Chapter 36
Chapter
Thirty-Six
“Iwanna go home!” Eva whined, tugging on Hope’s hand as she tried to walk toward the elevator.
“I understand, babe, but we have one more week of shooting, and then we’re done.
” Hope tried to drag her toward the elevator, but she wasn’t having it.
It’d been this way the entire plane ride over, and while they’d actually flown with Rex this time, which had helped, she was exhausted from the trip and from the whining.
“This place sucks.” Eva crossed her arms and pouted, staring at the ground.
“We don’t know if Chicago sucks, Eva. It could be fun! I think there’s a lot planned for you to do this week in between your studies.” Hope was trying to make this sound as exciting as possible, and it just wasn’t working.
“Eva”—Rex’s voice was low with authority—“quit the whining and go up to the room with your mother.”
Hope’s heart hammered. She looked over her shoulder and met Rex’s dark eyes and mouthed a thanks to him. He walked with them up to the room, and Hope let Eva inside before shutting the door and sighing heavily.
“She was a pain toward the end of last week too. I’m not sure what’s going on with her.” Rex crossed his arms and frowned.
“She’s had a lot of changes this year.” Hope frowned. “And if you remember, last year when we filmed the last episode…” Hope trailed off, not really wanting to say anything out loud.
“Yeah.” Rex shuffled his foot. “I was an ass. Rach was an ass. You were an ass.”
Hope snorted and chuckled at that. “Sure, we’ll just call it the time we were all assholes.”
He laughed with her and shook his head. “I’ll see what I can do to help out this week. But I imagine once we get back to LA next week, it’ll be a bit easier.”
“God, I hope so.” She sighed heavily. “Thanks again.”
Just as Rex stepped away down the hall, Angelica opened the door to her room and stepped out. She smiled at Rex, bowing her head slightly.
“Rex.”
“Ange,” he said back. When Angelica walked past him and was in between them, Rex turned around and waggled his eyebrows in Hope’s direction.
Jesus.
They weren’t keeping this a secret, were they? Angelica might not get what she wanted this time, despite their best efforts.
“Hey,” Angelica said as she stepped next to Hope, not even noticing that Rex was still looking at the two of them.
“Hey.” Hope bit her lip and then looked back at Rex, waving her hand in his direction to shoo him away. The last thing she needed was her ex-husband to act as a wingman for her girlfriend.
Girlfriend.
That’s what they were, wasn’t it? Just the thought of that word warmed Hope’s entire body. Quickly, she leaned in and kissed Angelica before backing away. Angelica blushed, but she didn’t object to the quick embrace.
“I don’t have a lot of time to talk right now. Eva’s on the struggle bus.”
“Oh?” Angelica furrowed her brow in concern.
“She’s been struggling this filming season. And when we left Saint Paul, it got so much worse.”
“I’m so sorry.” Angelica folded her hands in front of her, nervously playing her thumbs against each other.
“She’s going through a lot.” Hope bit her lip. “So you’re probably right about waiting a bit.”
Angelica nodded her understanding. “Makes sense. We, uh… we’re supposed to meet with the owners in ten minutes.”
“Perfect,” Hope muttered. “I’ll catch Rishal and then be right down, but it’s going to be about twenty minutes.”
“Okay.”
Hope wanted to lean in and kiss her again. She wanted to sink into the comfort she knew Angelica would bring her, but with the conversation about waiting longer, she held off. “See you down there.”
Angelica said nothing else as she walked away.
With one more steadying breath, Hope stepped into the fray that was going to be her room this week.
She just had to get through the next twenty minutes or so before she could escape for a little bit—at least she hoped she could.
Eva had to be her priority this week, but even then, she still needed a break or two in there.
When she stepped into the staging conference room nearly an hour after Angelica had left her in the hallway, everyone was already seated around the table—Josef included, right next to Logan. And he didn’t look happy. Angelica either. In fact, she shot Hope a look of annoyance.
“Are we ready?” Rex asked.
Hope’s phone buzzed in her hand, but she was too nervous to look down at it.
“Let’s get ready.”
