Do Not Disturb

by Bagshawe, Tilly

  “I’m not sure we should be talking about tools and boxes where your sister’s concerned,” quipped Lucas. “But I’m happy to hear you have me figured out, Miss Palmer. In that case, you have nothing to worry about, do you?”

  “And you can quit with the ‘Miss Palmer’ bullshit,” said Honor. “I don’t need your fake respect. And I’m not worried. I’m disgusted. Apart from anything else, how could you do this to poor Lola?”

  For the first time, Lucas’s fixed face of arrogant amusement slipped. He looked annoyed. “You are a piece of work, you know that?” he told her. “Lecturing me on fidelity? And on hurting Lola’s feelings?”

  “She’s crazy about you,” said Honor. “Fuck knows why, but she is. Of all the women you could have picked to screw around with in this town…why’d you have to pick her? She’s just a child.”

  “She’s not a child,” said Lucas hotly. “Besides, if you’re so fucking concerned about her welfare, maybe you should think twice about sleeping with her father and screwing up her parents’ marriage.”

  “I…I…” Honor spluttered. There was no point denying the affair with Devon, but at the same time she didn’t want to have to defend it to Lucas. “I’m not screwing up their marriage. It’s already screwed up. It has been for years.”

  “Please!” He laughed in her face. “Is that what he told you? Talk about a cliché.”

  “It’s the truth,” said Honor furiously. “You know nothing about it.”

  “Are you sure about that?” asked Lucas. “Don’t you think Lola ever talks to me about her parents, her home life?”

  Honor could feel her blood pressure rising. She didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking.

  “Karis and Devon tolerate each other for the kids’ sake,” she said firmly. “That’s it.”

  “They still share a bed,” said Lucas.

  “Crap,” said Honor. But inside she could feel her stomach lurching, like someone had just cut the elevator cable. Devon had sworn to her that he and Karis had slept apart for years. “Anyway, we’re not talking about my relationship.” She jumped back on the offensive. “We’re talking about you and Lola.”

  Lucas gave her a pitying look.

  It was weird. He hated Honor. Despised everything she stood for. But at the same time it drove him nuts to think of her being pawed by that arthritic hypocrite Devon Carter. Couldn’t she see what a lying douchebag the man was?

  “Listen, sweetheart,” he said, opening the night door leading out into the parking lot and striding toward his car, so Honor was forced to follow him outside barefoot. “I like Lola a lot. She’s a sweet kid. Why else do you think I’ve kept your sordid little liaison with her daddy a secret? It certainly wasn’t to protect you.”

  Honor hadn’t thought about it that way before, but she supposed it did make sense. Still, if he expected her to be grateful just because he’d kept his mouth shut, he could forget it.

  “Well if you care about her so much,” she snapped, “what were you doing upstairs in my hot tub with my sister?”

  “I was getting a blow job,” said Lucas, matter-of-factly.

  Honor was grateful he couldn’t see her rising color in the darkness.

  “And as long as you don’t go spilling your guts to lover-boy, Lola will never know about it, and never get hurt. Deal?”

  Honor glared at him. “You’re a bastard, Lucas Ruiz,” she hissed. “A selfish, manipulative bastard.”

  “Yeah? Well you’re a bitch,” said Lucas, climbing into his car and slamming the driver’s door firmly behind him. “Lola’s not my wife, OK? It’s a summer fling, nothing more and nothing less.” Revving the engine loudly, he jerked the car forward. Honor had to jump out of the way to avoid being run over.

  Lolling his handsome head out the window, Lucas delivered his parting shot.

  “Seriously, sweetheart,” he said, “you should look at your own messed-up love life before you start throwing stones at mine. Karis Carter still loves her husband. And she still sleeps with him. Whatever bullshit he’s been feeding you.”

  Only once he’d driven off, leaving Honor standing alone in the gravel driveway, did she realize she was shivering. Not from the cold night air. But from hideous, crawling, paralyzing doubt.

  Devon was her rock, her anchor of truth and goodness. He was her safety net.

