Page 59 of Sexy as Sin
“Right. Problem for another day, then. Here’s what you do now. You contact everybody you’ve cooked for in the past six months, since you bought into the company, and you ask them to leave a review on Yelp and a comment on your Facebook page. And a testimonial on the website, too.”
“Email them, you mean,” she said. “What if they ask why, assuming they don’t already know?”
“What have you lost?” he asked. “You need positive reviews up there, positive thoughts to counteract the negative ones. Some people will be scared away, maybe, by all this, but when nothing else happens, they’ll forget, especially once the negative comments get buried. You should be able to get six or seven reviews right away, and they’ll help. From the consortium’s PR woman, for a start. She’s not going to be gushing over anybody. Immensely critical woman. Four star with lots of detail, you can bet, which will be believable. And, no, you don’t email them. You call them, and you follow up with an email with the links. If they know about what happened, you acknowledge it, tell them there’s a suspicion of foul play, that it’s being investigated—you don’t say by whom—and meanwhile, all you want from them is an honest review oftheirevent. And from now on, you mail every client a customer satisfaction survey card after every single function, small or large, and send them an email with a link to the same thing, that goes directly onto your website, and you follow up if you don’t hear back, which you usually won’t. And don’t tell me that you don’t know how to write the survey or the follow-up.Iknow how to write it. You put a spot for comments on there, too. You get all that going now, because this is survival mode. You pull out all the stops. And you don’t have enough reviews up anyway, not for the number of events you do and how good you are at it. That needs to change.”
“Amanda won’t want to do any of it,” Willow admitted. “She keeps saying to lie low, and it’ll blow over. And that word of mouth is what grows the business.”
“Sure it is. And sometimes, you have to goose word of mouth along. Anyway, is that good enough for you, to sit here and wait to see what happens?”
“No. It’s not.” All the rage that had been building for the past three days rose to the surface. “I want to knowwho.I want to knowwhy.And then Idowant to bloody poison them.”
He smiled, but when he went on, he was serious. “Then do it. Don’t ask for permission.Doit. I’m going to say something else, too. What if it wasn’t anything at all to do with you, or Amanda, or Nourish? What if Amanda’s personality is getting in our way? If nothing like this has ever happened before, why would it happen now?”
“Dunno,” Willow said. “Why, besides me being in the picture now?”
“Maybe it had nothing at all to do with the caterers,” Brett said. “Maybe it had everything to do with the guests.”
It was two o’clock the next afternoon, and Brett’s morning calls and meetings were long since over. He still had a long list of things to check off today, and he was doing none of them. Instead, he was in the back of the car with Dave driving, on his way to the bowling club, and thinking about Willow.
He’d nearly forgotten about Azra the night before, but when he’d gotten out of the shower with Willow and was in bed with her again and on the verge of drifting off to sleep, the memory had caught at him, the way unfinished business always did, and he’d asked.
He could feel her pulling away from him even while she was in his arms. He was sure he’d done that to somebody, and more times than he cared to admit. It wasn’t a great realization. “Her father wants her to come back to London,” she finally said.
“Oh,” he said. “Is she going to go?”
“She thinks she has to. She’s on a working holiday visa, and you can only work for the same firm for six months out of the year. It’s expiring in a month. Wollongong has offered to take her on permanently, but getting the visa sorted will take time. Lucky she’s a UK citizen, or she wouldn’t have any shot at all, but in any case, she’s going to have to go home first, and I’m not sure she’ll come back if she does.”
“She has to leave Australia, anyway,” he said. “What if she doesn’t go home at all?”
“She’s cut off, I guess. He wants her married, he wants her mum to arrange it, and he wants her staying there. All Azra wants is to design, and who knows if she’ll have the opportunity there, if she’s married? She’s so good, Brett. She loves it here, and she wants to try. Surely everybody should get to try. Surely nobody should have to get married if they don’t want to.”
“Where’s her family from originally?” he asked.
“Egypt. She’s spent nearly twenty years in the UK, but it doesn’t matter to him. She’s the only daughter, and he told her last night that she’s his shame. Hisshame.”Her voice was full of all that passion of hers, and he wrapped her up tighter. She put her head on his shoulder, sighed, and said, “Her brothers are saying the same thing. That she’s an embarrassment. I’d want to run fast and far. Her father told her she’s too old already, too fat and too dark, and that nobody will want her at all soon enough, and I can see her curling up under that. I told her I’m thirty, five years older than her, I’ve got all the opposite issues, and bodies are good for what youdowith them, not just how they look to somebody else, and she just said, ‘You don’t understand.’ I should’ve stayed with her tonight. All this has been brewing for a long time, but it’s come to a head. She said to go, but...”
“First thing in the morning,” he promised. “I’ll tell Dave six-thirty. How’s that? It’s nearly ten now,” he pointed out when she hesitated. “And there’s something in all of this that’s bothering you personally, too. What is it?”Besides that you think you’re—what?he didn’t ask.Too tall, too thin, too redheaded, and you throw yourself into life too hard? How could any of that be bad?Unfortunately, he knew how. People carried their baggage with them, and it could be a heavy load.
She sighed. “If she really does leave in a month, I need a new flatmate, because I can’t do it alone. I can get one,” she hurried to say, like she wanted to make sure he didn’t feel too needed. She drove him nuts. “That’s not the issue. Housing’s hard to come by in Byron, and cheap housing’s harder than that. But she won’t be Azra. That’s the selfish reason. She’s a little bit of home, and good mates aren’t easy to find.”
“No,” he said. “They’re not. And here’s a question for you. Why are you paying for an apartment at all when Rafe has a house here that he’s surely not in much, and that I’ll bet has room for you? I’ve wondered about that since I first found out who you were.”
“How do you know Rafe has a house here?”
“You told me.”
“When?”
“Sometime. Doesn’t matter.”
“Bloody hell, mate,” she muttered, “remind me to guard my tongue better around you,” and he smiled. “Because...” she said, and stopped.
“Because?”
“Because he offered, but he’s Rafe. Because he and Jace have always known what they wanted to do, and they’ve made it happen. Because he isn’t...”
“Because he isn’t really your brother, and it would feel like living in your parents’ basement anyway,” he said, and could feel the truth of that right through her body. “And when hewashere, you’d think you were in the way, especially since he’s married Lily. I wonder if you give him enough credit.”
“Oh, probably not,” she said. “It’s hard to give Rafe enough credit. The bloke’s perfect.” And he thought,How do I fix this one?
