Page 7 of Never Been Witched (Starfall Point #3)
“No, he willfully ignored what are some very solid suggestions. I’m not sure if it was fear for his job, sexism, or good old-fashioned incompetence,” Collin said.
“Maybe a combination of all three,” she replied.
“Are you really filling out an occupancy chart by hand? We have more than three hundred and fifty rooms,” Collin marveled.
“Yeah, but we’re only at thirty percent capacity,” she replied with a shrug. “Mostly because Aura refused to book rooms through travel apps—with Robert’s full support—because more guests meant more work.”
Collin sighed, pinching his lips together. Aura also hadn’t liked the “vibe” of modern advances like travel apps, computerization, and the hotel having a website.
“I have a plan for that,” he told her. “I’ve purchased new computer equipment, new software.
By the end of the month, you’ll be able to track which rooms are booked, which ones have been cleaned, how many tiny shampoo bottles we have, the works.
Thirty percent, huh? I knew the numbers were down, but I had no idea things were this bad. ”
She nodded sympathetically. “They are this bad, and they have been for a while.”
“So, can you see why I need a competent manager who’s not going to call me a dipshit in front of all my employees?” Collin asked.
“Technically, he called you the ‘crown prince of spoiled dipshits,’” Julie said.
“Yes, I know,” Collin shot back, even as he smirked.
Julie’s lips twitched. “I can see why you need me. But I have to ask you: Are you here to change everything, fire longtime employees, and streamline just to make the hotel attractive to a big buyer? Because I’m not willing to help you flip a hotel.”
“Good,” he sighed, relaxing back into his seat. “Because I’m here to stay. And I think we’re going to work well together, Julie. Honesty, I can deal with. Mutiny in the lobby? Not so much.”
“I can respect that,” she said, nodding. “And I can promise not to foment a mutiny in the lobby.”
“Thank you. I would expect that of my new front desk manager,” he replied. “Which leads to my official offer to hire you for the position. I was hoping to promote you eventually, but Robert’s tantrum moves up my timeline. I have a whole prospectus prepared on why you should take the job.”
She grinned. “You have a whole PowerPoint presentation, don’t you?”
“The slides are set to inspirational orchestral music,” he told her, nodding solemnly. Julie buried her face in her hands and laughed.
For the next hour, Collin and Julie went over his extensive plans for the property.
The problem was that as a hotel, the Duchess was confused.
The myriad of owners over the years had tried to change with the times, adding features like a yoga room, miniature golf, a golf simulator, a miniature golf simulator , float tanks, an indoor infinity pool—Collin still wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work.
And it hadn’t helped. Bookings slowly dried up, summer after summer, to the point where the hotel just about broke even.
Adding to that was the orange of it all.
Now that Collin had officially taken the helm, he knew the Duchess needed to take advantage of what few other hotels had: the history.
He wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over, shoring up the older sections of the hotel for structural safety and redecorating pretty much every square inch of the hotel except for his office.
In a normal hotel that was open year-round, that would have to happen in phases and could take years.
But, because the Duchess shut down entirely for four months when the lake froze over in winter, Collin hoped that they would be able to complete most of the changes before next summer’s vacation season.
It would mean closing to guests a little earlier in the year than usual, and the construction crews would have to stay on the island and ship all the materials before the lake froze, but with an oversize crew and a bit of luck and focus, they could at least get the main wings redone in time.
And the good thing about the insular nature of the island was that there wouldn’t be much to distract the workmen.
He just had to keep them from going full The Shining on each other.
By the time Collin was done outlining his plans, he and Julie were devouring cheeseburger platters from the hotel restaurant, looking over the blueprints sprawled across his desk.
Just from hearing Julie’s responses to his plans, he knew he’d made the right choice in promoting her.
She had a realistic understanding of what was happening at the hotel, and unlike nearly every other employee he’d talked to—who had sugarcoated, downplayed, and lied to him, even—she was candid with him.
“You’re really going to stay here? Year-round?” Julie asked, chewing on an onion ring. “Permanently?”
He drank from his bottle of mineral water. “Why is that so hard to believe?”