  She told herself that Lucas was just being spiteful. But if she really believed that, why did she feel like the ground had just opened up beneath her feet? Like she was falling, falling so far and so fast and so hard that she knew, once she hit the ground, she’d never be able to get up again?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BEN SLIPPED BOTH hands under the small of Sian’s naked back and slowly dragged them down the bed until he was cupping the two firm, warm globes of her bottom.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Doyle. This won’t hurt a bit,” he whispered, bringing his mouth so close to her ear that his breath tickled as he eased himself back inside her. “You can trust me. I’m a doctor.”

  It was the morning of his last full day in the Hamptons, and he and Sian were in his bed at the Herrick, savoring each precious minute they had left in each other’s company. Tonight Lucas was throwing him a farewell party on the beach. But right now all he cared about was Sian.

  Letting out a noise that was half laugh, half moan, she arched her hips against him. She loved the size and scale and weight of him, the way his back and shoulders seemed to go on for miles when she ran her fingertips across them. Being so tall, she rarely got to feel fragile or feminine. But Ben made her feel tiny, like a precious china doll. It was liberating.

  Their lovemaking had been intense from the beginning. It was only two weeks since Ben had stumbled, quite literally, into her life. But already Sian found it hard to imagine being without him, or to remember clearly how independent and complete and happy she’d felt before they met.

  The irony was, he was the absolute antithesis of her type. She’d always been drawn to sophisticated, educated, urbane guys—Clark Kents. Admittedly, Ben had vaguely hinted that he had a financial job back in England, so he must have been to college, but she found his life back home impossible to picture. To her, the boy she had come—in a frighteningly short time—to love seemed to be a classic model of the beach-bum genre, complete with scruffy hair, a worrying penchant for loud, vulgar Hawaiian-print shorts, and a wickedly irreverent sense of humor. Best of all, he loved her. She could feel his passion in the tightening of each muscle across his back as he made love to her, as though his body were one giant engine designed for the sole purpose of pleasing her. And please her he did, more than she could have believed possible.

  “Mmmmm,” she moaned, feeling her climax build as he brought one hand back across her hip and stomach and allowed his thumb to explore downward into the welcoming softness of her pubic hair. Finding her clitoris, he began stroking it gently, the lightness of his touch in sharp, delicious contrast to the quickening rhythm of his thrusts. “That is sooooo good.”

  “I love you,” he murmured, half into her ear and half into the pillow as he came, and Sian’s own orgasm immediately followed. “God, I fucking love you!”

  He rolled over onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow. To his amazement, he saw she was crying.

  “Hey. What’s wrong?” Gently, he stroked the damp tendrils of hair back from her face.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Sian, her watery eyes widening and her bottom lip wobbling with emotion. “How can you ask me that? You know what’s wrong. You’re leaving.”

  Ben sat up and ran his hands through his hair. “Please understand,” he said. “I don’t want to go. I have to. I have a business to run. If I don’t get back to London, that bloody Kraut Tisch is gonna swipe this deal right out from under me.”

  In all honesty, he should have flown back to the office a week ago, as soon as he heard that Excelsior, Anton’s fund, was moving in on one of his biggest institutional investors. Sian was the only reason he�
��d stayed. But he couldn’t put things off indefinitely.

  Sian looked at him blankly. She didn’t understand, not really. “Hedge fund,” “fund of funds,” “fixed income,” “return performance”: they were all just meaningless words to her. Meaningless and boring.

  “It doesn’t mean things have to end between us,” said Ben, resting a comforting hand on the flat expanse of her belly. “That’s why God invented airplanes. And it definitely doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

  “I know that,” she said, sounding utterly unconvinced.

  Pulling her to him, Ben wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her so tightly Sian worried about breaking a rib. But it was a good feeling, to be straitjacketed against the comforting warmth of his chest. She felt safe, the way she had as a little girl when her father held her in his arms.

  And yet, at the same time, she knew the security was an illusion. Soon Ben would be gone, back to his real life, and the fantasy of their summer romance together would fade into a milky, nostalgic haze.

  He’d forget her. She knew he would.

  “I promise you,” he said solemnly. “I won’t be gone forever. But for now, let’s just try to enjoy today, OK? I want tonight’s party to be fun. For both of us.”

