Shopping for a Billionaire 4 (12 page)

Which throws being inconspicuous out the window.

Even Greg wouldn’t relent, making up some sob story about how he needs his car to take his mother to her hip rehab appointment.
Pffft
. Excuses.

The Fort is a massive building of wonder and beauty, blinding in the bright sunshine and shining like a beacon on the edge of Boston’s Back Bay. Located right on the edge of all the fun in the city’s core, you can walk to fine steakhouses, Faneuil Hall, see the boats come in, go to the aquarium, and have everything at your fingertips. 

But first you have to talk to a valet named Guido who looks just like your ex-boyfriend.

Guido—according to the name tag—makes me do a triple take, because if Guido were a few years younger and had green eyes instead of brown, he’d be Declan.

“Holy—
what
?” I exclaim as I climb out of the car, keys in hand. The semicircular covered driveway in front of the glittering bronze-covered entrance seems like it’s made of polished marble. As my high heels clack on the ground, I realize it
is
marble. Actual marble. 

And because it’s just rained, and various car tires have brought water onto the ground, I go flying in the air, keys arcing through the air like they’ve been ejected from a stomp rocket, arms and legs flailing to grab on to anything so I don’t crack my assbone in half.

Two strong hands wrap around my waist and save me from permanent butt damage. The red jacket Guido is wearing unbuttons and reveals a slim waist, broad shoulders stretching the fabric. His hair is a thick, wavy brown like Declan’s, eyebrows thicker, a strand of grey here and there peppering his hair. His eyes are kind and worried, though there’s a suppressed mirth there, his mouth twitching.

He sets me on my heels, my knee turning inward. I’m dressed in business clothing, the client insisting I assume the role of a C-level female executive traveling for business, in town for the night. And valet parking is the start.

“You hurt?” Guido asks in a bass voice that makes me jolt. If he had poured warm caramel sauce on my nipples I couldn’t have had a naughtier response. That voice must get a lot of women out of their pants for him. I, myself, will be using the bathroom clothesline to dry my panties shortly if he speaks again.

“I’m, um, fine,” I say, breathless. He steps across from me to retrieve my keys from the ground, giving me a chance to really look at his butt, er...at him. His face. His face! His cheekbones are broader than Declan’s, and he’s confident in that loose way men who work with their hands for a living have about them. 

“Your car?” he asks with arched eyebrows.

“Business car.” I smile with more perk than I really feel. I’ve already developed an excuse for the piece-of-crap car. “Testing a new advertising model for a client.”

He nods, like he’s in on some joke I don’t know about. “I see, Ms.…”

“Jacoby.”

“Jacoby.” He smiles and gives me a small bow. “Does the market test include aromatherapy as well?”

“What?”

“Never mind, Ms. Jacoby.” He jingles my keys and looks at my car with amusement. More amusement than I’ve ever felt. “I’ll park your company car and keep it safe from harm.” 

“Really? Actually, I’d prefer you just park it on the street. Maybe someone will steal it and then I’d—” The words are pouring out of my mouth before I can stop them. Something about Guido is so casually comfortable, so companionable, and the facade of being an executive fades away without my even thinking about it.

He smirks and instantly looks nothing like Declan. What was I thinking? I clearly can’t get him out of my head, so I’m inventing men who look like him. But when Guido’s face goes back to semi-serious, it’s like a shadow of my ex is there.

I’m going crazy, aren’t I?

Driving the crazy piece of sh—

“I’d lose my job if I did that,” he says in a low conspirator’s voice.

I swallow, my mouth dry. All the moisture in my body migrates south. “Just kidding.” 

He eyes me in a way that makes me feel like I felt the first time I ever met Declan.

Inventoried.

“I suspect you aren’t. Kidding, that is.” And then he just stands there, watching me. It doesn’t feel sensual, though. More of a neutral acknowledgement of my existence, for which I’m grateful, because if he starts sending out sexual signals of any kind I’m going to fall over in a puddle of my own goo.

The awkward pause makes me realize he’s waiting for a tip. Of course! We have a mystery shopping procedure for this, so I pull out the $5 bill and hand it to him. He frowns, then glances at the other valets. What kind of parking dude doesn’t take the bill and slip it in his pocket with a quick thanks?

