“Your father passed away this morning.”
She stood there staring at him blankly. After what felt like an age, she eventually managed a strangled “I’m sorry?”
“It was very peaceful,” said Devon. “I was with him when it happened, purely by chance. I stopped in to see him on my way to work, and Lise told me he’d taken a turn for the worse last night. The doctor was with him, but I don’t think there was anything he could have done.”
“Lise didn’t call me,” said Honor. She was still staring straight ahead, like a zombie. “No one called me.”
“I asked her not to,” said Devon. “My pilot brought me straight down here. I thought…I don’t know. I didn’t want you to hear over the phone. And I figured you could use a shoulder to cry on.”
“But…I’m coming to see him,” Honor whispered. “This month. I booked my flight.”
With infinite tenderness, Devon pulled her to him, wrapping his arms tightly around her.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I really am sorry.”
Trey Palmer’s funeral was a circus.
A stream of black-clad bimbos, like aging ghosts of Christmases past, filed into St. Stephen’s Cathedral and proceeded to argue loudly about which of them should have precedence in the seating arrangements. They were fighting for space with all the great and the good of Boston: hoteliers, captains of industry and their wives, and old family friends like the Carters, most of whom hadn’t laid eyes on Trey for a good twenty years. Then there was the press, none of whom Honor could recall inviting, but who seemed nevertheless to have turned out in spectacular force to see the old man off.
“Did you ask these people to show up?” Honor hissed at Lise after one particularly insensitive photographer had shoved a lens within inches of her face.
“Of course not,” Lise snapped back. Her skintight Dolce & Gabbana minidress, though black, was possibly the most unfunereal item of clothing Honor had ever seen, and the red soles of her sky-high Louboutin stilettos undoubtedly said more about her true feelings than anything else she was wearing. “Tina’s the one who can’t take a shit unless it’s on film.”
Of course. Tina. Sharing the front row with her sister, stepmother, and of course the ubiquitous Dick, she was, as usual, reveling in the attention in a bright-red pantsuit and more diamonds than a De Beers advertisement.
“I look on today as a celebration of my dad’s life,” Honor overheard her earnestly explaining to a reporter behind them. “He would have hated to see all this black. It’s so depressing.”
What was truly depressing, of course, was the hypocrisy. In private, Tina had made no effort to hide her elation that the final chunk of her trust fund would at last be made available to her. All she wanted to talk about was selling the house and how quickly they could come to a financial agreement with Lise.
Admittedly, Trey had been a pretty awful father. Even so, her sister’s utter lack of compassion shocked Honor to the core. Especially when she herself was struggling with feelings of guilt for not having visited him enough and regret that his last lucid memory of her was having Palmers wrenched out of his control. She desperately wanted someone to confide in, to unburden herself to, but Devon was with his family, as usual, and as unavailable to her as if he’d been on the moon.
Looking across at him now, she felt her frustration mounting. Poring over his hymnal, looking every inch the upstanding family man, he was pointing something out to his daughter. Karis, elegant in floor-length black, stood dutifully beside him, with their son, Nicholas, on her other side. Honor knew it was wrong to feel jealous. What right did she have to resent his family? But she couldn’t help it. Despite his protestations to the contrary, looking at them now she could easily believe he and Karis were exactly what they seemed: a strong, loving unit, shored up against the hard times by twenty-five years of marriage, two children, and a whole life built together.
There were days, mostly when she was alone and exhausted at Palmers, when she thought she wanted nothing more than to marry Devon. As though being his wife would complete her, and give her the security and unconditional love she’d craved ever since her mom died. But at other times, the nagging doubts she’d harbored from the beginning of the affair grew louder and harder to ignore. Both his kids were adults now—it wasn’t as if they were nine. Surely, if he really loved her, he’d find the courage to call it quits with Karis and make a commitment to her?
He often talked about their future together as if it were a fact. But whenever she pressed him on timing, or mentioned the dreaded D word—divorce—he became defensive and shut the conversation down.
