Do Not Disturb

  He always seemed surprised when this nugget of information failed to comfort Honor.

  Few people around her knew Honor well enough to notice how bad-tempered and strung out this dwindling of her sex life was making her. Unfortunately, Tina, who’d moved into a suite at Palmers for the season, was one of the few.

  The tension that had been growing between the sisters for weeks had come to a head this morning over breakfast. “You know your problem?” Tina asked loudly. “You need to get laid. That’s your problem.”

  They were in the middle of the Palmers dining room, a light, oak-paneled former ballroom filled with tables dressed with white linen cloths and offset by gleaming silver jugs overflowing with white-scented stocks, lilies, and Michaelmas daisies. Around them, the great and the good were busily tucking in to their buttermilk pancakes and fresh-fruit compotes, pretending not to listen.

  When they sat down, Honor had made the mistake of making a critical remark about Tina’s ultralow-cut, ass-hugger jeans; that was one snide comment too far. Tina was sick to death of her big sister’s assumption that her dress sense, love life, or indeed any aspect of her life, was any of her goddamned business. Honor resented the fact that while she worked her fingers to the bone trying to keep Palmers going, Tina seemed content to spend her days swanning around the pool in a series of ever-raunchier bikinis and her evenings flirting with every rich or powerful man who crossed her path. Including the hated Lucas.

  “Keep your voice down,” said Honor.

  “No. Why should I?” Tina was on a roll. “You’re so uptight right now, you could be sponsored by Midol.”

  “Jesus, T, stop it,” Honor hissed, blushing despite herself. “People are staring.”

  “Get over yourself. If they’re staring, it’s at me, not you,” said Tina, flipping back her perfectly coiffed blonde hair. Even at this time of the morning, she looked every inch the sex bomb in the J-Lo jeans Honor had so objected to and a skintight, hand-embroidered Fred Segal tee. Honor, by contrast, sported deep shadows under her eyes after a series of late nights and looked thoroughly washed out by the slate-gray halter-neck top and skirt that had seemed so ethereal and womanly on the rack at Barneys. She could have used a year of sleep, or at the very least an IV of coffee.

  “Seriously,” said Tina, pushing the point, although she did mercifully lower the volume a little. “When did you last have sex?”

  “None of your business,” snapped Honor, adding recklessly: “Recently, OK?”

  She hated it when Tina was right. Luckily it didn’t happen that often.

  “Recently? Really?” Tina frowned, surprised. “With who?” Then, clapping her hand over her mouth in an exaggerated rendition of surprise, she gasped, “Oh my God!” Clearly her acting style owed a lot to the reruns of Melrose Place she watched endlessly on TV. “It’s Lucas, isn’t it?”

  “What’s Lucas?” said Honor, testily. “What are you talking about?”

  “This whole feud between the two of you,” said Tina, with the look of someone who’s just solved a particularly troublesome crossword clue. “It’s gotten you all fired up. Underneath all that hostility, you’re hot for him, aren’t you? You slept with him in New York! Admit it!”

  “I will not admit any such thing,” said Honor. “We did not sleep together, and I do not find him even remotely attractive. Nor would you if you knew him like I do.”

  “Bullshit,” said Tina, warming to her theme. “OK so maybe you want him, but he’s not biting, and that’s what’s driving you crazy. Huh?” She was laughing by this point. “C’mon. Am I getting warmer?”

  “No, you are not getting warmer!” said Honor furiously. “You are fucking arctic, is what you are. How can you say that to me? Do you know…do you even have any conception of how hard I’ve worked to reestablish this place?”

  She waved her arm around the packed breakfast room, where fifty pairs of eyes turned guiltily away and back to their breakfasts.

  “I don’t mind competition, as long as it’s a fair fight. But that…man,” she spat out the word with disgust. “The lies he’s told about our family! And it’s not just that. He’s sexist. He’s arrogant. He’s common as muck. I wouldn’t sleep with Lucas Ruiz if he was the last man on this earth, and if you can’t see that then you’re even more stupid than you look in those ridiculous pants.”

  “Wow.” Tina shook her head slowly. It was fun to have Honor on defense for once. “Talk about protesting too much.”

