Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“The Wi-Fi out here really sucks,” grumbled Rachel, holding her phone above her head. The hotspot kept dropping out, making any effort to check emails or work online a near impossibility.
On the other side of the enormous table, Matthew continued to type happily away on his laptop.
What is he working on? We are meant to be coming up with a strategy, and all he has done for the past hour is tap, tap on his computer.
It had better not be him trying to figure out how he could wedge the Death Star inside the lobby of the ski lodge.
If he is, I’ll find the missing dome spike and wedge it up his …
After two cups of coffee and the promise of unfettered access to the coffee machine and pods, Rachel was finally in the mood to get to work. Matthew could make a mean cheese grilled sandwich, but she wasn’t ready to sing his praises. He’d scored too many points from her already today.
The one good piece of news they did share was the discovery of what must have once been a private office and meeting room situated directly across the hallway from the kitchen. After cleaning the large window on the far wall, they were afforded a pleasant outlook which took in a snowcapped mountain and a nearby Aspen tree grove. There didn’t appear to be any water damage in this part of the building, which made it the perfect place for a work room.
The internet was still however a major problem for Rachel. But while she’d struggled to get any websites to load, she’d noticed that Matthew had been steadily working. Rachel narrowed her eyes at him. Why wasn’t he complaining about the lack of cell signal?
“Matthew?”
“Hmm.” His fingers continued to dance effortlessly across the keyboard.
“Matthew!”
“Huh?” he said, finally lifting his head and looking at her. “What did you say?”
“I said the Wi-Fi signal here is terrible. I can barely get one bar, so how is it that you are able to work?”
His cheeks flushed red. “Do you remember that bit last night when you discovered that my real surname is Royal, and my family owns a lot of hotels and resorts? Okay. Yeah well … we have our own commercial satellite. I’m hooked onto its signal now.”
She’d grown up surrounded by well-to-do people but had never met anyone who could actually afford their own communications satellite.
So that’s what billionaires spend their money on. Fancy tech toys.
He might be wealthy, but Matthew had the good manners to appear embarrassed over his misstep. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize you were having internet issues. Let me patch you in.”
Nope. I still can’t get my head around this. How and why do they have their own satellite?
“How are you allowed to have a satellite? I thought only governments and evil billionaires were allowed to do that. Oh, yes, I forgot the billionaire bit.”
He raised his eyebrows at her last comment. “I don’t know all the politics behind it, but we launched the project through the European Space Agency. The satellite handles a lot of the Royal business traffic across all the various countries we operate in, but we are also looking to use it in places like this one. The lack of reliable signals impedes our ability to operate in some locations. We’ll have a second satellite launching late this summer. I’m hoping that Royal Resorts Aspen will be the first US based site to link directly to our satellites. That way our guests will have strong internet and phone signal.
Satellites. As in plural, that’s serious money.
Rachel laughed. “It’s kinda nuts that we can get in touch with the furthest reaches of the planet from here, but we can’t get a coffee delivered from town.”
She spun her laptop round and pushed it toward him. “Please, Mister Royal, would you kindly hook me up to your rocket ship.”
The heat had gone out of her fight. Rachel was talking to him once more. Thank heavens. It was a welcome change to how the day had started out between them, but Matthew was still wary. She was against his plan and hadn’t hesitated to tear it—and by default, him—apart in public last night. The injury to his pride hurt almost as much as his stomach did.
He didn’t give a damn about the coffee or the internet. He wanted them to find a way to communicate with one another without it ending in a yelling match. This went deeper than simply the fate of the old ski lodge.
I can’t think about that now—about us . Still, the doubt of whether they’d ever repair this gaping wound in their relationship nagged at him.
They worked on in silence for a time, but he was now very much aware of how silent things were, of the distance between them.
I wish we could go back to being what we were before.
The bud of romance had been ready to blossom between them, now he feared it was lost. Crushed somewhere under the snow. He lowered the lid of his laptop, quietly watching as Rachel continued to work.
At some point she must have finally realized what he was doing and looked up from her keyboard. “What?”
“Do you really think my design looks like the Death Star?” he asked.
She puffed out her cheeks. “I didn’t mean that it was ugly, or evil. What I was trying to say is that the design is not sympathetic to this place.”
People kept throwing that remark at him, but no one had actually bothered to say what they meant by it. How was he to design something when he didn’t know what the people of Aspen wanted?
Rachel held up her pointer finger. “Let me show you. Once you understand then I think you and I can get down to work and come up with a plan.”
