But his gloomy thoughts were banished the next moment as the door swung open and he found himself face-to-face with a gloriously naked Carla.
“Querido,” she breathed huskily. “Flowers, for me? You shouldn’t have.”
Gazing in unashamed admiration at her body, he wondered if she’d had any work done since he last saw her. If she had, then her surgeon deserved a medal of honor. She must be, what, forty-seven now? But her skin showed no signs of sagging, and her breasts, as brown and full as coconuts, the tiny pale-pink nipples standing to attention to greet him, were as firm and high as ever. Her dark hair had been cut shorter and dyed a striking, deep red, but it suited her. And her bush, he noticed with delight and amazement, had been trimmed and shaped by some extortionate pubic topiarist into the shape of a heart and dyed to match the hair on her head. In nothing but a pair of red Louboutin stilettos and a diamond choker, she looked like every schoolboy’s fantasy, with only a few faint fans of lines around her eyes and lips to indicate middle age.
Dumping the bottle and flowers unceremoniously on the floor, Lucas gathered her up in his arms without a word and carried her straight up the stairs.
“That way,” she giggled, pointing to a door at the end of the corridor as he burst into bathrooms and offices, looking for a bed. Following her directions, he carried her to what he assumed must be the marital bedroom and laid her gently down on the black satin counterpane.
“Very Ozzy Osbourne,” he said, clocking the deep-red velvet curtains and vast, black onyx sculpture of a panther at the foot of the bed. “I wouldn’t have thought old Pepe had it in him.”
“That’s Rex,” said Carla, nodding at the panther as she fumbled with the buttons on Lucas’s fly. “He’s supposed to protect me from intruders when Pepe’s away. Symbolically, obviously.”
“Well, he’s doing a pretty lousy job,” said Lucas, freeing his rock-hard erection at last and boring into her like a freight train.
Carla gasped at the force of him. He hadn’t even taken his shoes off, so desperate was he to get inside her. Though it was over quickly, she was gratified that he hadn’t lost any of his skill or generosity as a lover, going down on her afterward for a languorous twenty minutes until she had come twice herself. Pepe went down on her occasionally, usually on Valentine’s Day or their anniversary, but he always made her feel as though he were bestowing some hugely irksome favor. With Lucas, she felt like an ice cream that he was taking his sweet time to enjoy. It was pure heaven.
Afterward they showered together, dressed, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Carla put together a simple supper of cold meats, salad, and a perfect Spanish omelet, washed down with plenty of chilled Chablis. As it was still so warm they ate out on the terrace, drinking in each other’s company, the heady scent of bougainvillea, and the beauty of the view, which looked even more lovely in the milky moonlight than it did by day.
“You have to come up and see her before you leave.” Lucas, who’d talked about nothing but Luxe since they’d rolled out of bed, was still waxing lyrical. “You were the one who made her possible, after all. If it hadn’t been for you, for your inspiration and help and support—”
“You’d have made it anyway,” said Carla, pouring herself a third glass of wine. “No, don’t shake your head at me, Lucas. You were the most ambitious man I’d ever met back then. I suppose you still are now,” she added dreamily.
Lucas’s face darkened. “My ambitions have changed,” he said grimly. “It’s not only about personal success anymore.”
“Oh?” Carla looked at him questioningly. His features had set hard, and the veins on the back of his hand, she noticed, stood up like swollen tree roots as he clenched the stem of his wine-glass. “What is it about, then?”
A muscle in Lucas’s temple twitched involuntarily. “Revenge,” he said quietly. “It’s about revenge.”
He told her the whole story, of how Anton had set him up and blackened his name throughout the industry.
“It wasn’t enough to get rid of me at the Herrick,” he said bitterly, stabbing at the remnants of the omelet on his plate with a fork. “He wanted me bankrupt, ruined. He tried to take away everything I’ve ever worked for.”
“Why would he do that?” asked Carla rationally.
“How the fuck do I know?” said Lucas, getting increasingly irate. “Because he’s a fucking psychopath. He even tracked down Petra fucking Kamalski and hired her as my replacement.”
