Do Not Disturb (31 page)

They were in the middle of the Palmers dining room, a light, oak-paneled former ballroom filled with tables dressed with white linen cloths and offset by gleaming silver jugs overflowing with
white-scented stocks, lilies, and Michaelmas daisies. Around them, the great and the good were busily tucking in to their buttermilk pancakes and fresh-fruit compotes, pretending not to listen.

When they sat down, Honor had made the mistake of making a critical remark about Tina’s ultralow-cut, ass-hugger jeans; that was one snide comment too far. Tina was sick to death of her big sister’s assumption that her dress sense, love life, or indeed any aspect of her life, was any of her goddamned business. Honor resented the fact that while she worked her fingers to the bone trying to keep Palmers going, Tina seemed content to spend her days swanning around the pool in a series of ever-raunchier bikinis and her evenings flirting with every rich or powerful man who crossed her path. Including the hated Lucas.

“Keep your voice down,” said Honor.

“No. Why should I?” Tina was on a roll. “You’re so uptight right now, you could be sponsored by Midol.”

“Jesus, T,
stop
it,” Honor hissed, blushing despite herself. “People are staring.”

“Get over yourself. If they’re staring, it’s at me, not you,” said Tina, flipping back her perfectly coiffed blonde hair. Even at this time of the morning, she looked every inch the sex bomb in the J-Lo jeans Honor had so objected to and a skintight, hand-embroidered Fred Segal tee. Honor, by contrast, sported deep shadows under her eyes after a series of late nights and looked thoroughly washed out by the slate-gray halter-neck top and skirt that had seemed so ethereal and womanly on the rack at Barneys. She could have used a year of sleep, or at the very least an IV of coffee.

“Seriously,” said Tina, pushing the point, although she did mercifully lower the volume a little. “When did you last have sex?”

“None of your business,” snapped Honor, adding recklessly: “Recently, OK?”

She hated it when Tina was right. Luckily it didn’t happen that often.

“Recently? Really?” Tina frowned, surprised. “With who?” Then, clapping her hand over her mouth in an exaggerated rendition of surprise, she gasped, “Oh my God!” Clearly her acting style owed a lot to the reruns of
Melrose Place
she watched endlessly on TV. “It’s Lucas, isn’t it?”

“What’s Lucas?” said Honor, testily. “What are you talking about?”

“This whole feud between the two of you,” said Tina, with the look of someone who’s just solved a particularly troublesome crossword clue. “It’s gotten you all fired up. Underneath all that hostility, you’re hot for him, aren’t you? You slept with him in New York! Admit it!”

“I will not admit any such thing,” said Honor. “We did not sleep together, and I do not find him even remotely attractive. Nor would you if you knew him like I do.”

“Bullshit,” said Tina, warming to her theme. “OK so maybe you want him, but he’s not biting, and that’s what’s driving you crazy. Huh?” She was laughing by this point. “C’mon. Am I getting warmer?”

“No, you are not getting warmer!” said Honor furiously. “You are fucking arctic, is what you are. How can you say that to me? Do you know…do you even have any conception of how hard I’ve worked to reestablish this place?”

She waved her arm around the packed breakfast room, where fifty pairs of eyes turned guiltily away and back to their breakfasts.

“I don’t mind competition, as long as it’s a fair fight. But that…man,” she spat out the word with disgust. “The lies he’s told about our family! And it’s not just that. He’s sexist. He’s arrogant. He’s common as muck. I wouldn’t sleep with Lucas Ruiz if he was the last man on this earth, and if you can’t see that then you’re even more stupid than you look in those ridiculous pants.”

“Wow.” Tina shook her head slowly. It was fun to have Honor on defense for once. “Talk about protesting too much.”

“Miss Palmer.”

The masseur’s voice brought Honor back to the present with a jolt.

“If you’d like to turn over, I can begin work on your abs.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure, Gerard,” she groaned.

He was holding up a towel as a makeshift screen and modestly averting his eyes to allow her to flip over without having to show her breasts. A big, stocky, heavy-featured guy—the giggling gaggle of beauticians at the spa had already nicknamed him Gerard Depardieu—he was not at all Honor’s usual type. But to her horror, she found herself fantasizing that he would drop the towel, climb on top of her, and fuck all the tension out of her frustrated body, right then and there.

Damn Tina.

And damn fucking Devon.

Why was he never there when she needed him?

Ben Slater picked his way along the beach, trying desperately to suck in his flabby stomach and wishing he’d taken Tammy’s advice and booked himself a few hours in a tanning salon before he flew out here. As far as he could tell, the average age of the blokes staying at the Herrick was about nineteen and a half, and most of them looked like professional surfers, tanned and buff and with ridiculously macho names like Chip or Chuck and a body mass index somewhere in the minus numbers.

And that was just the white guys.

Ben’s skin, by contrast, hadn’t seen daylight since his Easter ski trip to Val d’Isère, and then it was only his face and forearms that had caught the sun, leaving lingering tan lines at his neck and elbows that only accentuated his general pallor elsewhere. He felt like an unpleasantly overgrown larva that had crawled out from under a rock and was making all the beautiful people lose their appetites—or would be, if any of them ate anything.

