“Well, well, well.”
The taunting, malevolent voice was accompanied by a slow hand clap. Lucas turned unsteadily around.
“If it isn’t the prodigal son returned.”
Miguel, the manager, emerged from the shadows like a fat, bald genie of the lamp. His face was markedly more lined than when Lucas had last seen him, and his grotesque, wobbling beer belly now protruded a farther inch or two from beneath his straining, food-splattered T-shirt. But otherwise he was the same sneering bully he’d always been. Lucas had assumed that even a deadbeat like Miguel would have moved on to new pastures by now. But apparently not.
He looked his old boss up and down as if he had scabies. “Miguel. What an unpleasant surprise.”
“So tell me.” The manager eased his spreading thighs down into the one threadbare sofa shoved against the wall in reception and threw his arms wide with exaggerated bonhomie. “Just how exactly do you move from managing a famous Tischen Hotel to flogging homemade porn on the Internet? Is that the sort of savvy career move they teach you at EHL?”
But Lucas wasn’t playing along.
“You know,” he said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Something smells rotten in here. You’d have thought disinfectant this strong would wipe out all the vermin.” Sniffing pointedly, he looked Miguel right in the eye. “But I guess not. Will you excuse me? I’m afraid I have to go outside and vomit.”
The poisonous smile melted from Miguel’s face.
“Sticks and stones, Ruiz!” he shouted, waddling after Lucas’s retreating back like a venomous toad. “Say what you like about me, but at least I have a hotel to run. You were so full of it when you left, swanning off to Lausanne. Remember your Luxe?” he jeered. “You were going to blow the hotel world wide open. Show us all how it was done. Ha!”
With an effort, Lucas kept walking. What on earth had possessed him to come back to this shit hole?
“But of course, you’ve come crawling back. Just like I said you would.” Miguel called after him, struggling up from the sofa to follow Lucas out. “Staying with that junkie slut mother of yours, are you? No wonder you got tangled up with Tina Palmer.” He laughed, a horrible, wet, gurgling sound, like someone drowning in phlegm. “They say boys are always attracted to girls that remind them of their mamas.”
Lucas had reached the bottom of the steps now and was standing in the Plaza. Only one desultory pizza place was still open, its few patrons glued to the big screen above the bar, which was showing a welterweight boxing match. Miguel was a couple of steps above Lucas but was short enough to still be at his eye level. Which meant that when Lucas turned around and launched his first punch, a wild swing directed straight at his opponent’s nose, Miguel had plenty of time to see it coming. Luckily for him, after so much booze, Lucas’s reflexes were not what they otherwise might have been.
Ducking to avoid the blow, Miguel swiftly hit back, landing one of his own right hooks in the pit of Lucas’s stomach—this was no time for gentlemen’s rules of combat—winding him just long enough to land a second blow across the top of his jaw. Jolted, Lucas staggered backward. Having grown up taking beatings from a powerhouse like Jose, Miguel’s feeble efforts were little more than bee stings. But, like bee stings, they were irritating. And the more irritated Lucas got, the less he seemed able to make his tired, drunken body do what he asked it to.
The patrons in the pizzeria had turned their attention from the dull televised fight to the much more exciting live action. But it was a bit like watching a small child baiting a bear: Lucas had all the strength but apparently no idea what to do with it.
Letting out a great, bloodcurdling roar of frustration and rage, he ran headfirst at the steps like a charging bull. For a split second, Miguel panicked—jammed between solid stone stairs and two hundred pounds of lean, angry muscle, there was nowhere to go. But to his great relief, Lucas lost his footing just at the crucial moment. With a collective, audible gasp, the pizzeria diners watched as his head slammed down onto the bottom step with a sickening crunch.
“Not so high and mighty now, are we?” snarled Miguel, swinging his fat leg back and launching a kick at Lucas’s head as if it were a football.
A semiconscious Lucas merely groaned. Then he lay back as slowly, pixel by pixel, the world faded to black.
