Zachary Danvers was pissed. This job had lasted too long, and wasted too much of his time. What little pride he had in the renovation was tarnished. Working here made him feel like a hypocrite, and he was thankful the project was just about over. Muttering oaths at himself, his brothers, and especially at his dead father, he pushed open the glass doors of the old hotel. He’d spent a year of his life here. A year. All because of a promise he’d made at his father’s deathbed a couple of years ago. Because he’d been greedy.

His stomach soured at the thought. Maybe he was more like the old man than he wanted to admit.

The hotel manager, a newly hired nervous type with thinning hair and an Adam’s apple that worked double time, was laying down the law with a new clerk behind a long mahogany desk, the pride of the lobby. Zachary had discovered the battered piece of dark wood in a century-old tavern located off Burnside in a decrepit building. The tavern had been scheduled to be razed, but Zach had decided to take the time to have the bar restored. Now the once-scarred mahogany gleamed under the lights.

All the fixtures in the hotel had been replaced with antiques or damned-close replicas, and now the hotel could boast an authentic 1890s charm with 1990s conveniences.

The advertising people had loved that turn of phrase.

Why’d he’d agreed to renovate the old hotel still eluded him, though he was beginning to suspect he had developed a latent sense of family pride. “Son of a bitch,” he grumbled under his breath. He was tired of the city, the noise, the bad air, the lights, and most of all, his family, or what was left of it.

“Hey, Danvers!” his foreman Frank Gillette yelled from his position on the scaffold twenty feet above the lobby floor. He was tinkering with the wiring of a particularly bad-tempered chandelier. “Been waitin’ for you. There’s a woman here, in the ballroom. She’s been here over an hour.”