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“No? You acted like one, so it is rather difficult to tell.”
“I was not that bad,” he protested.
“You were late, you insulted me, you insulted several members of our dinner party, and then you left in a fit of pique. And you were drunk.”
Guy winced. “I had a difficult day.”
She stared at him. “A difficult day that culminated in driving your brand-new motorcar drunk to a gambling den?”
“The Aerocar! I need to find it. It was twenty-eight hundred dollars!”
Adele nearly gasped at the price. Twenty-eight hundred dollars? That was more than some men could hope to make in a decade.
“The cursed thing is here, thanks to the goodwill of my cousin’s husband,” she said.
“James found it and drove it back? Good man.”
“He found you because he found the motorcar,” she said. “Now, will you tell me what happened yesterday that merited all of this?”
Guy winced. “The bank denied my loan.”
“A loan?” she asked, alarmed. “Why do you need a loan?”
He began to rub his forehead with his free hand. “The cost of the San Gabriel Mountain Lodge is proving to be higher than we expected, and I need additional capital.”
“You haven’t even started construction on the mountain lodge and already it is over your budget?”
“The cost of materials has increased since the architect did his projections,” he said.
“But your estimates—”
“The hotel will cost what it costs to build,” he interrupted her with a scowl. “We will make the expense back tenfold when it opens.”
She had been uncomfortable with this idea from the moment he’d told her that he would build the Colorado Grand with a mix of profits from the Andalusian and investors’ money. Then, while the profits of the Colorado Grand were paying its investors back, he would divert the Andalusian’s funds to the San Gabriel Mountain Lodge. Once that hotel was up and running, he reasoned, the Colorado Grand would be profitable and he could use the proceeds from his first two hotels to pay off the third while building a fourth and a fifth, and on and on until he had the hotel empire he had dreamed of when he first arrived in Pasadena.
He had spoken of it with such certainty, she had been loath to voice her fears. What happened if something went wrong? What if guests no longer filled the Andalusian’s rooms as they once had and its profits were not as high as previous years? What if Pasadena fell out of fashion as a winter retreat and people no longer wished to come here from the Midwest and the East?
It all felt like risk to her and, after seeing her father’s carelessness nearly ruin her family, she hated the thought of taking such a risk again. After all she had sacrificed to save her family, she could not sit by and see her husband take such a chance without saying something. When she’d raised her concerns, though, Guy had simply kissed her and told her to leave the business to him.
“Why did the bank not grant you the loan?” she asked.
Guy’s shoulders slumped. “They said that because of the loan they have already given me, they would not extend it.”
“You already have a loan on the mountain lodge?” she asked.
“Well, no. This bank has a loan on the Colorado Grand.”
It was the first time that she had heard of any loan for the Colorado Grand, but that was not what alarmed her most.
“This bank? Do you have business with more than one?”
Guy gave her a weak smile. “Adele, this is not something you should concern yourself with. I will find someone else to lend me the money, if not in Pasadena then in Los Angeles or San Francisco—or New York or Chicago. Everyone knows that our hotels are a good investment.”
She was about to ask another question, but Guy set aside his coffee cup and stood. “Enough. It’s time I dressed to go into the office.”
She hesitated but then stepped back, closing the door between them.
Adele was still thinking of her conversation with Guy about the bank loan the next day when she and Margot called upon Mrs. Blakeney in her big Federalist-style house a few blocks away from the Gables.
