Free Hotel Indigo by Aubrey Parker Page A

keep seeing the way she looked at me. Even my workout, which I sacrificed my afternoon break to do, couldn’t shed my troublesome thoughts. I did the most brutal routine I could think of, a Russian squat progression that’s left me a bit nauseated and barely able to stand on my beat-to-shit legs. Still, I see the way things ended with Miss White, and can feel her accusations behind my boss’s stare now.  
    But I’m not volunteering anything. I don’t know if Lucy called down here to complain about me, or kept it to herself. If Booth plans to hang me, fine. I won’t hang myself.  
    “Lucy White.”
    “What about her?”  
    “How did her massage go?”  
    So he doesn’t know. He’s fishing for answers, knowing only that something’s amiss.  
    “It went fine.”  
    “Roger says you were back in your cabana twenty minutes after going up to her room.”
    “Maybe Roger should mind his own business.”  
    Booth raises his eyebrows.
    “What if I came down to get some hot rocks? Or did Roger follow me around like the sniveling little weasel he is?”  
    “Did you?”  
    I consider. I can’t get away with this. Others surely saw me, too. “It was a short massage.”  
    “I’ll say. Kendall said that Miss White called down around the same time, maybe twenty minutes after you went up.”
    “And? What did she say?”  
    “Nothing.”  
    “Well. That’s some damning evidence. I see why you called me in here.”  
    “Kendall says that Miss White called a few more times after that. That she seemed strange.”  
    “Based on what I’ve read about Caspian White, that family is strange.”  
    “What have you read?”  
    I shrug. I’m not exactly a news junkie. “More money than God.”  
    “And does that bother you, Marco?”  
    “Why? Does it bother you?”  
    “You went up there with a chip on your shoulder.”  
    “Because you cut my break.”  
    “In part. But I keep hearing buzz about things you say. Things you do. You dislike people with money.”  
    “Not at all. I hope to be one myself someday.”  
    I shift in the chair, more uncomfortable than I’m letting on. I’ve been waiting to be called in for hours, and now I’m sitting here as my expectations unfold. I can’t shake Lucy from my thoughts. I’ve felt her lurking behind my eyelids ever since leaving her room. The emotion is strange. It’s as if I fear being punished for something I didn’t even do, but there’s more to it. I feel a sense of something missing inside. Am I only worried about my job?  
    This feels like something more.
    “Listen to me, Marco,” Booth says, and I can feel something coming. He readjusts both his body and his little folded hands, then sharpens his manner. Nobody — and I mean nobody — can condescend like Thomas Booth. I’ve seen him make chambermaids cry. I’ve seen him reduce strong men to yammering, unable to defend themselves against his verbal ninjutsu. “I don’t care even a little tiny bit if you don’t like the guests at this spa. I don’t care if you grew up poor, and if there was a group of rich kids in your school who used to wear fancy blazers and made fun of your short pants when you grew out of them too fast and your mommy and daddy couldn’t afford to buy you new ones. I don’t care if you’re haunted by visions of an orphanage in your past, where you used to take your tray up to the servers for another helping of gruel and they’d laugh in your face and push you around.”  
    “I’m not an orphan.”  
    Booth’s eyes say that I shouldn’t have interrupted. He continues his rant. “You’re my employee, and these people pay your salary. You only deserve that salary to the degree that you do your job in service of these people. And what is your job, Marco?”  
    “To give massages.”  
    “Wrong,” Booth snaps. “And I’m getting tired of telling you. Your job is to make these people happy. That’s it. If massages make them happy, great. But