Do Not Disturb (21 page)

“No more high school jerks,” she told her reflection sternly, slathering on a big dollop of moisturizer and willing herself to
feel better. In an hour’s time she’d have to play the dutiful daughter in front of two hundred of her parents’ dullest East Hampton friends, so she had to get her shit together.

From now on, she would only date college guys. Period. Someone from Harvard College, or the law school even. That should at least make her dad happy.

Things between Lola and her father were still not good. Devon might have won the battle to enroll her in St. Mary’s and steamroll her into taking a bunch of science courses that bored her to tears, but Lola still hadn’t given up her dreams of becoming a designer. They fought about her future constantly. Unbeknownst to Devon, she’d already made formal applications to a bunch of fashion schools and sent them off in secret. Man, was he was going to go ape-shit when he found out. But so far she’d done a good job of hiding all the brochures and paperwork. And at least breaking up with Bryan would score her a few advance points in her dad’s good books. Devon had hated him from day one.

Wrapping her green bathrobe around her shoulders, she padded back into her bedroom and opened the blinds. It was only half past five, but the sky was already getting dark. Right now it was the sort of bruise-blue color that Lola loved. She’d tried many times to capture it in a silk dye—how great would it be to have a full-length evening gown that color?—but had never quite gotten it right.

“Knock, knock?”

Karis, immaculate in a white Givenchy jacket and navy flared trousers, slipped into her room carrying a tray laden with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on toast, Lola’s all-time favorite snack.

“I thought you might be hungry,” she said, smiling, setting down the tray on the end of the bed. “How’re you feeling, honey?”

Both of Lola’s parents had been in bizarrely good moods lately. Her dad had been practically skipping around the house since she arrived, chipper as a lottery winner—and that was
before he heard about Bryan. And her mom, who could normally be counted on to get drunk and depressed on her own birthdays, seemed giddy with excitement about tonight’s party. Especially since the guy who was building some big new hotel in town, this Spanish dude everyone was talking about, had agreed to come. Personally, Lola couldn’t see the big deal. It wasn’t like the guy was Johnny Depp or anything. But this was the first social engagement he’d accepted since coming to East Hampton, and her mom clearly viewed it as a major coup.

“I’m fine.” Lola took a suspicious bite of the toast. “Do I have a terminal illness that no one’s told me about?”

“What? Of course not.” Karis looked shocked. “Why would you say a thing like that?”

Lola smiled. Her mother could be terribly literal sometimes.

“I was kidding.” The eggs were delicious. Sitting down cross-legged on the bed, she set about demolishing them in earnest. “You’re being awfully nice to me, that’s all.”

“Well, you’ve just been through a breakup. I know how tough that can be.” Had she OD’d on Doctor Phil or something? All this concern was seriously out of character.

“But I do have some news that’ll cheer you up,” Karis beamed. “Guess who’s just turned up downstairs?”

“Brad Pitt?” said Lola hopefully.

“Better,” said her mother. “Nicky. He managed to get a flight out after all. Isn’t that terrific?”

“Mmmm.” Lola nodded through a mouthful of toast and rolled her eyes sarcastically. “Terrific.”

Great. Just when she’d thought her weekend couldn’t get any worse, her dipshit brother had to show up. He was bound to give her a hard time about Bryan, in between bouts of sucking up to their mom like a leech.

“Who else is coming?”

“Oh, everyone!” gushed Karis. “Well, everyone who’s anyone, let’s put it that way. Lucas Ruiz, as I told you…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Lola, bored. “And?”

“Oh, darling,” Karis waved her hand distractedly, “I don’t know. Do you really want me to list them all? The Sullivans, the Meyers, Antonia Dickinson, Reverend Jameson and his wife.”

Lola took another big bite of toast.

“Anyone under the age of, like, ninety?”

“Don’t be snarky,” said Karis on autopilot. “Honor Palmer’s coming. She’s young, and fun.”

“I guess,” said Lola.

She’d liked Honor the few times they’d met last summer. The girl didn’t take any shit from anyone.

