Do Not Disturb (63 page)

He wondered how Petra would react if he brought Saskia in to help corral the press coverage. Not well, he imagined, chuckling quietly. Petra responded to other attractive women the way that the majority of her sex responded to spiders. You could visibly see her flesh crawl in their presence. A brassy, British ball-breaker like Saskia would be Petra’s equivalent of a fat, hairy tarantula. Throwing the two of them together was bound to result in some serious fireworks.

But he’d save that particular bombshell for later. For now, he kept his responses to Petra’s messages as neutral and businesslike as usual.

By the time he clicked open her third e-mail, with its multiple JPEG attachments, he was almost home. But the title “Palmers Pics” piqued his interest, and he instructed his driver to make a detour through Shepherds Market and around Berkeley Square so he could finish downloading it in the car.

“Thought you might like to see these,” Petra had written. “From this month’s
Hello!
”

Opening the first image, Anton gave a little snort of surprise, bordering on admiration. Honor had made startlingly rapid progress.

The building wasn’t finished, but it couldn’t be more than a couple of months from completion, and what he saw here was impressive. The facade was strongly reminiscent of the old hotel but fell short of the sentimental replica he’d been expecting. It was grander, for one thing—the portico was taller by a good three feet, he reckoned, and it was rendered in stone rather than the cutesy Huck Finn whitewashed wood of its predecessor. The landscaping was also done on an altogether bigger scale, although to his mind it was still drearily conservative: rose gardens, topiary, lavender-lined gravel paths. No vision. No daring. It reminded him of a slightly grander version of Southampton’s 1708 House.

“Did you know she was this far down the line?” he instant-messaged Petra, before moving on to the interior shots: simple, classic bedrooms with heavy mahogany four-posters and lots of white linen and ceiling fans; bathrooms with freestanding copper tubs and big enough proportions to accommodate the comfy antique armchairs and paintings that gave them the feel of living rooms.

Petra IM’d him back.

“I’ve been trying to tell you for months. You didn’t want to know.”

Anton scowled. He didn’t appreciate being upbraided by his staff, or his lovers. He’d always felt that Petra overestimated Honor’s significance as a threat, her judgment clouded by her own personal hostility. But perhaps he should have heeded her warnings after all?

Clicking open more of the pictures, he saw that Honor had given more than a nod to her family’s colonial heritage. There was bound to be a pretentious, walnut-lined library in there somewhere, crammed with first editions of Hemingway. And she’d eschewed all the modern touches normally considered to be
de rigueur
in a top-flight hotel these days. There wasn’t a plasma screen in sight, and the doors all had traditional locks and keys. Still, for a woman who most of the industry had written off as a crackpot, she’d done well. He wondered how on earth she’d raised the money.

“Interesting, but not important,” he wrote back to Petra. “She can’t touch us now.”

Ninety-five percent of him believed this—that with the Herrick so firmly established, and now at world number one, Palmers stood no chance of regaining its old supremacy. But the five percent of doubt irritated him almost as much as the pictures of Honor looking so effortlessly beautiful in that green dress, a perfect match for her defiant eyes, as she lounged on the hard stone bench.

He cheered up when he read the next e-mail, a gloating note from Connor Armstrong about yesterday’s hearing in Paris. Lucas, apparently, had first shot himself in the foot by turning up to court without a tie—Madame Justice Dubois, the lesbian battle-ax judge, was not remotely impressed—and then damned himself further by losing his temper when she’d quizzed him about employing illegal immigrants in the Luxe kitchen.

“Show me a hotel chef in Paris with a kitchen full of legal workers, and I’ll show you a liar,” he’d apparently roared at her. “What does any of this have to do with Mr. Armstrong deliberately sabotaging my business?”

Needless to say, she’d ruled against him.

Anton was no admirer of Connor’s. He found him pompous and his pretensions at being a big hitter in property nothing short of pathetic. But he’d really outdone himself with this court case, devoting an energy and effort to destroying Lucas that was almost a match for Anton’s own. As well as the endless legal wrangles, Connor had had a hand in most of the other blows that had rained down on the nascent Luxe chain in recent months: drug raids in Ibiza, strikes in Paris, a lurid kiss-and-tell with a girl from the Crazy Horse in last month’s
Paris Match
. He’d been worth every penny of the blood money Anton had paid him.

So much for Lucas’s boasts about opening Luxe America by the end of the year. At this rate he’d be lucky to open at all. As irritating as Honor’s progress at Palmers was for Anton, he knew it would be a thousand times more galling for Lucas to see his old rival storming ahead while his shitty little business foundered in the muddy shallows like the dying fish that it was.

“D’you want me to keep circling, sir?” The driver had already gone past Annabel’s four times and was starting to think about his bed.

“No, Michaels,” said Anton imperiously, switching off his computer. “I’ve seen all I need to see. We can go home now.”

Bianca stared at the pile of dirty mugs and overflowing ashtrays in the kitchen sink and pursed her lips with annoyance.

“There are three fucking adults in this house,” she muttered furiously under her breath, scraping used cigarette butts and congealed takeout remnants into the trash before filling up a second sink with hot water and detergent. “How come I’m the only one capable of cleaning up after themselves?”

It was the evening after Ben had stormed out of the meeting with the wedding planner, and she’d hoped he might have shown a little sensitivity to her feelings. But no, he’d been on the phone to Sian first thing this morning, unable even to wait until he got into the office, and promptly invited her over for an evening progress meeting. Progress my ass, thought Bianca bitterly, peering through into the living room to see the two of them laughing together over yet another dumb piece of paper. They’d been working on Sian’s scoop for five months now, but she’d yet to mention a publication date for the piece and seemed as far away from finishing the damn thing as ever. Bianca tried not to believe that both of them might have an ulterior motive for dragging the thing out indefinitely. But she couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.

