Do Not Disturb (19 page)

“I don’t know who you think you are, b-b-buddy,” he stammered, once safely within reach of the trailer door. “But I work for the Tischen Group, not you. I gotta contract.”

Picking up a heavy brass paperweight, Lucas raised it purposefully above his head. The debating part of the conversation had come to an end.

Taking the hint, the fat man waddled out the door. Lucas watched his gleaming bald pate from the trailer window as he climbed into his Ford pickup and sped away, no doubt in the direction of the nearest employment lawyer or union representative. Only once he’d gone did Lucas sink back down into his chair, pick up the 1980s-throwback telephone, and call Anton.

As usual he was unavailable—“traveling” was all his uptight Swiss secretary would divulge—so Lucas left a message, briefly outlining the events of the last half hour. There was no point going into detail. Tisch would either back him or he wouldn’t.

Either way, all the ebullience he’d felt earlier outside Palmers had now deserted him utterly. The next year seemed to stretch ahead of him like a life sentence, stuck in this dreary, drizzly small town trying to build a hotel from ground zero—a hotel that 90 percent of the local populace had already decided they despised, thanks to Honor fucking Palmer.

He’d felt from the beginning that landing the Herrick job was too good to be true.

Looked like he was right. It was.

“Fuck, Caleb, what is wrong with you?”

Hopping into the bathroom, Honor turned on the shower and wrinkled her nose at the smell as she rinsed the dog shit off her bare foot.

Three weeks after Lucas’s arrival in town, she had finally made it back to East Hampton herself, having handed what was left of the tangled web of Trey’s affairs to Sam Brannagan, the family lawyer.

“I’ve done my best, Sam,” she told him wearily, unloading an entire trunkload of papers from the back of her rental car. “Most of the personal stuff is filed, but I really can’t give it any more time now. I have to get back to Palmers.”

Sam thought how tired and stressed she looked. He hadn’t seen her since that ghastly meeting in his office last summer, and she’d been tiny enough then, but now her collarbones jutted visibly through her white cotton shirt, and her sludge-gray size-zero pants hung off her hips like dirty ship’s sails. Running Palmers must be taking more out of her than she’d anticipated.

In fact, her wasted appearance had more to do with grief and stress about her dead-end relationship with Devon than it did with anxiety over Palmers, although she was itching to get back, especially since word had reached her that the future manager of the new Tischen was in town and had moved into a little cottage by the beach. It was now two days since her return and, rather to her annoyance, she had yet to meet the elusive Mr. Ruiz. To be honest, she’d rather expected him to stop by Palmers and make an appointment to see her. As the new kid on the block, sent here for the express purpose of putting her out of business, she figured the responsibility of a courtesy call lay firmly with him. But maddeningly he’d made no effort to get in touch, and Honor certainly wasn’t about to.

Though she forced herself to keep confident about Palmers’ future, she was still hopelessly unprepared for the coming summer season. So much of her energy had been devoted to getting
the structural problems under control without causing too much disruption to her few, precious off-season guests that she’d barely had time to begin her much-needed PR drive. Nervous about promoting Palmers’ renaissance in case the media used it as an excuse to rehash the twisted allegations about her “betraying” her father, she’d hoped for the first few months that if she kept her head down, the bad press would eventually fizzle out. But it hadn’t. Thanks to the growing media interest in Tina and Dick, and Lise’s shameless attempts to add to her already whopping inheritance with interviews in glossy magazines, looking as grief-stricken as she could in Atelier Versace and vintage Tiffany emeralds, the Palmer family soap opera looked set to run and run, with Honor unfairly cast in the role of resident villainess.

After the funeral, she’d decided to adopt a different tack, pulling up the names of every guest to stay at Palmers over the last decade and placing personal calls to each of them, urging them to think about returning this summer and offering them significantly discounted rates. It was a risky strategy that could easily have smacked of desperation had she not handled each phone call with the delicate balance of confidence and humility that such a task required. It had also taken weeks to plough through the list. But it seemed to have paid off. Once people heard Honor in person, they sensed immediately that she bore no resemblance to the money-hungry monster portrayed by the gossip press. Flattered by the personal attention and tempted by the low rates, they began, slowly—painfully slowly—to call back and start booking.

The rising summer numbers were wonderful, a real shot in the arm, but they’d come at a cost. With the reduced rates they would barely cover costs, and she’d be forced to put off the major electrical work for at least another few months. In the meantime, she’d done her best to start discrediting her soon-to-be rival, emphasizing Lucas’s lack of experience and Anton Tisch’s penchant for Blade Runner–esque architecture, knowing how much
that would piss off the arch-conservative Hamptonites. Slowly, the tide of local opinion was beginning to turn in her favor, but who knew how long that would last? Now that Lucas was here in person, he was bound to start returning fire.

“You’re a rescue dog, you know,” said Honor, trying to look stern at the sweetly snub-nosed boxer sticking his curious head around the door and failing miserably. “I rescued you. That means you owe me. So what’s with all the crapping indoors, huh?”

Caleb responded by thumping his stumpy tail loudly against the tiles a few times before running around in an excited circle and finally launching himself at his mistress with such force he almost knocked her flying.

