Do Not Disturb (30 page)

“Yes,” he murmured. “It is. I’ve missed you.”

He was so close now that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her collarbone, and his voice had collapsed into a soft, husky whisper. The next thing she knew, his lips had parted as if to kiss her, and she instinctively closed her eyes and stood up on tiptoes to respond. But after two long seconds, the kiss failed to materialize. Opening her eyes, she saw to her fury that he had in fact stepped back and was waving to someone about fifty feet away.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he said, kissing her briskly on top of the head. “Hold that thought.” And just like that he disappeared to join his friend, leaving her standing there like an idiot.

The arrogant bastard! How could he embarrass her like that?

In fact, Lucas was every bit as reluctant to break off their encounter as she was. As well as wanting her physically, he loved the idea of pissing off Devon Carter by rekindling his affair with Lola. That’d teach the stuffed shirt to look down his patrician American nose at him. But the guy waving at him was the head of A&R at Sony, an important guest at the Herrick. He couldn’t simply ignore the man.

After the requisite five minutes of small talk, he turned to look for Lola again, but she’d gone.

“Damn it,” he muttered under his breath, wandering back to the house in search of her. Moments later he felt a female arm snake around his waist.

“What’s wrong, baby?” its owner purred. “Lost something?”

Tina Palmer must have only just arrived. In a full-length, tight black sequined dress and Marilyn Monroe makeup, she was overdressed enough to look borderline ridiculous. But there was still something very sexy about her, if you liked the whole brazen Anna Nicole vibe.

As a rule, Lucas didn’t. But Anton had told him to get close to Tina, and this was his chance. Besides, flirting with her was bound to enrage Honor, and that alone made it worth the effort.

“No, no,” he said, responding to her wandering arm with a sly squeeze of his own. “I’m a little tired, that’s all.”

“Worn out from making mincemeat out of my poor sister, I imagine,” said Tina.

Underneath his tux, Lucas could feel her fingers already starting to slip inside the waistband of his pants. Talk about a fast mover.

“I heard the show. But don’t worry.” She smiled lasciviously. “I don’t bear grudges. Anyway, Honor can take care of herself.”

“Indeed she can,” said Lucas bitterly. “Listen.” Pulling a business card out of his jacket pocket, he scrawled his cell phone number on the back and handed it to her. “I have to get back to the hotel now, I’m afraid. Business.”

“Business?” Tina pouted. “At this time of night?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Lucas. In fact, the only business he had right now was to catch up with Lola Carter before she gave up on him completely. But he wasn’t about to tell that to Tina.

“But please do give me a call, OK?” Lowering his arm, he allowed his hand to wander appreciatively over her ample buttocks. “I’d love to…you know. Sometime.”

Tina slipped the card into her Versace evening bag. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Ruiz,” she smiled knowingly, “you’ll be hearing from me again. You can bet on it.”

Five minutes later, Lucas finally caught up with Lola as she was climbing into a cab.

“Hey!” he called after her. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” she said frostily. “Like you care.”

“Scoot over,” said Lucas. Ignoring her scowl, he opened the door and shoved her farther along the backseat, then climbed in himself, shutting the door behind him. “Woodcock Lane, please,” he instructed the driver firmly.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” said Lola, turning her head away and staring out the window in a sulk.

Lucas responded by putting his hand on her thigh. “I think you do.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Lola, unconvincingly. The downy hairs on her legs were already prickling upward at his touch. “I saw you giving Tina slut-bitch Palmer the come-on back there.”

“Slut-bitch? Dear me.” Lucas leaned in closer. Lola still wasn’t looking at him, but she could hear the smile in his voice. “That’s not a very nice way to talk about a family friend, is it?”

“It’s not funny!” she snapped, spinning around to face him. “If it’s Tina you want, why don’t you go back there and fuck her? Stop wasting my time.”

“If it were Tina I wanted,” he said, edging his hand northward, “I would. But it isn’t. It’s you.”

“But I saw—”

“You saw me giving her my card,” said Lucas. “That was business. Believe it or not, I thought she might be able to help me build bridges with her sister.”

Lola didn’t believe it.

“
You
want to build bridges with
Honor
?” She laughed. “I’d say that’s gonna be a tall order after today’s massacre on NPR, wouldn’t you?”

Lucas shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about Honor. He wanted to get this gorgeous, desirable, desiring girl back into bed. Ideally her daddy’s bed. Devon was away for the weekend, and Lucas couldn’t think of any sweeter revenge for the condescending way he’d treated him than to take the guy’s daughter between his own starched Ralph Lauren sheets.

“Lola.” Murmuring softly into her hair, he finally allowed his wandering hand to slip beneath the silky fabric of her panties.

At first she jumped. But then her breathing slowed audibly and she leaned into him, her lips parting silently but tellingly at his touch.

The battle was won.

“Lovely Lola,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you, little one. It’s you that I want, I promise you. Only you.”

R
ELAX.
L
ET GO
of your arm.”

Honor’s fingers were so stiff they felt fossilized as the masseur pulled at each of them in turn.

“I am relaxed,” she insisted, through clenched teeth. “This is as relaxed as I get.”

“If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Miss Palmer, that’s the problem,” said the masseur, giving up on the fingers and pinning her forearm behind her back instead in a vain attempt to loosen up the latticework of knotted muscles across her shoulder blades. “You ought to be having a massage
daily
, not once a year.”