  “Miss Palmer.”

  The masseur’s voice brought Honor back to the present with a jolt.

  “If you’d like to turn over, I can begin work on your abs.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure, Gerard,” she groaned.

  He was holding up a towel as a makeshift screen and modestly averting his eyes to allow her to flip over without having to show her breasts. A big, stocky, heavy-featured guy—the giggling gaggle of beauticians at the spa had already nicknamed him Gerard Depardieu—he was not at all Honor’s usual type. But to her horror, she found herself fantasizing that he would drop the towel, climb on top of her, and fuck all the tension out of her frustrated body, right then and there.

  Damn Tina.

  And damn fucking Devon.

  Why was he never there when she needed him?

  Ben Slater picked his way along the beach, trying desperately to suck in his flabby stomach and wishing he’d taken Tammy’s advice and booked himself a few hours in a tanning salon before he flew out here. As far as he could tell, the average age of the blokes staying at the Herrick was about nineteen and a half, and most of them looked like professional surfers, tanned and buff and with ridiculously macho names like Chip or Chuck and a body mass index somewhere in the minus numbers.

  And that was just the white guys.

  Ben’s skin, by contrast, hadn’t seen daylight since his Easter ski trip to Val d’Isère, and then it was only his face and forearms that had caught the sun, leaving lingering tan lines at his neck and elbows that only accentuated his general pallor elsewhere. He felt like an unpleasantly overgrown larva that had crawled out from under a rock and was making all the beautiful people lose their appetites—or would be, if any of them ate anything.

  Strolling by the beach volleyball nets, he smiled tentatively at a Cindy Crawford lookalike in a red bikini. She was limbering up on the sand before her match, like her girlfriends, arching her body in a sort of yoga-meets-porn way that seemed to Ben to be positively begging for attention. Yet she returned his smile with a “fuck off” look so frosty he almost felt like he’d molested her.

  He’d mentioned this phenomenon to Lucas last night.

  “American girls are weird,” he said, taking a philosophical sip of his third beer at the Herrick’s Japanese-themed bar. “Every time you try to start a normal conversation with them, they shoot you down. But five minutes later and there they are hanging off every word of some bragging wanker in a Ferrari telling them how much his last year’s bonus was in every bloody currency. What’s that about?”

  Lucas laughed. “You have to be forceful here,” he said. “The girls don’t understand the whole reticent, understated British thing. If you’re successful, they expect you to shout it from the rooftops.”

  “I’m not reticent,” said Ben indignantly. “I’m completely bloody up for it! I just don’t like talking about money, that’s all. It’s tacky. Aren’t these birds interested in anything else?”

  “Sure,” said Lucas, waving to a pair of Playboy-perfect blonde twins giggling at the other end of the bar. “Fame. And enormous dicks.”

  Ben stared down at his beer morosely. “Great. Well, I’m fucked then, aren’t I?”

  “Or not,” said Lucas drily, “as the case may be.”

  “It’s all right for you,” Ben grumbled. “You’ve got the lovely Lola. You don’t need to flirt around.”

  When Lucas had told him over the phone that he was dating a teenager, Ben’s disapproval was palpable. But now that he’d met Lola, he felt
confident she was mature enough to hold her own. She was feisty and funny, a good match for Lucas. He liked her a lot.

  “I’ve told you,” said Lucas, downing the remnants of his own drink and ordering another, “Lola and I aren’t serious. It’s just a casual summer thing.”

  Ben frowned. “I hope she sees it that way, mate.”

  Lucas hoped so too, especially as Anton was on his case again about getting intimate with Tina Palmer. The Herrick was going great guns, but Anton clearly considered Palmers’ continued survival as some sort of personal affront—a chink in the formerly foolproof Tischen business plan. He wouldn’t be happy until the great old hotel was on its knees, and he remained weirdly convinced that Tina held the key to its downfall.

  Privately, Lucas wasn’t sure what bagging Tina was going to achieve, besides winding up Honor and appeasing his boss. Still, he could think of worse assignments. And Lola had been getting a bit clingy recently. It was probably time he rocked the boat a little.