Ready?
Hope furrowed her brow and waited for someone to tell her what the hell was going on. But everyone filtered out of the room, including Angelica. Rex sighed and bent down. “We’re filming.”
“What?” Hope asked in surprise.
“We’re starting today.” Rex shook his head. “The owners are eager to get started, and so is Angelica. Josef wants to as well. I was outnumbered, and you weren’t here to back me up.”
“I would have.”
“I know.” Rex frowned. “But I need you to get dressed and see Ansel really quick—and I mean quick—because we’re filming in thirty.”
“Jesus.” Hope ran her fingers through her hair. “Okay.”
Hope tugged at the shaggy ends of her hair. It didn’t take long for Ansel to fix her up, so she was looking presentable, and when she entered the hotel offices, she wasn’t surprised to find everyone already setting up to film.
She slid into the chair next to Angelica and sighed heavily. “I feel less prepared for this week than I did for our very first week of filming.”
“You were quite unprepared that week,” Angelica commented, but she didn’t look up from the new iPad that Lyric had ordered for her.
Guilt stabbed at Hope, but she pushed it to the side.
Angelica wasn’t lying. She’d been so unprepared for it.
And she didn’t even have a good excuse. She’d been thrown off by Angelica, not only her professionalism but the fact that she was attracted to her.
Which had been foreign up until that point.
And while Hope wanted to lean closer and tell Angelica exactly that, now wasn’t the time.
A man and a woman entered the office and sat down where Rex guided them.
Hope shifted her gaze to Angelica and then back to Rex.
She was off her game tonight, that was for sure.
Once they were all seated, Hope tense and confused, Rex called action and Hope again felt as though she missed at least twenty minutes of time.
“It’s good to meet you, Mark and Alexis.” Angelica held her hand out to shake each one of theirs.
Hope immediately jumped in to mime Angelica. She had to get her head back on her shoulders, because this was too much for her. She bit the inside of her cheek in an attempt to shock herself back into reality.
“Why don’t you start with telling us a little bit about Claridges?” Angelica waited patiently, looking at each of them directly.
Hope knew very little about who Mark and Alexis were, other than that they were married.
Or no, were they divorced? Curse it. She should have read up on them in between episodes, but she hadn’t had a moment to breathe.
Eva had been such a drain on her energy in that break, and she’d known she could ride Angelica’s coattails on this one.
“We bought the hotel twelve years ago,” Mark started, his tenor tones filling the quiet room.
Hope clung on to every word he said.
“Back then the business was thriving, and we wanted to make a legacy for our family and have some residual income when we retired.” Mark spread his hands out in front of him. “Obviously, that hasn’t happened.”
Alexis sighed and rolled her eyes. “When we got divorced, all of those dreams shattered. Business plummeted, and we haven’t been able to get our feet under us again.”
Hope clenched her jaw. Divorced. She should have remembered that.
She shifted a glance toward Rex, but she couldn’t find him in the sea of people.
It seemed they weren’t the only couple out there that still had to work together after a divorce.
That was good to know because for a while there it had felt like they were the only ones with this particular problem.
“We haven’t recovered,” Mark added.
But was he talking about the hotel or the relationship?
There didn’t seem to be too much tension in the room with them now, but then again, first impressions could certainly be deceiving.
Welcome to half of the people Hope had met lately.
She canted her head to the side and joined in the conversation. “Where do you think the issues are?”
“Where aren’t they?” Alexis sighed heavily, her voice dropping with guilt.
“The restaurant is a mess. We don’t have a chef anymore and haven’t had one in about six months.
Management is lazy, which in turn makes all the other employees lazy because they know they can get away with it.
No one is held accountable for anything.
We keep putting in more and more money and we’re just not making it back. ”
“We’re going to lose everything,” Mark added.
“How much debt do you have against the hotel?” Angelica asked.
“Just over a million, not including the mortgage,” Mark answered.
Hope’s stomach plummeted. That was an insane amount of debt.
How the hell were they even affording anything?
As much as she wanted to ask that question, she didn’t.
