Wrong Room: Sleeping With My Fiancé's Uncle novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Wrong Suite
Still in her plain work disguise, Romy walks into the wrong top-floor suite and overhears her fiancé buying a fifth star from her friend with Romy's own login; she steals the evidence from under their noses, and the stranger in the hall turns out to be his uncle, who wants to hire her.
I walked into the wrong suite on the top floor of the Kinsella with a birthday cake in my hands and my fiancé's voice coming through the wall.
The door was propped open with a room-service cart.
I thought it was his.
Ryland had told me the corner suite on twenty, and this was a corner suite on twenty.
I was still in my work clothes from Chicago.
Brown bob wig. Round glasses with no prescription. Beige raincoat. Flat black shoes.
My job is to stay in luxury hotels and be the guest nobody remembers.
Ryland had never seen me like this. I wanted to watch his face.
My sister Dell had baked the cake that afternoon in the Kinsella's own kitchen, two floors under the lobby. Chocolate, his favorite.
There was a man at the desk by the window.
He wasn't Ryland.
He was older, in shirtsleeves, with gray at his temples and a pen in his hand.
He looked at me.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Wrong room."
Then I heard a woman laugh on the other side of the connecting door.
The door wasn't latched. It had drifted open an inch.
"Happy birthday to you," the woman sang, low and slow.
I knew that voice.
I had shared a desk with it for four years.
Keely Vickery. My best friend at the Meridian Guide.
The man at the desk put his pen down.
"Say it again," Ryland said. "Say five stars."
"Five stars," Keely purred. "Fifty thousand dollars of five stars."
Ryland laughed.
I stood very still with the cake box against my chest.
Keely was the inspector on the Kinsella's review.
The Guide keeps those dates locked. I couldn't even see them. I'd been walled off the file the day I told my editor I was engaged to a Kinsella.
"How did you even get my dates?" Keely asked.
"Romy's laptop," Ryland said. "Her password's my birthday."
They both laughed at that.
"If anyone ever asks," Keely said, "it was her login, not mine."
"Then it was her login."
"She'll lose her job."
"She'll be grateful," Ryland said. "She won't have to work. Now come here."
The man at the desk was looking at me now.
Not at the wig.
At my face.
I set the cake box down on his carpet.
There was a silver tray on the room-service cart with four chocolates on it.
I picked it up.
The man half rose from his chair. "What are you doing?"
"Turndown," I said.
I pushed the connecting door open and walked through it.
The other suite was the mirror of the first one.
Champagne on the coffee table. Two glasses. A bank envelope, fat, with R.K. written on it in black marker.
Next to it lay a small black notebook.
I knew that notebook. Every inspector carries one. Mine was in my tote.
Ryland stood at the bar in a hotel robe with his back to me.
Keely leaned in the bedroom doorway in the other robe, her blond hair down.
"Turndown service," I said, in my slow Jane voice.
Ryland didn't turn around.
"Leave them on the table."
I set the tray down on top of the notebook.
I lifted my phone from my coat pocket and took one photo of the envelope.
Keely was busy looking at Ryland.
Ryland dug in his robe pocket and held a twenty out behind him without looking.
I took it.
"Thank you, sir."
I picked the tray back up.
The notebook came with it, flat under the silver.
I walked out through the front door of 2002 and let it close behind me.
My hands didn't shake until the hallway.
In the elevator alcove I opened the notebook to the last page.
Keely's neat round writing.
Suite 2002. R.K. 50.
I heard the door of 2001 open behind me.
The man from the desk came into the hall in his socks.
He stopped six feet away.
He looked at the tray, at the notebook in my hand and at my flat black shoes.
"Our housekeepers don't wear Italian leather," he said.
"They're secondhand."
"They're also the shoes of a woman who stays in hotels for a living." He nodded at the notebook. "That's a Meridian inspector's book."
I held it against my chest.
"You're not getting it."
"I didn't ask for it."
"What do you want?"
He took a breath and let it out slowly.
"I heard what you heard."
"Then you know who's in there."
"I know exactly who's in there." His jaw moved. "What's your name?"
My real name was the one being laughed at through that wall.
"Jane," I said.
"Just Jane?"
"Just Jane."
He almost smiled.
"I flew in from London this afternoon. Nobody in this building knows I'm here. Not the front desk, and not him."
I looked at the brass numbers on 2002.
"Who are you?"
"Colm Kinsella."
I knew the name. I'd never seen the face.
Ryland's uncle.
The CEO. The one man Ryland lowered his voice to talk about.
"That's my nephew," Colm said. "And that's my hotel he's selling."
Ryland's laugh came faintly through the wall.
The engagement ring on my finger felt heavy enough to pull my arm down.
I put my hand in my coat pocket, over the twenty.
Colm took a card from his shirt pocket and held it out.
"Be in my office at seven tomorrow," he said. "Mezzanine, end of the hall."
"Why would I do that?"
"Because I need someone to tell me the truth about this building." He looked at my wig and my glasses and then at my eyes. "I need a woman my nephew doesn't look at twice."
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