“I thought you might be hungry,” she said, smiling, setting down the tray on the end of the bed. “How’re you feeling, honey?”
Both of Lola’s parents had been in bizarrely good moods lately. Her dad had been practically skipping around the house since she arrived, chipper as a lottery winner—and that was before he heard about Bryan. And her mom, who could normally be counted on to get drunk and depressed on her own birthdays, seemed giddy with excitement about tonight’s party. Especially since the guy who was building some big new hotel in town, this Spanish dude everyone was talking about, had agreed to come. Personally, Lola couldn’t see the big deal. It wasn’t like the guy was Johnny Depp or anything. But this was the first social engagement he’d accepted since coming to East Hampton, and her mom clearly viewed it as a major coup.
“I’m fine.” Lola took a suspicious bite of the toast. “Do I have a terminal illness that no one’s told me about?”
“What? Of course not.” Karis looked shocked. “Why would you say a thing like that?”
Lola smiled. Her mother could be terribly literal sometimes.
“I was kidding.” The eggs were delicious. Sitting down cross-legged on the bed, she set about demolishing them in earnest. “You’re being awfully nice to me, that’s all.”
“Well, you’ve just been through a breakup. I know how tough that can be.” Had she OD’d on Doctor Phil or something? All this concern was seriously out of character.
“But I do have some news that’ll cheer you up,” Karis beamed. “Guess who’s just turned up downstairs?”
“Brad Pitt?” said Lola hopefully.
“Better,” said her mother. “Nicky. He managed to get a flight out after all. Isn’t that terrific?”
“Mmmm.” Lola nodded through a mouthful of toast and rolled her eyes sarcastically. “Terrific.”
Great. Just when she’d thought her weekend couldn’t get any worse, her dipshit brother had to show up. He was bound to give her a hard time about Bryan, in between bouts of sucking up to their mom like a leech.
“Who else is coming?”
“Oh, everyone!” gushed Karis. “Well, everyone who’s anyone, let’s put it that way. Lucas Ruiz, as I told you…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Lola, bored. “And?”
“Oh, darling,” Karis waved her hand distractedly, “I don’t know. Do you really want me to list them all? The Sullivans, the Meyers, Antonia Dickinson, Reverend Jameson and his wife.”
Lola took another big bite of toast.
“Anyone under the age of, like, ninety?”
“Don’t be snarky,” said Karis on autopilot. “Honor Palmer’s coming. She’s young, and fun.”
“I guess,” said Lola.
She’d liked Honor the few times they’d met last summer. The girl didn’t take any shit from anyone.
“Hey,” her eyes lit up mischievously, “d’you think Honor and this Lucas guy will have a big catfight at the table? She must hate him, right, setting up shop so close to Palmers?” Scraping up the last of the eggy crumbs, she pushed her empty plate to one side.
Karis shrugged. “I don’t see why she should. Competition’s a healthy thing in business. But I imagine she’s as curious about him as the rest of us.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” said Lola. “I’m not curious. At all.”
She loved her mom, but she felt sorry for anyone whose life was so boring that they considered meeting a hotel manager to be a major event. The most she hoped for from this evening’s party was that it would take her mind off Bryan for an hour or so. Plus it was a chance to get dressed up, and she’d had precious few of those since her incarceration at St. Mary’s.
“Suit yourself,” said Karis, not unkindly, smoothing down the creases in her pants as she got up to leave. “But tonight is my birthday, and it’s a celebration, OK? Don’t let some idiot boy ruin it for you, or the rest of us.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” said Lola with feeling. “I won’t. I’ve practically forgotten all about him already.”
Two hours later, Lucas was sitting in his parked truck in the Carters’ driveway, tilting the rearview mirror while he adjusted the knot on his tie.
“Give me a second, OK?” he asked the impatient-looking valet hovering by the open driver’s door.
He could have strangled Lucy, his assistant, for accepting tonight’s invitation on his behalf. She’d only been working for him a week, and he needed the help desperately, but one more fuckup like this and she’d be out on her ear.