“The girl from EHL?” Carla remembered Lucas’s passionate rages about Petra from years ago. Privately, she’d always thought his hatred of Petra was at least partly fueled by sexism. Much as she adored him, Lucas had always been pretty old-fashioned when it came to women in the workplace, particularly women who threatened to outperform him. But she wisely kept her thoughts to herself.
“Yeah, can you believe it?” said Lucas furiously. “He pulled her out of the Ritz in Moscow, hugely overpromoted her.”
“Look who’s talking,” teased Carla gently.
“That was different,” snapped Lucas. Clearly, he wasn’t in the mood for banter. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to take it out on you. But you don’t understand. Anton’s evil, and so is that bitch.”
Getting to his feet, he wandered over to the edge of the terrace. Below him, the olive groves glowed an eerie white gray in the moonlight, and beyond them the calm waters of the Mediterranean stretched out like a giant sheet of silver foil. Coming up behind him, Carla slipped her arms around his waist and pressed her lithe, soft body against his. She could feel the tension coiled inside him like a mattress spring about to snap.
“Be careful,” she whispered softly. “Tisch is a very powerful man, and not just in the hotel world. From what I’ve read he has a lot of contacts in Russia still, and those guys don’t mess around. You might end up with polonium slipped into your tea.”
Turning around, Lucas kissed her tenderly on the forehead.
“Don’t worry,” he smiled. “I don’t drink tea.”
But Carla did worry. It was wonderful to see him bouncing back after all he’d been through, and she didn’t doubt he would make a roaring success of his new hotel. But he was still so headstrong and stubborn, and now he was determined to make an enemy of one of the most powerful men in the world. She only hoped he’d come to his senses before Tisch decided to finish the job he’d started and wipe Lucas off the map once and for all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ESSEX IN THE autumn could really be quite beautiful, thought Ben, putting his foot down and pushing his trusty Mini Cooper to a chassis-rattling sixty miles per hour. As soon as you turned off the M it was all wooded lanes and half-timbered thatched cottages, their chimneys smoking a welcome amid the chill wind and the swirling, golden tumble of autumn leaves. Everyone associated the county with dumb blondes and blank, faceless suburban towns. Both of which existed, of course—his own parents lived in probably the blankest, most faceless of them all. But there was a lot more to Essex than bimbos and charmless apartment blocks.
Maybe one day he’d move down here with a young family of his own. Buy somewhere rural. Have…pigs. Or something.
Or maybe not.
A lot had changed in Ben’s life in a few short years. His fund, Stellar, had had its third rough quarter in a row, which was bizarre, given their investment performance had held steady in a very dicey market. But for some mysterious reason, his investors kept redeeming their shares and jumping ship to Excelsior, Anton Tisch’s fund. Three years ago, Ben had been almost neck and neck with Anton at around the five billion mark, but now Excelsior was the clear market leader, hoovering up the Russian money flooding into London at a rate that none of its rival funds could compete with. It was depressing.
Today, though, business woes were the last thing on Ben’s mind. He was driving home for the weekend, which ought to have been relaxing, if it weren’t for the fact that he knew he’d get a grilling about his love life. The moment he walked through
the door, his mum and sisters were bound to strike up their familiar refrain—the one that sounded like a train gaining momentum and was about as difficult to stop: Marry Bianca, Marry Bianca, Marry Bianca.
Grinding the gear stick belatedly up into fifth—no wonder his poor car sounded so wheezy—he wondered again how he might try to change the subject. Last time his dad had taken pity on him and dragged him down the pub to watch football, but Ben doubted he’d be so lucky again today. Apparently Dad got a right ear-bashing about it afterward. Ben could just picture his poor father, trying in vain to defend himself from three screaming Slater women, all intent on frog-marching their precious boy to the altar.
The problem was, he really didn’t have an answer for their biggest question: Why didn’t he propose? Bianca was wonderful, a real gem. Beautiful, smart, devoted, funny—he couldn’t think of a single thing about her that he’d change. She’d moved into his Kensington apartment a year ago after a year and a half of dating, and to this day had yet to get on his nerves, which was quite a feat. Even more amazingly, she seemed to be suffering from some sort of rare glaucoma that blinded her to his own all-too-obvious faults: the midnight chip eating, the hopeless fashion sense, the complete inability to put the toilet seat down after having a pee. All this on top of the fact that he was no Brad Pitt, whereas Bianca could give Angelina a run for her money any day of the week.
