Do Not Disturb (35 page)

“Don’t forget it’s Ben’s party tonight,” he said, dragging himself out of bed too.

“As if I could forget,” said Lola. “I feel so bad for poor Sian. She’s really upset about him leaving.”

“Hmm,” said Lucas grumpily. “So she says.”

It niggled him that Lola had become so tight with the scrawny little maid from Palmers. Quite apart from suspecting Sian of being a gold digger, he was pretty sure that she was one of the loudest voices warning Lola off him. The sooner she pissed off back to nowheresville, the better.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Lola.

“Nothing. Just that she’ll get over it,” said Lucas, who didn’t want a fight. “She’ll be leaving herself soon enough.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Lola ran her fingers absently through his short, preppy hair as he sat on the edge of the bed. “At least she won her bet.”

Lucas yawned. “What bet?”

“Her girlfriend from home bet her a hundred bucks she couldn’t land herself a millionaire in the Hamptons,” said Lola, getting up to go.

“Hey, it was just a joke,” she added hastily, seeing Lucas’s face darken and his forehead knot into a disapproving frown. “Sian adores Ben. You know that. She couldn’t care less whether he’s loaded or not.”

Like so many people born into money, Lucas reflected, Lola underestimated its importance to those born without it. Her loyalty to her new best friend was endearing, but it was also naive.

“I gotta run.” She kissed him. “Say a prayer that Mom and Dad are still in bed when I get back.”

“I’m praying, I’m praying,” said Lucas, as she shot out the front door, slamming it behind her. The mental picture of Devon and Karis entwined in one another’s arms made him turn his thoughts once again to Honor.

Lola wasn’t alone in her naïveté. Even a tough cookie like Honor could be blind where love was concerned. She seemed to have swallowed Devon Carter’s lies whole, like a credulous bait-hungry fish.

Feeling inexplicably irritated all of a sudden, he rolled over, pulled the duvet up over his head, and tried once again to fall back to sleep. What did he care about Honor’s love life anyway? Or Ben’s, for that matter?

Right now he had more than enough problems managing his own.

It was already nearly noon in London when the courier arrived at Anton’s Mayfair mansion.

“Package for Mr. Tisch,” he grunted through his motorcycle helmet visor, thrusting a clipboard under the butler’s nose. “Sign ’ere.”

William, Anton’s long-suffering butler and head of all the domestic staff in London, scrawled something across the paper and took the parcel. The boss had been hopping up and down like a cat on hot coals all morning waiting for it. He’d better take it straight in.

“Ah, at last. There you are.” Anton, still in his silk Turnbull & Asser dressing gown, was pacing around his study. “Give that to me.”

He’d been up since six, trying to woo a US pension fund’s finance director into investing in Excelsior, and between that and looking over the third-quarter figures for the Tischens, he hadn’t had a second to dress. His hair, usually meticulously smoothed down, was sticking up on one side at an oddly jaunty angle, quite at odds with his humorless face and making his dodgy dye job look even more obvious.

William handed over the package with a polite little bow, although inside he was seething. Tisch thought he was so proper English, but he still hadn’t mastered the use of “please” or “thank you.” One of these days someone’d strangle him with that damned tasseled dressing gown cord.

“You may go now.”

Fumbling in the desk drawer for a letter opener, Anton didn’t even bother to look up.

Once the butler was gone and he’d found the little silver Asprey’s dagger, he ripped open the package and triumphantly pulled out a VHS tape. With one press of a button on his universal remote, the door to the study locked, the lights dimmed, and metal blackout blinds began closing automatically over all the windows. A second button made the two faux-Chipperfield bookcases swoosh to one side, and an enormous flat-screen plasma TV emerged from the recess in the wall behind them. Anton took a childish delight in these James Bond touches, although on this occasion the effect was rather spoiled when he realized he would have to walk across the room and load the tape manually into the VCR.

Just as he was doing so, the phone rang.

“Tisch,” he answered, brusquely.

“Anton, I’m sorry to disturb you,” came the whining voice on the other end. “It’s Jordy here.”

Jordy McKenzie was the new editor of the
New York Post
. A former gossip columnist, he’d first crossed paths with Anton years ago when, desperate to make rent, he’d accepted a bribe not to run a negative story about one of his political friends. It was a mistake Anton had never let him forget.

When he decided to leak the story of Honor Palmer’s affair with Devon Carter, it was Jordy Anton he turned to. Partly because he knew he’d be too scared to refuse, and partly because a New York paper was the natural place for a piece about Hamptons gossip. Having the
Post
lead the story would also add credibility to the idea that Lucas was behind the leak, as they’d covered a number of Herrick-related tidbits in the past, so he would be assumed to have a relationship with Jordy.

Anton had been casting around for a while for a way to get rid of Lucas—ever since the boy had started taking sole credit for the Herrick’s success and mouthing off in interviews as if he owned the place. He could simply have sacked him, of course, but that would have been too easy, not to mention lacking in all the elements of revenge that Anton found fun. Teaching Lucas a real lesson required something more…imaginative. Ironically it was Lucas himself who’d finally drawn Anton’s attention to his Achilles’ heel, by pleading with him not to spill the beans about Honor and Devon. He had in fact forgotten all about their suspected affair, but now set about gathering hard evidence of Lucas’s suspicions with a firm of top-notch New Jersey PIs. Now he was at last ready to break the story that would not only shatter Honor’s reputation at a crucial point in the year—by making her and her family synonymous with Palmers and its revival, she’d ensured that any negative personal publicity would have a huge effect on the hotel’s image—but would also
create the perfect excuse to fire Lucas by outing him publicly as the mole behind it.

