Angelica frowned. “Rex…”
“Just think of it like this…” Rex lowered his voice so that only Angelica could hear. “Florence is exactly like you. Icy, cold, direct, organized, high capacity. But she’s calm, she’s thorough, and she knows what she’s doing.”
Angelica’s stomach twisted hard. She didnotlike that description at all. In fact, she hated it. The last thing she wanted was to be accused of being icy and cold, and as if she had no sense of creativity in her at all.
“Just… tackle her like you’d tackle yourself.”
The problem was that Angelica rarely had to deal with someone like herself. She normally dealt with people more like Rex and Hope. She said nothing, but she glanced up, finding Florence standing at the end of the hallway and staring at her and Rex, arms crossed, and an angry look on her face. Just what exactly was she thinking now?
“See? Exactly like you.” Rex chuckled and squeezed Angelica’s arm. “You ready to get started?”
“I guess.” Angelia frowned, but she turned around to face the reception counter. “Scripted, right?”
“Yes,” Rex answered.
Once everyone was set up in place, Angelica glanced down at the script in her hand. If Florence was angered by the fact that she couldn’t memorize this word for word in the span of thirty minutes, then she would just have to walk off the set. Because no way was Angelica going to be able to say this word for word.
“Hi, Colm.” Angelica held her hand out to shake, like she was told to do in the script. All the while thinking in her head,fuck this.“I hear you’ll be working with me today. Why don’t you show me around the hotel and tell me where you think the problems are.”
“I can do that.” Colm flashed her a smile. “Here we have the reception area, where guests check in and check out.”
Holy hell this was going to be a long boring episode and Rex would have so much postproduction to do. Angelica had to get this back under control quickly.
“And do you believe there are any problems with reception?”
Colm shook his head, his dark-brown curly hair moving side to side with him. “No, our front hosting staff is well trained.”
“All right, then let’s move to housekeeping.” Angelica crossed her arms this time, already hating the fact that she knew Colm was wrong.
“Okay.” Colm frowned, no doubt thrown off by Angelica’s push to get to the next topic.
She’d run through the script, and then she’d come back around and talk with Colm about things that she saw wrong. He took her on a short tour of the hotel, Rex and Sy following closely behind. They looked at the laundry room, the back storage areas, the cleaning closets. Each place, the scent of mold increased. They went into an empty hotel room, which wasn’t hard to find. Thus far, the crew was the only one there.
When they arrived back at reception, Angelica put her iPad and the script down and looked at Colm directly. “All right, so where do you see the problems in the hotel?”
“No one wants to stay here. We just need more money for marketing, and then we’ll be good, but we don’t have the revenue to do that.”
Angelica nodded slowly. She set her iPad down and covered it with her hand. She waited, using the silence to bring home her next question.
“What’s the stench?”
“What stench?”
“This hotel reeks. I know viewers at home can’t smell it, but it stinks. Every single room we go into. What is it?” Angelica stared at him directly, expecting an answer.
Colm shook his head. “There’s not a stench.”
Angelica flicked her gaze to Rex, nearly rolling her eyes, but she managed to hold it in. “All right. If you’re going to be in complete denial about the problems you have, and potential problems we haven’t uncovered, then we won’t be able to help you.”
“Angelica!” Florence’s voice rang through the lobby.
Angelica snapped sharply toward her. Oh, if this was how the entire season was going to go, it was going to be a disaster.
“You can’t threaten to pull our support when we’ve made a commitment?—”
“I’m not going to pour in a ton of money to help fix this place up if he’s going to ignore ever piece of advice and the fact that something’s wrong.” Angelica crossed her arms and popped out a hip. Screw focusing on Colm. Florence was going to feel her entire wrath this time. “And if you’re going to intervene every time you feel something is going wrong, this is going to be a long week of filming.”
She flicked her gaze to Rex to see if she had confirmation on that.