When he next opened his eyes, the first thing he was aware of was the drill that seemed to be soaring through his skull and into the soft tissue of his brain. He’d never known a headache like it.
“Where am I?” he groaned, trying to sit up but instantly regretting it as a wave of nausea slammed into him, and he sank back down onto the bed.
“You’re in the Euro Clinic Eivissa,” said the middle-aged woman who seemed to have materialized out of the ether.
“The German hospital?” said Lucas, weakly.
“Yes. You were lucky. A German lady at the Plaza Pizzeria called an ambulance for you. The rest of them would have left you there to bleed to death or freeze.”
Typical. Just his luck to be rescued by a bloody German.
“What happened?” asked the woman.
Fractured memories of Miguel’s malevolent face came floating back to him, interspersed with images of his pregnant mother, Anton, and, bizarrely, Honor. What was she doing right now? he wondered. This very second?
He still kept a mental picture of her from that first day on the beach, before he knew who she was, when he’d been so unforgivably rude and refused to help her. What was it about Honor that always seemed to bring out the absolute worst in him?
“Lucas?” The woman’s voice was back.
How did she know his name? He must have had his driver’s license on him when they brought him in. He couldn’t imagine any of his credit cards were left.
“Do you know who did this to you? The German lady said it seemed as though you knew the other man. The two of you were talking…”
“No,” Lucas shook his head. “She must be mistaken. I can’t remember anything. Sorry.”
He didn’t want to go after Miguel. What was the point? At the end of the day, everything he’d taunted him with was true. Maybe, in a twisted way, he’d done him a favor. Maybe it had to come to this—waking up alone, broke, and bloodied in a strange hospital—for him to finally see the light.
He’d left Ibiza with a dream—to build his Luxe. But somewhere along the way he’d lost sight of it.
Being made manager of the Herrick so young had gone to his head. He’d gotten sucked into this stupid war with Honor Palmer, jumping whenever Anton said jump, like a performing monkey, desperate to hold on to his status as the US hotel world’s next big thing. And he’d sacrificed his morals and his judgment in the process.
His vanity, he now realized, had hurt a lot of people. Some of them, like Devon Carter, might have deserved to suffer. But others—Karis, Lola, even to a lesser extent the Palmer sisters—they’d all been collateral damage. The person he’d hurt the most though, ultimately, was himself. It was his dreams that had come to nothing. His future that had folded before his eyes, like a house of cards.
He still hated Anton for double-crossing him. And he was still determined to get his revenge. But he would no longer let his hatred consume him. From now on he would focus his energies on something positive.
Tomorrow, Lucas would sit down and rewrite his business plan. Screw finding a job.
The next time he saw Miguel Munoz, he’d be the owner—not the manager; not, as Honor had once goaded him, “a paid employee,” but the owner—of the best boutique hotel in the world.
“Luxe,” he whispered, under his breath. Even saying the word out loud revived him.
“What was that?” The nurse pricked up her ears. “Have you remembered something?”
“Yes,” said Lucas, with a smile. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I have.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HONOR CHECKED HER hair in the elevator mirror and fiddled nervously with her silver-and-topaz cuff links. Officially you wer
en’t supposed to wear white to a wedding other than your own, but she hoped her wide-cut Marni pantsuit would count as oatmeal. Maybe the white rule didn’t apply to pants anyway? Or maybe pants were just a total no-no at a wedding? Oh shit, what if they were? If only she weren’t so damned nervous.
The Burnstein wedding was the first big social event she’d agreed to attend since last year’s scandals. Her first instinct when the stiff white invitation had landed in her in-tray at Palmers was to decline, the same way she’d declined everything else she’d been invited to since her affair and Tina’s tape were made public. But a series of things had made her change her mind. Firstly, the Burnsteins and the Palmers had been friends for generations. Honor had been friends with Arabella, Minty’s elder sister, since elementary school in Boston and had known the bride since the day she was born. Secondly, Billy Malone, her ex-professor, ex-lover, and dear friend had been staying with her at Palmers the week the invitation arrived and had read her the riot act about chickening out.
