Searching for a Heart Read online

  Darren hustled out of the back office. “Try booting the workstations now. Make sure they’re powered down first to do a hard restart.”

  “On it,” Ka’nali said. She was the daytime desk manager, had worked there just over a year, and until all this shit happened, Maddison had been considering promoting her to be her assistant general manager, because she currently didn’t have one. In a cost-cutting measure and to slim down the dead weight on the staff, Maddison hadn’t hired a new one when the one working there upon her hiring quit in protest of Maddison’s hiring, all because she hadn’t been promoted into the position.

  Which had been a good-riddance situation, because the woman had been worthless at her job and one of the larger problems the resort had to start with. Ivy, the administrative assistant who helped coordinate between departments, had sort of become Maddison’s assistant manager in a way, but she didn’t want an official promotion.

  Lord knew Maddison had tried to talk her into one.

  But Ka’nali was smart, motivated, reliable, and a self-starter. She was also a single mother whose son had just started fifth grade, and she couldn’t work weekends.

  Maddison had been thinking about offering her a free suite as one of the perks to get her on board with the new job.

  Guess that’s all shot to hell now.

  It’d be cruel for her to even mention it just to have the new management team yank it from her.

  Hopefully Ka’nali and Shona and all the others would still have jobs in a few weeks.

  One of the first things Maddison had done when she’d come on board was weed out the low-performing staff dragging everyone else down. Now, even when short-handed, their department teams could fill in for each other, multi-task. They worked well together, took pride in their jobs and in the resort. She’d done a lot to lift the staff’s morale while in charge.

  Including getting them raises that helped them feel more invested in the resort’s future.

  I hope the new team doesn’t fuck it all up.

  Then again, in a few weeks, it wouldn’t be her problem any longer.

  Ka’nali let out a happy squeal as the first workstation came up. “I’m in!”

  “Excellent. Shona, take that station. Ka’nali, get the rest of them going, please.”

  Darren pumped his fist. “Yes! I had to block a DDoS attack trying to brute force its way in. Isolated the IP addresses hammering our server and blocked the range. Then I upgraded the—”

  “That’s awesome, but you can give me the deets later. Can you please get the restaurants up next, then Housekeeping?”

  “Oh, sure! On it.” He hustled off toward the more casual restaurant, which also handled the pool-side bar and breakfast buffet and was currently busier.

  Shona took over at the workstation that was running, while Ka’nali worked on rebooting another one. Maddison kept working on her laptop, trying to slog through the backlog of customers queued at their check-in desk.

  They were almost caught up when a handsome guy with broad shoulders, a haircut as expensive as the watch on his wrist, and wearing a heavy gold necklace, matching gold bracelet, and a pinky ring, which all screamed flaming douchebag, stepped up to the desk.

  He offered her a smile as his green eyes swept over her. “Hello, there. I’m looking for Maddison Nance?”

  Her stomach hit the floor. Flaming douchebag was the guy, she felt certain of it.

  And he’d been standing in line for about fifteen minutes.

  Fanfuckingtastic.

  But she forced a smile. “I’m Maddison. Can I help you?”

  “Mr. Gonzales said he mentioned I was stopping by today.”

  “Oh, sure. Hold on for just a minute.” Maddison made sure to save where she was, double-checked that everyone was still online and accessing the system, and then closed her laptop and disconnected it from the key card encoder. “Follow me.” She led him behind the counter and through the back office, down the hallway leading to her office. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Jordan Holmes, from EVC Management Corps, LLC.”

  Of course he was. She shook with him, then closed her office door behind him and pointed to the chair in front of the desk while she rounded it to sit in her chair.

  It was still her office, dammit. He could wait to sit behind her desk until after she left.

  “That was quite a line out there,” he noted.

  “Our IT guy said our server went down because of a DDoS attack, but he got us back up and running.”

  “How were you processing guests?”

  She patted her laptop. “Fast thinking, and a damn good cell phone plan.”

  “You don’t have a contingency plan for processing guests?”

  “You just saw it. Run the front desk from a laptop and cellphone.”

  His gaze narrowed. “But why were you doing it?”

  It was tempting to tell the guy to go fuck himself, but she refrained. “They called me when the system went down, and I was already logged into our system. I used my own cell phone. But my laptop was logged in as admin, and we were too busy for me to stop and risk not being able to get back into the system. In other words, if it’s working, keep it working until everyone’s checked in. The encoder software is on my laptop, too, so we were able to run keys.”

  “Ah.” He sat back. “Sorry. Wasn’t trying to put you on the spot.”

  “Sure you were.” She sighed. “Look, I’m going to be honest that I’m not happy I worked my ass off to save this place, and you’re getting to step in and take over a well-run operation.”

  “I can appreciate that. Thank you for mentioning that, by the way. I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject.”

  She studied him. “Really?”

  “Really. I saw the financials. You did a damned good job. Frankly, I’m hoping you’ll stay on past the initial period. They want me to run this place, and one in Ft. Lauderdale they’re also buying to rehab. I’ll need all the help I can get.”

