Chapter 2 #2
Hallie had agreed to stay on for six months. Reese would keep her on forever if she wanted to, but she had no idea what Hallie’s long-term goals were. Sooner than later, she may find herself hiring a new manager, someone who’d never know the inn the way Hallie did.
God… what in the ever-loving hell had she gotten herself into?
In the last few years at her company, she’d been relatively insulated from all the ‘people-ling’ aspects of her role. That was a technical term she’d learned about at business school, clearly.
Megan had been the one who’d schmoozed with investors and still networked with their business school alumni while Reese had tucked herself away to tweak the software functionality and run the numbers on profitability and do any myriad of things that an early-stage founder did daily to ensure their dream could continue to exist.
Maybe if she’d been a little more dialed in on the people aspect of things, she wouldn’t have been so shocked by everything that had happened back in San Francisco.
“I assumed you weren’t working with them, given that they’d already made an offer,” Hallie said, studying her.
Reese pursed her lips. “Oh?”
“About a year ago, before my parents were seriously considering selling. ”
“Why didn’t it work out?” She tried to sound casual, but she’d at least admit to herself that she was wildly curious. She was pleased, at least, to realize she was taking another page out of Hallie’s playbook on forthrightness.
Her father had made it clear years ago that she was never the sibling who was being groomed to take over The Devereux Group, and since then, she’d tried to put anything business-related to the side. It was the only way she’d be able to have a productive relationship with her family.
“It was a good offer. Not as good as yours,” Hallie said with an impish smile, “but my parents had actually started the process of selling to them at the time. The financing fell through, though I don’t know a ton more than that.
Our lawyers said that deals fall apart all the time before they ever reach the finish line. ”
Reese nodded in agreement. There were hundreds of moving parts on mergers and acquisitions that could cause something to not work out.
“Anyway,” Hallie continued, “my brother and his wife had just had twins, but they live in Colorado. Once my parents got the idea in their head that they could spend more time out there, they started to seriously consider selling, even after that original deal fell through.”
So maybe, in some small way, Reese had her family to thank for The Stone’s Throw becoming available after decades of ownership by the Thatcher family.
She scoffed.
Hallie looked at her strangely.
Reese’s hand flew up to her mouth, heat rising on her cheeks. “Sorry. That had nothing to do with your story. I was just thinking about how The Devereux Group is the reason this whole thing kicked off. And look at us now.”
The large clock in the entry hall chimed, and Hallie looked at the computer screen, panicked.
“Only about half of the guests checking out today have already done so. It’s going to be nonstop for the next thirty minutes, and I need to find a replacement for Candace. She’s on the cleaning rotation today.”
Ah, yes. Candace, and her Shakespearean-level lovers’ quarrel with her paramour, Greg.
“What can I do to help?” Reese asked, just as the first set of guests came into view on the steps with their suitcases. She tightened her dark ponytail and smoothed her button-down shirt to gather herself.
“I’ll send a text out to the other staff to see who can cover her shift.”
“Are you going to fire Candace?” Reese asked seriously.
Hallie shook her head. “She’s nineteen and in the throes of young love. They’ll work it out, like they always do, and then beg to be on the schedule together. Plus, when she’s here, she’s the best we’ve got.”
Reese scrunched up her forehead. “Okay.”
“If you want to overrule that, it’s your prerogative,” Hallie added, though both of them knew it wasn’t likely. Reese was a newborn baby right now in terms of hotel management experience, and they both knew it.
“We’ll have to get a late start on cleaning the rooms for the guests checking out, but use that tablet.” Hallie pointed at a shelf only visible if you were standing at the back of the desk.
“Okay,” Reese said, grabbing the iPad and hitting the home button. The screen for her software popped up, and she immediately felt the twinge of sadness that happened whenever she saw it.
“Look at all the occupied rooms that don’t have checkouts today. We can worry about cleaning them later, but please stop by and restock the toiletries.”
“Which toiletries?”