My skin starts to tingle. Something doesn’t make sense here.

As if I’m handing him a piece of raw steak at a vegan restaurant, he takes the five and puts it in his breast pocket, wincing. Wincing! What kind of guy—

Oh. Hmmm. Maybe $5 is an insult in a place like this? No one explains tipping guidelines, so staying in an $800-per-night suite might mean that a $5 valet tip—which would be healthy anywhere else—is like pissing on his shoes.

I reach into my purse and pull out a second $5 bill, handing it to him with a smile. “Thank you so much, Guido. Take good care of her.”

The other valets laugh and Guido takes my bill with confusion clouding those rich chocolate eyes. “You’re giving me more?”

Didn’t expect that. “Yes. Is that okay?”

Finally, one of the other valets comes over and taps him on the shoulder. “Dude. Take the money, thank her, and let’s go park the piece of—”

I snicker. “We call it the Turdmobile.”

Guido laughs, eyes on me the entire time. “You’re funny.”

If he’s flirting, he’s horrible at it. But so am I, so maybe the weirdness is me? I can’t juggle being “on” for work, doing a mystery shop, and figuring out whether the valet is horrified or attracted to me. Too much input. So I do the simplest thing and just walk away. One step, two step, and down I go—

Splat.
Riiiiiiip
.

I’m showing more ass than J.Lo in a g-string. Guido wasn’t there to catch me this time, and I have one leg stretched out with my skirt split so high you can see where Niagara Falls visited my panties.

“Shannon!” Guido calls out, racing to my side.

Now, hold on there. I never told him my first name. But that takes a back seat to the fact that I am staring at the chandelier-topped canopy and a Range Rover the size of my parents’ house is about to squish me like a bug.  

Guido and his valet friends rush over to me, and four sets of man hands lift me up, making me feel like I’m in one of those romance novels where the woman has more men touching her than she has holes for them to occupy.

“I’m fine,” I protest, struggling to control my own body and realizing it’s useless. Like synchronized swimmers they set me upright, someone grabbing my carryon and computer bag, another picking up all the items that rolled out when I fell. 

Including Mom’s vibrator.

“Um,” Guido says as he hands it to me. It’s the one Mom picked out, with a tip shaped like a J, from the Alphasex Series. The one Josh wants to order in purple. But it’s pink, so... 

“How did that get in there?” I squeak out, and I’m serious. I have no earthly idea how it got in my laptop bag. Maybe Chuckles is playing an elaborate joke.

A vague memory of Mom in my closet that day after the sex toy shop in Northampton. J?

Oh. My stomach roils.

J for Jason. Mom got me one with a D on it, too. I crane my neck, twisting around, eyes on the ground. Where’s that one? If one vibrator magically appears in my bag, I’m sure there are more. 

“I’ve seen some crazy tips before, but…” Guido jokes. I shove the damn vibrator in my bag and decide that the best way to handle this with grace and dignity is to walk away without another word.

“I hope your stay is a pleasant one, Ms. Jacoby! You can believe all the
buzz
about The Fort,” he says as I walk away. I swear he winks. And in the recesses of my professional mind I think: 

Reminded me to have a pleasant stay? Check.

Sigh.

Chapter Fourteen

Another valet, Mike, removes my luggage from the trunk of my car and escorts me into the lobby. “Lobby” is an understatement.

The first wonder of the modern world is more like it. Grey Industries couldn’t come up with something this fine if they tried. I can tell James McCormick has stamped his touch on this place in the most subtle of ways, from the enormous Persian rug that covers a quarter of the lobby to the old world map imprinted in the arched ceiling, a deep cupola made of highly polished oak and bronze highlights screaming with his style. It looks just like his office at Anterdec Insustries. 

All of the lights are dimmed, with sunshine from the skylight adding just enough to make the lobby ethereal. I feel like I’m in a steampunk mystery, the blend of old-world flavor and modern technology so exquisite I could be in a slightly different dimension, couldn’t I? Just tilted enough to be between two possibilities.

