Do Not Disturb

by Tilly Bagshawe

  He’d told her when they met that he worked in finance, so she’d assumed he was reasonably well off. To stay at the Herrick he’d have had to be. But despite Lucas’s assumptions to the contrary, she’d actually had no idea Ben was a fully paid up member of the superrich. In some ways she supposed it explained his sensitivity over the whole bet thing. Explained it, but didn’t excuse it. Even after six months the pain of their parting was still raw, and the wound to her pride still stung like acid every time she thought of him. Which, these days, was pathetically often.

  “You know,” said Lola, pouring herself a second cup of tea, into which she heaped three towering teaspoons of sugar. “Breaking up with Igor does leave me with one problem.”

  “It does?” Sian looked disbelieving.

  “Kind of. It means I’m gonna be dateless for the Burnstein wedding.”

  Araminta “Minty” Burnstein was the daughter of family friends from Boston. Her wedding to some random shipping heir or other promised to be one of the grandest seen in New York since Liza Minnelli’s. Lola had had mixed feelings about going. She hadn’t been back to the States or seen her parents since Christmas, but she knew from Nick, who’d spent the holiday at home, that things at home were still walking-on-eggshells tense. Minty’s wedding would be the first big social event her mom had attended since her dad’s affair with Honor became public. Lola wasn’t sure she could bear to watch the forced, brittle smiles of people trying to pretend nothing had happened. And what if her mom broke down?

  On the other hand it looked set to be an awesome party. And Lola Carter had always been an awesome party kind of a girl.

  “Wanna be my date?”

  Sian choked on her tea, spraying hot liquid and biscuit crumbs all over her copy.

  “Me?” she said, cleaning up the mess as best she could with a tea towel. “You don’t want me cramping your style. Anyway, it’s not for another ten days. You’ll have guys lining up by then.”

  “Probably,” said Lola, not bothering to deny it. “But I really don’t wanna bring some guy I barely know. Not to this. And I don’t want to go alone, either. I need someone to carry the bucket for me if my dad starts playing the devoted husband and I have to puke halfway through the vows.”

  “As glamorous as that sounds,” said Sian, “I really can’t.”

  “Why not?” Lola looked crushed.

  “I can’t afford the plane ticket, never mind a hotel,” said Sian simply. “Anyway, I ought to be working.”

  “You’re always working, sweetie,” said Lola. “It’s only one weekend. You could see your mom and dad afterward,” she added, by way of further incentive.

  Sian rubbed her tired eyes, and to her horror found she was on the verge of tears. She tried not to dwell on it too much, but she missed home and Taneesha like crazy.

  “I can’t afford it, Lo,” she said again. “And please, don’t tell me your dad will pay, OK? We’ve been through all that a million times.”

  Leaning across the table, Lola grabbed her hand. “I know you don’t believe in taking handouts,” she said. “That’s cool. But I already paid for Igor’s ticket. It’s transferable but it’s not refundable. If you don’t come, I’m literally gonna have to throw it in the trash.”

  “Really?” Sian looked skeptical.

  “Yes, really,” said Lola, sensing her resolve weakening. “Absolutely. And I have a double room at the Four Seasons, also bought and paid for. We can share the bed, have our own girlie slumber party. Oh come on! It’ll be so much fun.”

  Sian wavered. Oh, what the hell.

  “All right,” she said, grinning. It really would be wonderful to see her folks. “Count me in.”

  “Yay!” Leaping to her feet, Lola clapped her hands and whooped around the table in an impromptu victory dance. “Fuck you, Igor. New York, here we come!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I’M SORRY, SIR, but the captain has switched on the fasten seat belts sign. I’m going to have to ask you to buckle up.”

  Lucas opened one eye lazily and looked up at the stewardess. She was young and pretty, but her looks were ruined by the drag-queen makeup that airlines seemed to insist upon nowadays—thick brown lip-liner filled in with pink shimmer gloss, too-dark foundation that stopped with an abrupt tidemark at the jaw line, and mascara so thickly caked it was a wonder the poor girl could open her eyelids at all. Combined with her severely pulled-back hair and starched orange-and-white uniform, the overall look was more dental hygienist than sex siren.