The service dragged on for what seemed like an age. The priest read out a eulogy that bore so little resemblance to her father it almost made Honor wonder whether she’d accidentally wandered into the wrong church, and Tina read a Rudyard Kipling poem in a faux-sentimental voice that she thought made her sound like a serious actress but that made Honor want to throw up.
Afterward there was some general milling about outside, although thankfully the weather was so arctic that no one wanted to linger long. Honor shivered in her black mink coat, gracefully accepting condolences from people she barely knew and pretending not to notice the disapproving whispers and sly, condemning looks from mourners and onlookers alike. Even the priest had been distinctly chilly toward her. What was it with people in this town? You’d have thought by now they’d have found somebody else to hate. Not that it was much better in East Hampton, where to Honor’s sensitive ears the snide whispers sounded almost deafening. Was she never to be forgiven for trying to save her family from financial ruin and her father from himself?
She was wondering at what point it would be reasonable to slip away—there were still a ton of papers to be gone through at the townhouse and nobody else was volunteering to deal with them—when she felt a hand on her shoulder.
“Hey.” Devon smiled at her, and she tried not to melt. In his dark suit and black cashmere coat he looked even more handsome and distinguished than usual, the gray flecks at his temples highlighting his dark eyes as they searched hers for a response. “How’re you holding up?”
“How am I holding up?” She mimicked his formal tone, her misery making her lash out despite herself. “Why, thank you for asking, Mr. Carter. I’m just peachy. And how are you and your wife? You all looked nice and cozy together in church.”
Devon grabbed her arm, lowering his voice to a whisper. “That’s not fair. It killed me seeing you across the aisle, all alone, not being able to hold you. You know it’s you I want to be with.”
“Do I?” snapped Honor, breaking free of his grip. “You were holding her hand. I saw you.”
“Christ, Honor.” He shook his head. “It’s a funeral. How do you want me to act?”
“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Just leave me alone, OK?”
Alone in the safety of her blacked-out limo a few minutes later, she thought she’d want to cry, but instead she just lay back against the headrest and closed her eyes, exhausted. Forcing Devon out of her mind, she groaned at the thought of how much work still had to be done here before she could get back to Palmers. Trey’s personal effects were in a hopelessly disorganized state. In some ways it was a good thing to be overloaded. It kept her from dwelling on her grief and guilt and blocked out the worst of the loneliness. And yet she felt herself teetering on an emotional precipice. Yesterday, sorting through some old files, she’d come across a black-and-white snapshot of her mother and to her horror had found herself dissolving into wracking, uncontrollable sobs.
Never much one for introspection, she found it impossible to untangle her conflicting emotions. All she knew for sure was that her father’s death had crystallized something in her. Once her tears subsided, she could feel the grief hardening in her veins into something more solid: determination.
Her father had died disappointed in her, believing that she’d not only stolen Palmers from him,
but that she was incapable of making the hotel a success. Now, more than ever, she had to prove him wrong. Tina and Lise could fight over the house and the trust if they wanted to. But for Honor, Palmers was all that mattered. It was, in some indefinable way, all that was left of her family. She wasn’t about to let anyone take that away from her.
Anton Tisch had obviously written her off, just like her father. He wouldn’t be opening his hotel next door if he didn’t think Palmers was finished. But he was wrong, just as Trey had been wrong. She knew she had a mountain to climb, but she was damn well going to climb it.
She’d show them, all those vultures today who’d looked down their noses, judging her. She’d show them all.
CHAPTER NINE
CRAWLING ALONG THE Long Island Expressway in the back of the Hampton Jitney, Lucas seethed quietly to himself.
As if arriving in America, a country he loathed almost as much as Britain, during a February cold snap weren’t bad enough, he’d landed at La Guardia to find that not only had his suitcase been lost in transit, but the driver who was supposed to pick him up had had an accident on the Sunrise Highway, and he’d be forced to take the bus.
