Page 115 of No Holds Barred

Hope’s phone buzzed in her hand, but she was too nervous to look down at it.

“Let’s get ready.”

Ready?

Hope furrowed her brow and waited for someone to tell her what the hell was going on. But everyone filtered out of the room, including Angelica. Rex sighed and bent down. “We’re filming.”

“What?” Hope asked in surprise.

“We’re starting today.” Rex shook his head. “The owners are eager to get started, and so is Angelica. Josef wants to as well. I was outnumbered, and you weren’t here to back me up.”

“I would have.”

“I know.” Rex frowned. “But I need you to get dressed and see Ansel really quick—and I mean quick—because we’re filming in thirty.”

“Jesus.” Hope ran her fingers through her hair. “Okay.”

Hope tugged at the shaggy ends of her hair. It didn’t take long for Ansel to fix her up, so she was looking presentable, and when she entered the hotel offices, she wasn’t surprised to find everyone already setting up to film.

She slid into the chair next to Angelica and sighed heavily. “I feel less prepared for this week than I did for our very first week of filming.”

“You were quite unprepared that week,” Angelica commented, but she didn’t look up from the new iPad that Lyric had ordered for her.

Guilt stabbed at Hope, but she pushed it to the side. Angelica wasn’t lying. She’d been so unprepared for it. And she didn’t even have a good excuse. She’d been thrown off by Angelica, not only her professionalism but the fact that she was attracted to her. Which had been foreign up until that point. And while Hopewanted to lean closer and tell Angelica exactly that, now wasn’t the time.

A man and a woman entered the office and sat down where Rex guided them. Hope shifted her gaze to Angelica and then back to Rex. She was off her game tonight, that was for sure. Once they were all seated, Hope tense and confused, Rex called action and Hope again felt as though she missed at least twenty minutes of time.

“It’s good to meet you, Mark and Alexis.” Angelica held her hand out to shake each one of theirs.

Hope immediately jumped in to mime Angelica. She had to get her head back on her shoulders, because this was too much for her. She bit the inside of her cheek in an attempt to shock herself back into reality.

“Why don’t you start with telling us a little bit about Claridges?” Angelica waited patiently, looking at each of them directly.

Hope knew very little about who Mark and Alexis were, other than that they were married. Or no, were they divorced? Curse it. She should have read up on them in between episodes, but she hadn’t had a moment to breathe. Eva had been such a drain on her energy in that break, and she’d known she could ride Angelica’s coattails on this one.

“We bought the hotel twelve years ago,” Mark started, his tenor tones filling the quiet room.

Hope clung on to every word he said.

“Back then the business was thriving, and we wanted to make a legacy for our family and have some residual income when we retired.” Mark spread his hands out in front of him. “Obviously, that hasn’t happened.”

Alexis sighed and rolled her eyes. “When we got divorced, all of those dreams shattered. Business plummeted, and we haven’t been able to get our feet under us again.”

Hope clenched her jaw. Divorced. She should have remembered that. She shifted a glance toward Rex, but she couldn’t find him in the sea of people. It seemed they weren’t the only couple out there that still had to work together after a divorce. That was good to know because for a while there it had felt like they were the only ones with this particular problem.

“We haven’t recovered,” Mark added.

But was he talking about the hotel or the relationship? There didn’t seem to be too much tension in the room with them now, but then again, first impressions could certainly be deceiving. Welcome to half of the people Hope had met lately. She canted her head to the side and joined in the conversation. “Where do you think the issues are?”

“Where aren’t they?” Alexis sighed heavily, her voice dropping with guilt. “The restaurant is a mess. We don’t have a chef anymore and haven’t had one in about six months. Management is lazy, which in turn makes all the other employees lazy because they know they can get away with it. No one is held accountable for anything. We keep putting in more and more money and we’re just not making it back.”

“We’re going to lose everything,” Mark added.

“How much debt do you have against the hotel?” Angelica asked.

“Just over a million, not including the mortgage,” Mark answered.

Hope’s stomach plummeted. That was an insane amount of debt. How the hell were they even affording anything? As much as she wanted to ask that question, she didn’t. They needed something to discover later on in the episode, and it’d add to the drama that Josef was always wanting if they were so far into debt that they literally couldn’t see their way out.