Do Not Disturb

  Despite their differences, Honor and Tina had tolerated each other well enough in those early years. It was their mother’s accident that changed things between them. Honor still remembered the awful day as though it were yesterday. She’d been up in her room in Boston, playing an imagination game with her dolls, and had jumped out of her skin when Rita, the nanny, burst in. She was supposed to have grown out of the dolls and passed them on to Tina. But all Tina ever wanted to do was dress them up, and Honor felt sorry for them, discarded in her sister’s toy box, never getting to go on any fun adventures anymore. Her first thought was that Rita was mad she’d taken them back. She remembered feeling almost relieved to be told it was only her father wanting to see her downstairs.

  Needless to say the relief was short-lived. The first thing she saw when she walked into Trey’s study was Tina sobbing hysterically on the couch. Honor remembered being shocked, because these clearly weren’t her sister’s usual crocodile tears. Something was very wrong.

  Trey was making no move to comfort her. He just stood there, as gray and still as a granite statue in the middle of the room. “Honor, there’s been an accident.”

  That was all he said at first. He wasn’t crying. In all the weeks and months and years that followed, in fact, Honor never once saw him cry for the wife she knew he’d loved more than anything. But still, he seemed to be having difficulty getting his words out. “Mommy’s dead. She’s not coming back.”

  Clearly her father was not a subscriber to the “break it to them gently” school of parenting. As an adult, Honor often wondered how many thousands of dollars in therapy that moment alone would have cost her had she grown up to be the navel-gazing type. Thankfully, she hadn’t. Because as awful as her mother’s death was, far, far worse was to come.

  Tammy. That was the name of their first stepmother. And what a fucking nightmare she was. Unlike the later models, she came from a respected Boston family, but her upbringing didn’t seem to have prevented her from growing up into a class-A bitch. It was a year almost to the day since their mom’s death and Trey brought Tammy home like a trophy, beaming with a pride and happiness that Honor couldn’t fathom.

  “Honor, Tina, this is Tammy,” he said, kissing the strange woman on the lips. Honor, who was eleven at the time, thought she looked like a taller Snow White, with short black hair and porcelain-pale skin. But she wasn’t kind and smiley like Mommy. “She’s going to be living with us from now on,” Trey continued. “And we hope that pretty soon she’s going to give you girls a little brother.”

  We? Who was this we? Honor didn’t hope for any such thing.

  It was the first time she’d heard her father express a desire for a son. Over the next decade, that desire was to bloom into a full-grown obsession.

  “Why?” Tina had asked, twirling her ringlets skeptically in the corner.

  “Your daddy needs a boy so he can take over Palmers one day, honey,” simpered Tammy. “And take care of you girls, too. That’s what brothers do.”

  “Daddy doesn’t need a boy!” yelled Honor, pulling herself up to her full four foot nine, her jaw jutting in defiance. “I’m going to take over Palmers when I grow up. What do you know about it, anyway?”

  “Honor.” Her father’s voice was stern. “Don’t you dare speak to Tammy like that. Apologize at once.”

  Honor had apologized. Not because she was remotely sorry. But because she couldn’t bear for her father to be angry with her.

  That night, she’d tried to talk to Tina about it. “We have to do something to get rid of her,” she’d whispered, once the sound of their nanny’s footsteps had finally died away.

  “Like what?” Tina had her Winnie the Pooh flashlight on under the covers and was brushing her hair, admiring its shiny blondeness in the mirror with quiet satisfaction. Though only nine, she was already taller than Honor and much more physically developed, with tiny, nascent breasts of which she was inordinately proud. “It’s not up to us.”

  “For goodness’ sake,” hissed Honor, exasperated. “Don’t you understand how serious this is? She’s horrible. She’s a witch. And if she does have a baby boy, Daddy won’t want us anymore.”

  “I don’t think he wants us now,” shrugged Tina, not missing a beat.

  “Of course he wants us!” said Honor hotly, although deep down she knew that the tears were pricking her eyes because her sister was right. Since their mom’s death, Trey had been distant to the point of neglect.