“Listen, Howard Hughes,” he told her sternly. “This whole recluse shtick has gotta stop. If you’re not careful you’ll wind up sleeping in an oxygen chamber and telling people that your cats are like your children. Go to the damn wedding, OK?”
But the deciding factor was when yet another old friend from Boston had called to assure her that Devon and Karis Carter, who also knew the Burnsteins, would be in Asia that weekend and would categorically not be going.
Even so, she thought, wondering if the flash of aquamarine Manolo heel visible beneath the hem of her flared pants was too much, today was gonna be an ordeal. All the questions, the curiosity veiled as sympathy, the stares…she was dreading it.
Since the very public end of her love affair with Devon, Honor’s self-confidence had been at an all-time low. She could understand him wanting to protect his family. After all, she’d devoted all her energies to trying to protect Palmers from the fallout (for all the good it did her). Even she could see that saving a hotel was hardly on par with saving a marriage.
But nothing had prepared her for the brutal way he had simply exorcised her from his life, overnight. Once the worst of the storm had died down, she’d waited for him to make contact. She wasn’t expecting hearts and flowers. A simple “how are you coping?” would have sufficed. “Sorry” would have been even better. But what she got was deafening silence.
Because of all the furor about Tina, the story of their affair wasn’t allowed to die a natural death in the media. Every time Tina did another interview (which was every other week—the girl knew how to milk a story), Honor’s and Devon’s names would get dragged up again. Honor felt helpless. Her life, her private heartbreak, was being served up as the glacé cherry on the top of Tina’s self-made soap-opera sundae, for people to pick over at their leisure.
To make matters worse, article after article started appearing painting Honor as the scarlet woman, the manipulative home wrecker. Anyone would have thought she’d drugged Devon, clubbed him over the head, and dragged him into bed to rape him.
Not once did he defend her or lift a finger to contradict this impression in the press. Not once did he call. When the chips were down, he’d abandoned her and their relationship without a backward glance. And Honor didn’t see him for dust.
Now, six months later, she was over the heartbreak. Mostly. But she was still left with the nagging doubt that comes from having trusted, deeply, and been so terribly let down. She’d always considered herself to be a good judge of character. But clearly she’d been kidding herself. When it mattered the most, none of her so-called instincts had been worth a dime.
Which was a shame, because right now she needed those instincts more than ever. Things at Palmers were going from bad to worse, and she had no idea how to turn the tide. When the Herrick had first opened, she’d gambled on survival by differentiation and played the old-money conservative card for all it was worth. Up until the scandals broke, it had worked. But now her strategy had turned around to bite her. Palmers’ guests were the last people on earth to be attracted by notoriety. These were the sort of people who packed their kids off to rehab after one puff of a joint. As for sexual liberalism, most of them viewed even marital relations with distaste, never mind four-in-a-bed lesbian orgies and S and M shows caught on film. With her core client base leaving in droves, Honor had no choice but to change her tactics and go after the younger, hipper crowd more typically drawn to the Herrick. But to those people, Palmers was the last word in stuffy. It was a classic lose-lose situation.
The elevator came to a stop with a worryingly sudden jolt. But after a few nerve-racking seconds the doors glided open and Honor stepped out into the hallway.
On the sixty-fifth floor of Number Thirty Rockefeller Plaza, the Rainbow Room restaurant with its incredible views, sky-high ceilings, and revolving dance floor was the epitome of classic New York chic. It was unashamedly old-fashioned—more Rat Pack than Sex and the City—but then Honor would happily take Sinatra over Carrie Bradshaw any day. Clearly the Burnsteins felt the same way.
On a good day you could see every square inch of Manhattan from up here. But today the March clouds hung low and heavy over the city, and what would have been the view was smothered in mist.
Honor sighed. What a shame.
“I’d offer you a glass of champagne, ma’am.” An elderly waiter in white tie appeared at her side. “But I’m afraid the service is about to start. Perhaps you’d like to slip in quietly at the back?”