  “Me too,” said Sian, doing her best to sound positive and brave. If this was to be the last night they spent together, she didn’t want to waste it crying. There’d be time enough for that later.

  Over at Lucas’s beach cottage, he and Lola were also in bed.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” Kneeling over her with an erection the size of a baguette, Lucas playfully tried to prize her legs apart. “You’re a woman. Women can always do it. We’re the ones that have to come up with the goods.”

  “I know,” Lola smiled, idly stroking his dick with her fingertips but keeping her thighs firmly clamped together. “And I can see you’ve come up with the goods fabulously, sweetie, as always. But if I don’t get home before my mom realizes I’m gone, I’m dead meat. So are you, I might add. My dad’ll come over here with a rusty pair of garden shears before you can say coitus interruptus.”

  The thought of Devon advancing toward his genitals with a sharp implement was enough to dampen even Lucas’s ardor. Feeling himself wilting, he reluctantly climbed off Lola and slumped back against the pillows.

  “I guess twice will have to do,” he said grumpily, staring at the ceiling. Actually, what he really needed was not more sex but an extra hour of sleep. But there was no chance of that. His mind was racing.

  His hot-tub shenanigans with Tina Palmer and the run-in with Honor had left a bitter taste in his mouth that still lingered now, weeks later. At the time, he’d gone on the offensive with Honor, turning the heat onto her and Devon. But the truth was he did feel guilty about sleeping with Tina. Lola was part of that guilt, although he stood by his belief that what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. In any case she’d be back at school in Boston within a week, and would no doubt soon forget all about him, like she did last year. What bothered him the most was a general sense of unease that he had somehow let himself down, and in the process allowed himself to become Anton Tisch’s puppet.

  At first he’d been as keen as Anton to play dirty with Honor if it meant wiping Palmers off the map. But as time went on, he found himself navigating increasingly murky moral waters.

  He still wasn’t sure what seducing Tina Palmer had achieved other than forming an illicit pseudofriendship between the two of them—what Anton called a bond. During the last two weeks he’d encouraged Lucas to use this bond to arrange introductions for Tina with some of his business associates, including a guest at the Herrick by the name of Toby Candelle. All Lucas knew about Candelle was that he was a personal friend of Anton’s, was unusually obsessive about privacy and anonymity, and was well connected in the movie business. In any case, Tina had seemed perfectly happy to entertain the guy, and a few days later Anton had shown his pleasure by offering Lucas an unsolicited pay rise.

  Taking advantage of his upbeat mood, Lucas had decided to risk asking him for a favor. For months now, he’d felt guilty about spilling the beans to his boss over Honor and Devon’s affair at the Herrick’s launch party. Now he wanted an assurance that Tisch wouldn’t go public with the information, so he could keep his side of the deal he’d struck with Honor.

  Anton seemed taken aback by the request but agreed to do as Lucas asked. “If it’s really that important to you, of course I’ll keep schtum,” he said. “Consider it forgotten.”

  And Lucas had. But still the miasma of guilt hanging over him failed to lift. He heartily wished he’d never gotten tangled up with either of the Palmer sisters.

  “Have you seen my cell?”

  Lola, washed and dressed and with her damp, bracken-red hair tied back in a loose bun, emerged from the bathroom looking harassed. Even in yesterday’s old T-shirt and jeans after a sleepless night and without so much as a scrap of makeup on, she was edible. Still, Lucas reflected with a pang, she did look terribly young. With that smattering of sun freckles across the bridge of her nose and the pink fluffy shoulder bag she took everywhere that wouldn’t have been out of place in an elementary school cubby, she combined her sexiness with an innocence that could be quite disconcerting at times.

  Maybe Honor was right.

  Maybe he shouldn’t be fucking with her?

  “On the couch, in the living room,” he said. “Right there, beside the white cushion.” Shoving the phone into her purse, Lola pulled out her car keys and skipped over to the bed to give him a good-bye kiss. To her surprise, he grabbed her and pulled her face down to his, kissing her back with much more tenderness than usual.

  “What was that for?” she smiled.

  “Nothing,” he said, smiling back.

