The Hotel Nantucket (102)

Lizbet touches his face. He loves her.

“Before that? I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight, but when I saw you in the parking lot that first day in those sexy heels telling JJ to leave you alone even though the dude was down on one knee proposing, I thought, That poor guy blew it but I’m not going to.”

“Stop,” Lizbet says, though she’s grinning.

“Before that…” Mario says.

“There was no ‘before that,’” Lizbet says. “That was the day we met.”

“Before that, Xavier told me that he’d hired a lioness named Elizabeth Keaton to manage the hotel. He said you used to run the Deck with your boyfriend but that you’d parted ways and you were looking for a fresh start.”

“Lioness?” Lizbet says.

“Direct quote. You don’t forget a description like that. I was so intrigued that I did some stalking. I saw the feature about you and JJ in Coastal Living, then I checked out the Deck’s website, and I developed a little crush on you.”

“You did not!”

“I did,” Mario says. “You reminded me of Allie Taylor.”

Lizbet swats him and he says, “I’m serious. She had blond hair like yours and pale blue eyes and that sweet-but-tough thing going that I haven’t encountered in any other woman until I met you. I always said I was going to find Allie Taylor someday and marry her.”

Lizbet is starting to feel a little jealous of Allie Taylor.

“But when I checked Facebook, I saw she was married with four kids at private schools in Manhattan and I also realized I was happy for her in that life. The magic was gone. But when I look at you…” Here, Mario traces his finger from Lizbet’s shoulder down her arm. “I feel like I’m twelve years old again and everything is shiny and new and colorful and full of wonder. And that’s how I know that I love you.”

“I love you too,” Lizbet says.

“There’s a reason why I’m telling you tonight,” Mario says, “even though I’ve been in love with you for most of the summer.”

“What’s the reason?” she says.

“Xavier was crazy about the bar, our numbers are good, and you said he was happy with the hotel.”

“He raved,” Lizbet says.

“So today it finally felt real,” Mario says. “It felt sustainable, like I can dig in here. I can stay here and do my thing with the bar and you can run the hotel, and in the off-season we can go wherever the spirit moves us. I still own a place in LA. It’s a bungalow with a little pool out back and an avocado tree.”

“An avocado tree?” Lizbet says. She kisses Mario and pulls the duvet onto the bed. All she wants is to go to sleep dreaming of swimming pools and movie stars, an avocado tree and some Craftsman furniture in Mario’s bungalow. Tomorrow, she will still have to charm Xavier, still have to make sure everything is beyond the beyond for him; a hotel experience isn’t made in one afternoon or even one night. Lizbet closes her eyes and Mario starts breathing deeply but Lizbet can’t settle. She’s in a happy bubble, insulated and safe, but isn’t there the teeniest tear, threatening to deflate it?

Well, she thinks.

The last Friday of the month is only two days away—which means a new Hotel Confidential post. Either Shelly Carpenter has stayed with them or she hasn’t. If she has and she gives them less than five keys, or if she hasn’t and doesn’t review them at all…what will happen?





24. Heartbreaker




Xavier Darling is out to dinner and so Grace spends the evening doing a few minor hauntings. She’s able to delight Mary Perkowski from Ohio by flickering the lights, then playing Mary’s favorite song, “Thunder Road,” spontaneously over the sound system, then by making the sheers of the canopy bed sway like the dress in the song. Next, it’s off to suite 114, where Grace peeks in on the Marsh children, who will be leaving in the morning. Today marked Louie’s last chess lesson with Rustam, and Wanda returned her Nancy Drew books to the library. (She made it all the way to number forty-five, The Spider Sapphire Mystery.) Kimber isn’t exactly an organized packer; she has been stuffing things in bags indiscriminately, a process that was interrupted by moments of her sitting on the bed with her face in her hands or writing her “memoirs” on her laptop with tears streaming down her face.

Grace has grown attached to Kimber—and Wanda and Louie, and even Doug. She can’t imagine the hotel without them, but it’s the very nature of a hotel to be impermanent. Hello, then goodbye; that’s how it goes. If people stayed forever, it would be a home.

Grace moves in close to Wanda, the only supernaturally sensitive person in the past hundred years who has wanted to understand her. Grace kisses her cheek, leaving behind a cool damp spot.

Wanda’s eyes flutter open. “Grace?”

I’m here, sweet child, Grace thinks. Then Doug growls—he’s such a crank with her, though Grace likes knowing he’ll protect Wanda—and Grace leaves the room.

Nighty-night.

She floats up two floors and across the hall to the owner’s suite, a place she has consciously avoided all summer long—and sure enough, it triggers her right away. Despite the fact that it’s bright and white and beachy modern now, Grace can picture her nineteen-year-old self crouched on the ground, trying to coax the damn cat, Mittens, out from under the bed. She’s thinking that a woman who would throw a silver candlestick at her own pet is a woman with a turd for a heart. Grace hears the door open. In her mind, it’s Jackson Benedict, come to sweet-talk Grace, kiss her and press her hand to his crotch, and she will, in that instant, know she’s ruined. But she will not yet know that she’s doomed.