Hallie nodded, like she wasn’t at all annoyed with the idiocy of Reese’s question.
“New towels, two per person. New bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and bodywash. A new bar of soap. There’s a cart in the cleaning closet on each floor.
It should be well stocked, and there’s a list of what each room gets. ”
Reese scanned the app and looked at the list of rooms that had guests staying through at least the weekend. Of the twenty rooms, eight had checkouts today.
Which meant… “Okay. I’ll stop by these twelve rooms and make sure they have the daily amenities, using the list on the cleaning cart.”
“Perfect,” Hallie said, like a parent using positive reinforcement for even the smallest of wins. “Skip the ones that have a ‘Do Not Disturb’ tag on the door, but mark it on the app.”
Reese nodded again.
The two guests who had been coming down the stairs at the far end of the hall finally made their way over, coffees from the drink station in hand.
Reese could see two more couples meandering in their direction, one from the dining area, where breakfast was available until ten a.m. but where stragglers loved to sit afterward, and another from the staircase.
“And so it begins,” Hallie said with a wide smile. “You good?”
Was she? “Sure. I’ll get started now.”
Reese disappeared just as she heard Hallie’s chipper voice asking the first guests if they’d had a good stay.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she quickly checked to make sure it wasn’t Hallie with a last-minute instruction.
It was her mom—for the second time this morning—who’d somehow found out she was back in town.
That was the only possibility as far as Reese was concerned, since the Devereuxs weren’t known for idle chitchat.
Eventually, her parents would find out that she’d purchased the inn, but she was trying to avoid that for as long as possible.
Being back for her idiot baby brother’s wedding was going to be enough family-imposed torture for the summer. She didn’t know what the fallout would be when they found out that not only did she own The Stone’s Throw, but that she’d unknowingly undercut The Devereux Group in some way .
Right now, though, she had bigger fish to fry. Namely, not walking in on any naked guests who didn’t hear her knock.
She took a staircase off to the side that Hallie had told her most of the staff used while working. It went up to the third floor, which had fewer rooms than the other two floors. Starting there was probably a good bet.
They’d taken a tour earlier this morning to help Reese get a better sense of the inn.
While she was a whiz with almost anything technical or business-related, spatial and directional awareness weren’t skills she possessed.
Add in multiple staircases, and she was lucky she even found the cleaning closet.
Even then, the giant ‘Cleaning Closet’ label on the door did help. A lot.
True to Hallie’s word, when Reese unlocked the door, she found a small, well-stocked cart that would see her through her newest task.
Reese had been putting effort into her life for as long as she could remember, but that effort very rarely included any type of physical labor.
Still, she knew all the work it took to be good at most types of jobs, and as the new owner of the inn, it was important that she knew how to do them all.
She pushed the cart to the end of the hallway and flipped her focus to the iPad nestled on top of a set of plush, white towels.
“Looks like three out of five rooms on this floor are staying,” Reese said to herself.
The rooms on the third floor were all suites, doors widely spaced apart to make room for the one-bedroom or two-bedroom configurations.
The Stone’s Throw had originally been an Art Deco mansion, built in the 1920s but unused for a large portion of the twentieth century.
Hallie’s parents had purchased the building in the mid-eighties and added this floor about twenty years ago, so they were the newest rooms in the inn by a wide margin .
After knocking, Reese stepped into the first suite, a one-bedroom with a living room that had a gorgeous view out across the Atlantic Ocean.
People flocked to Stoneport for a variety of reasons, but Reese knew that even if the inn was a little dated, it still pulled in strong occupancy numbers because it was set on a breathtakingly scenic overlook.
Only, Reese didn’t want people to accept whatever room they booked because it was in close proximity to what they really wanted.
She wanted The Stone’s Throw to be an inn that people would still flock to even if it was located inside of a city dump because of how it made them feel at home.
Because of the ambiance. Because of a certain je ne sais quoi that made them want more—to sort through every small detail and figure out why they loved it so much.
And she wanted to be the one to give that to them.