would probably—well, never happen.
She angled her head, and didn’t meet his eyes as she spoke.
‘My parents were on their way home from a weekend away. It was their anniversary, and every year they celebrated by staying at the hotel where they’d had their wedding. They’d been married twenty years.’ She cleared her throat. ‘A drunk driver overtook when he wasn’t supposed to and crashed into them. They died instantly.’
She looked up at him.
‘I was nineteen. Old enough to survive.’
But still young enough to need them, he thought, but didn’t say it in case it interrupted her.
‘My parents meant the world to me. We were incredibly close, and losing them...it felt like I’d lost a piece of myself.’
He reached for her hand again when he saw she was fighting back tears.
‘I was incredibly depressed. I couldn’t go back to university. I shut my friends out. I shut Connor out. I just felt like I was in this dark room and I was flailing around, trying to find a light.’
She paused when Rob, the waiter, returned with a pot of tea, but barely waited until he’d left before she continued.
‘My friends couldn’t deal with the morbid person I had become. One by one, each of them disappeared. Until even my best friend—well, I thought she was—couldn’t do it any more.’
She lifted her eyes to his, and gave him a sad smile.
‘Death is one of those things that you can only truly understand when it affects you. Sure, people are there for you at the funeral, and sometimes a few weeks after. But when you realise that this is your life now—that you have to live without the family who were so integral to your existence—even those people fade away. Because how can they understand that the life you knew no longer exists when theirs is going on as normal? Connor struggled too, but he had his job. Something that gave him purpose. I think that’s probably around the time he started climbing the ladder at the Elegance. But when I didn’t go back to university I think an alarm went off for him and he realised how lost I was. So he pitched up at my house one morning and forced me to go to work with him.’
She smiled at the memory.
‘I hated him for it, but he just told me to start shadowing the concierges. He did that every day for two months. And then one day I realised that I wasn’t walking around in a coma any more. I found myself asking questions and engaging with the guests. And that’s how the tours came about.’
Blake had known that it would be something like that. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Callie he knew Connor pretty well, and the man he knew would have never given his sister a job just because he could. But the truth was he didn’t really care why Connor had done it. He was more interested in Callie, and in the events that had had her starting at the hotel. That now had her desperate to save it. All of a sudden, it made sense to him.
‘I wondered why you wanted to save the hotel so badly.’ He looked at her and wished he could do something about that wounded expression on her face. ‘I knew it was because of Connor. And, of course, your job. But now I understand that the reason behind it is because they saved you. Connor and your job helped you cope with your parents’ deaths.’
‘Yes,’ she said, surprise coating her features, ‘that’s exactly it.’
He drank the last of his whisky and put the glass down with a little bit of a bang. ‘I’m definitely glad I listened to you, then.’
She laughed—a husky sound because of the emotion she had told her story with. ‘I’m glad you listened, too. Or I might be out on the streets and not out on a boat.’
Blake grinned, and slowly began to realise that he believed what he’d said. He was glad he’d listened to Callie. If he hadn’t he would have had to let staff go and face another example of his own poor judgement. He would have had to tell his father what had happened and face his reaction. And all the hard work he had put into building his own legacy—not merely being a part of his father’s—would have been for nothing.
As he asked Rob to bring him coffee he realised that Callie’s ghosts weren’t the only ones that had been stirred that night.
* * *
‘What’s wrong?’ Callie asked, holding her breath at the expression on Blake’s face.
Emotions she couldn’t identify flashed through his eyes, but then he shook his head and smiled at her.
‘Nothing. Just thinking that it’s been a tiring day.’
And it had been, she thought. Except that wasn’t what he was thinking. Maybe he was thinking of a way to fire her. Or to fire Connor. She had just admitted that Connor had given her a job—or rather an internship—to help her through her parents’ deaths. And even though Connor’s intentions might have been good, that didn’t matter in the real world. Professionalism mattered. Ethics.
She shouldn’t have told him any of it, she thought. She had just been trying to get him to see that she had earned her job. Why did the way it had started out matter? But at the same time she had told him about the worst part of her past. She had opened up to him. Her heart accelerated at the thought. She had done exactly what Connor had encouraged her to do so often. Except she’d done it with her boss. The man who had the power to kick her out of his hotel and make sure she never worked in the hospitality industry again.
She bit her lip and searched Blake’s face, hoping she would find the truth of what he was thinking somewhere. What she saw worried her even more.
‘Blake...look, I’m sorry if I overstepped. I probably shouldn’t have told you any of this.’
‘What?’ He looked up at her distractedly and whatever he saw must have alerted him to her paranoia. ‘Callie, no—I am so glad you told me. I understand.’
His face softened and something made her think that perhaps he wanted to say I understand you so much better now.
He laid a hand over hers. ‘Thank you for telling me. I know it wasn’t easy for you.’
‘It wasn’t.’ The heat from his hand slid through her entire body. ‘And if you’re not upset with me, that means you’re thinking about something that isn’t easy for you.’
He frowned up at her.
‘Come on, Blake. We’ve spent almost all our time together for the last two weeks. You don’t think I know when something’s bothering you?’
‘Look, it’s honestly nothing. I was just thinking that getting investors is probably the best solution for the hotel.’
‘And that upsets you?’
‘No.’ Rob placed coffee in front of him, and Blake waited until he was gone before continuing. ‘I was just so set on saving the legacy of the hotel that I would rather have retrenched staff whose livelihood was on the line—as you so nicely reminded me—than think about my father being disappointed in me—’
He stopped abruptly, and Callie realised he hadn’t meant to say that. But because he had, things began to fall into
