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Three pairs of eyes stared at me in confusion. Emiel was the first to get it.
“Oh,” he said, taken aback. “Thatidea.”
Byron was the next to grasp what I was talking about. “Oh. Crap. That’s... actually kind of brilliant. Do you think she’d go for it?”
“No idea,” I said. “It’s worth floating it and seeing what she thinks, though.”
Luca was still frowning. “What idea? What are you three talking about? Jesus, sometimes I feel like I need a decoder ring.”
I grinned, and started laying out the plan that could potentially solve two of our problems at once.
SIXTY
Mia
NAT HAD URGED ME TOtake my time with the decision to sell the restaurant. But with every day that passed, my certainty that it was the right thing to do only grew. The thing that still woke me up at night was my uncertainty about what came next.
“A vacation,” Luca had replied firmly, when I shared my misgivings one night in the nest. “What comes next is avacation.”
And that was all well and good, as far as it went. I’d been joking for a while now that being a stay-at-home omega was sounding better and better. But deep down, I knew I’d only be happy playing house for so long before I lost my mind with boredom.
“I think it’s time I started talking to the staff about this,” I told Nat one morning, as we were stumbling around trying to get ready for work after yet another night of not enough sleep.
“You already know it’s going to affect morale,” Nat said, without judgment. “You’ll start with Shani, I assume?”
I nodded. “Yes. She’s been such a huge part of turning the place around. I don’t feel right keeping her in the dark.”
I scheduled a one-on-one meeting with her on Sunday night, so she’d have her Monday off to process the news. Onceeveryone else left, I led her to one of the tables in the dining room.
She sat down across from me, her serene expression unchanged, even though sadness shone from her dark eyes.
“You’re planning on closing the place down, aren’t you,” she said, before I had a chance to get a word out. “I’ve known something was off for a couple of weeks now.”
For the first time since I’d made my final decision, I felt my throat tighten around the prospect of tears. I swallowed them down, doing Shani the courtesy of holding her gaze as I spoke.
“Not shutting it down,” I said. “But we’ve made the decision to sell, if we can find new management willing to take it on. And you should know that it can take months, sometimes evenyearsto find the right buyer for a place like this.”
Saying that aloud made me feel like gravity was dragging me down with exhaustion—like my body suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. “So, nothing’s likely to change anytime soon,” I went on gamely. “I just wanted you to know it was on the table—”
“I’d like to buy it,” Shani said, cutting me off.
I blinked at her. “You...would?”
She nodded. “OfcourseI would, Mia. It’s theElderflower Inn,” she added, as though it was an explanation. “I’d have to talk to my co-mates, obviously, since they’d be the ones bankrolling it.”