Charlotte Phillips - Access All Areas - HarperImpulse Contemporary Fiction

A quick glance around the door to check that Columbo had really gone and she took a sharp left down the corridor toward the dining room, left the hotel by a side door and sprinted to the back of the building where the staff entrance was. Her crowd of supportive pavement passers-by had long since dispersed.

Lucy met her in the sparse staff room. Opulence didn’t extend to this part of the hotel. The walls were festooned with staff rotas and notices and there was a kitchen area in the corner with a battered old kettle. The chairs looked as if they might have been part of the hotel dining room once upon a time. Now they wouldn’t have looked out of place in a skip.

‘Let me just get this straight,’ Lucy said, handing her a mug of steaming coffee and sitting down in the threadbare chair opposite. ‘I get you the hot tip, I get you into the sodding room across the hall, and then you blow the whole lot by hanging out of the window for half of London to see? Are you mad?’

‘I was trying to see into the suite through the balcony doors. I was using my initiative. You try staring at a locked door for three hours,’ Anna protested. She took a defensive sip of her coffee. ‘And you didn’t mention there would be a security presence.’

Lucy looked momentarily blank and then her eyes widened.

‘You mean the hot new guy.’

‘He’s new?’

She deliberately ignored the ‘hot’ part of that comment. OK so his dark and brooding good looks wouldn’t have looked out of place in an aftershave commercial but she didn’t have headspace or lifespace for men right now. Even ones who pushed themselves to the limit to stop her from jumping off a window ledge. A wistful pang tugged at her stomach as she recalled how he’d gone from pavement to hotel room in seconds flat to save her. She ignored it. He probably only did that kind of rescue act for basket cases. She knew better than anyone that knights in shining armour didn’t really exist and no one was going to sweep all her problems away any time soon. After the colossal let down that had happened last time she got involved with a man, the single years yawned comfortingly ahead of her.

‘Got here a week ago,’ Lucy said. ‘He’s an ex-bodyguard to the stars. Supposed to lick the staff into shape when it comes to security.’ She pointed her teaspoon at Anna. ‘He might be dreamy but you can’t let him distract you.’

‘Honestly, how many times? I’ve sworn off men.’

Being let down by a man you thought was your future husband did that for a person. Andrew had been long gone before the fact had actually registered with her. When she’d finally pulled him up on his constant excuses and distance it turned out he’d got a whole new life going on. New girlfriend, social life, the works. It had all gone unnoticed because she was too preoccupied with supporting her ailing parents and he hadn’t had the guts (or in the bastard’s words, the heart ) to tell her. The thought of her parents brought yet another pang of desperation to save her home.

‘Maybe it’s a sign,’ she said. ‘That we should rethink things a bit.’

‘Bollocks!’ Lucy said. ‘It’s a sign that you should have stuck to our original plan and staked out the suite door. The idea itself is perfectly sound.’

Anna hesitated a beat too long.

‘What?’ Lucy said.

Anna shrugged.

‘The whole privacy invasion thing doesn’t sit massively well with me, that’s all.’

Lucy sipped her coffee.

‘What about that last picture you made some money with? That soap star. Didn’t hear you mention scruples then.’

‘That was different. It was posed. The celebrity agreed to it. Right place, right time. There was none of this cloak and dagger stuff.’

Lucy gave her an incredulous look.

‘Save your guilt, for Pete’s sake. Betsy Warrender plays the press like a maestro. She’ll probably thank you for it, she’ll be coining it in with all the publicity. Let’s face it, she’s in her forties with three husbands behind her. Landing Kip Bevan is like a badge of honour for the older woman.’ She shook her head. ‘Nope, the only person you need to worry about here is the security guy. The good thing for us is that he’s just finding his feet. He wants to run a tight ship but he’s been saddled with the rudderless mess that is the Lavington’s minimum wage staff. He’s in at the deep end and it should be easy to slip under his radar if you’ve got the right insider information.’ She tapped the side of her nose.

Anna narrowed her eyes.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you. How exactly did you come by this piece of confidential information? If it’s all so cloak and dagger. You’re a waitress-cum-chambermaid. This place should be teeming with press if the waiting staff know about it.’

‘The waiting staff don’t know about it,’ Lucy said in a low voice. That’s why we have an advantage.’ She examined her fingernails. ‘I happen to have a bit of a thing going on with the hotel manager.’

‘For Pete’s sake, you’re sleeping with the management?’ Anna blurted. ‘Are you mad? I’ve seen the guy in charge swanning about in the lobby. He must be twice your age.’

Lucy flapped a dismissive hand in her direction.

‘I’m not mad. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.’

‘Excuse me? You mean it’s got nothing to do with actually liking the guy?’

‘It’s not serious. The way I see it, you can invest everything you’ve got in a relationship and it can still bite you on the arse.’

Andrew crossed Anna’s mind, bringing with him the usual surge of resentful regret.

‘He’s fun, he likes to treat me, the sex is great…’ Lucy carried on, counting off a list of benefits on her fingers ‘…I get all the best shifts, I’m first in the queue when it comes to booking time off, and I don’t have to pick up his socks. It’ll end when I want it to. No hassle.’

‘What if he ends it first?’

Lucy shrugged.

‘Then I’ll have some more free time. I really think we’re straying way off-task now. I’ve got the tip and it’s irrelevant how I got it. We both need the money, let’s just get the hell on with it.’

‘And what about the security guy?’

Lucy looked her up and down dubiously.

‘What?’ Anna folded her arms defensively.

‘You just need to blend in a bit more.’ Lucy stood up and crossed to the row of lockers along the side of the room. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. This is a classy establishment and you’re traipsing the corridors in jeans and a shirt. I’ll lend you my spare uniform, that’ll do the trick. You can use it to blag your way into the Purple Suite. Just don’t blow your cover by hanging out of a sodding window this time.’

Anna stared at Lucy as she opened a locker and pawed through the contents.

‘And what do you think your no-strings management squeeze will do if he finds out you’ve leaked the hotel’s top secret story?’

Lucy shrugged airily.

‘He won’t. And even if he does I won’t care by then because you will have scooped us both a fortune. I can spend a bit more time auditioning and putting myself out there and a bit less time serving coffee to moany tourists. Don’t let me down!’

She clapped an arm around Anna’s shoulders, directed her towards the ladies’ loo and thrust the pink and grey uniform into her hands.

So now she had Lucy’s acting dreams riding on her photographic prowess too. No sodding pressure then.

Joe returned to the lobby half an hour later having done a quick recce of the second floor and finding nothing whatsoever out of place. Still, his mind lingered on the girl from room 214, despite all attempts to just crack on with the day ahead. Make sure you have the measure of every detail of a situation, and if in doubt, check it out . Hadn’t he just gone through that mantra to the shambles otherwise known as staff this morning? This was about effective security protocol. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Miss 214 was extremely cute with her green eyes and her freckles and her breezy attitude. Of course, his senses still kicked into action when he encountered attractive women, even nutjobs who hung off window ledges, Rome wasn’t built in a day. His previous life had been so different to this, jetting around the world in the wake of his celebrity boss, a girl in every city. His body was still living in a different sexual time zone, one where he was never in one place long enough to stick out a meaningful relationship, where women lasted a night or two before he moved on and his bed was never empty for too long.