Do Not Disturb (60 page)

In front of her was a thing of rare beauty, at least in her eyes: a wooden skeleton of a building, half finished on the west side but still open to the elements everywhere else, its slate-tiled roof just beginning to take shape beneath a blindingly bright April sun.

The great Palmers rebuild had been underway for ten weeks now. Sometimes, waking up in the little cottage she’d rented in town, her muscles aching from the previous day’s labor, she still found it hard to believe that it was really happening. That the dream that had seemed so utterly hopeless in Vegas was actually coming to fruition.

After her disastrous one-night stand with Lucas—an error of judgment that still haunted her daily—Honor’s luck had finally changed. First Fred Gillespie, bless his triply bypassed heart, had agreed to an interest-free loan of two hundred and fifty thousand to get the ball rolling, as he put it.

“Of course I’ll help you, kiddo,” he said, taking her hand between his own great bear paws over lunch at the Venetian.
“Your father was like a brother to me. And I know he may not always have shown it too well, but Trey loved you. If he’d still been in his right mind at the end, he’d never have behaved the way he did, leaving your trust so vulnerable.”

Honor was so choked, she burst into tears. The fiasco of her night with Lucas, on top of the stress of the last few months, had left her seriously tired and emotional. Fred’s kindness was just too much.

The quarter of a million he was offering was barely a drop in the ocean of what she needed, but his faith in her marked a turning point in her own thinking. How could she expect an outsider to invest, with no security beyond an insurance payout that now looked ever more unlikely, if she wasn’t prepared to lose the shirt from her own back?

As soon as she got back from the conference, she met with a bunch of contractors, hired one, and set them to work at once, blowing almost all of Fred’s money on their first retainer and initial materials. Knowing that if she didn’t raise more cash immediately she would lose everything, her next step was to meet with the mortgage company and come to an agreement for paying off her debts slowly that stopped just short of declaring herself bankrupt. After that, she put her old Boston bachelorette pad on the market and began systematically selling off every last asset, from stocks and premium bonds to valuable family paintings. With gut-wrenching regret, she even sold the jewelry her mother had left her as a keepsake—two valuable ruby bracelets and a topaz-and-diamond choker, so precious to her that she’d never even worn them once for risk of losing them.

“Are you quite certain, Miss Palmer?” the kind man at Christie’s in New York had asked her, watching her lovingly finger the stones as she handed them over. “I’m sure we can fetch a good price for them, but sentimental items like this…you may live to regret parting with them.”

I’m already regretting parting with them, thought Honor with a pang. All she had left of her mother now were some dog-eared photographs and few letters she’d gleaned from the chaos of Trey’s home office after he died. She tried not to think about Tina, lounging around getting stoned in Santa Fe while that blood-sucking cult bled her bank accounts dry. She must stay focused on Palmers—keep her eyes on the prize, as Trey always used to say. Besides, she reasoned with herself firmly, it was only jewelry, and no more part of her mother than Palmers had once been.

Depressingly, even after turning her entire life into one big yard sale, she was still a long way short of what she needed to finish the building project. Day to day, week to week, she lived on a knife-edge, watching her funds deplete, sucked into the black hole of construction far faster than she could replace them. Desperate, she swallowed her pride and allowed gossip and lifestyle magazines to write features on her. They all wanted to know about her relationship with Tina, who by now had achieved iconic pinup status similar to Pam Anderson’s as America’s favorite slut-turned-saint. Honor quickly learned the art of providing them with exclusive “new” information without actually revealing anything significant, and soon became a regular on the pages of
US Weekly
,
In Style
, and even European magazines like
Hello!
and
OK!
She tried to tell herself that it would all be good publicity for Palmers when it opened next year (please God let it open next year!) and that in any case she needed the money and had no other choice. But she still felt like a prostitute every time she saw airbrushed pictures of herself lounging on a couch looking pampered and privileged. They normally had her in floaty John Galliano dresses, holding a flute of champagne. What a joke! She seemed to spend most of her time these days in overalls or sweatpants, schlepping bricks and tiles around like a cart horse.

