Do Not Disturb (18 page)

“Do I?” said Lucas, grinning. “Well, you look phenomenally sexy.”

The girl laughed nervously. “Er, thanks. I guess.” She blushed. “You’re pretty direct, aren’t you?”

Lucas shrugged. “I find it saves time.” Taking off his coat, he rubbed his hands together for warmth before offering one to the girl to shake.

“I’m Lucas Ruiz.”

“Desiree,” said the girl, shaking his hand, still somewhat warily. He was a divine-looking man. Different too—not at all like the bland, all-American Ralph Lauren–model types she was used to seeing in East Hampton. This one was more Antonio Banderas, perhaps crossed with a young Warren Beatty. And that deep, soulful Spanish accent was to die for. Even so, the way he looked at her made her feel naked and vulnerable. It was nice and disconcerting at the same time.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked, pulling herself together.

“Desiree,” said Lucas, rolling the word over his tongue like he was tasting an exquisite wine. “Beautiful name. Very appropriate.”

She blushed again, deeper this time.

“I think I will have a drink, thank you, Desiree,” he said, enjoying the effect he was having on her. “Hot chocolate, please. With as much cream as you can manage on the top.”

He was the only customer in the café—in fact, looking outside through the rain-splattered window, he and his fellow Jitney passengers appeared to be the only people in the entire town—and his drink wasn’t long in coming.

“The place looks dead,” he said, nodding toward the window and the empty village green beyond as he sipped gratefully at the creamy chocolate. “Is it always like this?”

“June, July, and August you can’t move. It’s a zoo,” said Desiree, pulling her thick dark hair back into a ponytail and tying it with a cheap elastic band. “But off season, yeah, it’s pretty quiet. I actually prefer it this way.”

“Really?” Lucas looked surprised. “Why? Aren’t you bored?”

“Sometimes,” she shrugged. “But, you know, I read. I paint. There’s more to life than party party party.”

“There is?” He was so deadpan it made her laugh. She was finally beginning to relax. He’d have liked to have stayed here chatting her up and gorging himself on hot chocolate for the rest of the day, but sadly it wasn’t an option. Thanks to all the delays and fuckups at La Guardia, he was already late for his meeting at the Herrick with the site manager and a bunch of potential contractors and architects, all bidding for the work. He should ask her for directions and get going.

“Tell me,” he asked casually, “have you heard much about the new hotel opening up here? I gather it’s going to be a big deal.”

“So they say,” said Desiree. “Everyone’s talking about it: the Herrick, it’s called. They’re building just a couple of blocks away from Palmers. All the local bigwigs are up in arms.”

“They are?” Lucas sipped at his drink, avoiding her eye. “But surely another big hotel means more jobs, more local business, more money. I’d have thought people would be pleased.”

Desiree laughed. “You obviously don’t know much about East Hampton. People here already have enough money. They like to keep things the way they are: traditional. From what I hear the Herrick’s going to be anything but that. According to Honor Palmer, the building’s going to be a hideous modern glass thing, designed by some trendy Manhattan architect. A real eyesore, so they say.”

“Is that so?” muttered Lucas angrily. How dare Honor act like she had inside information! He hadn’t even definitively picked an architect yet, although the design would be modernist. He wondered what other lies she’d been spreading, and whether the whole town was already poisoned against him.

Perhaps he was foolish to have expected anything less. With so much to do in London before he left, he’d put off reading the fat file Anton had given him on Honor until he got on the
plane. It was quite an eye-opener. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she’d evidently decided that one wasn’t enough. This girl wanted the entire cutlery set, wrenching control of her old man’s assets while he was dying of Alzheimer’s.

What kind of a bitch did that to her own father?

“Personally, I think this German guy, whatever his name is, is wasting his money.” Oblivious of Lucas’s stony face, Desiree trundled on. “Palmers may be a bit run down, but it’s an institution. I can’t see how some faceless newcomer can compete with it. Especially not one run by a college kid with no experience.”