  He was relieved she was going back to Boston. But at the same time, he knew he’d miss her. Since his one-night stand with Tina, guilt had made him start treating Lola more kindly. As a result, the clinginess that had so irritated him earlier in the summer had disappeared. Their last two weeks together had been almost as much fun as the old days.

  “Don’t forget it’s Ben’s party tonight,” he said, dragging himself out of bed too.

  “As if I could forget,” said Lola. “I feel so bad for poor Sian. She’s really upset about him leaving.”

  “Hmm,” said Lucas grumpily. “So she says.”

  It niggled him that Lola had become so tight with the scrawny little maid from Palmers. Quite apart from suspecting Sian of being a gold digger, he was pretty sure that she was one of the loudest voices warning Lola off him. The sooner she pissed off back to nowheresville, the better.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Lola.

  “Nothing. Just that she’ll get over it,” said Lucas, who didn’t want a fight. “She’ll be leaving herself soon enough.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Lola ran her fingers absently through his short, preppy hair as he sat on the edge of the bed. “At least she won her bet.”

  Lucas yawned. “What bet?”

  “Her girlfriend from home bet her a hundred bucks she couldn’t land herself a millionaire in the Hamptons,” said Lola, getting up to go.

  “Hey, it was just a joke,” she added hastily, seeing Lucas’s face darken and his forehead knot into a disapproving frown. “Sian adores Ben. You know that. She couldn’t care less whether he’s loaded or not.”

  Like so many people born into money, Lucas reflected, Lola underestimated its importance to those born without it. Her loyalty to her new best friend was endearing, but it was also naive.

  “I gotta run.” She kissed him. “Say a prayer that Mom and Dad are still in bed when I get back.”

  “I’m praying, I’m praying,” said Lucas, as she shot out the front door, slamming it behind her. The mental picture of Devon and Karis entwined in one another’s arms made him turn his thoughts once again to Honor.

  Lola wasn’t alone in her naïveté. Even a tough cookie like Honor co
uld be blind where love was concerned. She seemed to have swallowed Devon Carter’s lies whole, like a credulous bait-hungry fish.

  Feeling inexplicably irritated all of a sudden, he rolled over, pulled the duvet up over his head, and tried once again to fall back to sleep. What did he care about Honor’s love life anyway? Or Ben’s, for that matter?

  Right now he had more than enough problems managing his own.

  It was already nearly noon in London when the courier arrived at Anton’s Mayfair mansion.

  “Package for Mr. Tisch,” he grunted through his motorcycle helmet visor, thrusting a clipboard under the butler’s nose. “Sign ’ere.”

  William, Anton’s long-suffering butler and head of all the domestic staff in London, scrawled something across the paper and took the parcel. The boss had been hopping up and down like a cat on hot coals all morning waiting for it. He’d better take it straight in.

  “Ah, at last. There you are.” Anton, still in his silk Turnbull & Asser dressing gown, was pacing around his study. “Give that to me.”

  He’d been up since six, trying to woo a US pension fund’s finance director into investing in Excelsior, and between that and looking over the third-quarter figures for the Tischens, he hadn’t had a second to dress. His hair, usually meticulously smoothed down, was sticking up on one side at an oddly jaunty angle, quite at odds with his humorless face and making his dodgy dye job look even more obvious.

  William handed over the package with a polite little bow, although inside he was seething. Tisch thought he was so proper English, but he still hadn’t mastered the use of “please” or “thank you.” One of these days someone’d strangle him with that damned tasseled dressing gown cord.

  “You may go now.”

  Fumbling in the desk drawer for a letter opener, Anton didn’t even bother to look up.

  Once the butler was gone and he’d found the little silver Asprey’s dagger, he ripped open the package and triumphantly pulled out a VHS tape. With one press of a button on his universal remote, the door to the study locked, the lights dimmed, and metal blackout blinds began closing automatically over all the windows. A second button made the two faux-Chipperfield bookcases swoosh to one side, and an enormous flat-screen plasma TV emerged from the recess in the wall behind them. Anton took a childish delight in these James Bond touches, although on this occasion the effect was rather spoiled when he realized he would have to walk across the room and load the tape manually into the VCR.