She loved him. And in his own way, Ben loved her back. But the idea of marriage still made his blood run cold, which was something he couldn’t explain to himself, never mind his matrimony-crazed mother.
Passing Thorney Bay, he felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him. He used to come here sometimes as a kid, looking at the lights from the trailer park across the water and dreaming of making it big amid the even brighter lights of London.
By all objective standards, Canvey Island was a dump: rampant unemployment, blocks of apartment buildings, and cheap housing that must have looked awful even before the decades of neglect, sea wind, and graffiti had worn them down. Nothing to do but hang out at the waterfront drinking miniature bottles of Baileys and trying to get off with girls. But Ben had happy memories of the place. It would always be special to him.
“Blimey. At last. What time d’you call this?” Nikki, the younger of his two sisters, came running out as he pulled the Mini into the driveway of his parents’ house. “Mum’s going nuts. She ’ad dinner ready quarter of an hour ago.”
With her short-cropped peroxided hair and uncompromisingly tight stonewashed jeans, Nikki had never fully grown out of her Roxette phase. But she was very pretty in an eighties-throwback, Essex sort of a way. And she took good care of her body, which was more than Ben could say for himself right now. “You’ve put on weight,” she said cheerfully as he climbed out of the car. “Lard ass.”
“Fuck off,” he responded, kissing her and linking arms as they walked up to the house.
“Where’s Bianca?”
Ben sighed wearily. “I told you. She’s in New York, on a job. She does work, you know.”
Like all successful models, Bianca traveled a lot. Though he didn’t like to admit it, Ben suspected that her long absences might be part of the reason that they got along so well when they were together. Any relationship comprised of a series of joyous reunions strung together was going to seem fresher and more passionate than one based on the predictability of daily routine. More passionate than marriage, in other words.
“What if she meets another bloke out there?” Nikki raised an eyebrow in warning. “Someone who ain’t afraid to make an honest woman out of her?”
They hadn’t even gotten indoors yet, and already she was off on one.
“She meets loads of blokes, all the time,” said Ben, “and most of them look like David bloody Beckham. What can I say?” he shrugged. “I guess she must have a thing for lard-assed commit-mentphobes. Hello, Mum.”
He bent down to kiss his mother, who looked adorably furious in her apron with a wooden spoon in hand. Dear old Mum, she did love her props. They all knew that dinner, whatever it was, would have come straight out of a Stouffer’s box and that the only kitchen implement she’d actually have used was a fork for piercing the film lid several times. But Eileen Slater was not a woman to let insignificant details like that spoil her sense of occasion.
“You’re late, Benny. No Bianca?” She made a great theatrical show of hunting for his missing girlfriend, as if he might have hidden her in a pocket. But her son was so big, and she was so small, it was like watching a penguin trying to see around an iceberg.
Ben rolled his eyes to heaven.
This was going to be a long afternoon.
Lunch passed predictably enough. Ben fielded the questions and accusations as best he could, in between mouthfuls of Birds Eye Sunday Special: incinerated strips of roast beef smothered with gravy so thick it almost certainly qualified as a solid, which he soaked up with floury roast potatoes and three servings of Yorkshire pudding, earning himself a reproachful “steady on, Hagrid,” from Nikki.
By the time the Iceland trifle arrived in all its quivering, gelatinous, artificially colored glory, conversation had mercifully turned to other matters.
“’Ere, look at this.” Ben’s dad shuffled over to the sofa to retrieve the travel section from one of the Sunday papers. “That’s your mate, isn’t it? El Spic-o.”
Like everyone of his generation from Canvey Island, Rog Slater peppered his speech with racist, sexist, and generally politically incorrect references. But you wouldn’t find a kinder man in England, and Ben had long ago ceased to be offended.
