It was ironic that, even with her money problems, Honor was storming ahead at Palmers while he (who thanks to his new investor, the oil heir Winston Davies, had money coming out of his ears) was stuck not passing Go at Luxe America. Perhaps he’d been naive. But Connor had complained so vociferously about the business before Vegas it hadn’t occurred to Lucas that he would object to being bought out. And indeed, he’d already accepted the more-than-generous offer for his shares both verbally and by e-mail by the time Anton had gotten involved in February, stirring the pot as only he could do.
Everybody knew what had happened. But unfortunately, none of them could prove it. Tisch had gotten in touch with Connor and started throwing money around like a newly signed footballer in a brothel, promising him the earth and all its riches if he refused to sign the contract and stayed on at Luxe as a “spoiler” partner, preventing further expansion, including Luxe America. Lucas and Winston countered, citing their verbal agreement and the e-mails, not to mention the fact that Connor had already taken receipt of the first installment of Winston’s funds by the time of his sudden change of heart. In the end, it was highly likely that the courts would rule against Connor, but that wasn’t the point. With Anton’s legion of international lawyers behind him, Connor was quite capable of dragging out the case for months or even years, flitting from one jurisdiction to the next each time a decision went against him, and lodging appeals every time Lucas’s attorney opened his mouth.
So far, Winston had been very patient. He had the sort of wealth that made it easy to shrug off a million-dollar-plus lawsuit. Besides, he believed in Lucas and the Luxe brand and didn’t take kindly to people trying to bully him out of his business decisions. But as grateful as Lucas was for his support, it still left him nowhere in terms of getting his new hotel off the ground. And in the meantime, not only had the Herrick been voted the number one luxury hotel, with Petra planning the mother of all victory parties to celebrate this summer, but now Honor looked set to revive the Palmers franchise for a second time.
Time, in this instance, was not only money. Time was everything, and Lucas was fast running out of it. “Monsieur Ruiz?” The sour-faced woman clerk, a Gallic Barbara Walters who reeked of Jolie Madame and Elnett, emerged through the wooden double doors and nodded curtly in his direction. “Suivez moi, s’il vous plait.”
“At last,” said Lucas, handing the magazine back to his dough-bottomed neighbor, who blushed and smiled as she took it. Getting wearily to his feet, he followed the clerk into the almost-empty courtroom with a heavy heart. Despite all the waiting, he knew today’s hearing would be just like all the others: a monumental waste of fucking time.
“Yes, yes, I can see a lot of work goes into them,” said Ben, trying to keep his temper.
“It’s more than just work, duckie,” Maxwell, the flamingly gay wedding coordinator pouted furiously. “It’s artistic genius. Ice sculptures of this sort of scale and complexity are…well,” he dabbed his brow with a monogrammed linen handkerchief, “they’re the stuff dreams are made of.”
“Not my dreams,” said Ben bluntly. “Twenty grand and by the end of the night it’s a dirty fucking puddle. Come on, B, don’t you think this is just a bit extravagant?”
Bianca bit her lip and fought back tears. It wasn’t that she cared about the ice sculpture so much, although she did think that the scale model of Notre Dame, complete with miniature frozen gargoyles, was exquisite. But would it really have killed Ben to show just a smidgen of enthusiasm for any of her and Maxwell’s proposals?
The three of them were in Wedding World’s offices, which took up the entire top floor of a trendy converted warehouse in Clerkenwell. The place was a cross between a New York loft and a giant padded cell. Every surface was soft, even the walls, which were covered in some sort of foam-filled white fabric that looked like stuck-on clouds, and the rounded, rubbery desks scattered around the room like so many colorful children’s toys. Ben and Bianca were at one end, ensconced in a white sofa so ridiculously soft it kept threatening to swallow them whole, opposite Maxwell in a pink sixties bubble chair that had an annoying habit of swiveling and creaking whenever he moved. Between them was a white rubber coffee table, on which were spread out various books and magazines, all depicting the gruesomely vulgar weddings of Maxwell’s former clients.
Ben was there on sufferance. He’d said from the beginning that he didn’t want a big, flashy wedding, just a traditional ceremony in a pretty country church somewhere with a meal and dancing afterward. But Bianca had had her heart set on a fairy tale from the beginning and, encouraged by his mother and sisters, had pressed ahead regardless, concocting ever more extravagant and, to Ben’s mind, ridiculous plans with bloody Nathan Lane over there. He’d already been steamrollered into having the wedding at some damn stupid castle in Ireland and signed off on jugglers and fire-eaters and God knows what else. Next they’d be flying in Siegfried and Roy or riding up the aisle on fucking unicorns.