“Hey,” her eyes lit up mischievously, “d’you think Honor and this Lucas guy will have a big catfight at the table? She must hate him, right, setting up shop so close to Palmers?” Scraping up the last of the eggy crumbs, she pushed her empty plate to one side.

Karis shrugged. “I don’t see why she should. Competition’s a healthy thing in business. But I imagine she’s as curious about him as the rest of us.”

“Who’s ‘us’?” said Lola. “I’m not curious. At all.”

She loved her mom, but she felt sorry for anyone whose life was so boring that they considered meeting a hotel manager to be a major event. The most she hoped for from this evening’s party was that it would take her mind off Bryan for an hour or so. Plus it was a chance to get dressed up, and she’d had precious few of those since her incarceration at St. Mary’s.

“Suit yourself,” said Karis, not unkindly, smoothing down the creases in her pants as she got up to leave. “But tonight is my birthday, and it’s a celebration, OK? Don’t let some idiot boy ruin it for you, or the rest of us.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” said Lola with feeling. “I won’t. I’ve practically forgotten all about him already.”

Two hours later, Lucas was sitting in his parked truck in the Carters’ driveway, tilting the rearview mirror while he adjusted the knot on his tie.

“Give me a second, OK?” he asked the impatient-looking valet hovering by the open driver’s door.

He could have strangled Lucy, his assistant, for accepting tonight’s invitation on his behalf. She’d only been working for him a week, and he needed the help desperately, but one more fuckup like this and she’d be out on her ear.

East Hampton was a small town, and Lucas had already heard the whispers—that the local hostesses were starting to take offense at his refusal to accept social invitations. He’d even overheard a conversation in the newsstand yesterday in which one woman had described him to her friend as a recluse.

What did these people want from him, for God’s sake? Couldn’t they see that he had a fucking mountain to climb at the Herrick? That in the few snatched hours he got to spend away from work, all he wanted to do was sleep? Or perhaps, if he was feeling really adventurous, crack open a beer and collapse on his couch in Liberace Cottage in front of a decent porno?

Thankfully, things had finally started speeding up on-site. The foundations were in, and three days ago Lucas had watched gleefully as the first steel load-bearing beams sprang up out of the ground like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Yesterday he’d made a rare trip into Manhattan for a presentation at Dean Roberts’s office, where he saw a computer-generated mock-up of the enormous, curved, ecclesiastical arc of glass that was to form the core of the Herrick’s facade. Personally Lucas thought it quite beautiful, like the bow of a ship. But if the general whispers he’d picked up from the locals so far were anything to go by, he expected most of them would disagree. Anything that wasn’t eighteenth-century weatherboard counted as a hideous modern monstrosity in their book. He was sure to be dragged over the coals tonight,
with every neighborhood busybody and his wife grilling him about the building works. Frankly, he could have done without it.

The only silver lining to tonight’s cloud was the prospect of at last meeting Honor Palmer in the flesh. When he’d first arrived, he’d confidently expected her to turn up at the site and introduce herself, out of curiosity if nothing else. But no, Her Majesty had maintained an infuriating, regal lack of interest from the start. Well, screw her. When the interview he’d just done with American
Vogue
came out next month, she’d have to sit up and take notice. By a great stroke of luck, an old friend of Lucas’s from his Ibiza days was deputy features editor there now and had been happy to do a straightforward promo piece on the Herrick as the new, hip hotel in the Hamptons. Miss High and Mighty Palmer was about to discover that the power of the press worked both ways.

“Sir.” Somehow the valet managed to make the word sound like an insult. “We do have people waiting behind you. Perhaps you could take care of that inside?” He glanced disdainfully at Lucas’s tie.

Climbing down from the truck’s cab, Lucas towered over him like a brooding Spanish Goliath. “Listen to me, you snooty little shit.” The valet swallowed nervously. “If I want to take a moment to fix my tie, then that’s what I’m going to do. Would you tell those gentlemen to hurry it up?” He gestured to the pair of grumbling old buffers in the Bentley Continental behind him. “I don’t think so. And you know why not? Because they’re white, that’s why. And I am Spanish.”

