Do Not Disturb (42 page)

Some twelve hours later, at just after midnight, he staggered blindly out of a dive bar onto the filthy sidewalk.

“And don’t come back, asshole!” the owner shouted after him in Spanish. “You’re lucky my bouncer had the night off. Next time, he’ll break both your arms, tough guy.” Lucas didn’t bother to shout back, partly because he wasn’t at all sure he could string a sentence together, but mostly because he knew the guy was right. He had been an asshole, picking a fight with two of the patrons over some bullshit politics or other, purely because they were American.

In his defense, it had been one hell of a rough day. He’d arrived at the apartment to find that his mother, at the age of forty-one, was pregnant again—heavily pregnant—a fact she’d omitted to mention in any of their phone conversations of the past six months. Quite apart from the head-fuck of being about to have a baby brother or sister he was old enough to have fathered himself, Ines’s pregnancy was yet another financial and emotional pressure thrust onto his already overloaded shoulders. He couldn’t deal with it.

In the end they’d had a titanic row about it, with an incoherently drunk Jose and Tito, the only one of Lucas’s waster brothers not in prison, both throwing in their two cents’ worth, adding fuel to the fire.

“Take it!” he finally snapped, emptying his wallet and pockets of every last note and coin and flinging them hopelessly onto the floor at his mother’s feet. “It doesn’t matter what I make; it’ll never be enough, will it, Mama? There’s always another mouth to feed, another fucking bill collector at the door. You’re your own worst enemy.”

He stormed out with the sound of Ines’s sobs and his stepfather’s slurred abuse still ringing in his ears. Heading straight for San Antonio, he walked into the cheapest bar he could find and set about the important task of drinking himself into oblivion.

On the street, the cool night air hit him with sobering force. Ibiza in March could be quite cold, and Lucas found himself shivering in just a shirt and jeans. Slinging his one small bag over his shoulder, he set off in the direction of Plaza della Playa, where he hoped one of the cheaper, off-season B and Bs might give him a room, even at this time of night. It was far too cold to sleep on the beach, even warmed from within with whiskey as he was.

Without thinking, he turned a corner and found himself standing at the foot of the front steps to the Britannia, the ghastly dive where he’d worked as a teenage no-hoper all those years ago. Looking at the place, it might have been yesterday. Nothing had changed, from the dingy facade with its depressing, peeling paint to the stench of pine disinfectant that wafted out of the lobby and into the street like chemical warfare. The smell made him retch. And yet some strange impulse seemed to draw him up the steps. Putting one blind foot in front of the other, he soon found himself standing, swaying like a reed in the breeze, in the middle of the deserted reception area.

“Well, well, well.”

The taunting, malevolent voice was accompanied by a slow hand clap. Lucas turned unsteadily around.

“If it isn’t the prodigal son returned.”

Miguel, the manager, emerged from the shadows like a fat, bald genie of the lamp. His face was markedly more lined than when Lucas had last seen him, and his grotesque, wobbling beer belly now protruded a farther inch or two from beneath his straining, food-splattered T-shirt. But otherwise he was the same sneering bully he’d always been. Lucas had assumed that even a deadbeat like Miguel would have moved on to new pastures by now. But apparently not.

He looked his old boss up and down as if he had scabies. “Miguel. What an unpleasant surprise.”

“So tell me.” The manager eased his spreading thighs down into the one threadbare sofa shoved against the wall in reception and threw his arms wide with exaggerated bonhomie. “Just how exactly do you move from managing a famous Tischen Hotel to flogging homemade porn on the Internet? Is that the sort of savvy career move they teach you at EHL?”

But Lucas wasn’t playing along.

“You know,” he said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Something smells rotten in here. You’d have thought disinfectant this strong would wipe out all the vermin.” Sniffing pointedly, he looked Miguel right in the eye. “But I guess not. Will you excuse me? I’m afraid I have to go outside and vomit.”

The poisonous smile melted from Miguel’s face.

“Sticks and stones, Ruiz!” he shouted, waddling after Lucas’s retreating back like a venomous toad. “Say what you like about me, but at least I have a hotel to run. You were so full of it when you left, swanning off to Lausanne. Remember your Luxe?” he jeered. “You were going to blow the hotel world wide open. Show us all how it was done. Ha!”

With an effort, Lucas kept walking. What on earth had possessed him to come back to this shit hole?

“But of course, you’ve come crawling back. Just like I said you would.” Miguel called after him, struggling up from the sofa to follow Lucas out. “Staying with that junkie slut mother of yours, are you? No wonder you got tangled up with Tina Palmer.” He laughed, a horrible, wet, gurgling sound, like someone drowning in phlegm. “They say boys are always attracted to girls that remind them of their mamas.”

Lucas had reached the bottom of the steps now and was standing in the Plaza. Only one desultory pizza place was still open, its few patrons glued to the big screen above the bar, which was showing a welterweight boxing match. Miguel was a couple of
steps above Lucas but was short enough to still be at his eye level. Which meant that when Lucas turned around and launched his first punch, a wild swing directed straight at his opponent’s nose, Miguel had plenty of time to see it coming. Luckily for him, after so much booze, Lucas’s reflexes were not what they otherwise might have been.