  Pity. He could have done with the distraction.

  “How long till we land?” he asked, running a hand through his thick curls. One of the few good things about his ignominious firing from the Herrick was that he no longer had to keep the hated Matt Lauer buzz cut and could revert to his favored disheveled look. For the flight back to Ibiza he was wearing battered jeans and a faded blue open shirt with a string of worry beads underneath. No one would have recognized him as the preppy East Hampton playboy of six months ago.

  “Not long now, sir,” said the girl. “You on ’oliday?”

  She was eager to engage this gorgeous man in conversation for as long as she could and hoped fervently that he might ask her for her number before they landed. Sadly for her, Lucas was in no mood for chitchat.

  “No,” he said grumpily, clicking his belt buckle closed and gazing stonily out the grimy plastic window. “I’m going home.”

  He’d tried to tell himself that coming back to Ibiza was nothing to be ashamed of. That he was here to visit his mother and brothers, to help out, to do the right thing. But it wasn’t working. The truth was he was coming back with his tail between his legs because he’d failed. And because he’d reached a point where he honestly felt he had nowhere else to go. Since leaving the Herrick under such a massive cloud last September, his mood had swung violently between deep troughs of self-pity and murderous, obsessive hatred of Anton, whose weirdly impassive, Botoxed face had begun to haunt his dreams. Sometimes it would appear, unbidden, during his waking hours too: after every failed job interview, when door after door was slammed in his face at hotels from Rome to Paris to London. Overnight, Lucas had gone from being the industry’s wunderkind to persona non grata. Even the family-run boutiques seemed to have banded together against him. It was as though they were all part of an exclusive private members’ club, from which Anton had had Lucas blackballed.

  His name was now synonymous with Tina Palmer’s infamous sex tape. He could protest his innocence until he was blue in the face, or pay a fortune to have lawyers do it for him, but his reputation was already shot. By October, the clip of Tina snorting coke at the Herrick was the single most downloaded item on the web. By Christmas Palmer-Gate had outsold One Night In Paris by almost three to one. The fact that Lucas could prove that he had never received a cent of its proceeds was apparently immaterial. As manager, he was technically responsible for everything that went on at his hotel. His dismissal from the Herrick was quite legal.

  Meanwhile, Anton had been careful to ensure that he emerged from the whole sordid affair looking whiter than white. No money from the Pay-Per-View could be traced to his accounts either, and his “friend” Toby Candelle, now a minor celebrity in his own right as Tina’s costar, flat-out denied ever having met or spoken to him, which meant it was their word against Lucas’s. Two against one. How much had Anton had to fork out to secure that little shit’s loyalty? Lucas wondered bitterly. A lot more than thirty pieces of silver, that was for sure.

  Ironically, the only person who had ended up doing well out of the tape was Tina herself, Anton’s intended victim. She was cautioned over the drug taking but never charged. And as no one else was stepping forward to take responsibility for the footage, she ended up winning retrospective ownership to the rights herself. When she announced she’d be donating all the proceeds to Guatemalan orphans, Angelina Jolie–style, her media rehabilitation was complete. All of a sudden America couldn’t get enough of Tina Palmer.

&nb
sp; Lucas, on the other hand, was very far from being forgiven. After over five months of job hunting, he had yet to get so much as a sniff of interest from any of the top-tier hotels in Europe. (He’d already given up on the US, where the press had shit on him so hard employers could smell him before he walked in the door.) Unless he found something soon, he’d be forced to slide right back down the ladder and take a junior management position in some anonymous chain somewhere. How the mighty had fallen. Then two days ago, to add insult to injury, he’d been skimming through Hotel World on the way home to Ben’s apartment—financial necessity had turned his two-week stay into a semipermanent arrangement, and the boys were now room-mates—when he saw a double-page spread on the Herrick’s new manager.