East Hampton was a small town, and Lucas had already heard the whispers—that the local hostesses were starting to take offense at his refusal to accept social invitations. He’d even overheard a conversation in the newsstand yesterday in which one woman had described him to her friend as a recluse.
What did these people want from him, for God’s sake? Couldn’t they see that he had a fucking mountain to climb at the Herrick? That in the few snatched hours he got to spend away from work, all he wanted to do was sleep? Or perhaps, if he was feeling really adventurous, crack open a beer and collapse on his couch in Liberace Cottage in front of a decent porno?
Thankfully, things had finally started speeding up on-site. The foundations were in, and three days ago Lucas had watched gleefully as the first steel load-bearing beams sprang up out of the ground like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Yesterday he’d made a rare trip into Manhattan for a presentation at Dean Roberts’s office, where he saw a computer-generated mock-up of the enormous, curved, ecclesiastical arc of glass that was to form the core of the Herrick’s facade. Personally Lucas thought it quite beautiful, like the bow of a ship. But if the general whispers he’d picked up from the locals so far were anything to go by, he expected most of them would disagree. Anything that wasn’t eighteenth-century weatherboard counted as a hideous modern monstrosity in their book. He was sure to be dragged over the coals tonight, with every neighborhood busybody and his wife grilling him about the building works. Frankly, he could have done without it.
The only silver lining to tonight’s cloud was the prospect of at last meeting Honor Palmer in the flesh. When he’d first arrived, he’d confidently expected her to turn up at the site and introduce herself, out of curiosity if nothing else. But no, Her Majesty had maintained an infuriating, regal lack of interest from the start. Well, screw her. When the interview he’d just done with American Vogue came out next month, she’d have to sit up and take notice. By a great stroke of luck, an old friend of Lucas’s from his Ibiza days was deputy features editor there now and had been happy to do a straightforward promo piece on the Herrick as the new, hip hotel in the Hamptons. Miss High and Mighty Palmer was about to discover that the power of the press worked both ways.
“Sir.” Somehow the valet managed to make the word sound like an insult. “We do have people waiting behind you. Perhaps you could take care of that inside?” He glanced disdainfully at Lucas’s tie.
Climbing down from the truck’s cab, Lucas towered over him like a brooding Spanish Goliath. “Listen to me, you snooty little shit.” The valet swallowed nervously. “If I want to take a moment to fix my tie, then that’s what I’m going to do. Would you tell those gentlemen to hurry it up?” He gestured to the pair of grumbling old buffers in the Bentley Continental behind him. “I don’t think so. And you know why not? Because they’re white, that’s why. And I am Spanish.”
“Sir, I can assure you that’s not the case,” the valet mumbled, backing away as Lucas drew even closer. “Your being Hispanic…”
“I am not Hispanic!” Lucas roared. “I’m Spanish. Not that I’d expect you to know the difference. Maybe you think I should be the one in that uniform. Huh? Is that it?” He grabbed at the guy’s lapels but then abruptly released him. “Ah, forget it,” he muttered, straightening his tie again for good measure. “You’re not worth it.”
Ignoring the open-mouthed stares of the other arriving guests, he walked calmly up the steps to the house—or estate, as people he
re pretentiously insisted on calling every decent-size property. In fairness, the Carter place was almost grand enough to warrant the title. Not that it was ostentatious or in any way flash. Quite the opposite. Everything about the house reeked of old money, from the understated white clapboard facade to the original Victorian gas lamps lining the driveway. Even the family’s cars were distinctly low-key—a Jeep Cherokee and a BMW convertible that had seen better days—compared to the Ferraris, Bentleys, and Aston Martins littering the driveway. Devon Carter could clearly have afforded a fleet of Ferraris if he wanted them. But that was the point. He didn’t.
As he walked through the front door, a maid relieved Lucas of his coat and led him down an apparently endless corridor toward a crescendoing buzz of voices at the rear of the house. Four years at the Ecole Hôtelière had given Lucas an expert eye for interiors, and he appraised Mrs. Carter’s decor as he ambled along: simple and uncluttered with lots of white wood and enormous bunches of freesias everywhere, it was exactly what he would have expected in a wealthy Boston family’s vacation home. A little too feminine for his personal taste, perhaps. But undeniably classy.
