Do Not Disturb (47 page)

But Carla did worry. It was wonderful to see him bouncing back after all he’d been through, and she didn’t doubt he would make a roaring success of his new hotel. But he was still so headstrong and stubborn, and now he was determined to make an enemy of one of the most powerful men in the world. She only hoped he’d come to his senses before Tisch decided to finish the job he’d started and wipe Lucas off the map once and for all.

E
SSEX IN THE
autumn could really be quite beautiful, thought Ben, putting his foot down and pushing his trusty Mini Cooper to a chassis-rattling sixty miles per hour. As soon as you turned off the M it was all wooded lanes and half-timbered thatched cottages, their chimneys smoking a welcome amid the chill wind and the swirling, golden tumble of autumn leaves. Everyone associated the county with dumb blondes and blank, faceless suburban towns. Both of which existed, of course—his own parents lived in probably the blankest, most faceless of them all. But there was a lot more to Essex than bimbos and charmless apartment blocks.

Maybe one day he’d move down here with a young family of his own. Buy somewhere rural. Have…pigs. Or something.

Or maybe not.

A lot had changed in Ben’s life in a few short years. His fund, Stellar, had had its third rough quarter in a row, which was bizarre, given their investment performance had held steady in a very dicey market. But for some mysterious reason, his investors kept redeeming their shares and jumping ship to Excelsior, Anton Tisch’s fund. Three years ago, Ben had been almost neck and neck with Anton at around the five billion mark, but now Excelsior was the clear market leader, hoovering up the Russian
money flooding into London at a rate that none of its rival funds could compete with. It was depressing.

Today, though, business woes were the last thing on Ben’s mind. He was driving home for the weekend, which ought to have been relaxing, if it weren’t for the fact that he knew he’d get a grilling about his love life. The moment he walked through the door, his mum and sisters were bound to strike up their familiar refrain—the one that sounded like a train gaining momentum and was about as difficult to stop: Marry Bianca, Marry Bianca, Marry Bianca.

Grinding the gear stick belatedly up into fifth—no wonder his poor car sounded so wheezy—he wondered again how he might try to change the subject. Last time his dad had taken pity on him and dragged him down the pub to watch football, but Ben doubted he’d be so lucky again today. Apparently Dad got a right ear-bashing about it afterward. Ben could just picture his poor father, trying in vain to defend himself from three screaming Slater women, all intent on frog-marching their precious boy to the altar.

The problem was, he really didn’t have an answer for their biggest question: Why didn’t he propose? Bianca was wonderful, a real gem. Beautiful, smart, devoted, funny—he couldn’t think of a single thing about her that he’d change. She’d moved into his Kensington apartment a year ago after a year and a half of dating, and to this day had yet to get on his nerves, which was quite a feat. Even more amazingly, she seemed to be suffering from some sort of rare glaucoma that blinded her to his own all-too-obvious faults: the midnight chip eating, the hopeless fashion sense, the complete inability to put the toilet seat down after having a pee. All this on top of the fact that he was no Brad Pitt, whereas Bianca could give Angelina a run for her money any day of the week.

She loved him. And in his own way, Ben loved her back. But the idea of marriage still made his blood run cold, which
was something he couldn’t explain to himself, never mind his matrimony-crazed mother.

Passing Thorney Bay, he felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him. He used to come here sometimes as a kid, looking at the lights from the trailer park across the water and dreaming of making it big amid the even brighter lights of London.

By all objective standards, Canvey Island was a dump: rampant unemployment, blocks of apartment buildings, and cheap housing that must have looked awful even before the decades of neglect, sea wind, and graffiti had worn them down. Nothing to do but hang out at the waterfront drinking miniature bottles of Baileys and trying to get off with girls. But Ben had happy memories of the place. It would always be special to him.

“Blimey. At last. What time d’you call this?” Nikki, the younger of his two sisters, came running out as he pulled the Mini into the driveway of his parents’ house. “Mum’s going nuts. She ’ad dinner ready quarter of an hour ago.”