Strolling by the beach volleyball nets, he smiled tentatively at a Cindy Crawford lookalike in a red bikini. She was limbering up on the sand before her match, like her girlfriends, arching her body in a sort of yoga-meets-porn way that seemed to Ben to be positively begging for attention. Yet she returned his smile with a “fuck off” look so frosty he almost felt like he’d molested her.

He’d mentioned this phenomenon to Lucas last night.

“American girls are weird,” he said, taking a philosophical sip of his third beer at the Herrick’s Japanese-themed bar. “Every time you try to start a normal conversation with them, they shoot you down. But five minutes later and there they are hanging off every word of some bragging wanker in a Ferrari telling them how much his last year’s bonus was in every bloody currency. What’s that about?”

Lucas laughed. “You have to be forceful here,” he said. “The girls don’t understand the whole reticent, understated British thing. If you’re successful, they expect you to shout it from the rooftops.”

“I’m not reticent,” said Ben indignantly. “I’m completely bloody up for it! I just don’t like talking about money, that’s all. It’s tacky. Aren’t these birds interested in anything else?”

“Sure,” said Lucas, waving to a pair of
Playboy
-perfect blonde twins giggling at the other end of the bar. “Fame. And enormous dicks.”

Ben stared down at his beer morosely. “Great. Well, I’m fucked then, aren’t I?”

“Or not,” said Lucas drily, “as the case may be.”

“It’s all right for you,” Ben grumbled. “You’ve got the lovely Lola. You don’t need to flirt around.”

When Lucas had told him over the phone that he was dating a teenager, Ben’s disapproval was palpable. But now that he’d met Lola, he felt confident she was mature enough to hold her own. She was feisty and funny, a good match for Lucas. He liked her a lot.

“I’ve told you,” said Lucas, downing the remnants of his own drink and ordering another, “Lola and I aren’t serious. It’s just a casual summer thing.”

Ben frowned. “I hope she sees it that way, mate.”

Lucas hoped so too, especially as Anton was on his case again about getting intimate with Tina Palmer. The Herrick was going great guns, but Anton clearly considered Palmers’ continued survival as some sort of personal affront—a chink in the formerly foolproof Tischen business plan. He wouldn’t be happy until the great old hotel was on its knees, and he remained weirdly convinced that Tina held the key to its downfall.

Privately, Lucas wasn’t sure what bagging Tina was going to achieve, besides winding up Honor and appeasing his boss. Still, he could think of worse assignments. And Lola had been getting a bit clingy recently. It was probably time he rocked the boat a little.

Continuing his walk along the beach, Ben’s thoughts turned back to Lola. It was obvious she worshipped the ground Lucas walked on, just like every other woman he’d dated. But beneath all the teenage rebellious bravado, she was actually a sweet kid. He hoped she wasn’t going to get too badly burned.

The farther he got along the public beach, the more the crowds began to thin. It was another gloriously hot day, with the sun bouncing off the ocean like so many fireflies and a cloudless,
kingfisher-blue sky. But despite the undeniable natural beauty of the place, there was something about the Hamptons that Ben didn’t really like. It was all a bit too precious and dollhousey for his taste.

The Herrick itself was an impressive building, and with an objective eye he could see that the architects and interior designers had fulfilled their brief thoughtfully and with flair. All that glass gave it incredible light on every level, and the myriad fountains and water features, simple bamboo and teak furniture, and pervasive Oriental scent of lotus flowers were undeniably calming. But, though he wouldn’t dream of saying as much to Lucas, he still felt the hotel lacked soul.

Palmers, on the other hand, was much more his cup of tea. Classy, welcoming, but not over-the-top cutesy, he could quite see why it had such a unique reputation, and the building itself was gorgeous, as stately as any Southern gentleman’s estate with its wood porches, stone fireplaces, and wisteria-clad white walls. He was approaching its private beach club now, with its striking blue-and-white-striped sun umbrellas and the waiters all dressed in white, except for the dark blue piping on their blazers. They looked like they’d just come from Henley Regatta. More English than the English, but then New Yorkers all seemed to love that.

Ben knew about Lucas’s feud with Honor, of course. The whole world seemed to know about it by now. Lucas would eat him for breakfast if he caught him now, sticking his head over the fence to get a better look at his archrival’s grounds. But his curiosity got the better of him, and a few moments later, he was very glad it had.

There, standing by the poolside among the snoozing, elderly guests, picking up dirty towels, was a girl with the most incredible legs Ben had ever seen. Without thinking, he started looking for a gap in the rickety wooden fence and, finally finding an appropriately weak-looking spot, set about clambering over it toward her.

“Er, excuse me. Can I help you?”

The skinny, obviously gay head waiter who accosted Ben looked as though he could happily have replaced the word “help” with “castrate.”

“This is private property.”

“I know,” said Ben, blushing. He had one leg inside the Palmers compound and the other stuck awkwardly through the slats of the fence—not the most dignified of positions for one of the wealthiest, most successful financiers of his generation. “Sorry. I, er…I’m meeting someone here actually,” he blushed. “For lunch.”