“The sculpture was only an idea,” said Bianca coldly. “If you don’t like it, perhaps you’d like to suggest another centerpiece? You haven’t exactly been awash with contributions so far.”
She knew she sounded snappish and nagging, and she hated herself for it, but her nerves were frayed to ribbons. Things had been so horribly strained between them lately, ever since Ben got involved with Sian and that stupid story. Not a naturally mean person, Bianca made valiant efforts not to hate Sian or to blame her for Ben’s distancing and patent lack of interest in the wedding. But it was hard. This morning he’d been going on about her again, even trying to wriggle out of their appointment with Maxwell to go and meet her at the airport.
“She’s coming back from Azerbaijan this afternoon,” he said plaintively. “She says she really needs to talk to me.”
“Well, can she join the fucking line?” Bianca snapped. “I need to talk to you, Ben. About our wedding. It’s less than two months away now, you know.”
“How could I not know?” he snapped back. “You remind me often enough.”
“And why do I have to remind you?” she yelled hysterically. “Because you’re always holed up with bloody Sian in your little club of two, that’s why! Obsessing over Anton Tisch. Anyone would have thought it was her you were planning to spend the rest of your life with, not me.”
“Well, it isn’t,” said Ben guiltily. “It’s you.” He knew he’d been neglecting Bianca, but it was hard when all she wanted to talk about was a wedding he was increasingly coming to dread.
“Look, all right,” he said now, flicking through one of Maxwell’s magazines with about as much enthusiasm as a mother superior with a copy of Playboy. “What about something like that? That’d make a good centerpiece, wouldn’t it?” Maxwell wrinkled his nose in a “did I just tread in dog shit?” way and looked at Ben pityingly. “A cake?” he said.
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Ben.
“It’s hardly very original,” said Bianca, gently.
“So? Do we have to be original about everything? Does it always have to be skydiving angels leaping off chandeliers?”
“Oh, no, of course not,” said Maxwell snidely. “Tell you what, why don’t we just have a nice bunch of flowers on the top table and be done with it? Perhaps you could pick them up from the Shell garage on your way to the service, Ben?”
“I’ve had enough of this,” said Ben, getting angrily to his feet. He’d given Bianca a blank check for this wedding and resented the implication that he was being a cheapskate. Why couldn’t people see that the reason he didn’t want a big to-do was that it a) was tacky as shit and b) was turning the whole thing into a performance? Couldn’t Bianca tell he was nervous enough already?
“Where are you going?” she asked, getting up after him. She looked anguished, and he felt awful leaving her, but the whole thing was doing his head in.
“Back to work,” he said, picking up his briefcase by the door. “Look, I’m sorry, B, but I’m no good at this stuff. You and
Maxwell pick what you want. I’ll pay for it.”
I don’t want your money, thought Bianca bitterly. I want your interest. I want your heart.
As if reading her mind, Maxwell plonked his ample backside down in Ben’s vacated seat and wrapped a comforting arm around her.
“There, there, duckie,” he said. “He’ll come around. The grooms are all like this in the last few weeks. It’s only nerves.”
“Really?” Her eyes welled up with tears, and her beautiful, full lower lip began to tremble.
“Definitely,” said Maxwell, who couldn’t understand why such a showstoppingly gorgeous girl was throwing herself away on a philistine like Ben Slater anyway. “Trust Uncle Maxwell. I’ve seen it all before.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TRULY, MR. TISCH, we can’t thank you enough.”
The painfully earnest charity worker pumped Anton’s hand with her clammy palm and stared at him with her bulging bug-eyes. She must have some sort of thyroid problem. The woman looked like a blowfish with earrings.
“The difference you’ve made to these children is incalculable. Incalculable!”
“Not at all,” said Anton magnanimously, retrieving his hand and wiping it with distaste on his starched white handkerchief. Honestly, wasn’t it enough to give money to these people, without having them paw at you afterward with their sweaty hands, like vermin?
He was in Vauxhall, an area of London he would typically go out of his way to avoid. But tonight was the grand opening of an arts center for troubled inner-city teens, a spin-off from the Children of Hope charity of which he was patron.
Personally, he found the whole place deeply depressing. All the garish primary colors and walls covered with the dreadful, talentless paintings that the kids had produced. To call it art was an affront to common sense and probably a blatant breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. But then what could you expect from a bunch of dead-eyed crackheads brought up on welfare? The only children with any “hope” were the girls pretty enough to make a living off their nubile young bodies, a few of whom he’d been happy to help out personally. As for the rest, they had no future. The mindless optimism of charity workers like the blowfish woman never ceased to amaze him. Did she honestly believe a few afternoons a week throwing paint around was going to change the lives of these pond scum?
