The suggestion was so unexpected, so completely out of left field, that I couldn’t seem to form a coherent response. This was the same man who’d thrown our Christmas tree in a ditch not two hours ago. The same man who’d been making jokes about our decorations and our traditions since the moment he’d arrived.
And now he wanted to take me to dinner?
“I’m not going to dinner with you,” I finally managed to say. “No way.”
Instead of looking disappointed or offended, Kent flashed an infuriating, confident smile. “I might stick around a bit longer than one night,” he said. “And by the time I’m ready to go home, you’ll have let me take you out.”
The sheer arrogance of the statement left me speechless. He was so sure of himself. He thought he could waltz in here, insult all the things I cared about, and then charm me into having dinner with him.
“We’ll see about that,” I said without bothering to hide the disgust in my tone.
I fled the room before he could say anything else that might scramble my brain even further.
I practically ran down the stairs, my heart beating faster than it should have been, my cheeks warm with what I told myself was indignation rather than anything else.
Stacy was waiting for me at the bottom of the staircase, her hands on her hips and her expression demanding immediate answers. “What was that all about?”
“What was what about?” I asked, trying to sound innocent and probably failing miserably.
“Don’t even try that with me, Sylvie Northwood. You just charged that man seven hundred dollars for a room that usually goes for two hundred, personally escorted him upstairs like he was visiting royalty, and came back down here looking like you’d been hit by lightning. So I’ll ask again, what’s going on here?”
I sighed, knowing there was no point in trying to hide anything from Stacy. She’d been part of our family for too long and knew me too well. Plus, she had caught me red-handed.
“He threw our Christmas tree in a ditch,” I said. “So I figured if he wanted to waste money, I’d help him do it.”
Stacy’s eyes widened. “You overcharged a guest because he didn’t want his Christmas tree?”
“He didn’t just not want it,” I protested. “He literally threw it in a ditch on the side of the road. Like it was garbage. After paying a hundred dollars for it! And he said the sleeping bag races are dumb.”
Stacy raised an eyebrow at me. “And you thought the appropriate response was to commit what’s basically fraud?”
I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again. When she put it like that, my righteous indignation sounded a lot less righteous and a lot more like petty revenge. “Think of it as dynamic pricing. When companies do it, it’s genius. When I do it, it’s a crime?” I scoffed. “Typical.”
“What if we get caught?” Stacy continued, her voice rising slightly with panic. “What if he complains to corporate travel sites? What if he leaves bad reviews? What if?—”
“We won’t get caught,” I said firmly. “He didn’t even blink at the price. Trust me, seven hundred dollars is nothing to someone like him.”
“He’s a Bancroft,” she said, nodding.
“So?”
“Bancroft,” Stacy said again. “That’s his last name. Kent Bancroft.”
“Yes, I know. I checked him in.”
“Don’t you know who they are?” she whispered.
I frowned. “Who? The Bancrofts? They can’t be a bigger deal than the Northwoods. We founded this town.”
“Girl, you have no idea.” She sighed. “We are so screwed.”
CHAPTER 8
KENT
Don’t these mountain people have any idea who the hell I am? I’m Kent fucking Bancroft. Not some average working-class joe who took a wrong turn on his way to a budget motel.
Yet here I was, sitting at what appeared to be a communal dining table in the main hall like some kind of medieval peasant waiting for scraps from the lord’s table. I didn’t even get my own table?
