Do Not Disturb (2 page)

Ever since Honor and Tina’s mom died, Trey had been obsessed with fathering a boy to take over Palmers and carry on the family name. Honor, who loved her father deeply and wanted desperately to please him, had spent most of her teenage years trying everything she could think of to become the son he wanted. Not content with excelling at both academic work and overtly male sports like baseball and shooting, she started cutting her hair short and wearing boyish clothes in an attempt to make him happy. She even began starving herself: anything to stave off the arrival of puberty and the breasts she dreaded as unwanted, but irrefutable, symbols of her femininity.

But nothing was ever enough for Trey.

Unwilling to accept it was
he
who had the fertility problems, he’d refused to give up hope, foisting a series of ridiculously
young stepmothers on his daughters. When each one failed to get pregnant, he simply divorced her in favor of a newer, younger model. But not before he’d been forced to pay out a small fortune in alimony.

After a while, Honor had become immune to these women. Lise was no better or worse than the others. But at twenty-seven, she sure wasn’t with an elderly cripple like Trey because she loved him. To pretend she was was laughable.

“Dad’s been declared incapable of managing his own affairs,” Honor continued matter-of-factly. “That gives Mr. Brannagan, as his trustee, automatic power of attorney. The decision to put me in control of Palmers, and the rest of the family assets, was his and his alone. Right, Sam?”

The lawyer shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Was it just him, or was it getting awfully hot in here?

“So you’re saying it means nothing that cousin Trey made it abundantly clear during his lifetime that he wanted Palmers to pass down the male line?” spluttered the Omaha cousin, sensing his hoped-for payday slipping through his fingers.

“It’s still his lifetime, Mr. Foster,” said Honor scathingly. “He’s not dead yet.”

“I’ve told you,” the cousin snapped back, “it’s Jacob.”

“Sorry,” said Honor, with heavy sarcasm. “I’m afraid I was raised never to use first names with people I don’t know from Adam.”

“Who’s not dead?” Trey looked around him, bewildered. “And who’s Adam?”

Despite everything, it broke Honor’s heart to see him so lost and confused. If the doctors were right, he might not remember who she was in a few months’ time. Alzheimer’s was a bitch of a disease.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about, Mr. Palmer,” the lawyer interjected kindly. “I can assure you that your daughter is acting in your best interests. She’s very well qualified to take over the running of the business.”

Trey gave a short, derisory laugh. “Well qualified? She’s a woman, Mr. Brannagan,” he sneered. “Evidently she’s every bit as sly and conniving as the rest of her sex. But that hardly equips her to run the greatest hotel in the world.”

“But a dick and a pair of balls would equip her perfectly, right?” chimed in Tina. “You’re so pathetic.”

It was the first time she’d spoken since the meeting began, and everyone turned to look at her. Cousin Jacob’s wife looked like she might be about to spontaneously combust with disapproval at the coarseness of her language. “Don’t get me wrong,” Tina continued, smiling at Brannagan. “I really don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to Palmers. But if Honor wants to play the great white hope, I say we should let her. As long as I get my trust fund
and
my allowance, I’m easy.”

“Yes, we all know how easy you are,” said Honor furiously. It was bitchy, but she couldn’t help it. Tina’s devil-may-care wantonness had always provoked a mixture of revulsion and envy in Honor.

She certainly didn’t need it in her face today. “And for your information, I’m not ‘playing’ at anything. I’m only doing this because Dad’s so ill.”

“Please,” said Tina, reaching down her bra to rearrange her breasts without a hint of embarrassment. “That’s bullshit and you know it. You’ve wanted to run Palmers since the day you were born.”

Honor was silent. It was true: she had always wanted Palmers. But not like this.

From her earliest childhood, Honor Palmer knew she was different.

