Page 47 of Culinary Chaos (Hotel Bombshell #1)

Chapter

Thirty-Six

“ T hank you, Mary.” Angelica sighed heavily as she ended the call and set her phone down. She picked up the pen she’d been writing with and flicked it back and forth between her fingers.

She hadn’t expected that call.

She probably should have, but she hadn’t all at the same time.

Leaning back into the chair in her hotel room, Angelica sighed again.

Hope wanted to leave the show. She’d gotten the sense when they were in Seattle that the conversation might have come up between Hope and Rex, but she hadn’t expected Hope to take it this far.

To actually contact her agent and to try and break the contract—it must have been worse than Angelica had anticipated.

They weren’t even a full season in the books.

What if this was about the kiss?

About the conversation that Hope had tried to have in the elevator yesterday?

Angelica frowned again and rolled her shoulders. She didn’t have time to worry about it or come up with any kind of solution. They had this one last episode to film and post-production press to do, which she still needed to get on top of organizing.

But she didn’t have time for that today, or at least not right now.

She was due at hair and makeup in the next five minutes, so they could get started on filming.

Dropping the pen onto the desk, Angelica slid her shoes on and walked directly out of her room.

She stopped short, coming face to face with Hope.

“Angel?” Hope asked.

“Yeah…” Angelica trailed off. She hadn’t thought about the fact that their call times were the same that day so they could start with the beginning of production to introduce where they were, who they were working with, and the hotel itself.

No way in hell was Angelica going to tell Hope that she’d just gotten off the phone with Mary, but she had to know, right? Hope had to know that Mary would call production and ask around to find a way to break the contract.

“Want to walk together?” Hope furrowed her brow.

Had she asked something else and Angelica had missed it? She nodded slightly and pocketed her key. “I forgot my iPad.”

“I can wait.”

Angelica had hoped she wouldn’t. Holding in her sigh, Angelica retrieved the item, took two seconds to collect herself and put a mask in place, and then stepped back out into the hallway. She was much more prepared to join Hope now than she had been two minutes ago.

“Ready?” Hope asked, but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes like it normally did.

Or perhaps it was Angelica reading too much into it.

How much of this had been a farce from the start?

She’d risked for love before and that turned out to have been a wrong decision.

Leanne hadn’t given up anything for her.

In fact, she’d doubled down on what she had and how they were so similar and could just go back to being professional.

But they couldn’t.

“Yeah,” Angelica said softly. She didn’t look into Hope’s eyes, fearing that she might see the truth of what she was thinking. Instead, she glanced down at the iPad in her hand and pulled the door shut behind her. She could do this. They just had to make it through this episode.

“How did you sleep?” Hope asked.

Small talk it was.

“Fine,” Angelica answered. She refrained from reciprocating the question as was typically expected.

Instead, she walked directly to the elevator and smashed her finger a little too hard into the button.

The truth was she hadn’t slept much. Hope being in the room right next door had weighed on her mind all night, and she was still struggling to find a replacement for Leanne.

The one person she’d wanted to hire had declined her offer.

Which was a whole other problem. But at least she was in LA now so she could take care of the issues more readily than from a distance. Next week, she had three more interviews set up, and then maybe she’d find someone worthy of working for her—at least in that position.

“Did I do something wrong?” Hope asked, catching Angelica’s attention.

“What?” Angelica frowned, confused.

“I’ve never seen you this quiet before. At least not in a room with me.” Hope cocked her head to the side and looked Angelica up and down. “Did I do something wrong?”

That really depended on the definition of wrong , which wasn’t a conversation that Angelica wanted to get into that morning.

Not before she had another coffee at least. She clenched her jaw and gripped her iPad a little tighter.

“I have a hotel owner and manager who doesn’t want to actually manage, he just wants to own.

Which means that he’s done very little training—which seems to be a theme in these hotels we’ve been in—but worse than that, his employees walk all over him. ”

“Like last night?” Hope furrowed her brow.

