She kept one folder on her lap, sliding the other one across to Daniel. He didn’t even glance down at it. Instead, he held up his hands, almost like he was quieting a crowd of adoring fans.
“Picture this,” he said. “Snowboarding. Sledding. The Winter X Games right here in Orlando.”
“Oh, cool,” she said. She had only a vague idea of what the Winter X Games were, but from context she assumed winter sports. “When is that supposed to be?”
“Whenever we make it happen,” Daniel said, leaning forward, his eyes bright. “Don’t you see? If we build it, they will come. This is the future of Cold World.”
“Snowboarding.”
“In Florida.” He smiled up at the ceiling, as if he was thanking the lord above for all the cash that was about to come pouring in. “The novelty alone will have people beating down our door. We’ll need to completely revamp the place, obviously. If we build over the back parking lot, we can put the slopes there, and then—”
Lauren almost couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Where would people park?”
He waved his hand, as if it was no concern of his. “Where do they ever park in Orlando? At the Waffle House down the street and they can walk over. One of the garages downtown and then they can Uber. I don’t care.”
She pressed her fingertips to her temples. She felt a headache coming on, and she had a feeling it was the word slopes that had done it. He wanted to build actual snow slopes? Outside? In Florida? Was he absolutely off his rocker?
He picked up the folder in front of him, leafing through it quickly before closing it again. “So you’re the numbers girl,” he said. “You tell me how we can make this happen. I have a guy who says he’ll put up three hundred thousand, but we’ll probably need at least another one point two, something like that.”
“Hundred thousand?”
A line of irritation marred his forehead, like he thought she was being dense on purpose. “Million.”
“Million?” Lauren knew she’d reached the stage where she was just stupidly repeating words, but she couldn’t think of what else to say.
“What’s our overhead?” he asked. “There were a lot more people at that staff meeting than I expected. Do we employ too many people?”
She didn’t think cutting a few entry-level jobs would get them to over a million dollars, but what did she know. She opened her mouth, about to point out that operating a full winter sports park would likely require more employees, when the door cracked open and Asa popped his head in.
“Sorry,” he said. “Am I late?”
He didn’t wait for a response before coming in and sitting in the same chair where he’d faced down Dolores a few days before, calling their snowball fight a “lapse in judgment.” She hadn’t fully appreciated it at the time, but it was pretty decent of him to take the fall for that. She had started it, but he hadn’t even mentioned that in front of the boss.
Maybe it was that memory, but for some reason, she wasn’t upset to have him crash the meeting—even despite the many, many times she’d told him he wasn’t invited. Instead, she almost felt . . . relieved?
It was this new, harebrained idea from Daniel. Maybe Asa would be able to help him see sense.
But Daniel’s face closed off, and it was clear he had no intention of meeting with Asa. “Not at all,” he said, flashing him a fake smile. “In fact, we were just finishing up.”
They’d talked for maybe five minutes. He’d barely even looked at the reports she’d prepared. “But we haven’t—”
He picked up the folder of papers, giving her a little salute. “Thanks for these. If you can get me the numbers for what we talked about, that would be great.”
She glanced over at Asa, but he only raised his eyebrows in an expression she couldn’t quite read. It seemed to encompass his general feeling that Daniel was a douchebag, that Lauren was too mousy to stand up for herself, or all of the above. Whatever it meant, she shouldn’t let it get under her skin, because it would only lead to doing something very ill-advised, something like . . .
“Dinner tonight?” she blurted, and immediately cringed. But the words were out. There was no shoving them back in her mouth, so the only option now was to commit. “I mean, maybe we can talk more about the budget over dinner tonight. I’d love to hear more about your idea.”
Okay, that was laying it on too thick. She didn’t know if she could sit through a whole meal of him throwing out exorbitant numbers and sketching out some pipe dream about a snowboarding renaissance in Orlando. At least, not with any semblance of an appetite.