She wrinkled her nose. “You’ve never seen a winter here. Every Michigan winter has its own character, its own challenges. I know New Yorkers are tough and all, but—”
“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy,” he protested. “But the house is comfortable and I’m sort of interested in seeing if it’s really as bad as people say it is.”
“I’ll remind you that you said that when you have half a ton of blue ice rolling up from the lake, blocking your front door,” she muttered.
“Blue ice?” Collin asked.
“I’ll explain later,” she promised. Sipping her Coke, she pointed at the Superior Antiques shopping bag on his desk. “You took the time to go antiquing before overthrowing Bob the Terrible?”
He took the letter opener out of the maroon bag and showed it to her. “It reminded me of something my father used to keep around his office. What do you think?”
“Have we officially reached the stage of our professional relationship where I can tell you what I really think?” she asked.
Collin chuckled. “I think I’ve made it clear that I prefer it.”
She grimaced. “It’s pretty hideous.”
“Well, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, with this sort of thing,” he said, chuckling and turning it over in his hands.
“If it makes you happy, I’m happy for you,” she said. “I’m just surprised that you went into that particular antique shop.”
Collin blinked at her. “Why?”
Julie made a helpless gesture with her hands. “The Bancrofts and the Proctors have always had…well, what most people would probably call ‘beef.’ But not you, because I’m guessing that you attended a private school where you had to wear a tie to class. You would probably call it ‘filet mignon.’”
“You would be correct in assuming that I attended several of those schools. Any idea why the two families had ‘beef’?” Collin asked.
She grinned. “It pained you to say that, didn’t it?”
“A little bit,” he acknowledged. “How did my family even have time to create a feud? They barely spent enough time on the island to socialize.”
Julie pondered that. “I don’t know… I just remember my parents saying things casually in conversation.
‘The Bancrofts had never had any use for the Proctors’ or ‘The Proctors would never set foot in the Duchess.’ As if I was just supposed to understand that was reality, like the lake freezing over or a drunk tourist ending up naked on Main Square at some point every July. ”
“And you don’t know why?” Collin asked.
She shrugged. “Well, when people go on vacation, they tend to get drunk, and they think tourist destinations don’t have, like, laws —”
“No. Not the naked-tourist thing,” he exclaimed, making her laugh.
He was glad that she seemed to have relaxed over the course of their impromptu lunch.
He was going to need Julie’s support over the next few months, and that could create resentment unless they could build a comfortable working relationship.
“The family-feud thing. Did one of your family members mention to you why the ‘Bancrofts never had any use for the Proctors’?”
“Nope.” She chewed her lip. “Now that you mention it, they did not. Did anybody in your family ever say anything to you?”
“My family tended to gloss over unpleasantness,” he said, helping himself to one last fry.
The chef made them just the way he remembered from when he was a kid: crispy, with just a little bit of sugar mixed in with the salt.
As a precocious nine-year-old with considerable allowance, he’d had to sneak over to the restaurant for his fry fix.
He’d spent quite a bit of his summertime sneaking around the hotel, learning about it, getting to know the staff.
He’d swum in the pool, played on the putting green, made a game of memorizing the restaurant menu.
He’d even requested increasingly complicated and somewhat gross sandwich combinations to see if the chef, André, would comply.
And the chef very pointedly put the sandwich on the menu and named it after Collin.
Collin didn’t realize it at the time, but the employees largely put up with it because he was a Bancroft, and therefore bonded to the hotel, no matter how tenuously.
Unfortunately, after the sandwich thing, his parents caught wind of his adventures and were mortified that he’d caused trouble for people who were just trying to earn a living.
He’d been “grounded” from the hotel, which just made him better at sneaking over there.
Collin hummed. “In a weird way, my father would have considered it bad form to speak poorly of a family that had less than we did. He had an old-fashioned sense of honor about that kind of thing.”
Julie smiled. “I think I remember him a little, from when I was a kid, coming into Starfall Scoops and dropping twenties in the tip jar when he thought no one was looking. He always seemed like a good guy.”