on. He wasn’t asking them to take a four-day leadership seminar. He was asking for a couple of hours of frank discussion. It was day two already. It was time to buckle down and work harder than they ever had before.
“Stop making this more complicated than it needs to be.” Teague leapt back up three steps to snatch the pad from Alex. He flipped through. Frowned. Flipped through more. “We’ll run down each page of what has to happen. Then we’ll each take a few pages and we’ll do it. Simple as that.”
“Really?”
He finished thumbing through, then tried to rip off all the written-on pages in one swift yank. Except that it didn’t work. Because there were too many pages, too much to do in a single chunk.
And wasn’t that just a damn metaphor—allegory?—something for what Alex was trying to explain?
Alex pushed to his feet. Then he whipped out his arm and snatched back the legal pad. “If we do it your way, just hand out pages and do what’s on ’em, then you might end up having to come up with the design for the gardens. You up for that, buddy?”
“Obviously not,” Teague said with a head tilt to the side that called him a moron. “Obviously I’d hand that over to our flower expert, Amelia.”
“Okay. You sloughed off the landscaping.” Deliberately, Alex turned over a page. “What about choosing the themes for each bedroom? Deciding on sticking with the old décor or getting new?”
“My ‘décor’—” he made finger quotes around the word “—has mostly consisted of a camouflage tent with a Pittsburgh Steelers flag tacked to the wall. Of course I’m not the one to pick out paint colors.”
Gotcha, Alex thought. He had to bite his lips to keep from grinning. “Then who is?”
Amelia stood up, too. She marched over to stand toe to toe with Teague and jab a finger in his face. “And be careful with your answer. If you go all caveman on us and say that the girls do all the decorating and the boys do all the construction, I might need to do some serious rehab on your brain. I spend my days hefting potted trees. I’ve got muscles and stamina, and I’m not afraid to use either.”
“I’m more about stamina than muscles, but yeah, what she said,” Everleigh chimed in.
Before he could answer—and dig himself further into a hole—Alex pressed harder. “What about reaching out to the Chamber of Commerce? Who’s our expert on that?”
“You. Obviously, Mr. Hotel Manager,” Teague snarled.
He let his buddy’s irritation roll past him. This was a useful exercise. Talking through it all at once should get it out of everyone’s systems. “Nope. I can’t be the only one doing all the hotel admin things. Just like you can’t be the only one painting, and Amelia can’t be the only one planting. It’s all too much for one person. We’ve got to work as a team.”
To Alex’s relief, the women nodded, getting his point. And Teague—well, at least he stopped arguing.
And, to his surprise, Everleigh went one step further. She stood right next to Amelia, effectively boxing Teague in against the railing. “Don’t be so closed-minded. How do you know you won’t be good at choosing color schemes unless you try? Just like you can’t assume you hate brussels sprouts until you try them. I always said I hated them. But then Jeremy took me to this gastro pub where they were roasted with balsamic vinegar, and crispy and caramelized, and now I’m hooked.”
“Which one was Jeremy?” Amelia asked, tapping a finger against her lips. “The dermatologist or the investment banker?”
“The sommelier. And the wine we had with that meal was out of this world. The perfect wine for them is a Languedoc red. And all I know about it is that I definitely can’t afford it.”
Alex made two mental notes.
1) Everleigh was, indeed, good with the big picture and motivation. He wanted to nudge her toward doing their marketing.
2) She could derail a conversation in the freaking blink of an eye. Keeping her on task might be a challenge.
“Okay, okay already. I hear all of you.” Teague threw up his hands and then scooted past the women. “Let’s get this over with.”
Amelia beamed at him. “That’s the spirit.”
“We can start by listing the special skills on my résumé.” He ticked them off on outstretched fingers. “Operation and maintenance of domestic and foreign weaponry. Detonation and deactivation of explosives, sniper, and certified parachutist.”
Smart-ass.
“I think I’d better make my