Ironically, from the moment Anton had offered him the managership of the Herrick, his life seemed to have become one giant stress after another. Admittedly, telling Julia she could stick her job at the Cadogan up her ass had been fun. But from then on in it had all been downhill.
Tisch had insisted that Lucas should be on-site in the Hamptons by the end of February at the latest to begin the building works, and he’d made it—just. It was a tall order, leaving him only a few weeks once he returned from Switzerland to organize his visa, move out of his London apartment, sell his bike, settle his debts, and find himself a place to live in East Hampton until the Herrick was ready. But he couldn’t afford to cut corners on the time frame Anton had given him. He was expected to have the hotel built by next Christmas, including all landscaping, open in the spring, and have generated enough positive buzz to have the place heaving with celebrity guests by the following summer. That gave him only sixteen months to, as Anton put it, wipe Palmers off the map. All he had today was a bare patch of earth and a missing suitcase.
But the epic task that lay ahead of him wasn’t the only depressing thought on Lucas’s mind. There was also his family. Guilty because he’d barely been in touch since moving to London, he decided on a whim to fly out to Ibiza for Christmas. It was a mistake. Things at home were as bad as they’d ever been. The farmer who rented out his miserable little cottage to Lucas’s mother and her waster husband had finally gotten tired of waiting for his rent and kicked them out. It wasn’t until Lucas showed up at the doorstep on Christmas Eve, weighed down with gifts, that he learned they were gone. The new tenant told him they were now living in a so-called studio apartment, which turned out to be little more than a squalid, one-room bedroom in the dodgy part of Santa Eulalia.
“Your brothers had to leave,” Ines told Lucas when he finally tracked her down, inhaling deeply on one of the hand-rolled cigarettes she seemed to smoke constantly these days. “No room.” She looked around the tiny living quarters and shrugged hopelessly. Jose, drunk as usual, was snoring loudly on the sofa bed in the corner.
Lucas had done his best to improve things. Apart from emptying his meager savings account and giving it all to his mother in cash, he’d tried to inject some Christmas spirit into the gloomy little apartment, rigging up a garish artificial tree in the middle of the room and dashing off around the island on Christmas morning to round up his good-for-nothing brothers for an enormous, if somewhat stilted, family lunch. But in three days, there was only so much he could do. He had to be back in Geneva for a strategy meeting with Anton on the twenty-seventh.
Staring out of the grimy window of the bus now, he watched the rain pounding its steely needles onto the drab, flat landscape on either side of the freeway and tried to push thoughts of his mother from his mind. How he hated America. His loathing had begun years ago, at the Britannia, but this was the first opportunity he’d had to observe Americans on their home turf, and so far, they’d done little to reverse his prejudices.
The guy at the immigration desk was a power-hungry asshole, questioning Lucas for almost thirty minutes, though he could plainly see that all his papers were in order, before finally stamping his visa as if he were performing a personal favor. Then there was baggage claim, where the United staff first lost his luggage and then, when Lucas complained, began playing what was clearly a favorite game of theirs, entitled something along the lines of Let’s See Who Could Give Less of a Shit. They were really quite competitive at it.
The last straw had been the bus driver, a man so grossly overweight he looked like he might well have eaten his previous load of passengers and who smelled like he hadn’t washed this year. Having refused to help Lucas with his one remaining bag, this gem of a human being then claimed to have no idea how long the bus might take to reach its destination—despite the fact that all he’d done for the past twelve years was make the mind-numbing journey back and forth from the airport to the Hamptons fifteen times a week.
Dickhead.
But the thing that really got under Lucas’s skin was the fact that so many of the lowliest positions at the airport—rubbish sweepers, toilet attendants, and the like—seemed to be filled almost exclusively by Hispanics. He’d only been in the country three hours and already he was starting to feel like a second-class citizen.