“A college kid?” spluttered Lucas, unable to keep up his pretense of detachment any longer. “Is that what Honor Palmer’s been saying?”

“Well…yes.” Desiree looked baffled.

“Who the fuck is she to talk?” roared Lucas. “This time last year she was still at Harvard fucking Business School!”

“Hey, look, what do I know?” Realizing she’d offended him in some way, Desiree was kicking herself about it. Having gotten over her initial nerves, she’d decided Lucas was fully gorgeous. “Do you want another drink?”

“No,” he snapped, dropping a ten on the table and getting up to leave. “I don’t.” Looking up at her confused, apologetic face, he relented.

“Look, sorry,” he said. “It isn’t you I’m mad at, sweetheart. But I do have to get going. Do you think you could direct me to the site of this new hotel, the Herrick?”

“Sure,” she said, relieved to be back in his good books and praying silently that he’d ask her for her number before he left. “Make a right into the center of town, away from the beach. You’ll see Palmers about six blocks down; you can’t miss it. Five hundred yards farther on and you’re there. But there’s nothing to see,” she added. “It’s just a big, muddy hole.”

“Thank you,” said Lucas, pulling open the café door so that a chill blast of air hit the both of them.

“Wait!” Desiree heard herself calling after him. She couldn’t just let him leave. “You never said what you were doing in town. If you’re staying for a while I could show you around a bit. You know. If you’d like,” she finished lamely, her cheeks turning from pink to maroon with embarrassment. It had been a long time since she’d had to make the effort with a guy, and she was clearly out of practice.

Lucas smiled. “I’d like that,” he said. “And as it happens, I am staying for a while.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” he grinned. “I’m the college kid with no experience who’ll be managing the big glass eyesore. The one the German guy is wasting his money on.”

And with a wink he disappeared into the rainstorm, leaving Desiree staring wordlessly after him.

By the time Lucas reached Palmers he was freezing once again, having trudged through the rain like a hobo for almost twenty minutes without passing another soul. But despite the cold and his intense curiosity to check out the competition he decided against going inside. Honor, he knew, was still away in Boston, dealing with her late father’s affairs, but he didn’t want to risk encountering any of her staff until he both looked and felt on top of his game. Right now, nothing could have been further from the truth.

From the outside, though, he was encouraged. It was hardly the all-American idyll he’d been expecting. Beneath the solid gray blanket of clouds the whitewashed wooden structure looked bleak and forbidding, and the entire upper stories were covered with an ugly latticework of scaffolding. Leaping from bar to bar like so many human squirrels, a motley crew of grumbling workers were busy stripping tiles off the roof and hurling them to the
ground where they joined a growing pile of shattered debris, littering up what must once have been a heavenly formal rose garden. All that noise and mess must be driving Honor’s guests crazy.

Walking around to the side of the hotel, he peered through an original sash window (very nice) into the main drawing room, and his spirits were further lifted to see that the bar and sitting areas were almost empty. The few guests that were in residence looked like the sort of permanent fixtures that all the old-name hotels relied on off-season. There was one old man with close-cropped hair and a graying moustache sitting bolt upright on one of the overstuffed sofas—ex-military, Lucas would put money on it—and two overweight matrons, conservatively dressed in tweeds and pearls, sharing a pot of tea by the roaring, baronial fire. All three were probably too old and deaf to hear the roof works. No wonder Honor had been doing her best to slag off him and the Herrick. If this was the level of occupancy she was reduced to, she must be absolutely terrified at the prospect of competition. Structurally, the place looked to be on its last legs.