“Listen, Anton,” said Jordy, doing his best to sound firm. “I’ve been having second thoughts about this. Tina Palmer’s a well-known name, but her sister? Outside the Hamptons, Honor Palmer’s nobody very much. Who cares if she’s banging some married guy?”

“I do,” said Anton coldly. “So will Palmers’ clients, and the entire US hotel industry.”

“So run it in an industry paper,” said Jordy. “This isn’t news.”

“I’ve told you,” said Anton, his voice rising. “That’s not good enough. I don’t want her compromised, I want her ruined. It has to be the
Post
.”

While he spoke, the plasma screen in front of him flickered into life as the video at last began to play. Glancing up, his eyes widened. The quality and clarity of the images was extraordinary. It took a lot to shock Anton, but this tape had almost done it.

“Look, Jordy,” he said soothingly. He must be careful not to be all stick and no carrot. It wouldn’t do to alienate a now powerful editor completely. “Something else is about to break that will make this story very newsworthy indeed.”

The editor sighed. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that you might tell me what that something is?”

“I can’t—yet,” said Anton. “You’re going to have to trust me and run with what you’ve got for now. But you won’t regret it.”

The flip side of this promise—the threat that if he didn’t run the story, he would regret it—hung on the line between them like a cloud. In the end, with no realistic choice, Jordy reluctantly agreed.

“I can’t run it for at least a week,” he said petulantly. “And if something really big comes up in the meantime, I may have to push it back further.” He had no idea what this poor Palmer girl had done to upset Anton Tisch so badly. But she was soon going to regret it, whatever it was.

“Of course,” said Anton, happy to be conciliatory now that he’d gotten his way. “I leave that up to you.”

Settling himself down on his antique Chesterfield couch, he lay back to enjoy the rest of the show, confident in the knowledge that, in a matter of days, millions of eager Internet users would be doing exactly the same thing.

“I thought you said it was gonna be a quiet barbecue. Just a few friends, remember?”

Ben stared in dismay at the champagne-swilling hordes, crowded onto the Herrick’s private beach like sardines. He barely recognized any of them.

“I lied.” Lucas grinned. “You didn’t seriously think I’d send you back to rainy old London without a proper send-off?”

As usual, Lucas had put together a spectacular party in record time. Admittedly, nature had provided an ideal setting. The sun, which was just beginning to set, glowed the rich red of theater curtains, its light just soft enough to allow the outdoor candles and shimmering crystal champagne flutes to dance and sparkle like so many fireflies. But the music (six barefoot flautists dressed as nymphs), food (mouthwatering sashimi and miniature, individually garnished blueberry cream pies), and dancers (a Hawaiian fire-eating troupe) were all courtesy of Lucas.

Ben was touched that he’d gone to so much effort. But nothing Lucas had laid on could distract him from Sian. She was luminous tonight, paddling in the surf with Lola, her long gypsy skirt wet at the bottom and her dark hair flying around in the wind like gossamer. He still hadn’t figured out the practicalities of how to keep the relationship going after tomorrow. Long-distance romance was a killer, he knew that, but he was determined to make it work. The alternative—walking away and letting her go—was as impossible to him now as stopping breathing.

“I tell you what, mate,” he said to Lucas, unable to tear his eyes off the girls as they splashed each other and giggled in the water like the teenagers they were. “We are both seriously lucky.”

“Hmm.” Lucas sounded bored.

“What’s the score with you and Lola, then?” asked Ben. “Are you gonna keep seeing her after she goes back to Boston?”

Lucas gave him a questioning look. “Of course not,” he said bluntly. “How could I? She’s going back to school, and I’m going back to work. It was only a summer romance, you know. I don’t know why everyone’s so keen to marry us off.”

Ben shrugged. “Fair enough. I suppose I’m so happy with Sian, I want everyone else to have what we have. You know what I mean?”

Lucas cleared his throat. “About that,” he said. “Are you quite sure…how can I put this? Are you sure you have what you think you have?”

Ben sighed. He was starting to get seriously tired of Lucas’s negativity on this subject. “Don’t you ever stop? I love her, all right? And she loves me. Be happy for me.”

Lucas looked pained. “I would,” he said. “If I really believed that, I would be happy for you. But I heard something else today…”

“What?” said Ben, biting back his anger. He didn’t want to fall out with Lucas tonight, after all the trouble he’d gone to. “What did you hear?”

“Lola told me that Sian had a bet. With a girlfriend from back home.”

“So?”

“Apparently,” Lucas took a deep breath, “she bet this friend a hundred bucks that she’d land herself a rich man out here before the end of the season.”

“That’s bullshit,” said Ben, his face draining of color. “Sian would never do a thing like that. She doesn’t have a materialistic bone in her body.”

“OK.” Lucas held out his hands in innocence. “If you say so.”

“I do say so,” said Ben crossly. “You don’t know her.”

“Do you?” asked Lucas. “You only met the girl two weeks ago. What do you really know about her? Look, I’m sorry,” he added, sensing he’d already ruined his friend’s evening. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“Crap,” said Ben bitterly. “You just can’t stand it that for once I’m the guy who’s happy with a terrific woman, while you’re still…”

“What?” Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “I’m still what?”

“Lost,” snapped Ben. “Lost, lonely, and fucking insecure, all right?”