Mindlessly dropping dirty plates and silverware into the sink, she thought back to how much she’d liked Sian when they’d first met at that wedding in New York, and how long ago that seemed now. Back then she’d seemed spunky and fun, a real girls’ girl. But Bianca had evidently misjudged her spirit of sisterhood. Sian was over at the apartment all the time now, whenever she was in England anyway, shamelessly monopolizing Ben without a thought for Bianca’s feelings and pointedly excluding her from their discussions. The pair of them would smoke up a storm (Ben knew Bianca now loathed smoking), emerging from their stinking den only to order huge, revolting-smelling
Domino’s pizzas and leaving the empty boxes and grease stains for Bianca to deal with.

She’d never been one of those up-herself, high-maintenance models that expected minions to clean up after her. Nor was she afraid of a little housework. But she wasn’t a doormat, and she was tired of being treated like one.

Feeling left out and taken for granted wasn’t even the worst of it. It was the horrid, creeping realization, a sort of slow-growing panic, that Ben preferred Sian’s company to hers. She’d tried to talk herself out of this a thousand times—to tell herself that his interest in the story was purely business, about exposing Anton as a crook so that he could win Stellar’s investors back. But each time she watched him giggling with Sian over a shared joke, or even fighting with her about which angle to pursue, she felt the fear start to crawl back over her body, like lice.

Last night in bed, she’d finally plucked up the courage to voice her anxieties to Ben.

“You’re being ridiculous,” he assured her. “Sian and I were over years ago.”

But Bianca couldn’t help but notice that he turned away from her when he spoke, as if his face might give him away.

“Well if you do love me,” she said, stroking the bare curve of his back, “why don’t you make love to me?” She hated herself for sounding so weak and jealous, for having to ask. But she needed the reassurance. “You haven’t touched me for weeks.”

Turning around with a sigh, Ben pulled her into his chest and kissed her on the forehead.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently. “I’m just tired, that’s all. It’s got nothing to do with Sian. Honestly. Work’s hellish, and this story’s taking up a crazy amount of my time.”

“So leave it to Sian, then,” said Bianca, pulling back and kissing him on the mouth, desperately hunting for some sort of a response that went beyond brotherly affection. “You’re paying for the stupid thing. Let her do the bloody detective work.”

“She is doing most of it,” he said. “She sometimes needs a sounding board, that’s all.”

Bianca raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“I’m the one who stands to gain the most financially if we do nail him, so I want her to succeed,” said Ben. “If Excelsior goes down, that would be a huge coup for me. For us.”

Reaching for her breasts, he started to stroke them, something he hadn’t done in ages. Bianca closed her eyes and tried to feel comforted. They made love afterward, and though the sex was clumsy and brief, it felt so good to be connected again, she barely noticed. Then, this morning, they’d slept in an extra hour. He’d been so sweet to her, promising they’d spend more time alone and even setting aside a whole evening next week to go through wedding plans properly with Maxwell.

But just as she was starting to relax, he’d picked up the phone to Sian, and the whole downward spiral began again. Stacking the dripping plates to dry, Bianca was horrified to find herself fantasizing that Sian might be hit by a bus on the way home.

“Hey, chica.”

She jumped out of her skin as two strong, deeply tanned arms coiled themselves around her waist. Spinning around, she squealed with delight to see Lucas.

“I can’t believe he’s got you barefoot in the kitchen already,” he joked, standing back to admire her flat, toned belly, exposed between a midriff-baring tie-dye T-shirt and sexy low-cut jeans. She was Ben’s girl, but he could still look. “You’re not even married yet.”

Bianca smiled. Lucas had always had an uncanny ability to make her laugh in even the blackest of circumstances. Standing in front of her, a lit Gitane in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, he looked mightily pleased with himself. His grin was almost as broad as his shoulders.

“At this rate, I’m starting to wonder if we ever will be,” she said ruefully. “Married, I mean.”

Lucas frowned. “What on earth makes you say that?”

“Oh, nothing.” She turned back to the dishes so he wouldn’t see the tears welling her eyes, but it was obvious she was upset. Stubbing out his cigarette on one of the takeout boxes, Lucas gently spun her back around to face him.

“Come on, angel,” he said gently. “You can tell Uncle Lucas.”

Bianca gave a sob. Desperate to confide suddenly, it all came flooding out: Sian’s investigation into Anton and Ben spending more and more time with her, the growing distance between herself and Ben, the fights over the wedding. When she’d finished, Lucas looked stone-faced.

“That bitch,” he said viciously. “No wonder Ben’s been so bloody evasive with me recently. He didn’t want to admit he’s let that little gold digger back into his life.”

“I wouldn’t say she’s a gold digger, exactly,” said Bianca, shocked by the strength of his reaction. “It’s just that she’s incredibly…intrusive. Getting Ben to focus on the wedding when she’s around is like trying to teach astrophysics to a goldfish.”

“Where is he?” Lucas still looked far from pleased.

“He’s next door in the living room. With her.”

“With Sian?” his eyes widened. “She’s here now?”

Bianca nodded. “But listen, darling, please don’t say anything. Ben already thinks I’m overreacting and—”

“Don’t worry,” Lucas said firmly. “You leave this to me.”