Wrong Room: Sleeping With My Fiancé's Uncle novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Seven A.M.

Colm tests the plain woman and hires her to inspect his hotel until the gala; that night Romy refuses Ryland her laptop and moves to her sister's, and Ryland swears to ruin his uncle's new spy.

At six fifty-eight I pushed through the gold revolving door in the same wig and the same flat shoes.

I hadn't slept.

I had sat on the floor of the loft until three, reading Keely's notebook with a flashlight in my own home.

Ryland never came back from the hotel.

He'd texted at midnight. "Crazy night. Inspection stuff. Love you."

The lobby was empty except for a night clerk and a vase of lilies taller than me.

I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine.

The door at the end of the hall was open.

Colm Kinsella sat behind a desk the size of a rowboat, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled.

On the corner of the desk sat my cake box.

"You left this on my carpet," he said.

"It's not mine anymore."

"It's chocolate. I checked." He didn't smile. "Sit down, Jane."

I sat.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"How long were you in my lobby just now?"

"About a minute."

"Tell me what's wrong with it."

I folded my hands on my tote.

"The clock over the front desk is two minutes slow."

He didn't move.

"The doorman said good morning to the newspaper, not to me. The lilies are dropping pollen on the registration counter. Somebody's been wiping it with a sleeve, because there's a yellow streak."

I tapped the edge of his water glass twice with my nail.

"The marble's chipped by the revolving door, left side. Someone filled it with white grout and it's gone gray. The night clerk is on a personal phone under the counter. The music is a radio station. I heard an ad for a mattress."

"That's six."

"The brass on the elevator says KINSELLA with a thumbprint on the second N. The bowl of apples is wax. And it smells like burnt coffee, which means the pot's been on since four."

He sat back.

"Nine," he said.

"You tapped." He nodded at my hand. "You did it in the hall last night, on the tray. Twice. Every time you added something up."

I put my hand in my lap.

Nobody had ever noticed that.

Not Ryland, in two years.

"I need someone to do that to every floor of this hotel," Colm said. "The kitchen. The laundry. The suites. Whatever my nephew's done, I want to know how far it goes."

"I already have a job."

"Then you'll have two." He wrote a number on a card and turned it toward me.

It was more than the Guide paid me in a year.

"Until the centennial gala," he said. "December twelfth. You report to me. Nobody else."

"I keep the notebook."

"Keep it."

"And I don't tell you who I am."

His gray eyes held mine.

"I don't need to know who you are. I need you to be right."

He slid a phone across the desk. Cheap, black, new.

"My number's the only one in it."

I picked it up.

"One more thing," he said. "Whatever's in that book stays in that book until I know what it's attached to. If it goes to the papers this week, he says it was a maid with a grudge."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you walk out of here with a cake and a stolen notebook, and I find someone worse at this."

I thought about the line in Keely's handwriting.

R.K. 50.

Three letters and a number, against a Kinsella with lawyers.

And my login under all of it.

"Fine," I said. "Until the gala."

He stood and held out his hand.

His palm was warm and dry, and he didn't let go quite as fast as a stranger should.

"Jane," he said.

"Mr. Kinsella."

"Colm."

"Mr. Kinsella," I said again, and picked up the cake.

That night Ryland came home at eight with flowers and a tanning-bed glow.

He kissed my cheek like nothing had happened.

To him, nothing had.

"Babe, my laptop died," he said. "Can I borrow yours for an hour?"

My laptop was on the kitchen island.

His birthday was still the password.

"It's locked," I said. "Work changed the settings."

"So unlock it."

"I can't. It's a Guide machine."

He laughed and reached past me for it anyway.

I picked it up first and held it against my chest the way I'd held the cake box.

He stopped.

For one second his face went flat.

Then the charm came back.

"Okay. Weird. But okay."

"Dell's roommate moved out," I said. "She can't make rent alone. I'm going to stay with her for a while."

"How long's a while?"

"Until the wedding."

He thought about it.

"Good," he said. "Saves me the dry cleaning."

I packed one suitcase.

He watched a game while I did it.

The laptop went in first, under my sweaters.

I left the loft at ten with the suitcase, my tote and a ring on my finger I couldn't take off yet.

Dell lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Hell's Kitchen with a fire escape and a radiator that knocked.

She opened the door in pajamas covered in cartoon croissants and looked at the suitcase, then at my face.

"Oh, I'm going to kill him," she said. "What did he do?"

I sat down on her couch.

Before I could answer, my real phone buzzed in my coat.

Ryland.

"Uncle Colm's in town. Nobody even told me. He hired some mousy little spy to sniff around my hotel."

The dots came up again.

"When I find her, she'll never work in this city again."

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