Ducking to avoid the blow, Miguel swiftly hit back, landing one of his own right hooks in the pit of Lucas’s stomach—this was no time for gentlemen’s rules of combat—winding him just long enough to land a second blow across the top of his jaw. Jolted, Lucas staggered backward. Having grown up taking beatings from a powerhouse like Jose, Miguel’s feeble efforts were little more than bee stings. But, like bee stings, they were irritating. And the more irritated Lucas got, the less he seemed able to make his tired, drunken body do what he asked it to.

The patrons in the pizzeria had turned their attention from the dull televised fight to the much more exciting live action. But it was a bit like watching a small child baiting a bear: Lucas had all the strength but apparently no idea what to do with it.

Letting out a great, bloodcurdling roar of frustration and rage, he ran headfirst at the steps like a charging bull. For a split second, Miguel panicked—jammed between solid stone stairs and two hundred pounds of lean, angry muscle, there was nowhere to go. But to his great relief, Lucas lost his footing just at the crucial moment. With a collective, audible gasp, the pizzeria diners watched as his head slammed down onto the bottom step with a sickening crunch.

“Not so high and mighty now, are we?” snarled Miguel, swinging his fat leg back and launching a kick at Lucas’s head as if it were a football.

A semiconscious Lucas merely groaned. Then he lay back as slowly, pixel by pixel, the world faded to black.

When he next opened his eyes, the first thing he was aware of was the drill that seemed to be soaring through his skull and into the soft tissue of his brain. He’d never known a headache like it.

“Where am I?” he groaned, trying to sit up but instantly regretting it as a wave of nausea slammed into him, and he sank back down onto the bed.

“You’re in the Euro Clinic Eivissa,” said the middle-aged woman who seemed to have materialized out of the ether.

“The German hospital?” said Lucas, weakly.

“Yes. You were lucky. A German lady at the Plaza Pizzeria called an ambulance for you. The rest of them would have left you there to bleed to death or freeze.”

Typical. Just his luck to be rescued by a bloody German.

“What happened?” asked the woman.

Fractured memories of Miguel’s malevolent face came floating back to him, interspersed with images of his pregnant mother, Anton, and, bizarrely, Honor. What was she doing right now? he wondered. This very second?

He still kept a mental picture of her from that first day on the beach, before he knew who she was, when he’d been so unforgivably rude and refused to help her. What was it about Honor that always seemed to bring out the absolute worst in him?

“Lucas?” The woman’s voice was back.

How did she know his name? He must have had his driver’s license on him when they brought him in. He couldn’t imagine any of his credit cards were left.

“Do you know who did this to you? The German lady said it seemed as though you knew the other man. The two of you were talking…”

“No,” Lucas shook his head. “She must be mistaken. I can’t remember anything. Sorry.”

He didn’t want to go after Miguel. What was the point? At the end of the day, everything he’d taunted him with was true. Maybe, in a twisted way, he’d done him a favor. Maybe it had to
come to this—waking up alone, broke, and bloodied in a strange hospital—for him to finally see the light.

He’d left Ibiza with a dream—to build his Luxe. But somewhere along the way he’d lost sight of it.

Being made manager of the Herrick so young had gone to his head. He’d gotten sucked into this stupid war with Honor Palmer, jumping whenever Anton said jump, like a performing monkey, desperate to hold on to his status as the US hotel world’s next big thing. And he’d sacrificed his morals and his judgment in the process.

His vanity, he now realized, had hurt a lot of people. Some of them, like Devon Carter, might have deserved to suffer. But others—Karis, Lola, even to a lesser extent the Palmer sisters—they’d all been collateral damage. The person he’d hurt the most though, ultimately, was himself. It was his dreams that had come to nothing. His future that had folded before his eyes, like a house of cards.

He still hated Anton for double-crossing him. And he was still determined to get his revenge. But he would no longer let his hatred consume him. From now on he would focus his energies on something positive.

Tomorrow, Lucas would sit down and rewrite his business plan. Screw finding a job.

The next time he saw Miguel Munoz, he’d be the owner—not the manager; not, as Honor had once goaded him, “a paid employee,” but the
owner
—of the best boutique hotel in the world.

“Luxe,” he whispered, under his breath. Even saying the word out loud revived him.

“What was that?” The nurse pricked up her ears. “Have you remembered something?”

“Yes,” said Lucas, with a smile. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I have.”

H
ONOR CHECKED HER
hair in the elevator mirror and fiddled nervously with her silver-and-topaz cuff links. Officially you weren’t supposed to wear white to a wedding other than your own, but she hoped her wide-cut Marni pantsuit would count as oatmeal. Maybe the white rule didn’t apply to pants anyway? Or maybe pants were just a total no-no at a wedding? Oh shit, what if they were? If only she weren’t so damned nervous.