On the other hand, pressing his nose to the window pane like Tiny Tim looking at the rich folks’ Christmas feast, Lucas caught glimpses of what had once made Palmers the greatest hotel in the world. Yes, the furnishings were threadbare, and the antique English furniture scratched and battered around the edges. There was even a visible hole in the exquisite Persian rug. But the room gave off such a welcoming, old-world warmth and charm it seemed to draw one in anyway. It was an old truism that money and class don’t always go together, but Palmers was living proof of its veracity. You could quite see how its understated ambience had been a magnet to all that old Protestant Connecticut money. Mayflower money. If he hadn’t come here with the express purpose of destroying the place and its eponymous owner, he might even have felt sorry to see such a once-great giant brought so low.

But he had. And anyway, he’d never been much of one for sentimental musings. Turning away, he trudged back to the road. Honor clearly intended to play dirty with him, but Little Miss Privileged was about to meet her match. No woman was going to outsmart Lucas, not Julia Brett-Sadler, and certainly not an inexperienced trust-fund brat like Honor Palmer.

He was enjoying himself, mentally embellishing his plan to nuke his would-be rival out of the water with a few well-placed bombs in the New York press when, turning a corner, he stopped dead in his tracks, his confident defiance deflating on the spot like an old man’s erection.

“Fuck…” he whispered out loud.

He knew there wouldn’t be a lot to see. But somehow the quagmire in front of him, stretching across acres like an abandoned, rain-swept battlefield, was far more depressing in reality than it had been in imagination. A few beams and pieces of tape had been laid on the ground as markers, and in the far right-hand corner of the plot was a single twelve-by-twelve-foot hole, filling up with rainwater. But that was it. That was what he had ten months to transform into a five-star resort, and another six to have it heaving with celebrities. It wasn’t possible, surely?

Set back a few yards from the hole, an aluminum trailer mounted on concrete breeze blocks contained a temporary office, in which one man—one! Lucas had been expecting to meet at least five contractors and architects—was sitting behind a Formica desk, tapping away in a desultory, one-fingered manner at his keyboard.

“Hey, buddy. You look cold,” the guy said, looking up but not moving from his seat as Lucas squelched in. Lacking Desiree’s unique advantages—this man was fat, bald, and had sweat patches under his arms the size of small dinner plates—there was nothing to mitigate the banal stupidity of the comment. Lucas exploded.

“
Cold?
” he snarled. “No shit I’m
cold
, Sherlock. It’s about minus nine out there, which you’d know if you bothered to get up off your fat backside and actually do some fucking work. Where the fuck is everybody else?”

The man opened his mouth to speak, but Lucas was on a roll. “The building works are supposed to be finished by Christmas.
Finished!
”

“Well, that ain’t happening,” tittered the fat man, ill-advisedly.

“Where are the contractors?” Lucas was apoplectic. “Our meeting was at two.”

The fat man nodded and started shuffling the papers on his desk in a distinctly nervous manner. “Ah, about that. What I understood from Tisch’s office…it was never, like, a definite meeting for today. I wasn’t sure exactly when you’d be arriving.”

“Bullshit!” bellowed Lucas. “I faxed you my flight details myself, weeks ago. All you had to do was pull together one lousy meeting, and you haven’t even done that.” Grabbing a plastic chair from the back of the trailer, he dragged it noisily over to the desk and sat down. “Get them all on the phone, right now. Maybe we can salvage a conference call.”

The foreman looked apologetically at the basic plastic handset in front of him. “Sorry, man,” he said. “We ain’t set up for conference calls and shit.”

Lucas looked as though he might be about to commit murder.

“Come on, lighten up a little,” said the foreman defensively. “This ain’t Manhattan, you know. No one round this neck of the woods is high tech.”

Slamming both fists down on the desk, Lucas leaned right across it until his face was millimeters from the man’s nose. With one easy movement, he swept the computer keyboard, monitor, and several stacks of paper onto the floor.

“You’re fired,” he said quietly, but with such menace that the foreman shivered, his fat arms wobbling like a shaken jelly. “Get the fuck out of here, and don’t come back.”

Backing away from Lucas like a startled crab, clearly anticipating imminent physical violence, the foreman made a few halfhearted protests as he gathered up the remnants of his files.