Check-in goes smoothly—Mike disappears with my luggage—and I’m assigned to room 1416, which means climbing into one of the elevators of doom. You know the kind. Major hotels have them. You punch in your floor number and the smart elevator system tells you which one to go on. Inside, there is no panel of numbers for floors, because the system is designed to assume that you are a pathetic, stupid human with inferior reasoning skills, and that the engineers (almost all male) who designed the system are smarter than you. 

Which means that if you get on the elevator and a harassing asshole is on with you, you’re stuck in elevator purgatory until the Machine of Superior Intellect decides to spring you out of your misogynistic prison.

I ascend to the fourteenth floor without incident, noting the condition of all the common areas (pristine), then enter my room. The bed is covered with fine chocolates from a Swiss company that uses slave-free chocolate, and the towels are twisted to form a gorgeous rendering of the
Mona Lisa
in 3D.

I plop my carryon on the bed, and the valet has already delivered my rolling bag. One of the first steps I take in any hotel room I enter is to check out the balcony, if there is one. The thick black-out curtains take some serious muscle to pull apart, but the work is worth it. A stunning view of the city rolls out before me. Opening the sliding glass doors, I let the wind whip through my hair and carry my worries away. 

A gentle knock at the door compels me to open it. Mike is standing there, smiling. He looks nothing like Guido, and resembles Merry the Hobbit mostly.

“Everything to your liking, Ms. Jacoby?”

I know the drill. I slip him a five and assure him all is well. He tips his hat to me and walks calmly down the hall.

My nineteen-page (
nineteen-
page!) list of instructions for the twenty-seven-page evaluation tells me exactly what to do for the night I’m here. If you mystery shop a lower-market chain of hotels you typically get your room free, about $25 in pay, and reimbursement for one dinner and a tip for housekeeping.

This place involves:

Valet parking

Tipping the bellhop

Drinks in the bar (two, minimum)

A full dinner from room service, from appetizer to entree to dessert

Breakfast buffet in the morning

Housekeeping tip

A massage in the spa

Tipping the bellhop on check out

Valet parking tip upon checkout

This
is how the other half lives? If so, how do I join them?

But that’s not all.

Like relationships, you learn way more about customer service by testing them via problems. Any hotel or restaurant can run smoothly when it’s quiet, when they’re fully staffed, and when nothing’s gone wrong.

The true test of a business is how its employees react to crisis.

Even manufactured crisis.

And my job is to manufacture a series of them, starting with the bathroom. I read the instructions, which were written by Amanda: 

Facilities and Engineering: Create a problem with a fixture in the bathroom, a problem great enough to require a service call from one of our facilities workers. For instance, separate the chain from the ball in the toilet tank, or remove the nut that secures to one of the bolts on the underside of the toilet seat. Tuck the loose nut under the wastebasket.

The goal is to test the friendliness of the front-desk clerk, the response time of the facilities worker, and whether their service is friendly and efficient.

Okay. Standard operating procedure for a hotel mystery shop. I’ve done this tons of times before. My old standby is a little more creative than these suggestions, for I typically just make it so the toilet handle doesn’t connect to the flushing mechanism.

Easy peasy.

I make the call first, eager to get this out of the way so I can move on to drinking at the bar…er, to the next task for my job. The hotel has an ice bar—an entire nightclub carved out of ice. The hotel desk clerk (Celeste) takes my call in stride, apologizes for the inconvenience, and at 3:56 p.m. promises that someone from their maintenance department will respond within ten minutes.

Great. I have ten minutes to break something. I’m Shannon; how hard can
that
be?

Something buzzes in the next room. My phone. I search the room and my eyes locate it, but it’s not lit up. No text.

Bzzzzz
.

Weird. What could be buzzing like that?

My carryon starts to move of its own accord, edging toward the end of the bed. I open it and—

A giant, carved J stares at me. It’s pink.

Oh, yes.

Mom’s Special Surprise.

The Power button appears to be jammed, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to pop up and stop vibrating. My fingers worry the little button, and in frustration I bang it—hard—against the edge of the desk.

BZZZZZZZZZZZ
.