Opportunities

“Well, hello- Jesus, Robbie, what’s going on?”

Vanessa’s usually cool expression broke when she looked at me. I had to assume I was looking as mentally exhausted as I felt, and as I handed her over the fresh coffee I’d picked up for her downstairs, I sighed and shook my head. “Where do I start?”

Vanessa raised one of her carefully trimmed eyebrows, accepting the coffee and bringing it up to take a deep smell of the rich aroma before setting it down. “Is this work or personal?”

“Yes?” I answered with a wince. “Don’t worry about it, though, you asked me to come up, so there must be something on your mind. What’s up? Anything I can help with?”

The blonde’s questioning look lingered on me for a long moment as she decided whether to push or not, but she softened slightly and shook her head almost imperceptibly, giving up on that chase for the moment. Instead, she half-turned in her chair and leaned back across her desk, reaching for a file. The movement had the unintended consequence of highlighting Vanessa’s slim, tight body as her blouse hugged her high, perky breasts.

It took effort for me to look away, and more to quash that little voice in my head that wondered if it had been on purpose. Vanessa and Dayana were my work friends. We were colleagues who respected each other and relied on each other at times. They were both ambitious women who were also well aware of how much I was in love with my fiancee, and had spent time with the two of us. Vanessa was, strictly speaking, an attractive woman, but that didn’t mean she was trying to subtly hit on me.

My mind after the Lake Powell trip was still on Horny High Alert, and the whole thing with the topless Eastern European Bombshell at the pool hadn’t helped things.

“This is less about what you can do for me, and more about what I can do for you,” Vanessa said as she brought the file around and handed it over to me. “Now, understand, Robbie. It’s not the sort of thing you were looking for, and it’s not a sure thing. It is, however, an opportunity.”

“Why do you make that sound so ominous?” I asked, smirking a little as I held her gaze, then I sat up and opened the file, starting to scan the first page.

“It would be a Get for the entire hotel, obviously,” Vanessa said. “I only found out they were looking to change venues for next year because I found myself in a bidding war for some national billboard spots with the former hosts, which was how I got a back door into why they were moving from California to Nevada.”

“We can’t handle this,” I said, shaking my head and looking up from the file. “We don’t have the facilities to handle an entire music festival of this size.”

She smiled in that shark-like way she sometimes did. “Oh, I know, Robbie. Let some of the other hotels scramble to try and find a way to land that big a fish, and whoever does will end up with all the problems that go with that large of an event. No, you’re going to aim for something different.” She leaned forward and flipped me a few pages deeper into the document, then stabbed a finger onto a specific page titled ‘Talent Relations.’

I raised my eyebrows, taking in the numbers quickly and trying to think how far ahead this booking was and if we could even swing it.

We might need to move a wedding, but for a get like this, I could probably move two, offer them a fifty per cent discount for the trouble, and no one would bat an eye.

“Jonas would shit a brick if he found out I got this,” I said, coughing lightly as I tried not to break out into laughter.

“I know,” Vanessa smirked triumphantly. “And it would also help you put a nail in Doug’s coffin, as long as you can manage not to share the credit with him and be a little selfish for once.”

I blew out a breath, looking over the numbers again.

Forty-odd musical acts, mid to superstar tier, their crews, and their guests. We’d need to coordinate transportation for all of them, extra security, extra parking for tour buses and equipment trucks, and around-the-clock food services. It would be a big effort, but if I could put a little more into it - private parties or events restricted to acts and their crews - it could put the Vaso on the map with some big names. Jonas’s lineups for the theatres could change if we became a favoured tour stop. We could see them coming back as guests.

“Is there a deadline for this?” I asked her. “Any sort of timeline?”

“From what I understand, part of the issue was a lot of holes in an already massive, leaky ship,” Vanessa said. “Three-quarters of their organising board got the boot, and they wanted to keep the circle small. They're trying to cut out some of the bloat, and getting out of California is part of that. I don’t have a firm date or time, but ‘two weeks’ was mentioned to me earlier on the phone.”

Two weeks to put together an enticing package to convince a music festival to have us host several hundred guests, including their VIPs, next Spring. “I can do this,” I said, feeling my confidence rise as I said it. “I can definitely do this. The problem is going to be putting it together without blasting it up to the C-suite and back. I can’t put together all of the monetary parts of the package myself, or even me and Dayana.”

“You will,” she nodded.

I grunted. The ‘correct’ answer, at least by the way the hotel was supposed to run, was that I would run it up the chain to the VPs and let them decide it all by committee, then take whatever they gave me. But with the chaos up in that bracket of the Hotel right now it was more likely that we’d lose the opportunity entirely as they all started fighting with each other to try and outdo or undercut their different efforts - no decisions would get made, we’d run out of time, and the worst-case scenario would be it somehow blowing back on me.

“Fuck,” I said, running through the possible accomplices. I could manage about three-quarters of the pitch package myself. Security, transportation, parking, and events. Dayana could do the food and drink with her eyes closed. It was just the approvals on blacking out every suite in the hotel for that time period, plus half of the other rooms for crew and the like, and then locking in the discounts offered to the Festival to be competitive without losing our shirts in the process.

I had leeway, I didn’t have ‘We make one-eighth our usual revenue for an entire week’ leeway if I got those numbers wrong.

“It has to be Ash,” I said after a long moment, then saw the look on her face. “Really?”

Vanessa shrugged lightly. “I knew you would get there. He isn’t a threat to you, but he has the ability to both manage the booking blackout and has access to the numbers as the Head Concierge. You just need to make sure you can get him to keep his mouth shut.”

“Well, I know one way to do that,” I sighed. “Remind him that I’m going to be bodyblocking some of the problems our new resident Russian Widow is going to be causing.”

That had Vanessa’s triumphant look turning curious again. “How much of a problem are we talking about?”

I sighed. “You’re not going to believe half of it.”

She took a sip from her coffee and set it down, then crossed her arms over her chest and cocked one of those tidy little eyebrows of hers again. “Try me.”

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