“Tell me,” he asked casually, “have you heard much about the new hotel opening up here? I gather it’s going to be a big deal.”
“So they say,” said Desiree. “Everyone’s talking about it: the Herrick, it’s called. They’re building just a couple of blocks away from Palmers. All the local bigwigs are up in arms.”
“They are?” Lucas sipped at his drink, avoiding her eye. “But surely another big hotel means more jobs, more local business, more money. I’d have thought people would be pleased.”
Desiree laughed. “You obviously don’t know much about East Hampton. People here already have enough money. They like to keep things the way they are: traditional. From what I hear the Herrick’s going to be anything but that. According to Honor Palmer, the building’s going to be a hideous modern glass thing, designed by some trendy Manhattan architect. A real eyesore, so they say.”
“Is that so?” muttered Lucas angrily. How dare Honor act like she had inside information! He hadn’t even definitively picked an architect yet, although the design would be modernist. He wondered what other lies she’d been spreading, and whether the whole town was already poisoned against him.
Perhaps he was foolish to have expected anything less. With so much to do in London before he left, he’d put off reading the fat file Anton had given him on Honor until he got on the plane. It was quite an eye-opener. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she’d evidently decided that one wasn’t enough. This girl wanted the entire cutlery set, wrenching control of her old man’s assets while he was dying of Alzheimer’s.
What kind of a bitch did that to her own father?
“Personally, I think this German guy, whatever his name is, is wasting his money.” Oblivious of Lucas’s stony face, Desiree trundled on. “Palmers may be a bit run down, but it’s an institution. I can’t see how some faceless newcomer can compete with it. Especially not one run by a college kid with no experience.”
“A college kid?” spluttered Lucas, unable to keep up his pretense of detachment any longer. “Is that what Honor Palmer’s been saying?”
“Well…yes.” Desiree looked baffled.
“Who the fuck is she to talk?” roared Lucas. “This time last year she was still at Harvard fucking Business School!”
“Hey, look, what do I know?” Realizing she’d offended him in some way, Desiree was kicking herself about it. Having gotten over her initial nerves, she’d decided Lucas was fully gorgeous. “Do you want another drink?”
“No,” he snapped, dropping a ten on the table and getting up to leave. “I don’t.” Looking up at her confused, apologetic face, he relented.
“Look, sorry,” he said. “It isn’t you I’m mad at, sweetheart. But I do have to get going. Do you think you could direct me to the site of this new hotel, the Herrick?”
“Sure,” she said, relieved to be back in his good books and praying silently that he’d ask her for her number before he left. “Make a right into the center of town, away from the beach. You’ll see Palmers about six blocks down; you can’t miss it. Five hundred yards farther on and you’re there. But there’s nothing to see,” she added. “It’s just a big, muddy hole.”
“Thank you,” said Lucas, pulling open the café door so that a chill blast of air hit the both of them.
“Wait!” Desiree heard herself calling after him. She couldn’t just let him leave. “You never said what you were doing in town. If you’re staying for a while I could show you around a bit. You know. If you’d like,” she finished lamely, her cheeks turning from pink to maroon with embarrassment. It had been a long time since she’d had to make the effort with a guy, and she was clearly out of practice.
Lucas smiled. “I’d like that,” he said. “And as it happens, I am staying for a while.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” he grinned. “I’m the college kid with no experience who’ll be managing the big glass eyesore. The one the German guy is wasting his money on.”
And with a wink he disappeared into the rainstorm, leaving Desiree staring wordlessly after him.
By the time Lucas reached Palmers he was freezing once again, having trudged through the rain like a hobo for almost twenty minutes without passing another soul. But despite the cold and his intense curiosity to check out the competition he decided against going inside. Honor, he knew, was still away in Boston, dealing with her late father’s affairs, but he didn’t want to risk encountering any of her staff until he both looked and felt on top of his game. Right now, nothing could have been further from the truth.