  She wasn’t sure if she should feel rage or relief, and opted for cool professionalism. “I’d be open to discussing it,” she offered, not wanting to piss the guy off.

  Yet.

  He smiled, and maybe he wasn’t as douchey as she’d first thought. He was kind of cute. “Excellent.”

  “Well, where did you want to start?” she asked.

  “I want to know how you did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Saved this place.” He smiled again, obviously eyeing her, his gaze lingering on her cleavage for far too long. “You’re a lot younger than I was expecting. Gonzales didn’t say much about you, except what he was paying you and what you’d accomplished.”

  He still rode that razor’s edge between complimentary and condescending.

  She chose the high road. “I gave a damn.” She shrugged. “I gave a damn about the people working here, the place itself, the guests. I spent my first two days personally talking to everyone on staff to see what they thought. What was working, what wasn’t. Who was working and who wasn’t. I looked through customer comments on review sites. I looked for the strengths and how to quickly emphasize them. For example, our head chef. Did you know he was trained at Le Cordon Bleu?”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. And the previous manager had basically given him a generic, discount food service menu to follow. Lots of crap you can find elsewhere for cheaper and better. I told him to look at the clientele and their average budget, and give me six signature dishes that wouldn’t break our bottom end but could wow a crowd and be created en masse, and then another ten simpler ones, to build our new menu around. Not counting breakfast buffet, and the lunch fare like salads, soups, and sandwiches. He put his heart into it and, three weeks later, he won an award from the Miami Herald for it. That brought us some immediate customers. It was an unexpected bonus. I used our ‘award-winning cuisine’ as a selling point when I started courting tourism boards…”

  They spent the next hour
talking about the “hows.” But she still wasn’t sure about Jordan Holmes.

  Turned out he was originally from Massachusetts, but had spent the past fifteen years out in California, running resorts there.

  “So you gave immediate function discounts to local groups to have their events here and undercut the competition.” He grinned. “That’s very cut-throat. I love it.”

  She shrugged. “What better way to start earning customers than have social movers and shakers in the Miami-Dade area see that we can serve a lot better than rubber chicken. I was able to talk three different Rotary groups into having their weekly meetings here, too. We host a monthly business card exchange for the Chamber of Commerce. Build goodwill and that will overcome a multitude of sins, Mr. Holmes.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Meanwhile, we started renovating rooms. The beds were fine, so I only replaced the top-end suite beds, at first, and gave the rooms fresh paint and flooring.”

  “Because the top-dollar spenders talk.”

  “Exactly. Then started freshening the low-end rooms next.”

  “Because they rent first and most frequently.”

  “Yep.”

  He studied her for a moment and she didn’t try to fill the silence with nervous chatter. She was beyond that, had learned the benefits of watching and waiting.

  “Which brings me back to what I saw when I was standing in line earlier,” he finally said.

  “Upgrading the tech was on my list to do later this summer, right after Labor Day. So we’d have that lull between end of summer and before snowbirds start arriving.”

  “What about storms and hurricanes?”

  “We have an emergency generator system. Normally, the computers would have worked off the local server, and then batched everything up to the cloud once the Internet came back on. Darren is good at what he does. You’d do well to keep him on board and follow his plan for upgrades at the end of summer. It’s already budgeted in. But for the price of completely redoing the entire system—including the food service and housekeeping departments, which have to be integrated—I could refresh two hundred rooms. I decided the priority was getting customers in the door and keeping them happy, and that the system could wait.”

  “Can’t say I disagree with you, looking at it like that.”

  “Are you familiar at all with Miami, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Please, call me Jordan. And can’t say that I am. I’ve been here a couple of times.”

  She ignored the familiarity. “Are you staying here? And how long will you be here?”

  “Yes, check-out late Monday. I wanted to see how a weekend flows.”

  “Smart.”

  “Not my first rodeo, although the more I talk with you, the more likely I am to go back to my bosses and tell them you should stay exactly where you are, at your current salary and title.”

  Maddison swallowed back the hope trying to climb its way up her throat. That was the fastest way to get herself heartbroken. “And my bonus?”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  “I wouldn’t be averse to discussing that. When are we telling the staff?”

  “Not yet. You can tell everyone I’m a consultant from a VC group wanting to examine your ops to see how you do things so we can take a look at instituting some changes at our own properties. That’s not a lie.”

  “It’s not the truth.”

  “I don’t want the brown-nosing version of everyone. I want the real-life version.” He plucked at the perfect crease along his left thigh, giving it a little tug and straightening it, and something about the gesture sent butterflies through her. “Even from you.”

  “Me?”

  “How old are you?”

  He had to have that info already, but she said it. “Almost twenty-seven.”

  Jordan leaned forward, those green eyes sharply focused on her. “I’m forty-eight. I’ve seen resorts that were larger than this one and not floundering nearly as badly still nosedive off a cliff when given twice the time and three times the budget to turn them around. This was your first such job like this one, right out of college, and you not only turned it around on a shoestring, you more than doubled the value of the holding. I want to know how…you…did…it.”