  “It’s Tammy that’s the problem. You know she’s going to try and act like she’s our mom. And I bet she’ll try to take Palmers away. Her and her new baby.”

  Sighing, Tina reluctantly switched off the flashlight and slipped the mirror under her bed. “I wish you’d stop talking about Palmers. It’s only a stupid hotel.” Honor was so flabbergasted by this she was temporarily speechless.

  “And if she does try to act like our mom, we’ll just ignore her. It’s really not a big deal. Anyway, I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.”

  Seething with frustration, Honor pulled her bedspread up to her shoulders and turned her head to the wall. There was no point pushing it any further. Clearly Tina had no understanding whatsoever of the dangers they were facing. As usual it would be up to her, Honor, to do something.

  If a son was what their father wanted—and clearly it was—then that was what she’d have to become.

  “Miss Palmer?”

  Honor looked up with a start at the sound of Sam Brannagan’s voice. For a moment she’d forgotten where she was.

  “Shall we continue?”

  “Yes, yes of course,” she said, smoothing the crease in her black pants as she got to her feet. This was no time for melancholy reflection. She needed to be in control.

  “The fact is that, while I appreciate all of you coming, there’s really nothing left to discuss. The trustees have appointed me to manage Dad’s affairs, including Palmers, and that’s what I’m going to do. I had hoped,” she looked plaintively at Trey, “to make you understand why I’m doing this, Daddy. Believe me, if there were any other way—”

  “I’ll change my will!” Trey shouted, the effort plunging him back into another bout of coughing. Jacob Foster made a great show of passing him his oxygen mask, but the old man pushed him angrily away.

  “You’re a viper, Honor. A snake in my house!”

  “Mrs. Palmer.” Seeing Honor struggling to suppress her emotions, the lawyer addressed himself calmly to Lise. “For your husband’s sake, I think you’d better take him home now. And that goes for the rest of you, too. All interested parties will be receiving copies of the documentation in due course. But this meeting is over.”

  Slipping on her oversize Gucci sunglasses, Tina was the first to head for the door, without so much as a backward glance at Trey. “Honor, call me,” she said brusquely. “I wanna know when that money will hit my account.”

  “This isn’t over, you know,” said Jacob furiously, yanking his dumpy wife up out of her seat. “Not by a long shot. You’ll be hearing from us again, Mr. Brannagan.” Honor said nothing as they filed out of the room, but her heart was pounding. Harvard may have taught her how to deal with confrontation and take control of a hostile meeting, but it hadn’t taught her not to feel sick to her stomach each time, especially when her adversary was her own father, whose mind had been taken over by dark, inexplicable shadows that made him distrust everything and everyone around him. He couldn’t even trust his own senses anymore, the poor bastard.

  Lise was the last to go, leading the doddering Trey by the hand. Honor winced to see him so frail. She could only pray that, behind closed doors, his child-wife treated him with more kindness and compassion than she’d shown today. Somehow, she doubted it.

  “I’ll make you proud, Dad,” she heard herself calling after him, ashamed to hear her voice breaking with emotion. Why did she still need his approval so badly? “I’ll make Palmers great again. You’ll see.”

  Turning to look at her as the elevator d
oors opened, Trey shook his head bitterly. He knew his periods of lucidity were getting rarer and rarer. But to be outwitted by his own daughter was more than his pride could bear.

  “I hope God forgives you for this, Honor,” he muttered darkly. “Because I never will.”

  And stepping into the elevator with the rest of his so-called family, he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LUCAS, STOP—WE can’t! My husband might come any minute.”

  Lucas Ruiz unzipped his jeans and pushed Mrs. Leon back against the living room wall, hitching up her skirt as he did so.

  “Fuck your husband,” he growled. “I’m going to come any minute. And I intend to be inside you when I do.”

  They were in the living room of the Leons’ luxury villa in Ibiza. To Lucas’s left, double-height glass doors gave way to one of the most stunning panoramas on the island. Manicured gardens ran down the hillside, merging into olive groves that in turn blurred into the still, sparkling blue of the Mediterranean.

  But Lucas was focused on a different view.