From the outside, though, he was encouraged. It was hardly the all-American idyll he’d been expecting. Beneath the solid gray blanket of clouds the whitewashed wooden structure looked bleak and forbidding, and the entire upper stories were covered with an ugly latticework of scaffolding. Leaping from bar to bar like so many human squirrels, a motley crew of grumbling workers were busy stripping tiles off the roof and hurling them to the ground where they joined a growing pile of shattered debris, littering up what must once have been a heavenly formal rose garden. All that noise and mess must be driving Honor’s guests crazy.
Walking around to the side of the hotel, he peered through an original sash window (very nice) into the main drawing room, and his spirits were further lifted to see that the bar and sitting areas were almost empty. The few guests that were in residence looked like the sort of permanent fixtures that all the old-name hotels relied on off-season. There was one old man with close-cropped hair and a graying moustache sitting bolt upright on one of the overstuffed sofas—ex-military, Lucas would put money on it—and two overweight matrons, conservatively dressed in tweeds and pearls, sharing a pot of tea by the roaring, baronial fire. All three were probably too old and deaf to hear the roof works. No wonder Honor had been doing her best to slag off him and the Herrick. If this was the level of occupancy she was reduced to, she must be absolutely terrified at the prospect of competition. Structurally, the place looked to be on its last legs.
On the other hand, pressing his nose to the window pane like Tiny Tim looking at the rich folks’ Christmas feast, Lucas caught glimpses of what had once made Palmers the greatest hotel in the world. Yes, the furnishings were threadbare, and the antique English furniture scratched and battered around the edges. There was even a visible hole in the exquisite Persian rug. But the room gave off such a welcoming, old-world warmth and charm it seemed to draw one in anyway. It was an old truism that money and class don’t always go together, but Palmers was living proof of its veracity. You could quite see how its understated ambience had been a magnet to all that old Protestant Connecticut money. Mayflower money. If he hadn’t come here with the express purpose of destroying the place and its eponymous owner, he might even have felt sorry to see such a once-great giant brought so low.
But he had. And anyway, he’d never been much of one for sentimental musings. Turning away, he trudged back to the road. Honor clearly intended to play dirty with him, but Little Miss Privileged was about to meet her match. No woman was going to outsmart Lucas, not Julia Brett-Sadler, and certainly not an inexperienced trust-fund brat like Honor Palmer.
He was enjoying himself, mentally embellishing his plan to nuke his would-be rival out of the water with a few well-placed bombs in the New York press when, turning a corner, he stopped dead in his tracks, his confident defiance deflating on the spot like an old man’s erection.
“Fuck…” he whispered out loud.
He knew there wouldn’t be a lot to see. But somehow the quagmire in front of him, stretching across acres like an abandoned, rain-swept battlefield, was far more depressing in reality than it had been in imagination. A few beams and pieces of tape had been laid on the ground as markers, and in the far right-hand corner of the plot was a single twelve-by-twelve-foot hole, filling up with rainwater. But that was it. That was what he had ten months to transform into a five-star resort, and another six to have it heaving with celebrities. It wasn’t possible, surely?
>
Set back a few yards from the hole, an aluminum trailer mounted on concrete breeze blocks contained a temporary office, in which one man—one! Lucas had been expecting to meet at least five contractors and architects—was sitting behind a Formica desk, tapping away in a desultory, one-fingered manner at his keyboard.
“Hey, buddy. You look cold,” the guy said, looking up but not moving from his seat as Lucas squelched in. Lacking Desiree’s unique advantages—this man was fat, bald, and had sweat patches under his arms the size of small dinner plates—there was nothing to mitigate the banal stupidity of the comment. Lucas exploded.
“Cold?” he snarled. “No shit I’m cold, Sherlock. It’s about minus nine out there, which you’d know if you bothered to get up off your fat backside and actually do some fucking work. Where the fuck is everybody else?”
The man opened his mouth to speak, but Lucas was on a roll. “The building works are supposed to be finished by Christmas. Finished!”
“Well, that ain’t happening,” tittered the fat man, ill-advisedly.
“Where are the contractors?” Lucas was apoplectic. “Our meeting was at two.”