“The party’s in the drawing room, through there on your left,” the maid informed him, a little frostily Lucas felt, before walking off. He watched her go, an ugly girl with drooping shoulders and pimples struggling to break through her thick makeup. He wondered what had possessed Devon Carter to employ her, before the thought struck him that it was probably Mrs. Carter who made the hiring decisions at home. No doubt she didn’t want some tart in a maid’s uniform making her look bad.
“You must be Lucas!” Right on cue, the drawing room door swung open and a very pretty, only marginally over-the-hill blonde opened her arms wide, greeting him like an old friend and kissing him on both cheeks in the European fashion.
“Mrs. Carter.” He smiled. If she weren’t so uptight, he decided, she could be quite sexy. “Thank you so much for inviting me. I must say, it was unexpected.”
Though hardly short of social invitations—they’d been falling from the sky like unwanted confetti since the week he arrived—the last person Lucas had expected to hear from was the wife of Devon Carter. Devon had been by far the most vocal of the Herrick’s many opponents on the planning committee and was a paid-up member of the Palmers’ Old Guard, Modernism-Is-Evil squad.
“Unexpected? Goodness me, what nonsense!” Karis let out a tinkling little laugh. “You’re the hottest ticket in town, Mr. Ruiz, don’t you know that? Our very own international man of mystery. Although,” she wagged her finger at him teasingly, “I’m afraid there are quite a few people here tonight who want to have a word with you about that glass…thing you’re building.”
Here we go, thought Lucas. The barbed comments were starting already. On second thought, he was going to fire Lucy for putting him through this.
“I’m afraid I’m strictly off duty tonight, Mrs. Carter. No talking shop.”
“Please,” Karis squeezed his hand. “Call me Karis. You’ll make me feel old otherwise.”
“Karis.” He repeated the word in his slow, knee-weakening Spanish accent, throwing in a wink for good measure that made his hostess glow with pleasure.
“Let the poor fellow catch his breath, darling, before you start haranguing him.”
“Devon, there you are. This is—” Spinning around, Karis looked thoroughly put out at the interruption.
“I know who he is,” said Devon.
The man who stepped forward to shake Lucas’s hand was older than he’d pictured him and much more distinguished, with graying hair and the sort of deep voice and firm grip one associated with captains of industry or senior military officers. He was good-looking, if you liked the whole silver-fox roué senator thing, but stiffer than a day-old corpse. And his superior, snobbish noblesse oblige manner was instantly off-putting.
“How are you finding East Hampton?” He smiled, ostensibly in welcome, though it came off as patronizing. The Boston accent didn’t help, either. It was pure JFK. Lucas found himself wondering whether it were genuine or had been deliberately acquired and decided probably the latter. Either way it made him sound like he had the mother of all sticks up his ass.
“I’m still finding my feet,” said Lucas, adding jokingly, “To be honest, I feel like a bit of a circus freak tonight. People keep staring. Are they always like this?”
Devon frowned defensively. “Like what? It’s natural for people to be curious,” he said. “You’re making dramatic changes to both the look and the spirit of their town. Or at least you will be.”
“I’m building a hotel, Mr. Carter,” said Lucas wearily. “Not turning East Hampton into Las Vegas.”
“Hmmm.” Devon sounded unconvinced. “I’d say the jury was still out on that one. But let’s canvass some other opinions, shall we? Morty!”
Before Lucas could protest, his host started waving to a doddery, white-haired man with a pronounced stoop, who dutifully shuffled over.
“This is Morty Sullivan, chairman of our planning committee, among many other things,” he said brightly. “I believe he’s a friend of your boss. Morty, meet Lucas Ruiz.”
Shit. This must be the guy Anton had blackmailed to get the Herrick project off the ground. According to the files Lucas had read, he was only fifty-two, but he looked decades older, poor bastard. As for he and Anton being friends, he presumed this was Devon’s idea of a joke. A pretty cruel one, judging by the old man’s terror-stricken face.