It wasn’t just the envious way her little friends looked at her when the chauffeur would drop her and Tina off at elementary
school in the Bentley T-type. Or the photographers who frightened her by swarming around her mother and father whenever they went out to dinners or charity events. It was more than that. It was an awareness, reached very early, that the Palmer name she bore was not just a privilege but an immense responsibility.

She had never known her grandfather, and yet Tertius Palmer’s presence seemed to be everywhere when she was growing up. His portrait hung in the entrance hall of the family’s grand Boston townhouse. His books were on the shelves in the library. His heavy mahogany desk still dominated Honor’s father’s study. Even the gardens where she and Tina used to play, with their formal maze and the willow walk along the banks of the Charles, had been designed and planted by Tertius.

Nowhere, however, was his spirit more alive than at Palmers. In the early days, before her mother died, Honor would spend every summer at the grand old Hamptons hotel listening to stories of her grandfather and the wild and wonderful times he’d had there. To her child’s eyes, Palmers was a wonderland. When she and Tina played mermaids in the pool or had tricycle races along the endless polished parquet corridors, it was as if the outside world didn’t exist.

The hotel guests, many of whom were elderly and had been coming for years, were remarkably tolerant of Trey’s two boisterous little girls. Those who remembered Tertius were happy to pull Honor aside and tell her tall tales about the New Year’s Eve party when her grandfather had danced with an Italian princess or the day he’d landed a biplane on the hotel’s croquet lawn.

Honor lapped up the romance of it all like a bear with a pot of honey. She wasn’t the most attractive child—with her short hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and skinny, matchstick legs, strangers often mistook her for a boy, and a nerdy boy at that. But at Palmers, she always felt like a princess. She was the chosen one, born to inherit and preserve all the excitement and magic
that surrounded her. Because for Honor, above all, that’s what Palmers
really
meant—magic.

Tina saw things differently, even back then. Two years younger than her sister, Cristina Maud Palmer was as blonde, blue-eyed, and chubby-cheeked as a Botticelli cherub, with a line in cuteness that would have put Shirley Temple out of business had she been born a generation earlier. Adults universally pronounced her “adorable.” And she was, if pink hair ribbons, a frilly dress, and an ability to sing, “How much is that doggie in the window?” were all you looked for in a child. But underneath the butter-wouldn’t-melt exterior, a frighteningly detached, self-centered little person was forming.

Having learned early how to bend adults to her will, Tina pursued her own pleasure with all the ruthless determination of a general before battle. “Pleasure” for Tina meant, very simply, the accumulation of things: toys, clothes, money, a puppy. Whatever the flavor of the month was, Tina Palmer would twirl and simper and cajole until it was hers.

Like Honor, she understood from an early age that her family was rich and important. But as far as Tina was concerned, that simply meant that she would grow up to have even more stuff, and live in even more luxury, than she did now. Palmers was nothing more or less than another sign of that wealth. She had never understood Honor’s sentimental obsession with the place and its history. As a child she longed for people to stop blathering on about her boring, old, dead grandfather and bring her another ice cream. Preferably with hot fudge sauce and a cherry on top.

Despite their differences, Honor and Tina had tolerated each other well enough in those early years. It was their mother’s accident that changed things between them. Honor still remembered the awful day as though it were yesterday. She’d been up in her room in Boston, playing an imagination game with her dolls, and had jumped out of her skin when Rita, the nanny, burst in. She was supposed to have grown out of the dolls and passed them
on to Tina. But all Tina ever wanted to do was dress them up, and Honor felt sorry for them, discarded in her sister’s toy box, never getting to go on any fun adventures anymore. Her first thought was that Rita was mad she’d taken them back. She remembered feeling almost relieved to be told it was only her father wanting to see her downstairs.

Needless to say the relief was short-lived. The first thing she saw when she walked into Trey’s study was Tina sobbing hysterically on the couch. Honor remembered being shocked, because these clearly weren’t her sister’s usual crocodile tears. Something was very wrong.