The fat man nodded and started shuffling the papers on his desk in a distinctly nervous manner. “Ah, about that. What I understood from Tisch’s office…it was never, like, a definite meeting for today. I wasn’t sure exactly when you’d be arriving.”
“Bullshit!” bellowed Lucas. “I faxed you my flight details myself, weeks ago. All you had to do was pull together one lousy meeting, and you haven’t even done that.” Grabbing a plastic chair from the back of the trailer, he dragged it noisily over to the desk and sat down. “Get them all on the phone, right now. Maybe we can salvage a conference call.”
The foreman looked apologetically at the basic plastic handset in front of him. “Sorry, man,” he said. “We ain’t set up for conference calls and shit.”
Lucas looked as though he might be about to commit murder.
“Come on, lighten up a little,” said the foreman defensively. “This ain’t Manhattan, you know. No one round this neck of the woods is high tech.”
Slamming both fists down on the desk, Lucas leaned right across it until his face was millimeters from the man’s nose. With one easy movement, he swept the computer keyboard, monitor, and several stacks of paper onto the floor.
“You’re fired,” he said quietly, but with such menace that the foreman shivered, his fat arms wobbling like a shaken jelly. “Get the fuck out of here, and don’t come back.”
Backing away from Lucas like a startled crab, clearly anticipating imminent physical violence, the foreman made a few halfhearted protests as he gathered up the remnants of his files.
“I don’t know who you think you are, b-b-buddy,” he stammered, once safely within reach of the trailer door. “But I work for the Tischen Group, not you. I gotta contract.”
Picking up a heavy brass paperweight, Lucas raised it purposefully above his head. The debating part of the conversation had come to an end.
Taking the hint, the fat man waddled out the door. Lucas watched his gleaming bald pate from the trailer window as he climbed into his Ford pickup and sped away, no doubt in the direction of the nearest employment lawyer or union representative. Only once he’d gone did Lucas sink back down into his chair, pick up the 1980s-throwback telephone, and call Anton.
As usual he was unavailable—“traveling” was all his uptight Swiss secretary would divulge—so Lucas left a message, briefly outlining the events of the last half hour. There was no point going into detail. Tisch would either back him or he wouldn’t.
Either way, all the ebullience he’d felt earlier outside Palmers had now deserted him utterly. The next year seemed to stretch ahead of him like a life sentence, stuck in this dreary, drizzly small town trying to build a hotel from ground zero—a hotel that 90 percent of the local populace had already decided they despised, thanks to Honor fucking Palmer.
He’d felt from the beginning that landing the Herrick job was too good to be true.
Looked like he was right. It was.
“Fuck, Caleb, what is wrong with you?”
Hopping into the bathroom, Honor turned on the shower and wrinkled her nose at the smell as she rinsed the dog shit off her bare foot.
Three weeks after Lucas’s arrival in town, she had finally made it back to East Hampton herself, having handed what was left of the tangled web of Trey’s affairs to Sam Brannagan, the family lawyer.
“I’ve done my best, Sam,” she told him wearily, unloading an entire trunkload of papers from the back of her rental car. “Most of the personal stuff is filed, but I really can’t give it any more time now. I have to get back to Palmers.”
Sam thought how tired and stressed she looked. He hadn’t seen her since that ghastly meeting in his office last summer, and she’d been tiny enough then, but now her collarbones jutted visibly through her white cotton shirt, and her sludge-gray size-zero pants hung off her hips like dirty ship’s sails. Running Palmers must be taking more out of her than she’d anticipated.
In fact, her wasted appearance had more to do with grief and stress about her dead-end relationship with Devon than it did with anxiety over Palmers, although she was itching to get back, especially since word had reached her that the future manager of the new Tischen was in town and had moved into a little cottage by the beach. It was now two days since her return and, rather to her annoyance, she had yet to meet the elusive Mr. Ruiz. To be honest, she’d rather expected him to stop by Palmers and make an appointment to see her. As the new kid on the block, sent here for the express purpose of putting her out of business, she figured the responsibility of a courtesy call lay firmly with him. But maddeningly he’d made no effort to get in touch, and Honor certainly wasn’t about to.