  At forty-four, Carla Leon was twenty years his senior, but she still had a body designed for fucking. Her tits were round and high and seemed to be straining now at the silk and lace of her bra as if willing him to release them. Her legs were long but shapely, not like the twiggy twentysomething models at Pacha who seemed to think it sexy to starve themselves skeletal. Boy, did he hate that look. And even after three children her stomach was flat and toned, a testament to the long hours she spent each week in the gym.

  Lucas was impressed. He liked a woman who took care of herself.

  “Oh, God,” Carla moaned, closing her eyes and squeezing her muscles tightly around his dick as he powered into her, despite her earlier protests. “That’s so good.”

  “Shhh,” he said, slipping a rough, warm hand over her mouth. “Your husband, remember? Besides, I’ve hardly started.”

  It was by no means the first time that he’d “visited” Mrs. Leon. They’d first met five years ago, when he was still in his teens, and she and her husband were vacationing in Ibiza for the first time. Back then he was stuck working for that asshole Miguel, washing sheets and scrubbing toilets at the dreadful Hotel Britannia in San Antonio, the scummiest part of the island.

  Even then, he already knew he was going to get out one day. One thing Lucas Ruiz had never been lacking was ambition. Nevertheless, it was Carla Leon who’d bought him his ticket to a new life, funding him through hotel management school in Switzerland.

  This was the summer after his graduation, and he’d come back to see her to express his gratitude the best way he knew how.

  Staggering across the room with Carla’s long legs wrapped around his waist, he laid her down on the pool table.

  “Careful! Don’t break it!” she gasped, arching her back and throwing her arms back behind her head so she could grip the corner pockets. Ignoring her, Lucas climbed on top of her, increasing the pace of his thrusts as he ripped at the lace of her bra with his teeth.

  “You are so fucking sexy,” he breathed, his long black hair tickling her shoulders and neck now as he whispered in her ear. “I’m gonna make you come so hard you won’t walk for a week.”

  “Carla!” Pepe Leon’s gruff, booming voice echoed through the house like the voice of God. “Donde estas tú?”

  “Lucas!” Carla’s eyes widened with panic. “For God’s sake, get out of here. Pepe’s back.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, his eyes lighting up like a mischievous schoolboy’s. “Not until you come for me, my lady.”

  “Lucas!” she hissed. But at the same time she felt his hands slipping downward beneath her bottom and his fingers probing her everywhere, rubbing and stroking as he pushed his huge cock deeper still inside her.

  This was the sort of fuck that was worth losing your marriage for. Gripping him tightly around the neck like a drowning woman grasping for a buoy, her body exploded into shuddering orgasm. Moments later Lucas also came, biting down hard on his forearm to muffle the sound of his own delight.

  “What are you waiting for?” he whispered, grinning, once he’d finished. Leaping off the table, he started pulling up his jeans with lightning speed. “Don’t you know your husband’s home?”

  Before Carla could catch her breath, he’d pulled open the French doors, blown her a kiss, and sprinted off down the hillside like Carl Lewis.

  She only just had time to do up her blouse and jump off the table herself before Pepe walked in.

  “There you are, darling,” he said, kissing her on the cheek with the routine, absentminded affection of the long married. “Did you have a good morning?”

  “I did, thank you,” she said, glancing briefly out the window. Thankfully, Lucas was nowhere to be seen. “I had a very enjoyable morning. Very enjoyable indeed.”

  Lucas’s birth had been a difficult one.

  His mother, Ines, at only sixteen and unmarried, had been left to cope with her delivery alone. Too frightened to go to a hospital, she endured a long and terrifying labor in a remote olive grove close to the ramshackle farmworkers’ cottage where she and Lucas’s father, Antonio, were living.

  Antonio had promised to be there for the birth. But of course when the time came he was too high on heroin to see straight, never mind deliver a baby. This was the seventies, at the dawn of the tourist explosion on Ibiza, and drug culture had descended on the once-unspoiled island like a plague, bringing misery and destruction in its wake.