He was a kind man, with that part-of-the-furniture air about him common to staff in grand old restaurants. Honor suspected he’d worked here his whole life.
“Oh, no! I thought I was early,” she said. Glancing at her watch, she realized belatedly that it had stopped. Damned antiques. “I can’t believe I’m late for a wedding! Maybe I should just wait it out. I’d hate to cause a scene.”
“Wait it out? You mean, miss the ceremony?” The old man looked horrified. “Nonsense, my dear, we can’t have that. Come with me. I’ll slip you in there without a fuss.”
Inside the anteroom-cum-makeshift-chapel, Lola was suffering from a serious attack of the giggles.
“Kick me!” she hissed at Sian, her mouth twitching at the corners. “Pinch me. Do something. I’m gonna lose it in a minute, I swear.” But Sian wasn’t faring much better herself. She was too busy biting back her own mirth to help Lola. The service was so unutterably corny, it could have been made by Orville Redenbacher. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected from a high-society New York wedding. But it definitely wasn’t this.
First, the bride had arrived in a dress so over-the-top wide it couldn’t fit through the specially built rose archway. After much red-faced pushing and tugging, she was forced to reverse while the arch was dismantled, with the organist gallantly playing “Here Comes the Bride” throughout the entire five-minute charade.
“Whoever designed that dress should be shot,” Lola whispered in Sian’s ear, as poor Minty, flushed as red as the roses in her bouquet, finally made it to the altar. “She looks like a poodle that swallowed a hand grenade.”
That comment marked the start of the girls’ giggling fit. But it was the vows that really finished them off. Both bride and groom had written their own.
“I love you like the stars love the moon,” intoned Stavros, the groom, who at least had the decency to look embarrassed as he said it. Minty, by contrast, gushed so enthusiastically through her own efforts she had the entire chapel wincing: “I am you. You are me. We are one,” she bleated.
“She sounds like a frikkin’ perfume commercial,” giggled Sian.
“Smells like one too,” said Lola. “The poor rabbi must be about to pass out. Death by Eternity asphyxiation. I bet that’s a medical first.”
Quite apart from the hilarity value, Lola was glad she’d decided to come, and even gladder that she was here with Sian and not Igor the Ego. Nick had bailed at the last minute, an added bonus—apparently the world of global e-commerce would
grind to a shuddering halt if he took one weekend off—but her parents had braved the gossips and made it. Sitting two rows ahead of her and Sian, Lola could see that they were actually holding hands, which made her feel strangely but deeply happy. Having said that, her dad looked anxious. He’d lost weight, and hair. The last six months had clearly taken their toll on him, not that he didn’t deserve it. But her mom seemed much, much better than she had the last time Lola was home. She was no longer skeletal, but attractively slender, and her cheeks had finally regained some of their former color and glow. It was good to see. “Hey.” Sian leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Check it out. Two o’clock. Superman can’t keep his eyes off you.”
Lola glanced across the aisle to her right. A tall guy, she guessed in his early twenties, with a shock of jet-black hair and glasses that were indeed fully Christopher Reeve, flashed her a fifty-megawatt smile, which she returned.
“He’s cute,” said Sian, nudging her in the ribs.
“He is, isn’t he?” said Lola, grinning from ear to ear. This wedding kept getting better and better. “Sold to the girl who hasn’t got laid in a week.”
“A week?” said Sian, more loudly than she’d intended to, so she had to try to turn it into a cough when people turned around and glared at her. “Jesus. I haven’t had it since last summer. Oh my God. Speaking of last summer…”
“What?” said Lola.
“All right, now don’t freak out.” Sian laid a restraining hand on her arm in anticipation. “But Honor just walked in.”
“No!” Lola went white, and her lips pursed in fury. “She wouldn’t dare!”
For the second time, scores of people spun around to look as Lola raised her voice in indignation. One of them was Devon, who began by scowling at his daughter, but whose frown rapidly morphed into a look of purest panic as he caught sight of Honor, hovering at the back of the room like a ghost.
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