At the Billionaire’s Wedding (5 page)

“Partner?” Harry raised his brows. “What kind of partner?”

“Valerie, my partner in Luxe Events. She’ll be coming to join me here nearer to the wedding.” Harry looked gratified. “Assuming I decide to recommend Brampton to Miss Sparks and Mr. Austen.”

“What can I do to persuade you?”

“Is it your job to persuade me?”

“For the moment, yes. On the financial side Mr. Austen has been conducting his negotiations with the man of business for the Brampton Estates. I’m here to answer your practical questions.”

“Like where’s the Internet?”

“I expect to have service restored by tomorrow morning.” He smiled winningly, but Arwen resisted the urge to be won. Eight in the morning was far too early to be lusting after muscles. And twinkling blue eyes should never affect one’s decisions. Time to get tough and ask some hard questions.

Arwen knew how to ask the questions he’d rather not answer. By four o’clock, Harry felt like he’d been put through a wringer. On the plus side, the telephones were working, though not the broadband. It was time to call in reinforcements. He escaped to the estate office, put his feet up on the desk and punched numbers into the thankfully functional phone.

“Mark? It’s Harry. I need you to come to dinner.”

“Tonight? I love you but I need a bit more of incentive before I make a two-hour drive, especially when I have a hot date.”

“You have to come and impress Duke Austen’s New York wedding planner.”

Mark whistled. “That would be a coup. Those Internet billionaires are vulgarly extravagant, with an emphasis on the extravagant, just the way we like our customers. The press are mad about them so it’ll be great publicity. What seems to be the problem?”

“She’s mad about Brampton, but she’s a bit worried about the level of service at the hotel. I need you to reassure her.”

“Tell her the truth,” Mark said impatiently. “That the best hotel manager in London has been bribed to leave Claridges’s and take over the job.”

“I did, but he doesn’t start for three months.”

“Since you aren’t planning to open for four, that’s about right.”

Harry coughed. “I might have told her we could host this affair a month from now.”

Mark’s laugh carried the same disbelief with which he’d greeted the news that ten-year-old Harry had a crush on the headmaster’s wife. “You’ve lost your mind. You don’t even have a commercial kitchen license.”

“I’ll see if I can hurry up the inspectors.” Hopefully he’d have better luck with the Food Safety Department than with the telephone people. “She already understands that our kitchen staff isn’t in place and she’ll have to use a caterer. It’s guest comfort that concerns her. I told her our brilliant temporary manager comes to us from the Delaville Group.” A perfectly true statement. Mark had spent all his university vacations learning the business from the ground up at his family’s international chain of luxury boutique hotels. He had a little money and a lot of expert advice invested in the conversion of Brampton House to luxury resort.

“Did you mention that he is your oldest and about to be former best friend?”

“I knew I could count on you. You can get away for a week or two.” He could hear Mark grinding his teeth when he told him the dates.

“I’ll have you know, my darling, that I was planning to spend my holiday in the south of France soaking up sun with the beautiful people. If I save your cute arse this time, will you promise me sex?”

“Anything but that. I’ve been trying to be gay for you since prep school and it just won’t take. You’ll have to make do with Nanny.”

“I’ve been trying to be straight for Nanny since the first time I came to Brampton, but no dice. She doesn’t fancy me. If I agree to get into my fast German car and drive to your rescue, promise me she isn’t cooking dinner tonight.”

“Arwen doesn’t like Nanny’s food.”

“I like her already.”

“So I booked a table for three at the Preposterous Pineapple. Eight o’clock.”

“Oh God, why? Why not The Bull’s Head?”

“Because Ted the landlord always calls me the Honorable Harry in that tiresome way. It won’t even occur to Sheila and Carol to blow my cover.”

Mark laughed. “Let me get this straight. Miss Arwen the elf doesn’t know you are the son and heir to Lord Melbury and the owner of Brampton House?”