“Like last night.” Angelica sighed. “They were outside on a smoke break.”

“Smoke break?” Astonishment reached Hope’s eyes. “For forty-five minutes?”

“An hour and a half, actually. I looked at the cameras to see when they left.”

“Oh my God.”

“Exactly.” Angelica faced the front of the elevator when it dinged their arrival. Thank God, she needed to escape this as quickly as possible.

As soon as Ansel handed her the coffee cup and she sat down, Eva burst into the room.

“Mama!”

Hope held her arms out for Eva to run into them and gave her a long, deep hug. Angelica was actually impressed with just how long they stayed in each other’s arms before Eva pulled back and looked over her shoulder to meet Angelica’s eyes.

“Hi!” She blushed a little.

“Hey there,” Angelica said, nodding toward Hope. “Miss your mom?”

Eva nodded, biting her lip in the same habit that Hope had. Angelica hummed her understanding and looked over her shoulder to find Rex standing in the doorway looking at them both. “You two good? I need to go talk to Kyle.”

“Yeah, we’re good,” Hope answered, pulling Eva into her lap.

Eva, however, had other ideas. She wiggled her way off Hope’s lap and came to stand right in front of Angelica, hands on her hips, staring at her like Angelica had all of the answers to the problems in the world.

“Can I help you?” Angelica asked lightly before sipping her hot coffee.

“I’d like to be with you today.”

“Oh?” Angelica flicked her gaze to Hope to see what she thought of all this.

Eva nodded sharply. “What exactly do you do all day?”

Angelica laughed and took another sip of her drink. Only a six-year-old with the gumption of her unrestrained mother would be able to ask that question with a straight face and fully expect an answer.

“I do a lot of things,” Angelica answered. “But you’d probably find most of them boring since I spend a lot of time at my desk and on my computer.”

“But you tell people what to do.” Eva pursed her lips to the side, her dark hair falling over her shoulder as she cocked her head to stare hard at Angelica.

“I do.”

“Mom does too, but not like you.”

“No, your mom is much nicer than I am.” Angelica’s lips pulled upward into a smile as she looked at Hope for confirmation. No one needed to tell her twice how true her statement was.

“Maybe.” Eva got closer, beckoning Angelica to lean down with the crook of her finger. “But she does yell and throw things.”

“Does she now?” Angelica asked, this time looking at Hope with a whole new perspective. “I can throw things too, sometimes. But it takes a whole lot for me to get there.”

“Me too.”

“Somehow I don’t quite believe that.” Angelica found herself laughing again.

Ansel raised his eyebrows at her and shook his head. “Since you’re in the throes of an amusing conversation, I’ll start with Hope this morning.” He pulled gently at Hope’s hair, pushing the comb through it while she ate a light breakfast of fruit.

“See what you did?” Angelica teased Eva. “You made me go second, and I never go second.”

She couldn’t help but look directly at Hope when she said that.

Did she understand what she wasn’t saying?

It was as bold as she’d probably get in the presence of others around them, but for some reason, she wanted to continue the light teasing they’d started all those weeks ago when they first met.

Perhaps then Hope would want to stay on the show, instead of leaving her to herself with all these men.

“Are you good at math?” Eva asked. “Because Mom says she’s not good at it, and Daddy says he doesn’t know the difference between a four and a five.”

Hope choked.

Angelica dropped her gaze from the embarrassed Hope back down to Eva. “Your mom is actually very good at math, don’t let her think otherwise. But yes, I’m good at math.”

Eva wrinkled her nose and then stepped to put her hand on Angelica’s. “Can you help me with my math homework?”

Angelica paused. She really didn’t have the time that day to help a six-year-old with her math. Then again, it couldn’t be hard math, could it?

“I can probably find some time today.”

“Yes!” Eva threw her hands up in the air, made fists, and pumped them again.