  Continuing his walk along the beach, Ben’s thoughts turned back to Lola. It was obvious she worshipped the ground Lucas walked on, just like every other woman he’d dated. But beneath all the teenage rebellious bravado, she was actually a sweet kid. He hoped she wasn’t going to get too badly burned.

  The farther he got along the public beach, the more the crowds began to thin. It was another gloriously hot day, with the sun bouncing off the ocean like so many fireflies and a cloudless, kingfisher-blue sky. But despite the undeniable natural beauty of the place, there was something about the Hamptons that Ben didn’t really like. It was all a bit too precious and dollhousey for his taste.

  The Herrick itself was an impressive building, and with an objective eye he could see that the architects and interior designers had fulfilled their brief thoughtfully and with flair. All that glass gave it incredible light on every level, and the myriad fountains and water features, simple bamboo and teak furniture, and pervasive Oriental scent of lotus flowers were undeniably calming. But, though he wouldn’t dream of saying as much to Lucas, he still felt the hotel lacked soul.

  Palmers, on the other hand, was much more his cup of tea. Classy, welcoming, but not over-the-top cutesy, he could quite see why it had such a unique reputation, and the building itself was gorgeous, as stately as any Southern gentleman’s estate with its wood porches, stone fireplaces, and wisteria-clad white walls. He was approaching its private beach club now, with its striking blue-and-white-striped sun umbrellas and the waiters all dressed in white, except for the dark blue piping on their blazers. They looked like they’d just come from Henley Regatta. More English than the English, but then New Yorkers all seemed to love that.

  Ben knew about Lucas’s feud with Honor, of course. The whole world seemed to know about it by now. Lucas would eat him for breakfast if he caught him now, sticking his head over the fence to get a better look at his archrival’s grounds. But his curiosity got the better of him, and a few moments later, he was very glad it had.

  There, standing by the poolside among the snoozing, elderly guests, picking up dirty towels, was a girl with the most incredible legs Ben had ever seen. Without thinking, he started looking for a gap in the rickety wooden fence and, finally finding an appropriately weak-looking spot, set about clambering over it toward her.

  “Er, excuse me. Can I help you?”

  The skinny, obviously gay head waiter who accosted Ben looked as though he could happily have replaced the word “help” with “castrate.”

  “This is private property.”

  “I know,” said Ben, blushing. He had one leg inside the Palmers compound and the other stuck awkwardly through the slats of the fence—not the most dignified of positions for one of the wealthiest, most successful financiers of his generation. “Sorry. I, er…I’m meeting someone here actually,” he blushed. “For lunch.”

  “Oh?” The waiter looked unimpressed. His right eyebrow had taken on a life of its own, disappearing up somewhere dangerously near the line of his toupee, and his thin, neatly groomed moustache twitched with irritation. “And who might that be? Sir.”

  “It’s, erm…” For some reason Ben’s mind had gone completely blank. Shaking his back foot as hard as he could, trying to pull it free, he willed himself to conjure up a name—any name. But it wasn’t happening. “It’s, er…it’s her!”

  He pointed at the long-legged pool attendant. Just then, his foot suddenly burst free from the fencing, sending him flying, face-first, into the sand.

  “Sian?” The waiter was fast approaching the end of his tether. “Sian is working at the moment, sir, as you can see. She doesn’t have a lunch date with anyone. Now, who are you? And why are you trying to break into this hotel?”

  Sian, who’d spent a thoroughly dull morning carrying piles of towels back and forth from the beach to the laundry room, was watching the commotion by the fence with amusement. Rico, her boss, was a total bitch. He was obviously letting the poor blond guy have it. Now that he stood up she could see the intruder was enormous, twice Rico’s size at least. It was a bit like watching Pooh getting a dressing-down from Piglet.

  “Miss Doyle. Come over here, please. Hurry up.”

  Rico clicked his fingers imperiously, a favorite habit, and began hopping from foot to foot like an impatient hobbit.

  Sian dropped her pile of towels and did as she was told.

  “Do you know this gentleman?” he asked. A vein on his forehead was throbbing visibly. He looked seriously ticked off.