Trey was making no move to comfort her. He just stood there, as gray and still as a granite statue in the middle of the room. “Honor, there’s been an accident.”

That was all he said at first. He wasn’t crying. In all the weeks and months and years that followed, in fact, Honor never once saw him cry for the wife she knew he’d loved more than anything. But still, he seemed to be having difficulty getting his words out. “Mommy’s dead. She’s not coming back.”

Clearly her father was not a subscriber to the “break it to them gently” school of parenting. As an adult, Honor often wondered how many thousands of dollars in therapy that moment alone would have cost her had she grown up to be the navel-gazing type. Thankfully, she hadn’t. Because as awful as her mother’s death was, far, far worse was to come.

Tammy. That was the name of their first stepmother. And what a fucking nightmare she was. Unlike the later models, she came from a respected Boston family, but her upbringing didn’t seem to have prevented her from growing up into a class-A bitch. It was a year almost to the day since their mom’s death and Trey brought Tammy home like a trophy, beaming with a pride and happiness that Honor couldn’t fathom.

“Honor, Tina, this is Tammy,” he said, kissing the strange woman on the lips. Honor, who was eleven at the time, thought
she looked like a taller Snow White, with short black hair and porcelain-pale skin. But she wasn’t kind and smiley like Mommy. “She’s going to be living with us from now on,” Trey continued. “And we hope that pretty soon she’s going to give you girls a little brother.”

We?
Who was this
we
? Honor didn’t hope for any such thing.

It was the first time she’d heard her father express a desire for a son. Over the next decade, that desire was to bloom into a full-grown obsession.

“Why?” Tina had asked, twirling her ringlets skeptically in the corner.

“Your daddy needs a boy so he can take over Palmers one day, honey,” simpered Tammy. “And take care of you girls, too. That’s what brothers do.”

“Daddy doesn’t need a
boy
!” yelled Honor, pulling herself up to her full four foot nine, her jaw jutting in defiance. “
I’m
going to take over Palmers when I grow up. What do you know about it, anyway?”

“Honor.” Her father’s voice was stern. “Don’t you dare speak to Tammy like that. Apologize at once.”

Honor had apologized. Not because she was remotely sorry. But because she couldn’t bear for her father to be angry with her.

That night, she’d tried to talk to Tina about it. “We have to do something to get rid of her,” she’d whispered, once the sound of their nanny’s footsteps had finally died away.

“Like what?” Tina had her Winnie the Pooh flashlight on under the covers and was brushing her hair, admiring its shiny blondeness in the mirror with quiet satisfaction. Though only nine, she was already taller than Honor and much more physically developed, with tiny, nascent breasts of which she was inordinately proud. “It’s not up to us.”

“For goodness’ sake,” hissed Honor, exasperated. “Don’t you understand how serious this is? She’s horrible. She’s a witch. And if she does have a baby boy, Daddy won’t want us anymore.”

“I don’t think he wants us now,” shrugged Tina, not missing a beat.

“Of course he wants us!” said Honor hotly, although deep down she knew that the tears were pricking her eyes because her sister was right. Since their mom’s death, Trey had been distant to the point of neglect.

“It’s Tammy that’s the problem. You know she’s going to try and act like she’s our mom.
And
I bet she’ll try to take Palmers away. Her and her new baby.”

Sighing, Tina reluctantly switched off the flashlight and slipped the mirror under her bed. “I wish you’d stop talking about Palmers. It’s only a stupid hotel.” Honor was so flabbergasted by this she was temporarily speechless.

“And if she does try to act like our mom, we’ll just ignore her. It’s really not a big deal. Anyway, I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.”

Seething with frustration, Honor pulled her bedspread up to her shoulders and turned her head to the wall. There was no point pushing it any further. Clearly Tina had no understanding whatsoever of the dangers they were facing. As usual it would be up to her, Honor, to do something.

If a son was what their father wanted—and clearly it was—then that was what she’d have to become.