“Eva, you don’t need to bother Ms. Shields?—”

“She said yes , Mom.”

Oh that attitude was adorable on her, and Angelica was pretty damn sure that Eva was fully aware of that fact. Hope instead turned to Angelica. “If you don’t want to help her, don’t worry about it. I know how busy your schedule is.”

Angelica raised her eyebrows. She didn’t go back on promises, and she was fully prepared to help Eva that day. Barring any major emergencies that took all of her time. Instead, she turned to Eva after checking her schedule on her iPad.

“Come find me after lunch. I might have thirty minutes then.”

“Really?” Excitement was written all over her face. She did a little dance before crawling back up into her mom’s lap to give her a hug. “She said yes!”

“She did.” Though Hope didn’t sound as convinced by that as Eva did.

Oh well. Angelica made a promise, and she was going to keep it.

Ansel finished Hope’s hair quickly and moved into her makeup, dodging around Eva as she moved on Hope’s lap.

He was actually quite talented at that. How many times had he done it since they started filming?

Hope left as soon as she was able, Eva’s hand firmly in hers, with only one backward glance at Angelica.

Angelica lost herself in work for the morning, running through the opening of the show with Hope by her side as they explained to those who would be watching exactly the mess they were walking into—or at least as much of it as they knew and were willing to share.

To, you know, amp up the drama more.

Angelica was starting to loathe that word.

She finally made it to the room she’d claimed as her office and set her iPad down in favor of the one for the show.

She had just finished lunch and was ready to dive into some of the training issues she’d already discovered and knew she needed to fix first. And she needed to put some policy into place that Conrad could follow when it came to actual consequences and corrections on their work.

“Can you help me with my math now?” Eva’s small voice reached her ears, startling her.

Angelica looked up, finding Eva standing by the door with notebooks in her hands and her nanny behind her.

“I tried to tell her you were busy, but she insisted that you told her she could come up here.”

“I did,” Angelica said on a sigh. She held her hand out to the table. “I can help for a little bit.”

Eva grinned at her as she sat at the table and laid out all of the notebooks and papers that she’d brought with her. Angelica closed down her iPad and sat next to Eva, shifting the notebook over so she could see exactly what Eva was working on.

They sat together for way longer than the thirty minutes that Angelica had, but the break was so nice. It wasn’t until Hope interrupted them with Rex right behind her that Angelica stopped.

“We need to get back on schedule,” Rex said.

“Yeah, right.” Angelica gave Eva a sad smile. “We’ll have to work on it some more later.”

“Really?” Eva’s face lit up.

“Yeah, but not tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.” Eva closed up her notebooks and hopped off the chair. She left the room without a fuss, and her nanny immediately took her hand.

Hope sat next to her in Eva’s vacant seat. “We’re supposed to talk about planning for the upcoming fix.”

“I suppose we are.” Angelica rolled her shoulders and got up to get her iPad again. There was never an end in sight, was there?

While Rex and his crew set up, she started to pull up what she needed to discuss with Hope. This conversation would at least be one of their calmer ones—based on how the past episodes went. And she was looking forward to it.

“She feels safe with you, you know,” Hope said quietly, relaxing back in her seat.

Angelica frowned at her. “Who?”

“Eva…” Hope trailed off, looking directly into Angelica’s eyes. “I’m glad she does.”

Angelica smiled, genuinely, as she crossed her legs and waited for Rex to tell them they were ready to start this scene. She wasn’t exactly sure what to say, so she went with the truth. “I enjoy her.”

“That’s good. Isn’t it?”

“Yes, Hope. It’s good.”

“Sometimes I worry she’s too much like me…” Hope stared down at the table before flicking her gaze up to meet Angelica’s, a blush to her cheeks. Was she embarrassed about something?

“How so?”

“Impulsive.”

Angelica laughed heartily for a few seconds before she rolled her eyes and schooled the smile on her lips. “Well, I don’t think anyone would argue that, about either of you.”