“Daily, huh?” said Honor, wincing with pain as his fingers kneaded her sore flesh. “Sounds nice. Maybe next lifetime, Gerard.”

This was the first time she’d taken advantage of the newly refurbished spa facilities at Palmers, complete with Moroccan plunge baths and a traditional hammam. Even now, midmassage and surrounded by burning incense sticks, with some ghastly, jangly, Zen-like Muzak wafting through the speakers, she couldn’t stop herself from focusing on the cracked tiles in the floor that needed fixing (already!) and wondering whether or not it would make more economic sense to split these large treatment rooms into two and hire more staff.

That was the thing about running a hotel. You could never switch off. Or, at least, Honor couldn’t.

Having said all that, this new masseur that she’d poached from the Georges V in Paris was doing a damn good job, and she could feel waves of tension leaving her body as his rough hands worked their magic.

It had been two weeks since her now-infamous radio head-to-head with Lucas, and Honor was still seething about it. She didn’t know what bothered her more: his comments about her father, his implied threat to expose her affair with Devon, or the way he’d insulted her about her looks. His “bigger dick than your boyfriend” comment now played over and over in her head whenever she was alone, like a whining, insistent child, demanding to be heard. How dare he imply she was less of a woman than Tina? Stung more than she cared to admit, she’d stopped by Barneys on her way back from the studio and splurged horribly on some floaty Marc Jacob dresses and a clinging, peach-colored pencil skirt for work. As soon as she got back to Palmers, still fired up, she’d thrown open her closet, pulled out thousands of dollars worth of pin-striped suits in her trademark black and gray and flung them unceremoniously into the trash.

The next day she’d almost had a panic attack, waking up to find she had nothing to wear but dresses. Plumping for a deep maroon empire-line sundress because it was simple and long enough to wear with flats, she could feel the stares of the Palmers staff burning into her back like lasers the moment she came downstairs and bolted into her office, blushing furiously.

Desperate for male affirmation, she waited hopefully for Devon to make some positive comment on her new look. He was meeting her that morning to help her plan the next steps in her PR war with Lucas. But when he arrived, he was so enraged about Lucas’s public rekindling of his relationship with Lola—after the Loeb party, the pair of them were the talk of East Hampton—he
barely seemed to notice Honor’s existence, never mind her wardrobe.

“I always knew he was a playboy, but even I didn’t have him down as a pedophile,” he ranted, pacing the office like a hungry cat. “I’ve put my foot down and stopped all Lola’s allowance until she agrees to stop seeing him. But that child is so damned stubborn.”

“Can’t think where she gets it from,” said Honor, raising an eyebrow. It had taken all her tact and patience to persuade him that playing the enraged Lord Capulet in all of this would only heighten the drama for Lola and fan the flames of her attraction.

“Come on, honey,” she said gently. “You remember what it was like to be eighteen and in love.”

“I most certainly do not,” said Devon. “When I was Lola’s age I was a hundred percent focused on my studies. And I respected my parents’ wishes like God’s law.” He shook his head sadly. “I just don’t know where Karis and I went wrong with those kids…”

Honor thought back to their conversation now, as Gerard worked his magic. She was fond of Devon’s rebellious daughter and shared his concerns about Lola getting mixed up with Lucas. But she also knew that the heavy-handed approach would be counterproductive. She loved Devon dearly, but even she felt he overdid the whole Victorian father thing at times—especially given that he himself was hardly the saintly family man he pretended to be.

In truth, Lola’s welfare wasn’t her only concern. She also had a firm eye on safeguarding her own secrets. Not wanting to panic Devon—he was already skittish enough about their affair—she hadn’t told him about Lucas’s implied threat at the radio station. But for the last two weeks she’d been a nervous wreck, waiting for him to spill the beans, either to Lola or—even worse—the press.

So far, though, it hadn’t happened. God knows why, but he had decided to keep his counsel. The last thing Honor wanted
was for Devon to wade in now, raising hell about him and Lola and pissing Lucas off so much he changed his mind.

Increasing the pressure of his thumbs, Gerard started kneading Honor’s glutes mercilessly. Breathing through the pain, she tried not to focus on the fact that this was probably the closest she’d come to a sexual experience all week.

Deception, like so many life skills, seemed to get better with practice, and the longer her affair with Devon continued, the more imaginative and resourceful they both became in finding ways and excuses to meet each other. The anguish of those first few months together seemed like a lifetime ago now. But the flip side was that the wild, uncontrollable passion of their early days had also gone, replaced by something calmer and steadier, something Honor told herself she much preferred but that at the same time left her with a bitter aftertaste of sexual frustration that she found increasingly hard to shake.

On the rare occasions when she voiced that frustration to Devon, he was dismissive. “I’m fifty-three, baby,” he’d say with a shrug. “Even if we lived together twenty-four seven, I wouldn’t want to do it all the time. I’m just not at that stage in my life anymore.”

He always seemed surprised when this nugget of information failed to comfort Honor.

Few people around her knew Honor well enough to notice how bad-tempered and strung out this dwindling of her sex life was making her. Unfortunately, Tina, who’d moved into a suite at Palmers for the season, was one of the few.

The tension that had been growing between the sisters for weeks had come to a head this morning over breakfast. “You know your problem?” Tina asked loudly. “You need to get laid.
That’s
your problem.”