Love at Second Sight

Chapter 5

One person's embarrassment is another person's accountability.

~Tom Price

***

Since her room was the only room that was in use on the second floor, there wasn't any fear of disturbing anyone else in the palace. She was going to be alone until Zachary came at four-thirty, so she belted out the lyrics to the songs that played through her Airpods. Time and again, she would move her torso, hands and head to the rhythm and beats.

"You have some good moves in you, Chef."

"Jesus Christ! You scared me, Zac," she gasped, a hand on her chest. She thought for a while. Was what she was about to say going to be okay? Fuck it, she thought, and said, "Make that Savannah. There's no need to call me Chef here at least."

"Okay, great. By the way, that sounds so much better, you know."

"Huh?"

"I knew you didn't realize. You just called me Zac, not Zachary."

"I did?"

"Yup. Anyway, I'm here per your command."

"It's four-thirty already?"

"It's actually four-thirty-five, Savannah."

"Oh, I lost track of time. Sorry."

"I've been meaning to say this before too. You apologize too much."

"Oh? Sorry about that."

"See? You did it again," he chuckled, shaking his head.

She looked at him incredulously for a few moments before she, too, joined him in laughing.

Zac: 2. Rhett: 8.

Zac was still lagging by six whole laughs. But then again, though he was competing with Rhett in his mind, his goal was never to equal Rhett. It had always been to surpass and continue.

"Well, what did you want to talk to me about?"

"Oh, yeah. Um, first-off, I wanted to say thanks for this. What we have both is completely professional and despite that you let me invade your personal space and agreed to be my testing subjects, which is really extremely generous of you. So, thank you. In any case, you guys will have to tolerate me only till tomorrow morning and on weekends... other days, mostly I'll be gone by six in the morning and I'll return only by twelve-thirty or one at night—"

"Leave the formalities aside, Savannah. I wanna know one thing—you're gonna be working on around five-odd hours of sleep in a whole day?"

"That's how it is in my profession. I'm used to it."

"Wow. That's pretty commendable."

Hearing that her heart did the same happy dance it did whenever Zac came into picture. All these years she'd spent trying to get over him went in vain. She was still as much affected by him, if not more.

"Probably..." she shrugged. "Anyway, Zac, Abbey will be arriving this evening... Um, so, just reserve one room for her, wherever in the whole hotel, please?"

"She won't be staying here?"

"Well, nope. She needs to be there so that the staff can reach at least one of us at the earliest in case of an emergency. Plus, she'll do the background work for me when she's at the hotel... So can you do that, please?"

"Of course, I can. I will, rather, after we're done here. Anything else, you said you wanted to talk about the gala?"

"Yes. Um... I had a few questions. How many people are gonna come? Where is the gala gonna take place in the hotel? What are the color schemes? What's the arrangement gonna be like? Is it a theme party? Any specific food requirements? Anything that needs to be avoided? How many varieties of each course do you need? What all courses do you need and how many? What food service style—I'd suggest American—do you want it to be—"