Though she forced herself to keep confident about Palmers’ future, she was still hopelessly unprepared for the coming summer season. So much of her energy had been devoted to getting the structural problems under control without causing too much disruption to her few, precious off-season guests that she’d barely had time to begin her much-needed PR drive. Nervous about promoting Palmers’ renaissance in case the media used it as an excuse to rehash the twisted allegations about her “betraying” her father, she’d hoped for the first few months that if she kept her head down, the bad press would eventually fizzle out. But it hadn’t. Thanks to the growing media interest in Tina and Dick, and Lise’s shameless attempts to add to her already whopping inheritance with interviews in glossy magazines, looking as grief-stricken as she could in Atelier Versace and vintage Tiffany emeralds, the Palmer family soap opera looked set to run and run, with Honor unfairly cast in the role of resident villainess.
After the funeral, she’d decided to adopt a different tack, pulling up the names of every guest to stay at Palmers over the last decade and placing personal calls to each of them, urging them to think about returning this summer and offering them significantly discounted rates. It was a risky strategy that could easily have smacked of desperation had she not handled each phone call with the delicate balance of confidence and humility that such a task required. It had also taken weeks to plough through the list. But it seemed to have paid off. Once people heard Honor in person, they sensed immediately that she bore no resemblance to the money-hungry monster portrayed by the gossip press. Flattered by the personal attention and tempted by the low rates, they began, slowly—painfully slowly—to call back and start booking.
The rising summer numbers were wonderful, a real shot in the arm, but they’d come at a cost. With the reduced rates they would barely cover costs, and she’d be forced to put off the major electrical work for at least another few months. In the meantime, she’d done her best to start discrediting her soon-to-be rival, emphasizing Lucas’s lack of experience and Anton Tisch’s penchant for Blade Runner–esque architecture, knowing how much that would piss off the arch-conservative Hamptonites. Slowly, the tide of local opinion was beginning to turn i
n her favor, but who knew how long that would last? Now that Lucas was here in person, he was bound to start returning fire.
“You’re a rescue dog, you know,” said Honor, trying to look stern at the sweetly snub-nosed boxer sticking his curious head around the door and failing miserably. “I rescued you. That means you owe me. So what’s with all the crapping indoors, huh?”
Caleb responded by thumping his stumpy tail loudly against the tiles a few times before running around in an excited circle and finally launching himself at his mistress with such force he almost knocked her flying.
“Oh, all right, all right,” Honor laughed, submitting happily to his enthusiastic licks as she perched on the side of the bath and began drying her foot with a fluffy hand towel. “I’ll take you for another run. Just give me a minute to throw some clothes on, OK?”
It would take more than a dog-poo-stained carpet or Lucas Ruiz’s pointed radio silence to dampen Honor’s spirits today. Devon had called last night to tell her he was coming out early for Easter, officially so that he could deal with some local politics or other and attend a bunch of committee meetings, but actually as an excuse to spend some quality time with Honor before Karis and the kids flew out for the holiday weekend. For ten glorious days, Honor would have him all to herself, the longest they’d ever spent together. And it hadn’t come a moment too soon.
She’d only seen him for one snatched, unsatisfactory night in a New Jersey motel since the day she’d let him have it with both barrels at her father’s funeral. Perhaps that had been a bit unfair, she could see with hindsight. But somehow watching him play the dutiful husband to Karis had been a thousand times worse than just knowing he did it when she wasn’t there. The fact she’d been burying her dad at the time probably hadn’t helped her tolerance levels much either.
They spoke on the phone daily, but it wasn’t the same. Despite her long years of practice at it, extended periods of celibacy weren’t Honor’s forte and tended to make her stress levels rocket. A few more days and she’d be able to stake her claim as the world masturbation champion. Forget “mistress of her domain.” These days she was just a mistress of frustration—or a frustrated mistress. Devon wasn’t gonna know what hit him when he walked through that door tonight.