“I told you about those ghastly people who came for shooting and kept calling me Lord Harry and one of the wives kept groping me and crept into my room in the middle of the night. After that I told everyone in the estate to just call me Harry—not that they don’t anyway—or Mr. Compton if strictly necessary. I think Miss Arwen regards me as His Lordship’s odd job man and I’m perfectly fine with that.”

“And you want to be loved for yourself. You’re such a romantic.” Mark knew him far too well. “What’s she like?”

“Very bossy. Also pretty as a picture, sexy as hell, and frighteningly clever.”

“Darling, she sounds just your type. Does she lust after your brutish proletarian muscles?”

“God, I hope so. No, I don’t, not really. This is business and too important to be cocked up.”

“Did you really say cocked up? You’ve been in the country too long, Harry, and you need to get laid. Much better forget this mad idea and come to Cannes with me. There will be slutty Eurotrash to suit every taste.”

“I can’t. Duke Austen made me an offer I can’t refuse and now I must make sure he doesn’t take it back.”

Much to Arwen’s relief, Harry drove her into Melbury in the Land Rover where they were to meet the hotel manager at a restaurant. His history at the Delaville Group was impressive. Arwen had only had cocktails in the ultramodern bar of the midtown Delaville but she’d recommended it to the out-of-town guests of her wealthier and more sophisticated customers, those who would find the Plaza lacking in exclusivity, and she’d drooled over hospitality magazine pictures of Delaville hotels in Venice and Paris, Rome and Rio among others.

The Pineapple of Perfection, occupying the first floor of a red brick town house, featured scrubbed pine tables, candles, red and white checked cloth napkins, and the hum of English-accented conversation. Delicious smells assured Arwen that Nanny was not doing the cooking. She still had a craving for rare red meat.

A tall woman with a long face and a longer caftan greeted Harry with a kiss on the cheek. “How are you, Harry? I haven’t seen you for yonks. Mark is waiting for you on the terrace.”

“I’ve been busy, you know how it is. Sheila, this is Arwen Kilpatrick. She’s here from America to see about having a wedding at Brampton.”

“How do you do, Arwen?” Sheila said. “Brampton’s a marvelous place. Carol and I are thinking of having ours there.”

“Congratulations, darling,” Harry said. “I didn’t know you two had decided to take the plunge.”

Sheila simpered, an expression that was odd on her slightly horsey face. “She went down on one knee, the little angel, so what could I say?”

“Do bring her out to our table for a drink, if she has a moment. Sheila’s fiancée,” he explained to Arwen, “is the cook here.”

“What about yours?” Sheila asked. “Boy or girl?”

“I’m the wedding planner, not the bride,” Arwen replied.

“Let me know if you need any help catering. We offer a unique menu here.”

“I look forward to sampling it. I love the name. How did you think of it?”

“In Sheridan’s play
The Rivals
, Mrs. Malaprop uses the phrase instead of the pinnacle of perfection.”

“Of course! One of the original malapropisms. I saw that play in college.”

“And since the pineapple is an ancient symbol of hospitality, we thought it was ideal.”

Arwen was thoroughly charmed. Perhaps she’d hire this couple to put on a pig roast one evening of the wedding celebration. That would be very rural and traditional and make a nice change from the formality of the surroundings.

Sheila led them out to a delightful little back patio scented by a flowering shrub. An incredibly good-looking man, occupying the only table, put down a martini glass and stood to greet them. While Harry’s concession to dinner out was an open-necked white shirt tucked into clean jeans and tasseled loafers with no socks, Mark had stepped right out of the pages of
GQ
: tousled blond hair, a perfect scruff, and swathed in Armani from head to toe. The man should be a male model, except that he looked both alert and intelligent. Arwen’s mouth watered. What girl could possibly object to dining alone with two such magnificent male specimens? Her sorority sisters at Emory would die of envy and before the night was over they would. First on the agenda was to get a selfie of the three of them and post it on Facebook. She’d already determined that the town of Melbury was not cell-signal challenged.

