Bess at the Hyatt

I have been planning weddings for thirty-one years, and I can tell you the exact moment I stopped being nervous in a room full of hotel people. It was the day I realized that everybody at these conferences is performing, every single one of them, and the only question is who performs best.

My name is Bess Haines, I am fifty-six years old, and I run weddings for a luxury hotel chain you have absolutely stayed at. I wear my gray streak like a trophy. I have handled brides who cried in elevators, mothers who tried to renegotiate contracts during the toast, and one groom who lost the ring in a fountain. Not much rattles me anymore.

What still gets me going, though, is Dante Rios.

He owns a boutique chain, smaller than mine, prettier than mine, and he has been flirting with me at the national conference every year since I was forty-five. That is eleven years of banter, people. Eleven years of him leaning over the dessert table saying things like "Bess, your ballroom layouts are criminally good" while his hand hovers an inch from my elbow and never lands.

We have never done anything about it. Never once. And honestly? That is half the fun. The other half is that he is genuinely good at his job, which makes beating him at his job delicious.

This year the conference is at the Grand Hyatt Denver, three days of panels and badge lanyards and warm white wine. The contract everyone is sniffing at is a national account, the kind that makes a career. Both of our companies are shortlisted. So when Dante walked into the opening reception in a navy suit with a burgundy pocket square, I laughed out loud, because he had clearly dressed to win.

"Bess Haines," he said, kissing the air near my cheek the way hotel people do. "Still terrorizing the competition?"

"Still losing to it, Dante?"

"God, I missed you." And the thing is, he sounded like he meant it. That is the dangerous part about Dante Rios. He means it.

Here is something else about me, and I am just going to say it plainly because this is my story and you deserve the truth. I like being watched. Not in a vague, romantic way. In a specific way. When I was forty-three I did a little online arrangement with a man I never met in person, where I would perform for him on camera while he watched and told me what he saw. It lasted four months and ended amicably, no drama, we just drifted. But I never forgot how powerful it made me feel. Being desired out in the open, on purpose, by someone who knows exactly what he is looking at. That is my flavor. I stopped hiding it from myself a long time ago.

Dante does not know that about me. Or maybe he suspects. Men like Dante suspect everything.

Day two was the breakout sessions, which are the least exciting part of any conference, and this one was called "Optimizing Venue Revenue in the Post-Event Cycle." I want you to sit with that title for a second. Yeah. The room was on the twenty-fifth floor of the Hyatt, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking down into the huge atrium, and there were these glass-walled meeting pods along one side where people could take calls in private. The whole layout was glass. You could see and be seen from a dozen angles. Whoever designed that hotel understood hospitality people very well.

The speaker was on his fourth slide about ancillary revenue streams and I had quietly given up on life. I looked around the room, half hoping to find an exit that did not look rude, and that is when I saw Dante.

He was not in the session. He was across the atrium, on the mezzanine walkway that ringed the 25th floor, coffee in hand, clearly waiting for his own next thing. And he was looking at me.

Not glancing. Looking. The way you look at something you have been looking at for eleven years.

So I did what any mature professional woman would do. I held his gaze.

That is it. That is the whole move. I just did not look away. He raised one eyebrow. I raised mine back. He smirked, and I swear my whole afternoon changed shape. Four slides about ancillary revenue meant nothing to me after that. I was a fifty-six-year-old woman having a staring contest across a hotel atrium and I was winning.

At the next break I did something a little bolder, and I will admit I planned it, because I plan everything, it is my entire profession. I left my notebook open on my chair while I went to refill my coffee. On the page, facing the windows, I had drawn a lipstick heart. Just a little red heart, right in the corner of my margin notes about venue revenue.

When I came back, Dante was gone from the mezzanine. But my phone buzzed.

*You left evidence behind, Ms. Haines. Bold.* No signature. As if I needed one.

I typed back: *It was for whoever was paying attention.* And then I sat there grinning at my own phone like a fool while the speaker thanked us all and I clapped politely.

The afternoon panel was worse than the morning one, if you can believe it. Something about talent retention. The room was dim, the lights were warm, and the man beside me had fallen into a light doze with his badge still clipped on. Perfect conditions, in other words, for a woman with my particular tastes to get an idea.

Now. Let me be careful here and tell you what I actually did, because I want the sequence to be honest, and honest is more fun anyway.

I gathered my notebook and my bag like I was leaving to take a call. I walked the length of the room, out the door, and down the hall to one of those glass-walled phone booths near the atrium rail. I stepped in, pulled the door mostly shut, and set my bag down. From inside the booth you could see straight across the open air to the mezzanine on the far side. And there, sure enough, was Dante Rios, leaning on that rail with his coffee, watching the doors like he had nowhere better to be.

I picked up the booth's phone, held it to my ear as a prop, and looked at him. He tilted his head. I tilted mine.

Then, slowly, with one hand, I undid the top button of my blouse.

That is all. One button. But I did it while he watched, and I did it slow, and I watched his coffee hand stop moving. His mouth did this little thing, half smile, half disbelief, and he set the cup down on the rail. I held his eyes and raised my chin a little, and I felt that old familiar warmth in my chest, the one from four months on a webcam with a stranger, except this was better, because this was Dante, and Dante had spent eleven years being clever at me and now here we were.

I pressed the button back through its hole, straightened my collar, picked up my bag, and walked out of the booth like someone who had just closed a deal.

He was not at the evening reception. I looked. I looked more than I want to admit. But I told myself he was working an angle on the contract, because that is what Dante does, and tomorrow was another day of panels, and I had a heart drawn in lipstick and a whole arsenal of ideas.

The next morning, during the first panel, a bellhop came down the aisle with a folded card on a little silver tray, which is a very Hyatt way to deliver a note, and he leaned toward me and whispered, "For the lady in the plum jacket?"

That was me. I was the lady in the plum jacket.

The card was heavy stock, handwritten, and it said, in very good penmanship: *You have my full attention.*

I looked up. Dante was three rows ahead and to the left, and he did not turn around, but I could see the back of his neck and I knew he was counting on me reading it. I clicked my pen and wrote on the back of the card: *Then keep up.* I caught the bellhop on his way back up the aisle and handed it over with a twenty, and he gave me the tiniest wink, which, honestly, made my whole morning.

So there I sat, in a panel about dynamic pricing, holding a note from a man I had been circling for eleven years, with a lipstick heart drying in my notebook and a plan forming in the back of my head.

Because here is what Dante either knew or was about to find out. I do not do vague. If he wanted my full attention, he was going to get it, all of it, in a glass