Free Always Something There to Remind Me by Beth Harbison Page B

away, I’d pictured pipes spouting water. Maybe a sinkhole outside by the pool. Possibly even a guest with a broken limb in the water park.
    Jeremy had counted on me thinking that way, of course. If he’d mentioned cameras and zits, he knew I wouldn’t have come. Then he would have had to handle it himself. Now that I was here, though, I knew there was no way he’d leave his office. It was a game of chicken and he was a lot better at it than I was.
    I made my way into the bar, where I saw three bored-looking guys with camera equipment and beers, sitting among a bunch of wires and power strips. There was a woman with them, with short red hair, dramatic makeup, and, I could tell thanks to the sleeveless shift she wore, seriously buff arms.
    “Hello,” I said, as professionally as I could, given my appearance. “I’m Erin Edwards, events coordinator here at the hotel. Mr. Rambaur told me you’re here to do some establishing shots of the hotel?”
    “We got those,” the woman said, extending her hand. “Pippa Tanner,” she said, shaking my hand with an iron grip. “I’m the producer in charge of this mess. What we need”—here she looked me up and down critically—“is to ask a few questions about the planning. Just a little bit of tape on that, because normally the party planner obviously isn’t the money shot.”
    “Sure, what do you need to know?”
    “Why don’t you have a seat?” she suggested, gesturing at a seat being occupied by one of her crew.
    The moment her hand swept in his direction, he sprang into action, picking up the camera while one of his coworkers picked up and turned on a rack of bright lights and the other started assembling what looked like a boom mic to hang over me.
    “Oh.” I felt Cindy Brady Syndrome coming on. If the camera started running, I was liable to freeze. I didn’t sit. The camera hovered in my face and I said to the guy, “Can you turn that off for a minute?” To Pippa, I said, “I’m really not up for being filmed right now. I was out running and I got this call and I’m just a mess.”
    “How long would it take you to clean up?” She glanced at her watch, then back at me, the implication clear: Time is money and you’re wasting both of mine.
    This wasn’t going well at all. Why hadn’t they just looked at me, seen I’d make for awful TV, and let me off the hook? “Well, I’d have to go home and shower and it would really be more time than you’d want to spend—”
    “You’re not that big,” Pippa interrupted. She was probably two sizes smaller than I was, but the way she said it you would have thought she was talking to Oprah in 1997. “I can loan you something from my room.” That critical eye wandered over me again. “At least something you can put on as a suitable top and we can film from the shoulders up.”
    “I’m not borrowing your clothes.” I didn’t mean to sound snappish. “I mean, surely you can just wait until Jeremy … returns. I have a feeling it will be sooner than he expected,” I added through gritted teeth.
    “Fine. What did you think of Miss Tacelli when you first met her?” Pippa asked.
    The lights guy swung around in front of me and I felt my pupils shrink. Anything I said now—even begging off and saying I didn’t want to be interviewed—might be used to make me, and the hotel, look bad.
    I had no choice but to answer.
    I swallowed. “I thought she was delightful. A bright, vivacious young woman looking forward to a great future.” Had they met Roxanne yet? Was there any way they would buy this?
    Pippa gave me a smile that said she had and she wasn’t. “Has she had any special requests for the party?”
    I feigned ignorance. “What do you mean?”
    “I don’t know, balloons, limos, color-coded invitations”—she raised a knowing eyebrow—“horses?”
    I looked her dead in the eye. “Nothing unusual or impossible.” Game on. “We specialize in making dreams come true here.”
    My phone rang