  Lucas’s father was only one of its many early victims. By the boy’s first birthday he had disappeared from the scene completely. Ines presumed him dead, overdosed in a doorway somewhere, but she never knew for sure. In any case, within a year she was married, under intense pressure from her family, to a reclusive local farmer named Jose Ruiz.

  Twice her age and a heavy drinker, Ruiz was not much of a husband. Nor did he have any interest in his young wife’s brooding, withdrawn two-year-old son. The marriage was miserable from the start, but Ines nevertheless went on to produce three more sons in as many years. Lucas’s earliest memories were of fighting with his brothers—for some reason they were always fighting—in the filthy two-room shack up in the hills that the Ruiz family called home.

  They weren’t happy memories. But as the years rolled by, they were to get worse. Jose’s drinking spiraled into full-blown alcoholism, and shortly afterward the beatings began. One day, an eight-year-old Lucas arrived home from school to find his stepfather passed out on the kitchen floor and his mother hunched over the dishes, crying and trying to hide her split lip and swollen eye.

  “Mama!” Running over to her, he wrapped his arms around her waist, as fiercely protective as a little terrier. “What happened? Did he hurt you, Mama?”

  But Ines just shook her head angrily. “Do your homework, Lucas,” she said, without looking up. “Everything’s fine now. Off you go.”

  It was the moment that crystallized the boy’s dislike of his stepfather into hatred. And it was also the first time he fully realized what it meant to be powerless. Those two feelings—hatred and powerlessness—became the driving forces of Lucas’s adolescent years.

  When Jose hit him there was physical pain, but Lucas rapidly learned to cope with that. It was the emotional torture of seeing his mother and little brothers being hurt that kept him awake at night, sobbing tears of frustration and rage. He knew what he had to do, of course: grow. Once he was big and strong enough to take on his stepfather physically, then he would know freedom. Then, and only then, he would know revenge.

  He first started lifting weights at the age of ten. Not dumbbells, just any of the heavy detritus left strewn around the farm—tractor wheels, old crates of grain, rusting parts of long-abandoned harvesters. Though he was still short for his age, he rapidly saw a change in his build from wiry and athletic to stocky and strong. It was the first time any action of his had actually achieved something tangible. Before long he was hooked.

  His longed-f
or day of reckoning didn’t arrive for another five years, however. After a sudden growth spurt right after his fifteenth birthday, Lucas was finally able to look in the mirror and see a grown man staring back at him. Six feet tall, with an almost comically overdeveloped upper body, he was the sort of boy that anyone would think twice about picking a fight with. But it was the look in his eyes that really put the fear of God into would-be opponents. Underneath that wild, jet-black mop of Jim Morrison hair, two darkly narrowed slits of liquid rage glinted murderously. All he needed now was an opportunity.

  The next time Jose raised his fist to his wife, Lucas didn’t just hit him. He beat him into bloody unconsciousness on the kitchen floor. Turning to his mother, flushed with triumph, he was horrified to find himself being screamed at.

  “Lucas!” she yelled, tearing her hair, while his younger brothers looked on in awe. “What have you done? You could have killed him!”

  “And why shouldn’t I kill him, Mama?” Lucas looked baffled. “After the way he treats you. The way he treats all of us.”

  “He feeds us, Lucas,” said Ines, shaking her head. “He clothes us. He puts a roof over our heads.”

  “Barely,” spat Lucas, pulling at the peeling paper on the wall in disgust.

  “Who’s going to take care of us if your father can’t work?”

  “He’s not my father,” said Lucas indignantly. He couldn’t believe that they were having this conversation. Didn’t his mother want to escape? Didn’t she want to be free of him? “And I can take care of us, Mama. I’ll get work in town, in the hotels. I won’t even drink away three-quarters of my wages. How’s that?”

  “You don’t understand!” said Ines. Wetting a tea towel, she sank down to her knees and began mopping away the worst of the blood from Jose’s face. “You’re still a child. You don’t understand anything.”

  She was right about that. He didn’t understand.

  Within twenty minutes, he’d thrown his few paltry possessions into a bag and was on the point of storming out. Jose remained motionless on the floor, although occasional soft moans indicated he was still alive—sad fact though that was.