AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Great. Thanks. Are you sure you don’t want it?”
“Totally.”
He tucked it in his overcoat pocket and the weight of it felt like a rock. No one had ever returned a gift. He wasn’t even sure what to do with it.
As they reached a hotel that looked more like a Swiss chalet, Kristen said, “The princess had to pull some strings, but we emptied the entire hotel and it’s yours.”
“Mine?”
“Well, yours and your employees’. You have the penthouse suite on the third floor. The first and second floors each have twenty rooms, so you’ve actually got an extra room or two. Just in case.”
“So I’m in a hotel with my staff?”
“You’ll be fine.”
He shook his head. If Stella had booked this hotel, he would have accepted it on faith. Which was why they never fought or got personal. She did something. He accepted it.
So if he wanted to have an uncomplicated relationship with Kristen for the next two days, that’s what he needed to do with her too. Not engage her. Just trust her judgment.
“Okay. Whatever. When do I see our work space?”
“Actually, your work space is the hotel’s two first-floor meeting rooms.”
He gaped at her. “We’re working in the same space where we’re living?”
“I thought you’d like that.”
He blew his breath out on a sigh. Winslow had said to shake things up. So, sure. Why the hell not? “I might.”
“It’ll be very convenient. Staff has already been briefed on the fact that there’s only about six hours of daylight. Most have decided to use the daylight for family time and work when it’s dark.”
This he could not handle. “I’ve gone along with your conference rooms and having my employees and their families underfoot in my hotel...but eighteen hours of dark?”
She laughed. “It’s winter in Scandinavia. Anybody who knows geography knows we don’t get much daylight.”
He struggled with the urge to close his eyes in frustration. He supposed he did know that. He simply hadn’t put it all together.
“Look on the bright side. If your employees work when it’s dark, that’s eighteen whole hours a day.”
He sniffed a laugh. “You are such a dreamer.”
She climbed out of the limo. “Yeah, well, you’re pretty much the opposite.”
Of all the answers she could have given that was the last thing he’d been expecting. “That’s it? I call you a dreamer and your best shot is to call me the opposite.” He shook his head. “I’m absolutely going to have to teach you how to fight.”
She smiled and pivoted toward the entryway. “Maybe I don’t want to fight. Besides, that would take us back to you giving me lessons on how to handle myself in the business world. We just agreed to pretend we’d only met tonight. We can’t go back to those lessons.”
She walked into the hotel and he blew out another exasperated breath, staring at the starry sky.
Being with her, pretending he didn’t like her, was going to kill him.
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN KRISTEN FINALLY got to bed, she slept like the dead. She woke around nine, just as the sun was coming up.
Curious about what she’d been doing the past few days, her family asked a million questions. She’d phoned them the day she’d flown to New York, in the limo on the way to the boutique to get her gown for the Christmas party with Dean, but they’d never heard of flying across an ocean with someone just to make a pitch. So she filled them in on the details of her trip and the weekend that followed, but her mom had trouble taking it all in.
“He’s a busy man, Mom. People ask him to go places like lunches and dinners and I was his date for the weekend so I went too. But now we’re in Grennady and everything’s back to normal,” she said as she grabbed a piece of cheese and headed for the door. “I can’t do a darned thing to help him meet his deadlines, but I am in charge of making sure he and his crew are happy over the next two days. With his assistant in New York, I’m not sure what that’s going to entail, but I need to be on-site.”
She rushed out of her mom’s kitchen and headed into town, to the men’s shop where Prince Alex had bought his coat the first time he’d come to Grennady with Princess Eva, and realized he was horribly underdressed.