She disappeared from the room, returning a few minutes later carrying a cardboard box with tattered edges which she dropped onto the table. It landed with a thump.
“Gary Brocks found this when he was cleaning out one of his father’s cupboards. It’s the original blue prints for the Green Tree Resort. Along with a ton of photos. I’d started scanning the blue prints but hadn’t got around to the photos. ”
They gathered around the box and quickly emptied its contents onto the meeting room table. The aroma of old paper and dust had Matthew turning away to sneeze. It took a few seconds for his nose to stop itching.
“Sorry about that, the pages are pretty dusty. I wiped them down as best I could, but forty-eight years of being stuffed in the ceiling of a garage will do that to old designs,” said Rachel.
It was strange to be able to talk design to her. Matthew hadn’t met many female architects during his career. Few seemed to take the path into designing hotels and resorts. From the way Rachel had spoken last night, he doubted she would find much joy in such tasks. Apart from the fancy lobbies and grounds, most hotels and resorts were little more than cookie cutter projects.
Which is why this one had been so compelling to him—it had offered him a rare chance to strike a blow for something different in leisure and travel design. Something unique.
“Okay, so what exactly are we looking for in here?” he asked.
The soft smile on her face had his cock twitching in his pants. Matthew did his best to ignore his body’s not‐so‐subtle hints for sex. Things between him and Rachel were complicated enough at the moment, he didn’t need to throw lust into the mix.
An old album creaked as she opened it, laying it flat on the table. “This. This is why I want to save the old building. Look at these photos, they are the history of Aspen. And so is this place.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to give him a history lesson about the town. He even knew the standard dad joke about it. “Do you know, how many Aspenites it takes to change a lightbulb?”
Rachel shook her head to Matthew’s cryptic question .
“One hundred. One to actually change it, and ninety-nine to stand around telling everyone how great the old lightbulb was.”
He’d read up on Aspen’s history. How it had been a sleepy-ish ski resort town until the early 1970’s when the celebrities and some serious development money had arrived. But he’d also found some people were selective about remembering the “good old days” and how tourist expectations had seen the Green Tree Resort fall out of favor and eventually shut down. It was all good to preserve something, but if no one wanted to come out here and stay, it wouldn’t be long before the doors closed once more.
The photo album was full of black and white images. They looked to have been taken in the nineteen fifties if the clothes people were wearing was anything to go by. The ski lodge was visible in many of the pictures, and by the look of it, newly built.
But that’s over seventy years ago, this building doesn’t look like it’s been updated since.
“You, don’t seem to understand that when I first came here, I didn’t intend to knock this place down either, but it’s just not worth salvaging.”
“Says who? Your Royal Resort accountants? Your local bank manager?”
Matthew scowled. He’d never needed to set foot inside a bank, so had no idea what use he would have for a bank manager. “Rachel, can I show you the numbers we have run? Take your time, go through them. If you can find a way to save this lodge and still make it a viable investment for my family’s company, I’m all ears.”
She closed up the photo album with a sigh. “I’m not saying that we have to keep the site exactly as it is, but the main building can’t be knocked down. The Brocks have made their position clear. ”
Matthew nodded. “Yes, they have.” He was going to have to make concessions in order to get things moving. If in doing that he succeeded in getting Rachel closer to accepting the reality of this old resort and its dilapidated state, then in truth he really wasn’t conceding all that much. “But in return, I want you to agree to keep your mind open to what could be done with this site.”
Rachel dumped the photo album back into the box, then picked up a large cardboard drawing tube. Popping open the end, she tipped the tube sideways and a large rolled up piece of blue paper fell out.
Matthew immediately recognized what it was. “Wow, real hand-drafted blueprints. I haven’t seen the likes of these since I did the history of design in college.”
“These are the original plans for this place. If you want me to go through the figures the Royal Resorts people have put together, then I would like you to take a good look at these. Quid pro quo. If you want the scanned versions, I can send you a link.”
She was talking to him. Focusing on making positive head way with the project. He’d take that as a win. Matthew opened the blueprints and spread them out on the table. “These are good, I like working with the paper versions.”
Baby steps. If it took baby steps for them to find their way back, he would do it. The longer he spent with Rachel, the more certain he became that he’d found a special woman. Only a fool would let someone like Rachel slip through his fingers.
Matthew ran his hands over the blueprints. “I’ve always been one for touching beautiful things.”
He glanced up at her, and as their eyes met, she let out a soft gasp. The same gentle sigh she’d given him whenever they’d made love.
I will touch you again. And soon.