Eventually Lucas checks his watch, clicks his pen, and declares we’re done. He sets Barty’s sign on the front desk—Please ring for assistance and we will be with you in a jiffy!—and leads me to the store cupboard. It’s tidier than when I was last in here—he’s sorted the shelves and pulled out all the different paint tins, dusting off their lids.
“That one,” he tells me. “Can you carry it?”
I give him a withering look and then realise he’s teasing me.
“I’ve seen you in the gym now, remember,” he says, picking up two paint tins of his own. “You will never be able to pretend you need me to do heavy lifting for you again.”
Damn. I can never be arsed shifting the garden furniture, and guests always want it in a different spot. One of the very few upsides of being on shift with Lucas is that I can usually rope him into doing it.
I follow him through the bar to the conservatory at the back of the hotel. It’s carpeted and filled with a motley collection of too many armchairs, and it’s always been a bit of a wasted space—it’s usually where the elderly folk gather at a wedding party to get away from the noise. I’ve not been back here for a while, and I pause in the entrance, mouth dropping open.
“Lucas!”
“What do you think?”
I look around, taking it all in. He’s cleared the room completely and pulled up the carpet, and he’s scrubbed the place down, too—the windows are sparkling, showing the expanse of frosty gardens outside. It’s no longer an old conservatory, it’s more like an . . .
“Orangery,” I say, clapping my hands. “We’ll call it the orangery! People can eat bar food out here. Or even get married! For small ceremonies, this would actually be beautiful!” I spin on my heels, admiring the space. “And the paint is for the floorboards?”
Lucas nods. His eyes are warm when they meet mine; he’s glad I like it, I think. I look away.
“A thin coat,” I say, tilting the paint tins to check the colour. “A kind of washed-out white?”
He nods. “This is your job until lunchtime.”
I roll my sleeves up and start levering open the paint tin. This is way better than digitalising. Little does Lucas know, he’s just handed me a task that I’d choose over pretty much anything else. I smile as I dip the brush and get to work. Definitely an Izzy day.
Lucas
It is satisfying annoying Izzy. I like getting her to rise to the bait; I like making her eyes flare and narrow, and I like how her humour comes out when she’s snapping back at me.
But it turns out that making Izzy happy is a hundred times more satisfying.
“Finished. It looks great in there,” she says, bouncing her way back to me across the lobby. “What’s next?”
“Lunch,” I say.
We usually ask for a plate from Arjun for lunch, but today I’ve requested something special. He regarded me with great suspicion when I said I needed a favour, but when I told him it was for Izzy, he complied without complaint. It was a rare and enjoyable experience.
“We’re having it upstairs,” I say, nodding to Irwin, the builder who gave me permission to use the newly reconstructed staircase. Skip the fourth and eighth step was his first instruction. His second was, And if you fall through the ceiling while flirting upstairs, make sure you’re too dead to sue me.
I take her all the way up to the turret room. This is the second-most-expensive room in the hotel, after the one Louis is staying in. It is half the size but twice as impressive, in my opinion. It’s split over two levels, and one wall is curved. Up on the top level there is a sitting area that looks out over the garden and the forest beyond, and that’s where I’ve set us up for lunch.
“Oh, no,” Izzy says, slowing as she approaches the chairs.
This is not the reaction I had expected to the spread I’ve set up on the table. We have moqueca, rice, feij?o tropeiro, and farofa, of course—there are few meals my mother will serve without farofa. It is a beautiful selection of some of my favourite Brazilian foods. As much as Arjun frustrates me, he is an exceptional cook, and he listened to the advice I passed on from my mother when he was preparing all the dishes. They don’t smell exactly like they do at home, but they’re the closest thing I’ve had since coming to the UK, and my mouth is already watering.
“Fish,” Izzy says grimly. Her gaze shifts slowly to me. “Well played.”
Merda.
She looks slightly green. Did I know Izzy doesn’t like fish? I panic, sifting back through all the times we’ve raced through a quick plate of food together in the middle of a hectic day.