Tropical Bartender Bear (Shifting Sands Resort 3)

“No, of course you don’t need to come in. We’ll give your cases to Julie, naturally. Don’t feel bad, take whatever time you need.”

Painfully glad that Fred had not pressed her with any details about those cases, Laura hesitantly said, “The… the Mr. Shifter contest--”

“You wouldn’t have to go, of course,” Fred said quickly, then seemed to stumble and reconsider. “But you could, if getting away sounds good. You know, a change of scenery. While you… ah… recover.”

As if she could ever recover from this. The best Laura could hope for was escape from this. “A change of scenery sounds good,” Laura saved him gratefully.

“I’ll get Marty to put everything in order,” Fred assured her. “We’ll get you the tickets right away, send you the itinerary. Do whatever you need to do.”

“Thanks Fred,” Laura said sincerely. She tried not to think about how poorly she would be thanking him, abandoning Jenny’s job and fleeing the country altogether.

“Anything you need,” Fred repeated. “Anything you need, you let me know.”

“I will,” Laura lied. I need my sister.

She pulled out her wallet after she hung up and stared at the photo on her license.

The face — her face and Jenny’s - was so familiar. The name wasn’t hers anymore. Jenny’s hefty kitchen shears split the photograph, and the shreds of the card were cast into the garbage disposal. Laura’s credit card, already maxed out anyway, followed swiftly. Jenny’s passport would get her out of here, and she had enough information and identification to access her accounts through her laptop.

Even dead, Jenny was saving her butt.

Chapter 2

The conference room behind the restaurant was stuffed to the seams. Tex wryly thought that if they were going to keep adding staff members, they would have to start meeting in the grand event room where they held exercise classes and weekly formal dances.

Tex chivalrously stood when a strange woman in the Shifting Sands housekeeping uniform edged into the room and glanced around for a chair.

“Merci!” she said sweetly, with a grateful smile. She sank gracefully into the offered chair.

“Too bad we don’t have new French maid uniforms to go with the new French maids,” Breck, the headwaiter, hissed near his ear appreciatively as Tex backed up to the wall with folded arms.

“I think she’s French Canadian,” Tex whispered back. She smelled like too much perfume.

Not that Breck would care where she was from. Breck appreciated all women, and all men, for that matter.

When Scarlet entered, the chatter died to a murmur and then turned into an attentive silence at her frown.

“As you know, we’ve got a lot of new staff to welcome,” she said briskly. “We aren’t in preschool, so we aren’t going to go around the room and introduce ourselves, but do take a moment to look around and see who’s new and make a point of saying hello to those you don’t know. On your own time.” Her green eyes traveled appraisingly across the room, and Tex met them briefly.

“The World Mr. Shifter finals will officially begin one week from today, but we’ll be getting new guests every day between now and then, and they’ll be doing a lot of the early interviews and photoshoots starting in two days. Travis?”

Travis, a lynx shifter from Alaska who was in charge of repairs and maintenance, looked like he hadn’t gotten sleep in several days. The impression was probably accurate; he had been pulling all-nighters since the resort had gotten the news about the event’s last-minute change of venue, desperate to get enough of the housing into shape to house the influx.

“All of the primary cottages are ready for occupancy, and the hotel has been brought back up to code. The hot water in the west wing isn’t working yet, but should be by tonight. The toilets...”

Tex let Travis’ technobabble flow over him as he assessed the new staff. There were at least half a dozen new

housekeeping staff, two new kitchen assistants, two new waitstaff who would split time between the dining hall and Tex’s pooltop bar, a green-looking carpenter to work with Travis, and a second lifeguard to relieve Bastian. Even Graham, the stand-off-ish lion shifter in charge of landscaping, had been assigned a new helper, though Graham had already made it clear the young man would be do nothing but the most basic tasks, like lawn-mowing and hauling clippings. Tex suspected that he found the whole idea of an assistant deeply offensive, and the gardens had gone from immaculate to some new state of perfection, even while the gardener cleared vast new swathes of jungle encroachment back from the cottages that were being put back into use and tamed it into hedges of flowers and thick leaves.

“You want us to move?” Bastian said unexpectedly, in response to something Travis said.

Tex turned his wandering attention back to Travis, who squirmed and looked guilty, glancing at Scarlet for support.

“It’s not that we’d have to,” he said defensively. “It’s just that the houses on the south cliffs are set up as a large private family manors, never made for individual rentals. It would take a lot of work to convert them into private rooms, and they’d be a hard sell the way they’re configured now, with shared bathrooms and living space. But they’re in fine working condition, and if the staff moved to those three houses, we’d free up twenty more rooms in the hotel.”

Scarlet was nodding, paying no mind to Bastian’s disgruntled muttering about sharing a bathroom. “Let’s make this happen. I understand that it’s not ideal,” the withering look she gave Bastian was as much sympathy as he could expect out of her, “but our waiting list has never been this long, and this is a chance we can’t let escape us.”

She glanced around the room. “Chef?”