“His name’s Lucas, Dad,” he said, patiently. “And yeah, that’s his new hotel. Looks brilliant, doesn’t it?”
It was only a little over a year since Luxe Ibiza had opened her doors to rave reviews in travel periodicals all across Europe. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Lucas had already capitalized on his early success and launched the second hotel in his franchise, a chichi urban boutique in Paris.
The article was a double-page spread of the sumptuous new Luxe, a tiny townhouse off the Boulevard St. Germain. So discreet it was practically invisible from the outside, inside it was an oasis of luxurious tranquility, with the sort of minimalist, less-is-more glamour that only Lucas could pull off. In contrast to the white walls of his Ibiza flagship, he’d opted for a warmer decor of claret-red velvets and deep-green baize, though it was still lit exclusively by candlelight. To Ben’s untrained eye it looked part spa, part bordello, and part eighteenth-century salon. The pictures were out of this world.
“Let me see.” Karen, his other sister, snatched the paper off him and spread it open on the dining table so her husband could look too.
“Oooh,” she cooed. “Very nice. D’you think you could get us the friend rate, Benny?”
Ben laughed. None of his family could resist a bargain.
“Dunno,” he said. “I can certainly try.”
Although back in semiregular touch, he hadn’t actually seen Lucas since the launch party for the Ibiza hotel last summer. It was a great night, not least because Lucas and Bianca had hit it off famously.
Wrapped around Ben like a wood nymph in a pale-green chiffon wisp of a dress, she’d proclaimed herself to be a fully paid-up fan of the Luxe aura, complimenting Lucas on everything from the canapés to the candlelit rock pools.
“They look so natural, like the garden of Eden. Hey, maybe Ben and I should go skinny-dipping later? This is Ibiza, after all.”
Ben blushed and mumbled something suitably English about not wanting to frighten the horses. After she’d gone, Lucas drew him aside.
“Stunning girl,” he said approvingly. “Congratulations. You see? I told you you could do better than that anemic little maid from Palmers, didn’t I?”
Ben could recall that comment now as if it were yesterday, could still feel the way it had sent his stomach lurching like a free-falling elevator. Even now, thoughts of Sian still bothered him. It bothered him th
at they bothered him.
“You finished, darling?”
His mum’s voice brought him back to the present with a jolt.
“Yes, thanks,” he said, handing her his empty trifle bowl. “It was really delicious.”
Eileen blushed, as happy with the compliment as if she’d made the dessert herself from scratch, and handed him a mug of his favorite PG Tips tea, with two bourbon biscuits for dunking. “Take those through to the lounge if you like,” she said.
The family decamped en masse to the enormous living room, sinking themselves into the various supersized World of Leather sofas and continuing to ooh and aah over Lucas’s new Paris hotel. The rest of the Sunday papers were still on the dinner table, and Ben hung back, having caught sight of the lurid red print of the News of the World at the top of the pile. Flipping the pages idly, he wondered if Sian would have a byline in this week.
Ever since she’d graduated to the features desk at the infamous Sunday gossip rag, Ben had become a regular reader.
Bianca couldn’t understand it.
“But it’s such a horrible paper,” she pointed out each week, when he guiltily handed over his change to the newsagent. “All they do is prey on people, trying to break up marriages and wreck families. Why on earth do you buy it?”
“Good football coverage,” was his stock, lame excuse. He felt bad lying, but there was no point in rocking the boat with B by telling her Sian was a columnist. Since Bianca had actually met Sian two years ago, at that New York wedding—what sort of sick celestial sadist had sat his girlfriend next to his ex, for God’s sake?—she’d had a face to put with the name, and as a result had always maintained a slightly anxious curiosity about her and Ben’s relationship.
There was no way he could excuse his interest in Sian’s writing without sounding suspect. And he couldn’t very well tell the truth: that reading her pieces gave him a strange sensation—part pride, part nostalgia, part something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on—that had become weirdly addictive. Putting his personal feelings aside, she was a terrific writer. He loved her unique brand of acerbic wit and often found himself laughing out loud at things she’d written, taking the piss out of some fat-cat politician in the withering, deadpan voice he remembered so well from their brief summer together.