With her short-cropped peroxided hair and uncompromisingly tight stonewashed jeans, Nikki had never fully grown out of her Roxette phase. But she was very pretty in an eighties-throwback, Essex sort of a way. And she took good care of her body, which was more than Ben could say for himself right now. “You’ve put on weight,” she said cheerfully as he climbed out of the car. “Lard ass.”

“Fuck off,” he responded, kissing her and linking arms as they walked up to the house.

“Where’s Bianca?”

Ben sighed wearily. “I told you. She’s in New York, on a job. She does work, you know.”

Like all successful models, Bianca traveled a lot. Though he didn’t like to admit it, Ben suspected that her long absences might be part of the reason that they got along so well when they were together. Any relationship comprised of a series of joyous reunions strung together was going to seem fresher and more
passionate than one based on the predictability of daily routine. More passionate than marriage, in other words.

“What if she meets another bloke out there?” Nikki raised an eyebrow in warning. “Someone who ain’t afraid to make an honest woman out of her?”

They hadn’t even gotten indoors yet, and already she was off on one.

“She meets loads of blokes, all the time,” said Ben, “and most of them look like David bloody Beckham. What can I say?” he shrugged. “I guess she must have a thing for lard-assed commit-mentphobes. Hello, Mum.”

He bent down to kiss his mother, who looked adorably furious in her apron with a wooden spoon in hand. Dear old Mum, she did love her props. They all knew that dinner, whatever it was, would have come straight out of a Stouffer’s box and that the only kitchen implement she’d actually have used was a fork for piercing the film lid several times. But Eileen Slater was not a woman to let insignificant details like that spoil her sense of occasion.

“You’re late, Benny. No Bianca?” She made a great theatrical show of hunting for his missing girlfriend, as if he might have hidden her in a pocket. But her son was so big, and she was so small, it was like watching a penguin trying to see around an iceberg.

Ben rolled his eyes to heaven.

This was going to be a long afternoon.

Lunch passed predictably enough. Ben fielded the questions and accusations as best he could, in between mouthfuls of Birds Eye Sunday Special: incinerated strips of roast beef smothered with gravy so thick it almost certainly qualified as a solid, which he soaked up with floury roast potatoes and three servings of Yorkshire pudding, earning himself a reproachful “steady on, Hagrid,” from Nikki.

By the time the Iceland trifle arrived in all its quivering, gelatinous, artificially colored glory, conversation had mercifully turned to other matters.

“’Ere, look at this.” Ben’s dad shuffled over to the sofa to retrieve the travel section from one of the Sunday papers. “That’s your mate, isn’t it? El Spic-o.”

Like everyone of his generation from Canvey Island, Rog Slater peppered his speech with racist, sexist, and generally politically incorrect references. But you wouldn’t find a kinder man in England, and Ben had long ago ceased to be offended.

“His name’s Lucas, Dad,” he said, patiently. “And yeah, that’s his new hotel. Looks brilliant, doesn’t it?”

It was only a little over a year since Luxe Ibiza had opened her doors to rave reviews in travel periodicals all across Europe. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Lucas had already capitalized on his early success and launched the second hotel in his franchise, a chichi urban boutique in Paris.

The article was a double-page spread of the sumptuous new Luxe, a tiny townhouse off the Boulevard St. Germain. So discreet it was practically invisible from the outside, inside it was an oasis of luxurious tranquility, with the sort of minimalist, less-is-more glamour that only Lucas could pull off. In contrast to the white walls of his Ibiza flagship, he’d opted for a warmer decor of claret-red velvets and deep-green baize, though it was still lit exclusively by candlelight. To Ben’s untrained eye it looked part spa, part bordello, and part eighteenth-century salon. The pictures were out of this world.

“Let me see.” Karen, his other sister, snatched the paper off him and spread it open on the dining table so her husband could look too.

“Oooh,” she cooed. “Very nice. D’you think you could get us the friend rate, Benny?”