  He deliberately softened his voice and spaced out the last four words, and she knew. This guy was a Dom, or at least naturally dominant.

  I’m soooo fucked. She would absolutely have to be on her guard against this guy. He damn sure didn’t look like he was almost fifty.

  “During college, I worked for a high-end resort in Sarasota. I did everything from cleaning rooms, to staffing the front desk, to bussing tables. I’ve handled event planning, from intimate wedding parties of less than two dozen people, to award banquets of a thousand plates or more. The owner was a friend of my best friend’s father, and he took me under his wing when he found out I was going for a business degree. His resort regularly hosts high-end events and clientele, including some Hollywood A-listers I couldn’t name if you begged me, because of the NDA I signed.”

  She clasped her hands in front of her on her desk and leaned in. “So the secret, Mr. Holmes, is that I learned every part of ops from the ground up, view every single employee as indispensable to giving our guests the optimum experience possible, teach all of them as part of our employment culture how valuable they are, and I never take a single thing for granted. I don’t hire the cheapest help possible, because you short-change the guests. A resort won’t stand on its own if you build it on a base of toothpicks.”

  His gaze narrowed a little, even as his smile widened again. “Still won’t call me Jordan, hmm?”

  “Let me get to know you better, and then we’ll see.”

  He slowly nodded. “What are you doing for dinner tonight, Maddison?”

  “Why? Are you asking me out on a date?”

  He smiled, and it looked less douchey now. “That would be risking a sexual harassment lawsuit. How about we call it a working dinner off-property? My treat.”

  “Deductible expense.”

  His smile both widened and turned sexy. “Of course it is.” He had gorgeous green eyes, and not a hint of grey in his brown hair, but she didn’t know if that was natural or a secret shared only with his hair stylist. “Your choice. I’ll trust your judgment on where we eat.”

  “You will, hmm?”

  “Absolutely. I’d love to see Miami from your point of view.”

  She studied him. “All right. I’m in room 321. Pick me up at seven.”

  “How should I dress?”

  “However you want, Mr. Holmes.”

  Chapter Four

  Friday morning, Milo stood inside the courthouse foyer with his attorney, Ed Payne. He was seriously considering hitting a liquor store after leaving the courthouse, since he’d burned a personal leave day to handle this bullshit.

  He wasn’t exactly in a mood to socialize with anyone tonight, either.

  Linda was nowhere to be seen, of course. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, considering his current burn-down-the-world mood.

  “Don’t worry,” Ed said. “Doesn’t matter if she shows or not. This is the final hearing. You’ll leave here divorced.”

  “I fucking hope so,” Milo muttered. “I’m sick of this shit. I want her out of my life. Only reason she stalled things was because she’s too cheap-ass to buy her own health insurance. Which she shouldn’t be since she just fucking soaked me for twenty thousand dollars that wasn’t hers to start with.”

  Ed patted him on the shoulder. “That’s why I offer a free prenup with every divorce I handle. Because while I like earning a living, I don’t like seeing people get fucked over. Especially clients. With a prenup, you don’t have to worry as much.”

  “I’ll take you up on that if I ever decide to stab myself in the heart and balls and get married again.”

  “You’d be surprised how many clients I’ve heard say that, too, and yet still get married again. When the rig
ht one comes along, you’ll know.”

  “I’ll settle for a pleasant dinner companion at this point. Fuck marriage.”

  Linda’s attorney finally showed up ten minutes before their hearing was supposed to start.

  “Sorry I’m running late, I got caught up in traffic.”

  “Is your client appearing?” Ed asked him.

  “No, she’s out of town.”

  “That figures,” Milo muttered. “Probably on vacation with my money.”

  Ed shot him a sharp glare but didn’t scold him aloud.

  Once they were called into Judge Donnelly’s chambers, the judge quickly scanned through the latest round of paperwork and looked at Ed. “We satisfied, counsellor?”

  “Not hardly, but we have no legal objections at this point. My client wishes to bring this to an end.”

  The judge looked at Linda’s attorney. “Where is your client?”

  “Um, out of town, your Honor.”

  Milo didn’t need the glance Ed sent his way to remain silent.

  Under the table, however, where Milo’s hands rested in his lap, he shot double birds at the other attorney.

  The judge gave the attorney a less-than-impressed glance and returned his focus to Ed. “Anything else we need to handle before I issue final judgment?”

  “No, your Honor, that’s it.”

  “Counsel for defendant?”

  “We’re good, your Honor. You have the paperwork for her name change there.”

  “Okay. Then I hereby declare you divorced.” He signed the copies of the orders and returned the paperwork to Ed and the other attorney. “There you go, Mr. Richter, and good luck in your future endeavors.”

  “Thank you, your Honor.”

  Twenty minutes later, Milo sat in his car and stared at the certified copy Ed had filed for him with the clerk’s office immediately after the hearing. There would be more paperwork arriving by mail next week, but this was the important thing.

  After all this bullshit, after all her stalling and gaslighting, after all her cheating, he was no longer tethered to her. Any minor details, Ed would handle for him as part of his fee, so Milo no longer needed to have contact with her.