Page 60 of Falling for the Grumpy Bad Boy

21

RHETT

What the hell, Austin?

It was fucking hot. In November.

Even at three in the afternoon, the temperature had to be pushing eighty. It wasn’t that it was overly hot, but it was so much warmer than I had been expecting. And after a bumpy flight from Miami, I was already in a shit mood.

I was looking forward to getting to the hotel, taking a shower, and reviewing tomorrow’s prep schedule in the quiet of my own room. A stiff drink and peace. That was all I wanted.

That fantasy died a quick death the moment I saw Simone’s face at the hotel reception desk.

I knew that look. Simone wasn’t panicking but she was on the verge of freaking out. That did not bode well for me. And yes, it was all about me. I strolled across the hotel lobby after finishing my phone call outside. Conroy and Clem were standing close. They had those same dire expressions. Conroy looked at me and grimaced.

“What do you mean there’s only one room?” Simone said to the clerk. “We booked four separate rooms weeks ago.”

The desk clerk, a young guy who looked like he would rather be anywhere else, kept typing frantically on his computer. “I’m showing a reservation for one room with a king bed under the name Voss. The other three reservations seem to have been… canceled?”

“Canceled?” Clementine stepped forward, pulling out her phone. “That’s impossible. I confirmed all four reservations myself last week.”

I moved closer to the desk, already feeling the familiar tension that came with plans going sideways. Why plan if everything was just going to go to shit?

Simone looked at me, then back at the clerk.

“I hate to say this,” Simone said with a sigh. “But I’m really going to need to talk to your supervisor.”

The clerk sighed, picked up the phone, and muttered something about paging the manager. I leaned against the desk, rubbing my temples.

Simone shot me a look. “I made the reservations,” she said. “I have the confirmation.”

“I believe you,” I said.

Simone had been running my life for years and she never let me down. It wasn’t on her.

What followed was twenty minutes of the most frustrating customer service I had experienced in years. If I ran my restaurant the way they were running the hotel, I would be out of business.

The hotel had somehow mixed up our reservations with another group. They canceled three of our rooms to accommodate some country music concert crowd. The city was packed, every hotel booked solid, and our chances of finding alternative accommodations were somewhere between slim and nonexistent.

The manager finally appeared, a harried-looking woman in a too-tight blazer. She glanced at us like we were just another problem in her endless parade of disasters. “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience,” she began, her tone dripping with rehearsed sympathy. “We’ve had an unprecedented influx of guests due to the concert tonight. Unfortunately, we’ve had to prioritize⁠—”

“Prioritize?” I cut her off, my voice sharp. “We booked these rooms weeks ago. Confirmed them twice. You’re telling me you just handed them over to someone else?”

Her smile faltered. “I assure you we’re doing everything we can to rectify the situation.”

The kid behind the desk looked genuinely sympathetic, but his hands were clearly tied. He couldn’t make a room appear out of thin air.

“I wish I could help, but with the Blake Shelton concert tonight, literally everything in the city is booked. The one room we have for you is actually pretty spacious though. King bed, pull-out sofa, and we can bring up a rollaway cot.”

Blake Shelton. Of course. Leave it to a country music superstar to completely derail our accommodations.

“We can make it work,” Clementine said. “Right? It’s just one night.”

I looked around our little group, trying to calculate the logistics. Four adults, one hotel room, and enough personal and professional tension to power a small city. What could possibly go wrong? I did not want to listen to Conroy and Simone fucking all night. We weren’t in college.

“Fine,” I said, because what choice did we have? “We’ll take the room.”

The elevator ride up to the seventh floor was silent except for the soft jazz playing over the speakers and Simone’s occasional muttered curses about incompetent reservation systems. Conroy seemed completely unbothered by the whole situation, which was typical. The man could probably sleep comfortably on a bed of nails if necessary.