Ben laughed. None of his family could resist a bargain.

“Dunno,” he said. “I can certainly try.”

Although back in semiregular touch, he hadn’t actually seen Lucas since the launch party for the Ibiza hotel last summer. It
was a great night, not least because Lucas and Bianca had hit it off famously.

Wrapped around Ben like a wood nymph in a pale-green chiffon wisp of a dress, she’d proclaimed herself to be a fully paid-up fan of the Luxe aura, complimenting Lucas on everything from the canapés to the candlelit rock pools.

“They look so natural, like the garden of Eden. Hey, maybe Ben and I should go skinny-dipping later? This is Ibiza, after all.”

Ben blushed and mumbled something suitably English about not wanting to frighten the horses. After she’d gone, Lucas drew him aside.

“Stunning girl,” he said approvingly. “Congratulations. You see? I told you you could do better than that anemic little maid from Palmers, didn’t I?”

Ben could recall that comment now as if it were yesterday, could still feel the way it had sent his stomach lurching like a free-falling elevator. Even now, thoughts of Sian still bothered him. It bothered him that they bothered him.

“You finished, darling?”

His mum’s voice brought him back to the present with a jolt.

“Yes, thanks,” he said, handing her his empty trifle bowl. “It was really delicious.”

Eileen blushed, as happy with the compliment as if she’d made the dessert herself from scratch, and handed him a mug of his favorite PG Tips tea, with two bourbon biscuits for dunking. “Take those through to the lounge if you like,” she said.

The family decamped en masse to the enormous living room, sinking themselves into the various supersized World of Leather sofas and continuing to ooh and aah over Lucas’s new Paris hotel. The rest of the Sunday papers were still on the dinner table, and Ben hung back, having caught sight of the lurid red print of the
News of the World
at the top of the pile. Flipping the pages idly, he wondered if Sian would have a byline in this week.

Ever since she’d graduated to the features desk at the infamous Sunday gossip rag, Ben had become a regular reader.

Bianca couldn’t understand it.

“But it’s such a horrible paper,” she pointed out each week, when he guiltily handed over his change to the newsagent. “All they do is prey on people, trying to break up marriages and wreck families. Why on earth do you buy it?”

“Good football coverage,” was his stock, lame excuse. He felt bad lying, but there was no point in rocking the boat with B by telling her Sian was a columnist. Since Bianca had actually met Sian two years ago, at that New York wedding—what sort of sick celestial sadist had sat his girlfriend next to his ex, for God’s sake?—she’d had a face to put with the name, and as a result had always maintained a slightly anxious curiosity about her and Ben’s relationship.

There was no way he could excuse his interest in Sian’s writing without sounding suspect. And he couldn’t very well tell the truth: that reading her pieces gave him a strange sensation—part pride, part nostalgia, part something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on—that had become weirdly addictive. Putting his personal feelings aside, she was a terrific writer. He loved her unique brand of acerbic wit and often found himself laughing out loud at things she’d written, taking the piss out of some fat-cat politician in the withering, deadpan voice he remembered so well from their brief summer together.

He still regretted the way things had ended between them. With hindsight, he could see he’d overreacted. What the hell had he been thinking, taking love life advice from Lucas of all people? Lucas, who wouldn’t know true love if it bit him in the ass and whistled Dixie? It was like asking Donald Trump for a lesson in humility. He’d have liked to have had the chance to say sorry, at least. But the moment for apologies had long since passed. Sian probably wouldn’t even remember him. And anyway, he had Bianca now.

Even so, he’d lost count of the times he’d sat in front of his screen at work, struggling to compose a suitably casual e-mail, congratulating her on her writing and just saying hello. But he always lost his nerve before he pressed send.

“Ben!” Nikki crept up behind him and made him jump. Why were all the women in his family cursed with voices that sounded like pneumatic drills boring into bedrock? “What are you doing hiding in here? We all want to talk to you about Bianca. You needn’t think you’re off the hook.”