She cleared her throat. “Call me Raina; we’re not very formal around here.”
“OK, Raina, I will. Can I ask what the owner is like?”
“You mean the owner of the Del Mar?” She waved her hand. “Don’t worry about him. You’ll never see him. Even I’ve never met him. He owns so many buildings and properties all over the world I doubt he even realizes the Del Mar is one of his.”
“Some boss, huh?” he replied.
“I guess. The person from the company that we see on a more regular basis is the district manager,” Raina said. “But I doubt Pervy Rog will be bothering you.…” she muttered under her breath.
“Pervy who?”
Raina waved a hand. “Never mind. Forget I said that. But yes, from what I understand, the owner’s a pretty decent person, gives a lot to charity and so on, very private, but I suppose that goes with the territory when you’re one of the richest people in the world.” She gave a small laugh.
“Yeah, I guess so.” Then he asked a question she wasn’t expecting. “Do you like working here?”
It was an unusual question to ask in a job interview, but she liked him all the better for it. “Well,” she spread her hands on the desk between them, “I’ve been working here since I got out of high school. And I worked my way up from being a room attendant, to now managing this entire hotel.” She turned her hands, palm upward and gestured at the grandeur that surrounded them. “I’m very grateful to this company. There aren’t many places anymore where something like that can happen.”
She felt him watching her carefully, and she put a hand to her cheek as she felt the heat rising to her face. Pull it together, Raina, she chided herself silently.
“No,” he said slowly, carefully, his voice a deep timbre, “No, I guess there aren’t.”
Their eyes met for a brief moment and he held her gaze a little longer than was strictly necessary. Raina surprised herself by being the one to look away first.
He broke the tension by making a benign comment about the weather, and they chatted a little longer before Raina directed him to the Human Resources department to formalize his employment.
As the day wore on though, Raina found her thoughts drifting often to the enigmatic handyman. There was something about him that she was drawn to apart from his good looks. He spoke with charm and grace. Whatever his circumstances were, Christopher carried himself with dignity, and like someone who was used to getting what he wanted.
Then there was that smile—easy—as though everything in the world would fall in place before him as it should.
Raina shook her head. “Idiot,” she whispered to the air and to herself. Realizing how much thought she was giving a new employee—one who had likely already forgotten her name— Raina laughed at her ridiculousness and turned back to her work.
2
Christian Del Mar couldn’t keep his eyes away from the hotel manager’s lips.
They were large, and wide, and he wondered what they would taste like. And when she smiled, her whole face lit up and her serious demeanor faded away.
Her mouth begged to be kissed and he longed to be the one to do it.
Christian pulled hard on his jeans, willing his cock not to betray the direction of his thoughts. He swallowed hard and scolded himself. That wasn’t the reason he was here. He had far more pressing matters, and getting the maintenance man job was the first step to accomplishing his goal. He hoped the quick study he had done in the last couple of days would help him pass the interview.
He watched Raina with admiration as she deliberately set about making him feel at ease. Her outfit was neat and tidy, one that didn’t make her stand out but also made her look very professional. Her dark skin contrasted beautifully against her cream colored blouse, and when she leaned over he could just barely catch a glimpse of the shadow between her cleavage that tantalized him with hints of what lay beneath the delicate fabric.
Christian had seen her picture in the brochure he had been sent to proof a few years ago. He had noticed how remarkably pretty she was then, but a picture was nothing compared to the woman in real life.
He tried to keep his train of thought on the interview and responded to her questions, taking care not to show off his knowledge on the Del Mar group so much it raised her suspicions. He saw her eyes move to his torn collar, and the shadow of sympathy that followed.
Christian knew he had answered the questions adequately, but the last one about fixing a leaking toilet had thrown him off. Most of the knowledge he had on maintenance work was from his own experience back in the days when he was scraping by and working towards his dream of owning his own hotels. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d fixed anything at all, let alone a leaky toilet.
Fortunately, one of the skills that had helped him get where he was in life was a photographic memory. His mind flew to the page in the text book and a passage came to him. He recited the process of identifying the leak and fixing it but he saw the look of curiosity on Raina’s face. She was a little perplexed by the way he had answered the question, he could tell, but Christian hoped it wouldn’t prevent him from getting the job.
In the end, it hadn’t. She gave him the job on a trial basis and he congratulated himself on getting hired on his own merit. He chuckled to himself as he caught his reflection in the glass walls as he made his way to Human Resources. With the cap and jacket, he looked nothing like himself. His hair, normally jet black, was dyed in an unbecoming shade of brown and his blue eyes were hidden behind dark contact lenses. His Board of Directors would faint if they saw him now.
This was his grand strategy to rescue his hotel from several months of dwindling profits.
Christian mused over the circumstances that had gotten him to this point.
A year ago, feeling burned out, and feeling the need to give back, he had decided to take an extended leave from the company he had founded. It had been a wonderful interlude, though he had missed the hurried pace of his work.
Lazy mornings were not for him and during those six months, Christian never once woke up later than six o’clock in the morning. His schedule was tight, with at least four lectures per week. He hated idleness and so even while on a sabbatical he had traveled across the country in an effort to motivate young men and women to think of entrepreneurship as a possible career by sharing with them his own rags-to-riches story.
Growing up in a poor neighborhood and attending a questionable school district had been hard, but Christian had been a brilliant student. His guidance counselor had seen his potential and encouraged him to apply to schools he would have thought far out of his reach. He had gotten scholarship offers from three Ivy League schools and in the end he had decided on Harvard.
From the beginning, his focus was on starting his own business. He had seen his father lose his livelihood when he was deemed expendable after the company he worked for decided to downsize.
His father had trudged from office to office, looking for a job, even those well below his previous income levels. Even though he was a qualified mechanical engineer, his father had been forced to settle for a poorly-paying job as a machine operator in a steel factory.
At age thirteen, Christian had seen what being unable to earn an income did to a man’s self-esteem, and he had vowed to never find himself in that position. The family of five had survived on his mother’s paltry income as a teacher. Broken by the inability to take care of his family, his father had turned to drinking. He had died twenty years later, broke and alone, after Christian’s mother had divorced him due to his alcoholism.