Page 77 of The Wake-Up Call

The reception bell dings. As one, we look towards the door.

“Saved by the bell,” she says, already bouncing away towards the lobby. “You might want to... wait a minute.”

“Yes,” I say, shifting in my seat. “Perhaps you had better get that one.”

•••••

We both end up having to wait tables over lunch. Izzy changes into her waitressing uniform in the lost-property room, leaving the door ajar, taunting me, tempting me to follow her inside. When she steps out to see me frozen in my seat, determinedly not looking, she gives me a smug look, as if to say,Couldn’t take the heat, then?

I imagine I’ll be safe waiting tables, but we pass so often, always close enough to brush arms, always locking eyes. I never lose her in that room—I know exactly where she is. At one point, as she moves past me into the kitchen, she whispers, “Slow day, Lucas? I’ve neverseenyou check the time so often.”

I am openly staring at her across the dining area when Mr. Townsend walks in. By the time I manage to redivert my attention to the specials board, he is regarding me with amused interest. I swallow.

“Can I help you, Mr. Townsend?” I ask. “Has there been a phone call?”

We’ve come to rely on Mr. Townsend this winter: he is the only person ever guaranteed to be in the lobby.

“It’s Budgens time,” he says.

Merda.I glance at the Bartholomew clock through the dining-room door, which is propped open so that Izzy and I can see the front desk. After some quick maths, I realise Mr. Townsend is right.

“Lunch service ends in half an hour,” I say. “I am all yours after that.”

“Lovely.” Mr. Townsend pauses. “Why don’t you bring Izzy?”

“We can’t spare her, I’m afraid.”

“I’d like her to come.”

I eye him with suspicion. He looks back at me with an expression of innocence that brings Izzy herself to mind.

“I might insist upon it, actually,” Mr. Townsend says. “I think stepping out of the hotel together would do us all some good.”

“Excuse me,” says a woman whose toddler is currently drawing shapes on the tablecloth with pea soup. “Please can I get the bill? Like, as soon as you can? Ideally right now?”

“Half an hour,” I say to Mr. Townsend. “In the lobby.”

“With Izzy.”

The man has more backbone than I’d expected.

“It’s up to her,” I say. “And Mrs. SB. And,” I add, as an afterthought, “Barty.”

Mr. Townsend smiles. “I’ll speak to Uma,” he says, planting his stick and setting off into the lobby. “She can never say no to a guest, that one.”

•••••

“isn’t this nice?” Izzy says from the back seat of my car. “A team trip to Budgens!”

Things have escalated. I’m not sure Mr. Townsend is very pleased about this—his aim, I suspect, was to get Izzy and me together outside the hotel, having observed the way I looked at her in the dining room and decided to play matchmaker. But Ollie overheard us talking about the trip during lunch service, and was so determined not to be left manning the front desk again that he made up an obscure ingredient he had to get—himself—for Arjun. And then Barty overheardhimand said he was coming to get some doughnuts. I believe Mrs. SB is managing the front desk, which she hasn’t done for approximately forty years. I wonder if she knows how to work the computer.

“Are you all right, Lucas?” Mr. Townsend asks me kindly from the passenger seat.

“Absolutely,” I say, though there is sweat prickling between my shoulders.

Right now, in this car with me, I have Izzy, plus one elderly guest, one kitchen porter, and my boss. And yet every time I glance back in the mirror, all I see isher. The wicked heat in those palmeira-green eyes. The way she seems to know every time I’m looking at her. How her gaze meets mine fast, hard, like we’re crossing swords.

She said she’d torture me today, but she’s hardly had to—it’s the day itself that’s torturous. Every slow minute that stands between me and a night with Izzy.

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