“Mark Delancey,” he said and actually kissed her hand. Normally she’d think it a douche move but she’d forgive anything from such a gorgeous man. “Harry definitely underestimated your charms.”

“Did he? That’s an ambiguous statement.”

“She
is
clever. For God’s sake get the girl a drink before she learns all our guilty secrets. The raspberry martinis are excellent.”

“They are organic,” Sheila said. “As is all our food.” She went off to get the drinks.

Arwen was all for organic, locally raised meat. It reminded her of home. “So what’s good to eat here?” The question was interrupted by her phone, which made her jump. Even in a couple of days she’d become used to not being constantly interrupted by calls. “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing at the screen. “It’s my mother. It may be an emergency.”

“Arwen, honey, it’s Molly.” Molly Stanton’s voice sounded crackly and distant.

“Hi, Mom.” Arwen had taken an early stand against calling her parents by their first names, as soon as she started grade school and discovered no one else did. “What’s up? Are you okay? Is Dad?”

“Benjamin is fine. You sound awfully far away? Where are you?”

“I’m in England, visiting Brampton House about a wedding.”

“I thought you said Brampton. How funny.”

“I did.” She couldn’t think of any reason why her mother had even heard of Brampton, let alone find her being there either strange or amusing.

“I wanted to let you know we are taking a trip for a few weeks.” That was unusual. After traveling the world in their youth, Benjamin Kilpatrick and Molly Stanton had settled on their Pennsylvania farm and rarely budged.

“Where?”

There followed a lot of crackling and a few indistinct words before the phone went dead.

“Everything all right?” Harry said. “You look baffled.”

“My parents are going somewhere but I’m not sure where. It sounded like the Isle of Man, but it could have been Burning Man or Afghanistan.”

“Not the last, I hope.”

“Where’s Burning Man?” Mark asked.

“It’s a thing in the Nevada desert,” Harry said. “Hard to explain.”

“Hippies?”

“Exactly.”

Arwen was tempted to ask how Harry had heard of an event frequented by devotees of alternative cultures. But she really didn’t want to talk about her charming, loving, incredibly embarrassing parents. Time to get serious and grill Mark about his experience. Then she would enjoy dinner and decide which of the pair she’d most like to flirt with. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure Harry wasn’t gay, Mark too. Possibly together. She’d never heard men say darling so often. She sent Mark an enticing little smile along with her first zinger.

“What philosophy would you bring to ensuring the comfort of a small wedding party while maintaining an atmosphere of informality and ease?”

Mark answered without hesitation. “I see myself as the majordomo of an estate in the heyday of aristocratic power, where My Lord’s guests conduct the business of the nation and their private flirtations untroubled by countless servants who cater to their every need while remaining invisible. The titans of high tech are the new nobility. Here’s Sheila with your drink.”

She decided he was delectable and perfect, and so was the martini.

“Would you like to hear our menu?” Sheila said. “We don’t have a printed bill of fare. Our philosophy is a small but exquisite choice of dishes, changing daily according to the whims of the chef and the season. We use local ingredients whenever possible. ”

Talking about philosophy did sound kind of pretentious when Sheila did it. Arwen made a mental note to expunge it from her vocabulary unless speaking of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, which she tended to avoid. She prayed that the chef’s whim included something red and rare.

“Because it’s unusually hot, Carol has made two salads as starters.” Sheila spoke with all the drama of Emma Thompson accepting an Academy Award. “A lovely quinoa with scallions, broad beans, and dates, topped with wood-grilled pine nuts for crunch. Or you might prefer crispy kale and tofu with shredded coconut and a mango vinaigrette.”

Uncharitably, Arwen wondered what percentage of these ingredients were local to southern England. Since she loathed both tofu and kale with equal fervor, she opted for the quinoa.

“Good choice,” Sheila said. “So much nutrition. And for the main course may I recommend our signature veggie burger with porcini mushrooms and nondairy creamed cauliflower, served with a pomegranate ketchup and parsnip bacon.”