  He recognized her instantly. Her once-black hair was now supershort and dyed platinum, and her snow-white skin had gained some artificial color over the years. But the cruel, ice-blue eyes were just the same, as was the permanent man-hating sneer that hung over her angular, Slavic beauty like a shroud.

  Petra Kamalski.

  Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence that Anton had hired his old enemy and rival from his Lausanne days to be his replacement? It must be his idea of a sick last laugh—a metaphorical kick in Lucas’s ribs when he was down. If so, it worked. When he saw Petra’s picture, he felt sick to his stomach.

  According to the article, a sycophantic wank-fest obviously written by one of Anton’s pet journos, Petra had returned to Moscow after graduating from EHL. Lucas had always assumed she’d shove her MBA in a drawer, marry some other ludicrously wealthy trust-fund bratski and go off to make Damian babies in a palace somewhere. She didn’t need to work, after all. But it seemed he’d misjudged her ambition. After working her way up at the notoriously political Ritz-Carlton Group, she’d gone on to become number two at the Palace, the grandest hotel in St. Petersburg. That in itself was impressive less than four years out of college. But to go from there to the Herrick was almost as big a quantum career leap as it had been for him, leaving the Cadogan two years ago. She must have made quite an impression on Anton. Or maybe he just recognized a kindred spirit. Lucas couldn’t think of anyone who’d make a more perfect bride to Tisch’s Frankenstein.

  The plane finally landed in Ibiza, and Lucas followed his sheep-like fellow passengers down to baggage claim. He made no effort to hide his disdain for the Easter holiday tourists huddled around the lone rickety conveyor belt. Fat women, squeezed into Bermuda shorts designed to make their ample backsides look even more bovine, stood beside their already drunk husbands—most of them had their noses stuck in their pints since before they’d left Gatwick—while their unruly kids jumped on and off other people’s luggage, swarming around arrivals in their Manchester United soccer jerseys like so many red ants.

  His own bag, as usual, was practically the last to arrive, which did little to alleviate his foul mood. And when he finally struggled out to the taxi line, a pixie-like American woman barged past him and shamelessly stole his cab.

  “Sorry,” she said, not looking anything of the sort as she flashed him a mouthful of porcelain veneers and chucked her Louis Vuitton tote onto the backseat. “I’m in a real rush.”

  Lucas yelled obscenities after her as the cab sped away. With her scrawny little body, spiky hair, and outrageous sense of entitlement, she reminded him of Honor Palmer.

  He’d thought about Honor a lot since he’d left America.

  “Why don’t you call her and apologize?” Ben suggested innocently at Christmas, after Lucas had brought her name up yet again in conversation. “Put the past behind you.”

  “Apologize?” Lucas looked amazed. “Why the fuck should I apologize to her?”

  “Because you feel bad?” offered Ben. “Because if you hadn’t slept with Tina and set her up with that guy and spilled the beans to Anton about Honor and Devon’s affair, none of this shit would have happened?”

  “That’s crap,” said Lucas hotly. “Firstly, I didn’t know the Tina thing was a setup.”

  Ben raised an eyebrow. “Oh, come on. You must have had your suspicions. Why did you think Anton frog-marched you into bed with her? And why would he go to so much trouble to arrange introductions for a woman he barely knew?”

  Lucas scowled. Ben’s perceptiveness could be quite annoying at times.

  It was true, of course. He had smelled a rat. He simply hadn’t cared enough to dig any deeper. Nor had it crossed his mind that he might be the one at risk. But he wasn’t sure he was ready to admit that to himself yet, never mind Ben.

  “Honor has no one to blame but herself,” he said firmly. “She shouldn’t have been screwing around with someone else’s husband. Especially not one old enough to be her father,” he added with disgust. “She deserved to get caught.”

  Ben laughed. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! What are you now? The patron saint of fidelity? How many older, married women have you banged in your time?”

  Lucas looked sulkily at his shoes and said nothing.

  “For fuck’s sake, call the woman and straighten things out,” said Ben. “You know you want to.”