Not that she was complaining. Despite the back-breaking work and constant financial worry, coming on-site every morning
was a joy, and she wouldn’t have sacrificed her hands-on involvement for anything, however much Petra Kamalski might scoff. Whether looking at spreadsheets, arguing with suppliers, or getting down onto her hands and knees to inspect the damp proofing, this was Honor’s dream made real. She needed to be a part of it, to live it and breathe it like the oxygen that, for her, it was. All the old magic from her childhood—the Palmers magic—was still there. She could feel it in the air. But this time, Honor controlled it. She was the sorcerer, conjuring the building and the gardens to her will. Even now, in its half-built state, it was so fucking beautiful it made her want to cry.

The toughest times came at the end of the day, when she was forced to leave the magic behind and go home. It would be many months yet until she could move into the hotel. Until then, “home” was a quaint but impractical cottage smack-dab in the middle of town—impractical because there was nowhere near enough space for the mountainous piles of paperwork that the building project seemed to generate on an hourly basis and because there was no privacy. Many a morning Honor had woken to the sound of clattering downstairs and charged into the kitchen with the nearest blunt instrument only to find it was Mrs. Miggins from next door returning the cup of sugar she’d borrowed, or Joe, the site manager, letting himself in to look for some plans, or just in search of a cup of coffee. While it was nice to feel part of a community, and to feel that local people—Petra aside, of course—were rooting for her and for Palmers, Honor was discovering that you could definitely have too much of a good thing.

Last week, to her passionate relief, she’d received a phone call from her old bank manager and former family friend, Randy Malone.

“You’ve come a long way with your rebuild I see,” he told her warmly. “In the light of what you’ve achieved, and the investment already made, the bank might be prepared to reconsider
that loan you asked for a few months back. Why don’t you pop in for a chat?”

On cloud nine, Honor skipped into town to meet him, but her euphoria soon vanished when she heard the rate of interest they were offering.

“That’s daylight robbery!” she gasped indignantly, the figures swimming before her eyes. “You’ve known me since I was born, Randy. How can you even think of ripping me off like that?”

“It’s a competitive rate, Honor,” the old man insisted sanctimoniously. “If you’d prefer an equity partner, by all means go and look for one. But I think you may find it harder than you anticipate. Hotels are always a high-risk proposition, especially when you’ve got one as successful as the Herrick already established up the road. All commercial real estate’s looking very soft right now.”

Not as soft as your backbone, thought Honor, mutinously. But she desperately needed the money. With a loan this size she could guarantee finishing the construction on time. She couldn’t afford to refuse, and they both knew it.

At least she could enjoy the small comfort of knowing that Luxe America, the grand project Lucas had been so insufferably arrogant about in Vegas, had yet to get off the starting blocks. Bogged down in a complicated, multinational lawsuit with Connor Armstrong (funded, or so it was rumored, by Anton Tisch), he and his new American partner were forbidden to start work until the case was settled. Crushed under a pile of injunctions fatter than the Koran, they had no choice but to sit on their hands for the foreseeable future.

Lucas’s enforced absence from East Hampton was a bonus for Honor, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t on her mind. Ever since Vegas she’d been plagued by flashbacks of their night together. She tried hard to focus on the negative: his arrogance the morning after, how dismissive he’d been of her plans to rebuild Palmers. But the physical memory of his touch still haunted her.
More than once she’d woken in the middle of the night, after a particularly erotic dream, feeling so frustrated that she’d had to throw on her gym shorts and go for a run just to get it out of her system.

