Page 16 of Culinary Chaos

“Oh, you haven’t been around long enough. Just you wait.”

Chapter

Six

“Can you believe that?”

What they’d heard still boggled Angelica’s mind. She’d looked to Hope several times throughout the course of their interviews, but Hope didn’t seem to get it.

These owners should have filed for bankruptcy a year ago.

And the information they’d been given originally before they arrived was all wrong.

“Believe what?” Hope leaned back into the chair at the conference table, which was now cleared of all the work Angelica had finished last night.

Sighing heavily, Angelica tensed her shoulders. Her mind whirred with all the questions she now had, and anger simmering under everything. She’d done her research so many times over when it came to which hotels they would go into. How had they missed this? Who had missed it?

“They’re not drowning in debt, Hope. They’re drowned.” Angelica shook her head slowly, throwing her pen onto the table. She stood up suddenly, the urge to move strong. She needed to yell at someone. She needed to rail against the fact that they hadn’t figured this out before. “Where’s Josef?”

“Uh…”

Angelica ignored Hope and snagged her phone, sending off a text to the two other producers on site that day, and the director. They needed to have a meeting. Now.

“He’s coming,” Angelica said, though she didn’t really care if Hope agreed with her or not. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“With the biggest crack,” Hope answered, tapping her finger against the tabletop.

“Which is?”

“Their manager—Bryant.” Hope looked directly at Angelica. “Being in management requires good communication, and he clearly admitted to thwarting others for his own pleasure by miscommunicating or just not giving people the information they needed.”

“Agreed.” Angelica stared Hope down. Maybe she wasn’t as bad at this as Angelica had first thought she would be.

“I think the kitchens are the least of the problems here.” Hope put her hand flat on the table and pushed herself to stand. “I’m going to check them out.”

“Mrs. Lawrence…” Angelica paused. What was she going to say? That she wanted Hope in on this conversation? That she didn’t want Hope to leave just yet? That was asinine. The problems were with hotel management, not with the kitchens. Hope had pegged that quickly, which meant they were Angelica’s problems, not Hope’s.

“Did you need something?” Hope asked, raising an eyebrow in curiosity.

“Oh, uh… no.” Angelica clenched her jaw and relaxed into the chair again. Maybe she was just running face first into the stress of a new venture. She’d been here before, and she understood how she reacted to these types of situations.

This was no different.

Hope said nothing as she walked out of the conference room. But Angelica couldn’t take her gaze off Hope’s pear-shapedbody, the way her ass and wide hips swished from side to side in the tight black stretchy jeans she wore, the soft gold shirt fluttering around her waist and back.

Wade should have put Hope in gold instead of black. The colors matched her slightly darker-toned skin in a way that made her positively glow and brought out the auburn and red in her nearly black but definitely brown hair. The color suited her so much better, and yet, Angelica was supposed to be the star of the show. Who was she kidding? She wasn’t here to be a show runner. She was here to do the work that she loved and enjoyed and maximize on the income.

Angelica drew in a breath and held it tight in her lungs as the door shut lightly behind Hope.

What the hell was she thinking?

Her thoughts strayed back to Hope, to the distracted look on her face while they’d been interviewing managers, to the confusion that swam in her eyes the night before. Why did that haunt Angelica so much? She’d barely slept a wink. She traced a circle onto the top of the table, her mind spinning in thoughts and conversations, to the hopes and stresses of what this entire show was.

This was her one shot.

She wasn’t sure she could put herself through this again.

The door snicked open loudly, and Josef, a short portly man, stepped in with raised eyebrows as if expecting her to have all the answers already. Angelica sat up straighter in her chair. “We need to rework our plan of action.”