Page 111 of Culinary Chaos
She probably should have, but she hadn’t all at the same time.
Leaning back into the chair in her hotel room, Angelica sighed again. Hope wanted to leave the show. She’d gotten the sense when they were in Seattle that the conversation might have come up between Hope and Rex, but she hadn’t expected Hope to take it this far. To actually contact her agent and to try and break the contract—it must have been worse than Angelica had anticipated.
They weren’t even a full season in the books.
What if this was about the kiss?
About the conversation that Hope had tried to have in the elevator yesterday?
Angelica frowned again and rolled her shoulders. She didn’t have time to worry about it or come up with any kind of solution.They had this one last episode to film and post-production press to do, which she still needed to get on top of organizing.
But she didn’t have time for that today, or at least not right now. She was due at hair and makeup in the next five minutes, so they could get started on filming. Dropping the pen onto the desk, Angelica slid her shoes on and walked directly out of her room. She stopped short, coming face to face with Hope.
“Angel?” Hope asked.
“Yeah…” Angelica trailed off. She hadn’t thought about the fact that their call times were the same that day so they could start with the beginning of production to introduce where they were, who they were working with, and the hotel itself.
No way in hell was Angelica going to tell Hope that she’d just gotten off the phone with Mary, but she had to know, right? Hope had to know that Mary would call production and ask around to find a way to break the contract.
“Want to walk together?” Hope furrowed her brow.
Had she asked something else and Angelica had missed it? She nodded slightly and pocketed her key. “I forgot my iPad.”
“I can wait.”
Angelica had hoped she wouldn’t. Holding in her sigh, Angelica retrieved the item, took two seconds to collect herself and put a mask in place, and then stepped back out into the hallway. She was much more prepared to join Hope now than she had been two minutes ago.
“Ready?” Hope asked, but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes like it normally did.
Or perhaps it was Angelica reading too much into it. How much of this had been a farce from the start? She’d risked for love before and that turned out to have been a wrong decision. Leanne hadn’t given up anything for her. In fact, she’d doubled down on what she had and how they were so similar and could just go back to being professional.
But they couldn’t.
“Yeah,” Angelica said softly. She didn’t look into Hope’s eyes, fearing that she might see the truth of what she was thinking. Instead, she glanced down at the iPad in her hand and pulled the door shut behind her. She could do this. They just had to make it through this episode.
“How did you sleep?” Hope asked.
Small talk it was.
“Fine,” Angelica answered. She refrained from reciprocating the question as was typically expected. Instead, she walked directly to the elevator and smashed her finger a little too hard into the button. The truth was she hadn’t slept much. Hope being in the room right next door had weighed on her mind all night, and she was still struggling to find a replacement for Leanne. The one person she’d wanted to hire had declined her offer.
Which was a whole other problem. But at least she was in LA now so she could take care of the issues more readily than from a distance. Next week, she had three more interviews set up, and then maybe she’d find someone worthy of working for her—at least in that position.
“Did I do something wrong?” Hope asked, catching Angelica’s attention.
“What?” Angelica frowned, confused.
“I’ve never seen you this quiet before. At least not in a room with me.” Hope cocked her head to the side and looked Angelica up and down. “Did I do something wrong?”
That really depended on the definition ofwrong, which wasn’t a conversation that Angelica wanted to get into that morning. Not before she had another coffee at least. She clenched her jaw and gripped her iPad a little tighter. “I have a hotel owner and manager who doesn’t want to actually manage, he just wants to own. Which means that he’s done very littletraining—which seems to be a theme in these hotels we’ve been in—but worse than that, his employees walk all over him.”
“Like last night?” Hope furrowed her brow.
“Like last night.” Angelica sighed. “They were outside on a smoke break.”
“Smoke break?” Astonishment reached Hope’s eyes. “For forty-five minutes?”
“An hour and a half, actually. I looked at the cameras to see when they left.”
