“If you think you can swan in now, and then tell Mrs. SB and Barty that you got this reward for the hotel . . .”
Lucas pulls his chin back slightly, eyes flaring. “Is that what you think I’d do?”
I pause. His acts of sabotage aren’t generally that dishonourable, admittedly. But if he’s not planning to take the credit, why is he helping?
“I care about this place, too, you know,” Lucas says.
I tilt my head, like, Really, though? I know Lucas likes this job, but I’m not sure the man has it in him to really love something the way I love Forest Manor.
“Whatever,” I say. “I need to get changed back into uniform if we’re doing this meeting.”
I’m in a white knitted jumper that hangs down to my knees over washed-out jeans and my baby-pink trainers—I love this outfit, but it’s not very professional. I hike my bag onto my shoulder and head for the lost-property room. There’s space in there now that we’ve cleared it out a bit—or, as Lucas put it earlier, “moved the contents of this terrible room into the lobby where everyone can see them.”
I slip out of my jumper and trainers and then bend to yank my uniform back out of my bag. I like the Forest Manor uniform—it’s just a simple white shirt and black trousers, with the hotel logo on the left breast, but I feel good when I’m wearing it. It’s like slipping into the person I am at work. At the hotel, I’m not overstretched, I’m not exhausted; I’m nobody’s tragic anecdote. I’m the one who . . . what did Mrs. Hedgers say? The one who brings the sparkle.
“Oh, Izzy, I wanted to ask about this box of—oops!” says Poor Mandy, barging through the door behind me and then clocking that I’m in nothing but my jeans and bra.
I turn. Lucas is standing on the other side of the desk behind Mandy, and for the briefest of moments, before Mandy shuts the door, we lock eyes.
These days, Lucas tends to look at me with a sort of flat, weary regard, as though he’s just waiting for me to annoy him. It’s grown harder and harder to believe that I ever saw anything more than that in Lucas’s gaze when he looked at me. But right now, as our eyes meet, something shifts. He’s not completely in control of himself, and what I see makes my skin tingle. For the first time since that humiliating screaming match on the hotel lawns, Lucas da Silva is looking at me like he wants me.
The door slams shut and the moment’s gone, but my skin still glows from his gaze.
God. I hand the man my heart, tell him to meet me under the mistletoe, then turn up there to find him kissing my flatmate. I call him out for being a thoughtless dickhead and he tells me I’m making drama. He spends all year making this job as hard as possible for me, refusing to compromise on anything, even after what he did last Christmas.
And still he can turn me hot with one single glance.
Lucas
“Explain it to me,” Pedro says in Portuguese, coffee machine whirring behind him. “You hate her because . . .”
“It’s complicated,” I say, eyeing the coffee as it streams out of the machine into my favourite mug, the tall grey one with just the right-sized handle.
I’ve been frequenting Smooth Pedro’s Coffee and Smoothie Bar for almost two years now. Pedro and I met at the gym—I heard his accent across the weights zone, and it was like breathing in and suddenly smelling home. He’s from Teresópolis and has been in the UK for a few years longer than me. He gives terrible advice but makes excellent coffee.
“I can do complicated,” he says, and then, at my dubious expression: “Go on, try me. Allow me to surprise you. Wasn’t I right about putting avocado in your smoothie?”
This feels slightly different, but I humour him. “Last year, we were flirtatious, but she was always seeing someone, and it never really came to anything. Then, at the hotel Christmas party, I kissed this woman who turned out to be her flatmate. It was under the mistletoe, not even a real thing. But Izzy got so protective. She dragged me out onto the lawn and yelled that I had behaved like a pig, and that, hang on . . .”
I wrap my hands around the mug of coffee as I try to remember her exact wording.
“You’re not good enough for her anyway, you cold-hearted, shiny-shoed robot-man.”
“Whew. I am seeing some warning signs here,” says Pedro.
“I know.”
“Do you think she was jealous?”
“Izzy? No. And that would be crazy anyway. We weren’t together, we’d never even kissed . . .”