Instinctively, he lifted his hand to run it through his hair, something he always did when he felt agitated, only to be surprised yet again to find his trademark mop of curls gone, replaced with the preppy short back and sides Anton had demanded. Numerous girls back in Europe had assured him they loved the new look, but Lucas couldn’t get used to it. Every time he looked in the mirror, he did a double take when he saw a clean-shaven drone staring back at him. All he needed was a college tie and some veneers and he could be a CNN newscaster.
“Thz Bridgehammon,” mumbled the driver, which Lucas interpreted by means of looking at the road signs as “This is Bridgehampton.” Great. He could already speak moron.
How many fucking Hamptons were there, anyway? The road had become single-lane some time ago, but it seemed to stretch on forever, through a bunch of dull clapboard towns that all looked as drearily empty and sodden as the next. He thought he saw a sign saying “East Hampton, ten miles,” but that must have been a good fifteen miles ago by his reckoning.
Finally, three long hours after leaving the airport, they reached the edge of town. A few minutes later the Jitney pulled over beside what looked like the main village green, and Lucas gratefully climbed out of his cramped seat.
Outside, the rain had turned to sleet. Even so, it felt great to breathe fresh air after the muggy confines of the bus. The guy sitting next to him must have eaten enough garlic last night to sustain a small town’s worth of Italians. Holding his small case over his head in lieu of an umbrella, Lucas sprinted across the green toward the nearest available shelter, a coffee shop, shaking the freezing droplets off himself like a wet dog as he staggered inside.
“You look cold.”
It was hardly the most insightful of opening lines. But one look at the waitress’s small but perfectly formed body, all Latin curves and breasts heaving enticingly beneath her tight cashmere sweater, helped him see past her conversational deficiencies.
“Do I?” said Lucas, grinning. “Well, you look phenomenally sexy.”
The girl laughed nervously. “Er, thanks. I guess.” She blushed. “You’re pretty direct, aren’t you?”
Lucas shrugged. “I find it saves time.” Taking off his coat, he rubbed his hands together for warmth before offering one to the girl to shake.
“I’m Lucas Ruiz.”
“Desiree,” said the girl, shaking his hand, still somewhat warily. He was a divine-looking man. Different too—not at all like the bland, all-American Ralph Lauren–model types she was used to seeing in Eas
t Hampton. This one was more Antonio Banderas, perhaps crossed with a young Warren Beatty. And that deep, soulful Spanish accent was to die for. Even so, the way he looked at her made her feel naked and vulnerable. It was nice and disconcerting at the same time.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked, pulling herself together.
“Desiree,” said Lucas, rolling the word over his tongue like he was tasting an exquisite wine. “Beautiful name. Very appropriate.”
She blushed again, deeper this time.
“I think I will have a drink, thank you, Desiree,” he said, enjoying the effect he was having on her. “Hot chocolate, please. With as much cream as you can manage on the top.”
He was the only customer in the café—in fact, looking outside through the rain-splattered window, he and his fellow Jitney passengers appeared to be the only people in the entire town—and his drink wasn’t long in coming.
“The place looks dead,” he said, nodding toward the window and the empty village green beyond as he sipped gratefully at the creamy chocolate. “Is it always like this?”
“June, July, and August you can’t move. It’s a zoo,” said Desiree, pulling her thick dark hair back into a ponytail and tying it with a cheap elastic band. “But off season, yeah, it’s pretty quiet. I actually prefer it this way.”
“Really?” Lucas looked surprised. “Why? Aren’t you bored?”
“Sometimes,” she shrugged. “But, you know, I read. I paint. There’s more to life than party party party.”
“There is?” He was so deadpan it made her laugh. She was finally beginning to relax. He’d have liked to have stayed here chatting her up and gorging himself on hot chocolate for the rest of the day, but sadly it wasn’t an option. Thanks to all the delays and fuckups at La Guardia, he was already late for his meeting at the Herrick with the site manager and a bunch of potential contractors and architects, all bidding for the work. He should ask her for directions and get going.
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