Do Not Disturb (65 page)

Lucas, who’d sat back and watched in silent horror as this little drama unfolded, now shot Ben a “who are you kidding?” look.

“It’s OK,” said Sian, who was actually deeply shaken. “I’m fine. I should go.”

“You don’t have to.” The mark on her leg was already spreading, he noticed, and would no doubt soon morph into the deep plum shade she so often wore as eye shadow, which gave her pale face an even more ethereal, otherworldly beauty. Life would be so much simpler if only he didn’t want her so dreadfully much.

“I do,” said Sian, forcing a smile for his sake. “Really. I can see myself out.”

The front door slammed shut behind her, followed by a second slam from the bedroom door at the far end of the corridor. For a few seconds Ben just stood there, forlorn, like a little boy dumped on a station platform. “I’m going after her,” he said eventually, patting his various pockets frantically, looking for his car keys and only stopping when Lucas laid a hand on his shoulder.

“No you’re not,” he said firmly. “Bianca’s the one who needs you. You stay here and sort things out with her.”

Ben looked torn. “But Sian…what if she?…she mustn’t take that flight back to Russia. I’m serious, Lucas. What if she got killed? I’d never forgive myself.”

“Give me her address,” said Lucas. Ben looked dubious.

“For fuck’s sake, give me the girl’s address, all right? I promise to go easy, and I promise to keep her on the ground, at least for the time being.”

Grabbing a piece of paper from the desk, Ben scrawled something down and pressed it into Lucas’s hand.

“She lives with Lola Carter, you know,” he said. “You might want to take a bulletproof vest.”

“Thanks,” said Lucas grimly, nodding down the corridor in the direction of Bianca’s still-audible sobs. “So might you.”

Back at the apartment on Tite Street, Sian was relieved to find that Lola was out, no doubt staring doe-eyed across a candlelit table somewhere at Marti, who’d been staying with them again for the last few weeks. She truly couldn’t have faced Mr. and Mrs. Love’s Young Dream tonight, nor was she in the mood for talking things through, which was always Lola’s answer for everything.

Flinging herself down on her bed, still unmade from this morning, she pummeled her fists into the pillows and howled for a few minutes until she felt marginally better. Then she walked into the bathroom, splashed her face with a sink full of ice-cold water, half of which splattered down the front of her dress, and tried to marshal her muddled and depressing thoughts into some sort of order.

How the fuck had it all gone wrong tonight? She’d been so happy on the way over to Ben’s, armed at last with the breakthrough they’d both been hoping for. OK, so he might not love her, and he might be about to marry officially the most beautiful woman on the planet. But their work together, this story, had built a bond between them that was uniquely theirs. Anton Tisch, of all unlikely people, had brought her and Ben together. It was a closeness that she knew couldn’t last, but she’d cherished it all the more for that. And now it was gone. Just like that.

For all she knew Bianca might be at the police station right now, ruining everything. Spurred on, no doubt, by that shit-stirring motherfucker Lucas, her own personal bad penny.

“Open up!”

She was disturbed from her moping by a loud and very insistent knocking at the front door. Christ, it couldn’t be the cops already, could it? She hadn’t even begun to get her story straight.

“Just a minute.” Frantically scraping her unruly hair back into a bun and slipping her bare feet into slippers, she hobbled to the door. Her shin was still throbbing from where Bianca had clocked her one. Naturally Miss Fucking Accomplished at Everything turned out to be a black belt in friggin’ karate too. “I’m coming.”

Pulling open the door, she was equally shocked and enraged to see Lucas, who pushed past her and swaggered into the sitting room as though he owned the place.

“Lola here?” he asked, looking around.

“No,” said Sian furiously. “What the fuck—”

“Good,” Lucas cut her off. “We need to talk in private.”

“We sure as hell do not.” Sian looked murderous. “You have no business being here, and you know it. Why don’t you fuck off and leave me alone?”

“I knocked. You let me in,” said Lucas, with maddening nonchalance, picking up a glass paperweight from one of the side tables and examining it idly before setting it back down.