They needed something to discover later on in the episode, and it’d add to the drama that Josef was always wanting if they were so far into debt that they literally couldn’t see their way out.
Angelica pursed her lips and turned on her iPad, opening up a spreadsheet. “You’re understaffed.”
“We can’t afford any more staff,” Alexis responded, folding her hands together and shaking her head. “It’d put us further into debt.”
“How many hours are you two putting in?” Angelica again asking the pointed questions that no one else wanted to. She was so damn good at that.
“We basically live here. In fact, we’ve considered that to cut costs elsewhere, but the thought of living together again is…
nauseating.” Alexis chuckled a little, but the tension that Hope had been missing before popped right up and reared its ugly head.
That was a sensitive point, and Mark hadn’t seemed to appreciate that comment.
“What have you tried in order to bridge the gap of finances?” Angelica took the electronic pen and poised it to write.
“Everything,” Mark answered, his voice a lot gruffer than before. “Discounts, sales, advertising, promotions, specials… nothing seems to work.”
Angelica did note all of that down, though it couldn’t have been a surprise.
Those are the obvious things to try out when it comes to a floundering business.
Hope would probably start there too if she needed to increase income on short notice.
But it was also minimizing profit and spending money that they might not have.
“We’re going to be interviewing you on and off to make sure we’re on track, but we’re also going to be interviewing other employees so we can get the full story of what’s going on and potentially work through the problems.” Angelica scrawled something on the iPad and then shifted in the chair.
“I’ll do some inspections of your restaurant and work with you to hire a new chef.” Hope pressed her palm to the top of the table, getting both Mark and Alexis’s attention. “Because without a chef, the restaurant is probably going to flounder.”
Alexis nodded. “You’re right.”
Of course she was right, but that didn’t necessarily make the conversation any easier. It’d certainly be interesting to see the two of them in the interview process. It’d give her a really good insight into what some of the problems at Claridges was.
“Great. So we’ll get an early start tomorrow.” Angelica flicked to her schedule. “We’re starting at seven.”
“Seven?” Mark’s eyes nearly bugged out. Hope almost had the same response. Starting that early was going to be tough after the day she’d had, but she’d be up and ready to go in time for Ansel to make her up again.
“Yes.” Angelica closed her iPad with a snap, which shook through Hope, startling her.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Hope added, along with a small smile to soften Angelica’s sharp answer. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Rex called cut and ended the scene. He came around and pointed at Hope and Angelica.
“Stay for a minute,” he said. Then he turned to Mark and Alexis.
“Like Ange said, we’ll start at seven tomorrow morning, and we’ll start with opening statements and interviews.
Alexis, you’ll work with Cadence, our AD. ”
He answered a few of their questions before letting them go, and then he sat down across from Hope and Angelica. He sighed heavily.
“I already know these are going to be long days.” He eyed Hope. “You might want to prepare Eva for them. The problems here are mostly interpersonal conflicts.”
“I suspected,” Angelica said, clicking her pen onto the side of the iPad.
“Interpersonal?” Hope asked.
“They’re divorced, Hope. They don’t exactly get along.” Rex stared at her directly.
“They didn’t seem to be bickering or anything.” Hope pointed to the door that they’d walked out of.
Rex grunted. “They’re divorced.”
Apparently repeating that was going to make a difference in what Hope heard or saw in the relationship. “There’s no way that they’re not having conflicts between themselves and that it’s not affecting the hotel as a whole.”
“It could be. We get along well enough.”
The air in the room was sucked out in an instant. They did get along, didn’t they? She wasn’t just making that up. They’d worked hard to get to this point. And while it wasn’t perfect, they weren’t struggling every day like they’d done at the beginning of the season.
“It’s going to be a problem,” Rex reiterated.
“Fine.” Hope crossed her arms and leaned back in the chair, pushing it up onto the back two legs by digging her toe into the ground. “So interviews tomorrow?”
“Bright and early,” Rex responded.
“Then I need to go check on Eva.” Hope eyed him for a solid three seconds before she stood up and left. If he’d wanted to make her feel like shit, he’d succeeded.