“Oh, all right, all right,” Honor laughed, submitting happily to his enthusiastic licks as she perched on the side of the bath and began drying her foot with a fluffy hand towel. “I’ll take you for another run. Just give me a minute to throw some clothes on, OK?”

It would take more than a dog-poo-stained carpet or Lucas Ruiz’s pointed radio silence to dampen Honor’s spirits today. Devon had called last night to tell her he was coming out early for Easter, officially so that he could deal with some local politics or other and attend a bunch of committee meetings, but actually as an excuse to spend some quality time with Honor before Karis and the kids flew out for the holiday weekend. For ten glorious days, Honor would have him all to herself, the longest they’d ever spent together. And it hadn’t come a moment too soon.

She’d only seen him for one snatched, unsatisfactory night in a New Jersey motel since the day she’d let him have it with both barrels at her father’s funeral. Perhaps that had been a bit unfair, she could see with hindsight. But somehow watching him play the dutiful husband to Karis had been a thousand times worse than just knowing he did it when she wasn’t there. The fact she’d been burying her dad at the time probably hadn’t helped her tolerance levels much either.

They spoke on the phone daily, but it wasn’t the same. Despite her long years of practice at it, extended periods of celibacy weren’t Honor’s forte and tended to make her stress levels rocket. A few more days and she’d be able to stake her claim as the world masturbation champion. Forget “mistress of her domain.” These days she was just a mistress of frustration—or a frustrated mistress. Devon wasn’t gonna know what hit him when he walked through that door tonight.

Pulling on her running shorts and sneakers, she looked out the window while Caleb went demented with excitement, hurling himself at the front door to her suite like a canine battering ram. March storm clouds were gathering, but they looked high enough in the sky that there was a good chance they’d blow over. A run would do her good, warm her up for the marathon fucking session she fully intended on having later.

“Come on then, you moron,” she said, ruffling Caleb’s ears affectionately as she grabbed his leash from the coffee table. “Let’s go.”

Stuck in his trailer on the building site, Lucas was rapidly losing the will to live.

Three weeks he’d been here now—three weeks, one day, and two hours, to be precise—and he didn’t think he’d had more than forty hours’ sleep since his plane landed. He had bags under his eyes the size of Louis Vuitton trunks, and his voice had taken on the hoarse, gravelly Serge Gainsbourg edge it always got when he was chronically overtired, exacerbated in this instance by hours spent screaming down the phone at everyone from architects to lawyers to building suppliers.

To Lucas’s amazement, Anton had been sanguine to the point of nonchalance about his depressing report from the front line and completely relaxed that he’d summarily fired the foreman.

“It’s always the way,” he commented blithely. “When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, my boy, very little that construction companies do, or don’t do, will surprise you. Now that you’re out there things will kick up a notch.”

A
notch
? Did the man have no idea what they were up against? Naturally a workaholic, Lucas went into overdrive, spurred on by his terror of failure and his fury at the steady stream of negative campaigning that had been spewing out of the Palmers camp for months. It turned out that it wasn’t only the locals that Honor had poisoned: seemingly, she’d been busy as a bee, bad-mouthing Anton and the Tischen chain generally, as well as Lucas personally, in a whole bunch of lifestyle magazines, including the influential
World Traveler
. He couldn’t imagine how Anton had missed it. But then again, he’d missed it too. There simply hadn’t been enough hours in the day to keep track of everything before he left Europe, and there still weren’t. But from now on, he’d be all over that bitch like a rash.

By day, he spent hour after hour glued to the phone in the poky little trailer, hiring site managers, contractors, and engineers, most of whom he didn’t even have time to meet before they showed up for work. It was risky, he knew, using cheap, anonymous labor like that, choosing builders purely because they were available and gave him the lowest quote. But his only hope of meeting Anton’s targets was to flood the place with more workers than an episode of
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
, and pray that they worked as fast. Already the site was crawling with men like an enormous muddy anthill, while Julian, the stressed-out architect’s assistant who did most of his boss’s work, yelled at them ineffectually through a bullhorn, waving his drawings in the bitter March wind like a surrender flag.

At night, Lucas spent long hours doing press searches on the Internet, perched on a packing case in the little beach cottage his moron of a relocation agent had rented for him—what did she think he was, a fucking Munchkin? The ceilings were so low he
hit his head everywhere, and the place had more pink and lace than Liberace’s bedroom. Though he was desperate for sleep, he knew he had to think of ways to hit back at Palmers. If Honor was to be believed, every senator, film star, and pop artist in her little black book had committed to take suites at Palmers for the summer. If he read one more puff piece about the hotel’s “astonishing revival” he was going to throw up.

Then, this morning, his annoyance level had shot up still further when the expensive new multiline phone system he’d had installed in the trailer had died on him, right in the middle of a crucial conversation with Dean Roberts, his head architect and the hapless Julian’s boss.

“Fucking motherfucker, son of a motherfucking bitch!” he yelled. Switching on his new state-of-the-art US cell phone to try to call Dean back, the words
no service
flashed in cheerful neon pink across the LCD screen. The guy in the T-Mobile store had warned him that reception locally was erratic and suggested that if all else failed, he could try the beach.

Sighing heavily, Lucas grabbed the keys to his rented Ford pickup, which had an extended cab. It was a fucking farce, trying to get anything done in this stinking country.