“I didn’t know who it was,” said Sian. “Obviously.”

“You shouldn’t have opened the door then, should you? Those the kind of survival skills you’re going to use in Azerbaijan, are they? With a bunch of lawless, crackhead rebels with Uzis stuffed under their trench coats? You won’t last a day.”

Suddenly too tired to argue, Sian retreated to her bedroom, climbed under the covers, and pulled the rumpled sheet up to her chin. Maybe if she simply ignored him, he’d give up and bugger off. But apparently not. Following her, Lucas closed the door behind him, calmly removed a pile of dirty clothes and underwear from the chair by her dressing table, and sat down, crossing his legs and looking at her with his head cocked to one side, in the manner of a psychiatrist assessing a new patient. Irrationally, Sian found herself wishing that she’d bothered to put makeup on earlier, or at least had the foresight to tidy up her pigpen of a room. Lucas looked ludicrously out of place in his Savile Row suit
and silk sunflower-yellow tie surrounded by her journalist-on-a-deadline squalor (complete with used tissues on the floor and old mug of tea growing mold on the windowsill), like a Hugo Boss model posing on a Baghdad bomb site.

“I have a suggestion for you,” he said coolly.

“Does it involve you dying? Or having your testicles surgically removed and bequeathed to the women of the nation in a pickle jar?” asked Sian, deadpan.

“Sweet, but no,” said Lucas. “It involves you making a much bigger splash with your story than you would do by simply selling it to one newspaper.”

“Oh, so now you want to help me with my story?” Sian gave a hollow laugh. “What happened to rushing off to the police with your pal Bianca? Over our law-abiding citizen phase now, are we? That was quick, even for you.”

“Look,” said Lucas. “You can bitch or you can listen. It’s your choice.” Sian was silent for a few seconds.

“Go on,” she said skeptically.

“Petra’s throwing a party next month to celebrate the Herrick being voted number one luxury hotel.”

“I know,” said Sian, with an unimpressed shrug. “So?”

“So she and Anton have invited half the world’s media to be there. I’m not just talking print press either, but TV, news crews, all the LA gossip shows like
Entertainment Tonight
and
Extra!
None of them give a shit about the hotel, obviously; they’re there for the celebrity guests. But it’s turning into one big circus. Now, if you could hijack that event,” he raised an eyebrow temptingly, “you’d have coverage beyond your wildest dreams. Here, the US, Asia…”

Sian allowed herself to imagine this for a moment. It was certainly an appealing fantasy. But it wasn’t long before reality and reason reasserted themselves.

“There’s no way,” she said. “Anton’ll have major security at that party, and that’s aside from all the personal heavies the stars’ll bring with them. It’ll be like Fort Knox.”

“I agree,” said Lucas. “I’m not saying it’d be easy. We’d need a lot of inside help, and someone on the ground out there to coordinate things. Someone with access.” Sian looked at him quizzically.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “You don’t give a shit about me.”

“Correct,” said Lucas.

“So what do you care what happens with my story? What’s in it for you?”

Lucas stood up and walked over to the window. Outside, the Victorian streetlamps glowed orange, illuminating kissing couples as they strolled home after dinner on the King’s Road. When it wasn’t raining, London could really be quite charming, especially on warm summer nights like this one.

“Anton set me up,” he said quietly. “He’s spent the last three years systematically trying to ruin me. He’s even backing Connor in this damn court case. I want revenge. I want to see his reputation shredded, the way he shredded mine. And I wouldn’t mind seeing Petra Kamalski brought down a peg or two either. We go back a long way.”

Sian could see the muscles of his back and shoulders tighten visibly beneath his suit jacket, and his left hand coiled itself unconsciously into a fist. She’d heard Lucas’s version of this sob story from Ben many times and wasn’t sure how much of it she believed. But there could be no doubting his anger. That was palpably genuine.

“So what are you saying?” she asked. “Do you have insiders at the Herrick who could help us?”

