Page 25 of A Taste of Paradise

She took a deep breath as the woman thanked her once again, and duly took off down the path towards the beach. Though it was obvious the boyfriend wasn’t too impressed. She’d arrange to pop by or deliver something to their room later by way of further apology so they wouldn’t be tempted to bad-mouth the place.

But in the meantime, crisis averted. Or one at least.

She then dug out her phone and sent a quick message to the beachside attendants, letting them know of the promises she had made and that they should make a suitable fuss of the couple, before pinging another to Lily asking her to call her back ASAP.

That much squared away, Erin turned her attention back to the pool and was relieved to see some of the housekeeping staff duly arrive with caution signs, which the pool attendants used to secure a wide perimeter around the terrace.

This would at least buy them some more time to figure out what to do.

‘Did you get hold of animal control?’ she asked the pool attendant approaching her again with an unreadable facial expression.

‘Yes. Good news and bad news …’ he said, and she prayed that he had a misplaced sense of humour.

‘Tell me the good news,’ she said, inwardly holding her breath.

‘They’re not venomous, or highly aggressive.’

Erin smiled as relief washed over her. ‘Great, so we can get them out?’

‘That’s the bad news. They are indeed a protected species. So we have to use the utmost care when handling them. Scooping them out with a net is apparently a no-no because it’s too stressful …’

Stressful for the snakes – or the staff?

‘So unless we can figure out another way,’ he continued, ‘we need to wait for the experts to come and deal with them.’

And how long would that take? Erin already knew how slowly things moved on the island and since the snakes weren’t a danger she couldn’t imagine animal control would be in any great hurry. But for the sake of The Palms’ reputation, their guests’ (and indeed her own) blood pressure, she needed them out of their pool – fast.

‘OK, let me think …’ She put her hand to her forehead, in an attempt to alleviate some of the pressure she felt mounting behind her eyes. Then thought again about the idea of maybe putting some kind of ramp into the water for the snakes to crawl out on their own. ‘Stay here and make sure to keep the pool hidden from any guests as best you can, OK? I have an idea.’

She hurried back through the double doors into the lobby only to collide hard with someone on the way out.

‘Woah, where’s the fire?’ Mack asked, standing back to look at her. ‘And why is the floor all wet?’

Seriously? Erin couldn’t believe that someone hadn’t yet called a cleaning team to mop up after the pool stampede. This day truly kept getting worse and worse.

‘Sorry, just dealing with something,’ she muttered, trying to appear unflappable in front of him, of all people.

‘Erin, how on earth did snakes end up in our main pool?’ the general manager, who’d suddenly materialised alongside her, demanded.

Damnit.

‘We’ll look into that later, Grant. Right now I’m trying to find a way to get them out of the pool without injuring them …’

Erin felt like throttling him for mentioning their emergency in front of any guest, much less an important corporate client like Daniel MacKenzie, but knew better than to show it. It was doubly frustrating too that not only was Grant late to the scene but didn’t have any solutions to add either.

‘Snakes? What kind of snakes?’ Mack asked, frowning.

‘I’m not sure. They’re very long, very black, and very … wriggly.’ Erin used all of her inner strength to prevent herself from visibly shuddering as she spoke.

‘Rat snakes, sounds like,’ he stated matter-of-factly. ‘Let me see them. If I’m right, they aren’t water creatures, so we need to get them out fast.’

Seems he and Grant were both very good at pointing out the obvious.

‘Thanks, but I can assure you that my staff are fully equipped to handle the situation,’ Erin told him, just as the sound of yelling filled the air once again.

All three headed back out to the pool, where now one of the attendants was jumping up and down in agitation.

‘Did you see how long that one’s tongue was?’ he cried, cringing.