  Sian looked up at the blond guy. He had freckles and kind of a bashed-up face, but there was definitely something attractive about him. She’d never seen him before in her life. But something about his urgent, pleading, wide-eyed stare made her decide to play along.

  “Sure,” she said, scanning his face again for clues. “He’s my, er…he’s my…”

  “Doctor,” blurted Ben.

  “Yes.” Sian grinned at him. “Exactly. Thank you. He’s my doctor. How are you doing, Doctor…?”

  “Slater.” Ben grinned back, dusting the sand off himself and offering his hand to his still-skeptical inquisitor. “I’m Doctor Benjamin Slater. Sian…Miss Doyle, is a patient of mine.”

  “I see,” said Rico witheringly. “Well perhaps next time—Doctor,” he looked Ben’s garish surf-shorts-and-tank-top combo up and down, allowing his eyes to linger on Ben’s paunch with ill-concealed disgust, “you’d do us the courtesy of using the front entrance like everybody else. And of picking a more convenient time for your…consultations. Sian is on the clock now, as I said. She has a lot to do.”

  Reluctantly taking this as her cue, Sian turned to go.

  “No!” said Ben, grabbing her arm. He’d gotten this far after all. He may as well see it through. “You don’t understand. I’m afraid it’s very important. An emergency, in fact. I have to speak with her…with Miss Doyle…right away.”

  “You’re saying this is a medical emergency?” said Rico. He couldn’t have looked more scathing if he’d tried.

  “Exactly,” said Ben, turning from pink to scarlet at this second lie. “An emergency.”

  Sian smiled. Cute. Definitely cute. And the Lock Stock cockney accent was to die for.

  Rico wasn’t convinced for a moment, but decided he was tired of his part in this charade. He’d have words with Sian about it later. In the meantime, one of them needed to get back to work.

  “Make it quick,” he snapped. “Very quick.” And with a meaningful glare at Ben, he turned on his perfectly polished heel and stormed off.

  “So.” Sian cocked her head to one side, curiously. “What’s wrong with me, Doctor Slater? I must confess I’m dying to know.”

  Close up she was even more stunning than she had been from forty meters away. With her pale skin and straight, silky brown hair she looked so…strokeable. And the white shirt-dress uniform she was wearing made her legs look even more endless than they had from the other side of the fence. “There is nothing at all wrong with you,” said Ben d
reamily. “You’re perfect. That’s the problem.”

  Now it was Sian’s turn to blush.

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, fuck, shit, sorry. I’m Ben. Ben Slater,” he babbled nervously. “That is my actual name. I’m not a doctor. Obviously. That was a bit of a fib. I just wanted to think of something to get rid of Elton John,” he nodded toward Rico, who was still eyeing the two of them suspiciously from the outdoor bar, “and it was the first thing that popped into my head.”

  “Genius,” Sian teased him. “He totally bought it.” For a long, awkward moment, silence fell between them.

  Oh, bollocks bollocks bollocks, thought Ben. Why was he such a lame-o with women? Why couldn’t the right words just flow for him, like they did for Lucas?

  “Look,” he said eventually, screwing up the courage from somewhere. “I’m crap at chatting up girls. Especially American ones.”

  “How many have you tried to chat up?” Sian looked amused.

  “Oh, God, loads,” said Ben, unthinking. Then, noticing her grin broaden, he tried to undo the damage. “I mean, not literally loads. Some. You know, one or two. Shit.”

  Sian laughed. “And are we really that different than British girls?”

  “Fuck, yeah. You’re all bananas,” said Ben. “I mean, not you personally. You’re not bananas. You’re gorgeous. When I saw you from the beach just now, I sort of…found myself coming over here, and yeah, sure, then I made a bit of a tit of myself, but the thing is, what I was wondering was, if you’re not busy, you know, which you probably are, obviously…”

  “I’d love to go out with you,” said Sian.

  Ben did a double take. “Really? ’Cause American girls never fancy me.”

  “Is that so?” She laughed again. He was such a dork, but it worked for him. “And you so suave and smooth and all? Incredible.”

  Rico was advancing toward them again, and this time he’d brought reinforcements. Ben decided to quit while he was ahead.