Lucas turned around. “I can probably call in a few favors, yeah. Petra pays her staff well, but she treats them like shit. I don’t imagine it’ll be too tough to find some bitter, disaffected soul to help us.”

“I don’t know,” said Sian. “I don’t like the idea of sharing information with some random bellboy we barely know. What’s to stop them from selling whatever we tell them to the highest bidder?”

“We don’t have to tell them anything material,” argued Lucas. “Come on, you’re the investigative journalist here. Surely you’re not above a little spin?”

But Sian wasn’t budging. “It won’t work,” she said. “It’s too complicated; there are too many wild cards. Besides, I can’t be in the Hamptons to pull it all together. I have to go back to Azerbaijan.”

“Forget that,” said Lucas, walking over to the bed and sitting down next to her, to Sian’s unspoken alarm. God, the man was pushy. “Ben’s right, it’s far too dangerous.”

“No, Ben’s wrong,” said Sian, starting to lose patience. Why was she even having this conversation with Lucas? “I need that information.”

“Then get it,” said Lucas. “There are other ways. You can stay in London and work on that from here. I’ll take care of things in the Hamptons.”

Sian wavered. He was so forceful, so sure of himself, it was hard not to get swept along. And though she’d die rather than admit it to him or Ben, she was in fact scared shitless about the thought of going back to meet the rebels on her own.

“What about your court case? Won’t that keep you in Europe?”

“Yeeeees,” Lucas admitted, acknowledging a snag in his argument for the first time. But the doubt was gone as soon as it had appeared, and with a eureka snap of his fingers he suddenly said: “Honor!”

“Excuse me?” said Sian.

“Honor Palmer. We should bring her in on this. She’d be the perfect person to manage things on the ground. She and I can work together when I’m there, and when I need to go to Europe—”

“Whoa, whoa there,” said Sian. “Have I missed something? Doesn’t Honor, like,
loathe
you?”

Lucas shook his head. “That’s just a front, because she wants me so badly. Women always get aggressive when they can’t handle their own desire.”

The arrogance was breathtaking. Sian opened and closed her mouth in wordless fury before finally managing a disbelieving, “My God, you are such an asshole.”

“One thing I would like you to do, if you have time,” said Lucas, ignoring the insult, “is to do a little digging into the Palmers fire.”

“I don’t have time,” said Sian, truthfully.

“Those bastards at the insurance company really did a number on Honor, and they won’t pay out until someone’s actually charged with arson,” Lucas went on, once again ignoring her objections. “The Hamptons police are a lazy bunch of doughnut eaters; they’re never going to find anything. But you’re obviously…good at this.”

She could see how much it pained him to bestow this compliment, and smiled. “Thanks.”

“Maybe you could, I don’t know…come up with something? Once you’ve got what you need on Anton.”

Again, Sian looked puzzled. “You want me to help Honor Palmer. Why?”

“Look, it’s not a big deal, OK?” snapped Lucas, defensive all of a sudden. “If you have time, that’s all. So what do you think?”

“About?”

“About holding off going to the papers? Ambushing this party?”

Sian was silent for a moment. The ridiculousness of her current situation had not escaped her. Here she was, lying in bed, casually chatting to the man she loathed most in the world about a plan so audacious and fraught with difficulties it would almost certainly see her ending up with egg on her face. But the combination of Lucas’s boundless confidence, his unexpected faith
in her abilities, and the tantalizing possibility of worldwide coverage for her story proved too much to resist.

“I think,” she said, grinning, “it’s a crazy idea. But what the hell. I’m in.”

Watching her face light up with excitement, Lucas realized for the first time what it was Ben saw in her. She’d always be too pale and scrawny for his taste. But there was a charisma about her, a combination of intelligence and courage, that could floodlight a stadium if she put her mind to it.

“Listen,” he said, fishing a Gitane out of his pocket and lighting it without asking her whether she minded. “There’s one other thing we need to talk about.”

“Oh? And what’s that?” she said, humoring him.

“Ben,” said Lucas. Inhaling deeply, he blew out a long stream of smoke through his nostrils.