The Honeymoon Hotel Read Online Free Page A

provide my confrontation-phobic boss with a strategy for handling the Brazilian chambermaid who’d eaten £150-worth of pillow chocolates in less than two weeks. I merely noted, with my customer service hat on, that the posh bloke in the red shirt had managed to convey his punchy opinions on the tagine in such a charming, if opinionated, manner that the waitress didn’t empty the contents of his plate over his head.
    It was my best friend, Helen, who alerted me to the fact that I’d been sitting next to the most controversial food writer in London. Helen managed the restaurant at the Bonneville and had headshots of all the major food critics lined up by the service hatch in the kitchens, arranged in Fear Order. (I rarely ventured into the kitchens; to be honest, I was a bit scared of the chef.)
    As I recounted the horror of the complaining, Helen’s expression swung between delight and alarm. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew Dominic Crosby?’ She was normally quite inscrutable – her ‘look’ was basically that of a Hitchcock blonde: neat grey suits, immaculate blonde French pleat, composed demeanour – but occasionally flashes of excitement broke through the Nordic cool. ‘Can you get him to review us? Although—’ her brow creased, ‘there’s always the risk we’d end up on the “Killed by Quips” list.’
    ‘How do you mean, “Killed by Quips”?’
    ‘When he ignores the food and just takes potshots at everything else. It’s worse when Dominic Crosby decides to be funny about somewhere. That’s when you might as well just shut down.’ Helen seemed surprised at my blank expression. ‘You haven’t read his columns? In the
London Reporter
? And in the Sunday papers? He’s the Man in the Red Trousers.’
    ‘These “Sunday papers” of which you speak? What exactly are they?’ I pretended to look baffled.
    She blinked, then realized I was joking. ‘Not everyone sleeps through Sunday mornings, you know.’
    ‘There’s a
morning
on Sundays?’
    Helen and I both worked the same insane hours at the Bonneville: ours was a friendship forged from late nights and blister plasters and oversharing brought on by too much Red Bull. She was the only person who really understood why I sometimes worked eighteen-hour days. She was the only person who could make me laugh at the end of them too, with her brutal assessments of which of our co-workers she’d like to murder first. And then how she’d get rid of the evidence.
    She tapped me playfully on the knee. ‘But, hey. Exciting. New man. Are you going to see him again?’
    ‘He’s not a new man. I don’t think he noticed me,’ I said firmly. ‘He was paying more attention to the bread rolls. He said the yeast died in vain. He felt sorry for it, to the point of requiring revenge.’
    ‘That place will be closed down in three weeks,’ sighed Helen. ‘Mark my words.’
    But she was right, and I’d been wrong. Dominic had noticed me. I got an email the following week, asking if I’d mind coming along to review a restaurant with him; he made it sound, rather sweetly, as if I’d be doing him a favour by ‘eating an extra starter and anything with a sauce because I have problems around cream.’ Two days later, we were sitting at the best table in Windows on the World overlooking the lights strung like glittering diamonds across the patchwork squares of Hyde Park, and Dominic made me laugh so much I forgot to eat anything. (He didn’t. He cleared his plate, then mine, apart from the bits with sauce on.)
    I know it seems sudden, looking back, but it felt as if Dominic was the boyfriend I’d been waiting all my life to meet. For one thing I knew exactly what he did, unlike Anthony, who had never explained his ‘actuary job’ in a way I fully understood, possibly because he still secretly wanted to be an asset manager. Dominic was funny, extremely knowledgeable about the food and drinks industry, a terrible gossip, and good-looking in a way I