?”
“Hi there, I’d like to book a reservation for a three-bedroom cottage over March Break,” the woman’s voice on the other end of the line said. I sat down and moved the mouse, waking up the computer.
“Let me see if we have any availability over March Break with our three-bedroom cottages,” I told the woman.
I clicked into our booking software program and checked.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have any three-bedrooms available, however we do have one two-bedroom cottage and a few four-bedroom cottages. ”
“Hmm. Does Hartwood Creek still do the Maple Syrup Festival?”
“Sure does, every year! And we have plenty of activities planned all March Break long for families.”
“Okay, I’ll take a four-bedroom from the eleventh until the fifteenth.” The woman said.
Five minutes later, the reservation was booked.
Setting the phone receiver down, I picked up my coffee and took a much-needed sip, then opened the Word document that contained the pre-written job postings Charlotte had done up for us a year or so ago.
The postings were mostly for summer positions and housekeeping positions, and there was the office administration listing from before we’d hired Jeannine.
I had to make a few adjustments to have it fit our needs now, but it was a great template to fall back on. Another half hour later, the posting was listed on the Hartwood Creek community page and the Ontario job listings website.
It’d been a long ass day. It was only five o’clock, and I already felt like crashing for the night. However, I had nothing to eat at home because I regularly put off grocery shopping.
I hated trying to figure out what to buy.
I might be well into my thirties, but I’d never grasped the simplicity of meal planning.
I could smoke meats and cook a mean steak on the grill, but that was the extent of my cooking abilities.
If I couldn’t barbeque it, microwave it, or toss it already-made into the oven, I avoided it.
So, instead of going home to crash on my couch and veg out, I went straight into town to do the dreaded task.
My family had lived in Hartwood Creek for generations.
My great-great-great grandfather was one of the original founders of Hartwood Creek.
He’d settled with his family on the large patch of land that was now the Whimsical Woods Resort.
Back when the town first formed, it was an operational wood mill.
A lot of the historic buildings were built with wood from Alexander Wood’s mill.
It was a long running joke in our family that Wood wood could withstand generations of pressure and still stay sturdy and erect.
The charred ruins of the original Wood family homestead could be found on the trails in the middle of the forest just north of the farthest operational cottage.
We included it in our Halloween Haunt walk, telling tourists that it was haunted.
I didn’t believe in ghosts, but the tourists ate up the story, especially because Alexander Wood had perished there when the family homestead burnt down.
The downtown area was less than a ten-minute drive when the roads were clear, a little longer when the plows hadn’t been through. I drove a lifted truck with killer winter tires. Within thirteen minutes, I was pulling into a parking spot at the grocery store.
I grabbed a cart and started perusing aisles, nodding in greeting to all the familiar faces I passed as I tossed stuff in. I didn’t want to have to come back for anything, so I loaded up on anything that caught my eye.
By the time I reached the junk food aisle my cart was almost full, and I was satisfied I’d have enough to eat for the next week or two.
There was a gorgeous woman in the junk food aisle, eyeing up bags of chips like she couldn’t decide which ones to get.
Long, rich chestnut brown hair tumbled down her back in waves.
Something about her seemed familiar—something about her tugged at a memory just out of reach.
Her delicate hand was reaching for a bag of Lays Dill Pickle chips.
“Can’t go wrong with dill pickle chips,” I said, and she startled, dropping the bag into her cart, her hazel eyes fixing on me.
Her pillowy lips opened in surprise. “Noah?”
“Do we know each other?” I asked, moving closer. The woman’s pretty mouth pursed, and she narrowed those gorgeously familiar eyes at me. Fire sparked behind them, making the golden flecks of her irises stand out.
“Yes, unfortunately. Though you probably don’t remember me. Just another name on your long list,” she smarted, her hands gripping the bar of her cart tightly as she went to move around me.
Her voice. I heard it in my dreams. Had ever since the Witches’ Ball. I reached out, grabbing the end of her grocery cart to stop her. Sage’s gorgeous friend. The woman that had been starring in my wet dreams for weeks now.
“Hey now, no need for such hostility, Nellie. You were in full face makeup last time. I had a better chance of recognizing you naked than recognizing you without your epic makeup skills,” I smirked, my eyes dropping down and taking in her covered body through her open winter jacket.
I might not have recognized her fully dressed, but if I’d seen her naked again, I’d know every inch of her body.
“I guess you have a point,” she allowed, still eyeing me like I was a decision she regretted.