“Sir, I can assure you that’s not the case,” the valet mumbled, backing away as Lucas drew even closer. “Your being Hispanic…”

“I am not Hispanic!” Lucas roared. “I’m Spanish. Not that I’d expect you to know the difference. Maybe you think I should be the one in that uniform. Huh? Is that it?” He grabbed at the guy’s lapels but then abruptly released him. “Ah, forget it,” he
muttered, straightening his tie again for good measure. “You’re not worth it.”

Ignoring the open-mouthed stares of the other arriving guests, he walked calmly up the steps to the house—or estate, as people here pretentiously insisted on calling every decent-size property. In fairness, the Carter place was almost grand enough to warrant the title. Not that it was ostentatious or in any way flash. Quite the opposite. Everything about the house reeked of old money, from the understated white clapboard facade to the original Victorian gas lamps lining the driveway. Even the family’s cars were distinctly low-key—a Jeep Cherokee and a BMW convertible that had seen better days—compared to the Ferraris, Bentleys, and Aston Martins littering the driveway. Devon Carter could clearly have afforded a fleet of Ferraris if he wanted them. But that was the point. He didn’t.

As he walked through the front door, a maid relieved Lucas of his coat and led him down an apparently endless corridor toward a crescendoing buzz of voices at the rear of the house. Four years at the Ecole Hôtelière had given Lucas an expert eye for interiors, and he appraised Mrs. Carter’s decor as he ambled along: simple and uncluttered with lots of white wood and enormous bunches of freesias everywhere, it was exactly what he would have expected in a wealthy Boston family’s vacation home. A little too feminine for his personal taste, perhaps. But undeniably classy.

“The party’s in the drawing room, through there on your left,” the maid informed him, a little frostily Lucas felt, before walking off. He watched her go, an ugly girl with drooping shoulders and pimples struggling to break through her thick makeup. He wondered what had possessed Devon Carter to employ her, before the thought struck him that it was probably Mrs. Carter who made the hiring decisions at home. No doubt she didn’t want some tart in a maid’s uniform making her look bad.

“You must be Lucas!” Right on cue, the drawing room door swung open and a very pretty, only marginally over-the-hill blonde opened her arms wide, greeting him like an old friend and kissing him on both cheeks in the European fashion.

“Mrs. Carter.” He smiled. If she weren’t so uptight, he decided, she could be quite sexy. “Thank you so much for inviting me. I must say, it was unexpected.”

Though hardly short of social invitations—they’d been falling from the sky like unwanted confetti since the week he arrived—the last person Lucas had expected to hear from was the wife of Devon Carter. Devon had been by far the most vocal of the Herrick’s many opponents on the planning committee and was a paid-up member of the Palmers’ Old Guard, Modernism-Is-Evil squad.

“Unexpected? Goodness me, what nonsense!” Karis let out a tinkling little laugh. “You’re the hottest ticket in town, Mr. Ruiz, don’t you know that? Our very own international man of mystery. Although,” she wagged her finger at him teasingly, “I’m afraid there are quite a few people here tonight who want to have a word with you about that glass…thing you’re building.”

Here we go, thought Lucas. The barbed comments were starting already. On second thought, he was going to fire Lucy for putting him through this.

“I’m afraid I’m strictly off duty tonight, Mrs. Carter. No talking shop.”

“Please,” Karis squeezed his hand. “Call me Karis. You’ll make me feel old otherwise.”

“Karis.” He repeated the word in his slow, knee-weakening Spanish accent, throwing in a wink for good measure that made his hostess glow with pleasure.

“Let the poor fellow catch his breath, darling, before you start haranguing him.”

“Devon, there you are. This is—” Spinning around, Karis looked thoroughly put out at the interruption.

“I know who he is,” said Devon.

The man who stepped forward to shake Lucas’s hand was older than he’d pictured him and much more distinguished, with graying hair and the sort of deep voice and firm grip one associated with captains of industry or senior military officers. He was good-looking, if you liked the whole silver-fox roué senator thing, but stiffer than a day-old corpse. And his superior, snobbish noblesse oblige manner was instantly off-putting.