Reaching the end of the strip of turf, she switched off the rickety old weed-whacker and turned around to admire her handiwork. Not bad, especially considering that the closest she’d come to manual labor growing up was handing her dirty laundry to the maid. Petra and her cronies could make fun of her all they liked. Honor didn’t care. When this place was finished, they’d all be eating their words. Trendy, flash-in-the-pan hotels like the Herrick always burned themselves out in the end. That was the nature of the beast—no one place could remain the It-spot forever. However high-end they were, and however hard they tried to differentiate themselves, the Tischens were a chain. So were the Luxes, whatever Lucas might claim. Only Palmers was a oneoff. Unique. Only Palmers had the magic.

It was hard to define what made a hotel a classic. Even Honor wasn’t sure she could put it into words. All she knew was that whatever alchemy it took, the Palmers of her grandfather’s day had had it in bucketloads.

And she vowed that, by this time next year, her version was going to have it too.

Walking back to her hotel room in the sweltering, ninety-degree heat, Sian felt the weight of the world on her bony, sunburned shoulders.

She was in Grand Cayman, on the last leg of an exhausting paper trail that might or might not throw more light on Anton Tisch’s links with the corrupt Azerbaijani government. Right now, unfortunately, her money was on the latter option. Or rather, Ben’s money, seeing as that was what she was spending.

The last three months had been the most exciting, hardworking, and frustrating of her life. Tisch was a uniquely compelling subject, and unraveling the murky depths of his past had rapidly morphed from a professional interest into a deeply personal obsession. Regularly putting in eighteen-hour days, which often involved skipped meals, she’d now reached the point where she even dreamed about Anton at night, his pale, waxy, emotionless face competing with Ben’s freckled, broken-nosed loveliness for her unconscious’s attention.

But as driven as she was, she constantly seemed to be moving one step forward and two steps back. An unexpected source would suddenly pop up from nowhere, providing her with the name and address of one of Anton’s underage playthings, then she’d travel halfway across Europe to discover that the girl was too drugged out of her mind to make a statement. Unsolicited letters, hinting darkly at possible involvement with the Russian Mafia and ex-KGB underworld, had Sian buying a plane ticket to St. Petersburg, only to find that her British Press Association accreditation wasn’t recognized and she was denied access to even the most basic documentary evidence. Other letters, threatening letters, had also started hitting her and Lola’s doormat with depressing regularity. Sian told Ben about the first one, from some illiterate Eastern bloc hood with an overactive imagination and a well-developed knife fetish. But Ben had overreacted so massively, threatening to pull the plug on the whole story if she put her personal safety at risk, that she’d kept mum about the rest of them.

The frustrations of the investigation were nothing, however, compared to the torture of working with Ben. As the weeks rolled by and the case against Anton built, Sian spent more and more long evenings over at his apartment, poring over documents and planning the next prong of attack. At the beginning, Bianca had taken off and left them to it. But lately, perhaps sensing the longing that poured out of Sian like water through a sieve and
wanting to guard her territory, she’d taken to hanging around, even taking a nominal interest in the story herself. Never anything less than physically perfect, she lolled on the couch next to Ben in her skinny-rib sweaters and spray-on fucking jeans, resting a flawless manicured hand on his thigh in a gesture of casual possessiveness that made Sian want to leap up and bite her, like a snake. Of course, she felt desperately ashamed of her hostility. Bianca was so self-evidently a good and loving person, and much more deserving of Ben than she was. But she couldn’t help it.

Like a horror movie she couldn’t switch off, she played every glance, touch, and gesture over and over in her mind, analyzing Ben’s responses to Bianca and to her with the obsessive precision of a microbiologist poring over a single cell. Often she thought she noticed him distancing himself from Bianca, withdrawing eye contact or shifting positions when she came and sat next to him. Occasionally, he even seemed to look lingeringly at Sian herself, or to jump with the same high-voltage shock that she did when their hands accidentally brushed against each other. But perhaps this was just wishful thinking, in both instances? His wedding to Bianca, scheduled for this August, was still very much on. And despite numerous opportunities, he hadn’t made the slightest pass at Sian in the twelve long weeks they’d been working together.