  But Lucas was adamant he did not want to. Honor was a hostile, self-important cow. His life was the one in ruins. Why should he call her?

  Despite his loudly proclaimed indifference, he found himself keeping an eye out for references to Honor and Palmers in the press. In the same Hotel World article where he’d read about Petra’s appointment, the journalist claimed that Palmers had been losing market share to the Herrick at a consistent rate since last summer and that its bookings for the coming season were at an all-time low. Of course, it might not be true. The writer was clearly a Tisch stooge, and Honor, as usual, had been “unavailable for comment” and so couldn’t confirm or deny the rumors. Since the scandal had broken, she’d become a virtual recluse, leaving it to Tina to bask in notoriety in the pages of the gossip magazines.

  Staring out the window at the scrubby palm trees battered by the recent gales and the squat, low-rise apartment buildings that had sprung up like toadstools along the main road from the airport, Lucas felt sad. Every time he came back, this part of the island seemed to have gotten uglier. Soon he’d be in his mother’s dingy apartment, doling out what little money he had left like Santa Claus, all the while knowing it would almost certainly be wasted on booze by his stepfather or sucked into the black hole of the family’s debts.

  He closed his eyes and let his head flop back against the soft plastic of the headrest. He felt bone weary but was too wound up to sleep. Instead, as usual, he allowed a picture of Anton’s smug, smiling face to float into his consciousness. It wasn’t long before he felt his simmering rage bubble up to boiling point.

  Some twelve hours later, at just after midnight, he staggered blindly out of a dive bar onto the filthy sidewalk.

  “And don’t come back, asshole!” the owner shouted after him in Spanish. “You’re lucky my bouncer had the night off. Next time, he’ll break both your arms, tough guy.” Lucas didn’t bother to shout back, partly because he wasn’t at all sure he could string a sentence together, but mostly because he knew the guy was right. He had been an asshole, picking a fight with two of the patrons over some bullshit politics or other, purely because they were American.

  In his defense, it had been one hell of a rough day. He’d arrived at the apartment to find that his mother, at the age of forty-one, was pregnant again—heavily pregnant—a fact she’d omitted to mention in any of their phone conversations of the past six months. Quite apart from the head-fuck of being about to have a baby brother or sister he was old enough to have fathered himself, Ines’s pregnancy was yet another financial and emotional pressure thrust onto his already overloaded shoulders. He couldn’t deal with it.

  In the end they’d had a titanic row about it, with an incoherently drunk Jose and Tito, the only one of Lucas’s waster brothers not in prison, both throwing in their two cents’ worth, adding fuel to the fire.

  “Take it!” he
finally snapped, emptying his wallet and pockets of every last note and coin and flinging them hopelessly onto the floor at his mother’s feet. “It doesn’t matter what I make; it’ll never be enough, will it, Mama? There’s always another mouth to feed, another fucking bill collector at the door. You’re your own worst enemy.”

  He stormed out with the sound of Ines’s sobs and his stepfather’s slurred abuse still ringing in his ears. Heading straight for San Antonio, he walked into the cheapest bar he could find and set about the important task of drinking himself into oblivion.

  On the street, the cool night air hit him with sobering force. Ibiza in March could be quite cold, and Lucas found himself shivering in just a shirt and jeans. Slinging his one small bag over his shoulder, he set off in the direction of Plaza della Playa, where he hoped one of the cheaper, off-season B and Bs might give him a room, even at this time of night. It was far too cold to sleep on the beach, even warmed from within with whiskey as he was.

  Without thinking, he turned a corner and found himself standing at the foot of the front steps to the Britannia, the ghastly dive where he’d worked as a teenage no-hoper all those years ago. Looking at the place, it might have been yesterday. Nothing had changed, from the dingy facade with its depressing, peeling paint to the stench of pine disinfectant that wafted out of the lobby and into the street like chemical warfare. The smell made him retch. And yet some strange impulse seemed to draw him up the steps. Putting one blind foot in front of the other, he soon found himself standing, swaying like a reed in the breeze, in the middle of the deserted reception area.