Morty shook Lucas’s hand with all the enthusiasm of someone greeting the Grim Reaper. “How do you do?” he asked querulously.
“Mr. Sullivan.” Lucas nodded respectfully in return. He felt genuinely bad for the guy. Devon, on the other hand, seemed to be reveling in the awkwardness of the moment. Evidently he was not only pompous, but spiteful.
Lucas spent the next half hour being thrust like a ritual sacrifice in front of the various great and good burghers of the town, smiling until his jaw ached, and defending the Herrick, or trying to, until his head throbbed. Devon stood beside him through each encounter, his smug, paternalistic smile seeming to suggest that he was doing Lucas a great favor by introducing him into “polite” Hamptons society. Which was ironic, seeing as the one thing these people were self-evidently not was polite.
“Glass is one thing, Mr. Ruiz,” a withered crone dressed head to toe in black Chanel, like a crow, conceded grudgingly. “But is all the steel really necessary? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Has your employer ever been to the Hamptons?” The crow’s equally ancient friend was keen to join the conversation, closing her bony, arthritic fingers around Lucas’s arm like a vise while she harangued him. “Perhaps if he actually saw the town he was defacing…”
“It wouldn’t make a difference, Sheila.” The crow talked through Lucas as though he were invisible. “He’s German. None of these Europeans—no offense, Mr. Ruiz—none of them really understand the American concept of class. I may disapprove of the way Honor threw over her poor father, but there’ll never be another Palmers in this town. It’s as simple as that.”
Lucas longed to tell the pair of them to stick their ignorant, racist opinions where the monkey stuck his nuts, but for once he restrained himself, escaping instead to the far side of the room and sinking gratefully down into an empty space on one of the couches. Some kind soul handed him a fresh martini, which he downed in a single gulp.
Beside him, a dark-haired boy was talking animatedly on his cell phone. Jumping off the call with a loud and self-important “Ciao, ciao,” he turned to Lucas.
“Nick Carter,” he said, pumping Lucas’s hand vigorously. “And you must be Lucas. Welcome.”
“Thanks,” said Lucas warily. It was hard to put his finger on it, but there was something about the boy, a certain arrogance, that he instantly disliked. He reminded Lucas of every spoiled, cocky rich-kid playboy who used to prop up the bar at the Cadogan: handsome, certainly, although in quite a different way from his
father. Devon might be stiffer than a porn star’s cock, but he was masculine to the nth degree. This boy, on the other hand, was metrosexual to the point of foppishness—slicked-back hair, doused with enough Gucci Envy to stop a train, manicured nails, a mouth full of enamel veneers. He clearly hadn’t done a day’s real work in his life.
Just then, Lucas was distracted from his musings by the appearance of a bombshell of a redhead.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” She addressed herself to Nick, who looked up at her disdainfully.
“Sure,” he grunted. “Lucas, this is my kid sister, Lola.”
“Hellola,” drawled Lucas. At long last the evening was starting to look up.
She was wearing exactly the sort of outfit he usually hated: a long gypsy skirt that swished like a mermaid’s tail when she walked and some sort of peasant smock shirt with a gilet thrown over the top. But on her, it worked. And unless he was hallucinating—unlikely after only one martini, though God knew he was tired enough—he could have sworn he saw her give him a distinctly lascivious wink.
For her part, Lola’s pulse had taken off like a rocket—holy crap, was this guy hot!—but she made a titanic effort to play it cool, not wanting to betray any sort of weakness in front of her brother. No wonder all her mom’s friends had gotten so excited over Lucas. The words “hotel manager” had conjured up an image in her mind of a balding, middle-aged bore with a paunch and a polyester suit. Who could have guessed East Hampton’s public enemy number one would turn out to be such a love god?
On the other side of the room, Devon could feel the tension coiling around his arteries like a slowly squeezing fist. Honor, who’d arrived late and very obviously tipsy five minutes ago, was making a spectacle of herself flirting with one of the waiters. Itching to go over and confront her, he had to wait almost ten more minutes until Karis was safely engrossed in conversation with one of her girlfriends before he made his move.
Weaving his way through the crowd, he surprised her, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her to one side.