Noticing that a London Tonight TV crew was hovering just behind her, Anton gave her a second, ingratiating smile. “I’m thrilled to be able to help in my own small way,” he said. “What the children have achieved here is truly magical. You must be very proud.”
“Oh, I am, I am.” She beamed. “God bless you.”
He was pleasantly surprised by the good press turnout. Most journalists expected more from a charity do than carrots and a few plates of jelly sandwiches, but all the major papers and news channels were here. He supposed he had Saskia to thank for that.
Saskia Kennilworth, the PR girl he’d hired last year to oversee his charity work and personal branding, was already proving herself to be quite an asset. Her privileged bubbly blonde persona hid a steely business acumen that was rare in public relations, an industry largely staffed by the inbred daughters of British aristocrats whose combined IQ would be unlikely to impress a self-respecting earthworm.
But Saskia was a pearl among swine. She was the one who’d steered him toward teen charities and away from the more elitist opera and polo events he used to be associated with. It had turned out to be an inspired move. He’d read more positive articles about his philanthropy in the last six months than ever before. And his star definitely appeared to be rising in those all-important establishment circles.
Saskia was attractive too, albeit in a completely opposite way from Petra. She had tits the size of balloons, wore far too much makeup, and had a raspy, filthy smoker’s laugh that was as infectious as it was sexy. She’d come on to him like a train in their initial meeting, but he hadn’t slept with her yet, as much from a lack of opportunity as anything else. He’d been traveling an awful lot lately. But Saskia was definitely on his to-do list. He needed to break the unhealthy cycle of monogamy he’d gotten into with Petra, and Ms. Kennilworth should provide the perfect antidote to the Slavic hauteur he’d grown to find so addictive.
“…don’t you think, Mr. Tisch?”
Damn it. The blowfish was speaking to him again, and he’d been miles away. Now the cameras were trained on him hopefully, waiting for a response.
“Absolutely,” he said, smiling broadly.
Saskia was big on smiles. They made him more approachable, apparently.
It was a further twenty minutes before he was finally able to extricate himself from the glad-handers and escape to the safety of his waiting Daimler.
“Thank God,” he sighed, as the driver glided across Vauxhall Bridge back toward civilization. The MI building loomed above them, illuminated an ethereal green at night, like a comic-book Gotham City. Below them, the Thames oozed as shiny black and sinister as an oil slick. Anton flipped open his laptop in the backseat and went straight to his e-mails.
The top four were all from Petra. Two were about the arrangements for next month’s “number one” party at the Herrick. As always, she’d done a stellar job organizing things and had already put together a guest list and entertainment program to rival the Oscars. Scrolling down the attached list of confirmed attendees, Anton felt a warm rush of contentment: Hollywood royalty, rock royalty, fashion royalty. There wasn’t a C-lister among them. Only real royalty had failed to succumb to Petra’s charms—they’d had a no from Lady Helen Taylor. Uptight bitch. But looking at the last page, he brightened considerably and let out a half-stifled squeal of delight: the Duchess of York was listed as a maybe, along with both her daughters. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Lady Helen!
He wondered how Petra would react if he brought Saskia in to help corral the press coverage. Not well, he imagined, chuckling quietly. Petra responded to other attractive women the way that the majority of her sex responded to spiders. You could visibly see her flesh crawl in their presence. A brassy, British ball-breaker like Saskia would be Petra’s equivalent of a fat, hairy tarantula. Throwing the two of them together was bound to result in some serious fireworks.
But he’d save that particular bombshell for later. For now, he kept his responses to Petra’s messages as neutral and businesslike as usual.
By the time he clicked open her third e-mail, with its multiple JPEG attachments, he was almost home. But the title “Palmers Pics” piqued his interest, and he instructed his driver to make a detour through Shepherds Market and around Berkeley Square so he could finish downloading it in the car.
“Thought you might like to see these,” Petra had written. “From this month’s Hello!”
Opening the first image, Anton gave a little snort of surprise, bordering on admiration. Honor had made startlingly rapid progress.
The building wasn’t finished, but it couldn’t be more than a couple of months from completion, and what he saw here was impressive. The facade was strongly reminiscent of the old hotel but fell short of the sentimental replica he’d been expecting. It was grander, for one thing—the portico was taller by a good three feet, he reckoned, and it was rendered in stone rather than the cutesy Huck Finn whitewashed wood of its predecessor. The landscaping was also done on an altogether bigger scale, although to his mind it was still drearily conservative: rose gardens, topiary, lavender-lined gravel paths. No vision. No daring. It reminded him of a slightly grander version of Southampton’s 1708 House.
“Did you know she was this far down the line?” he instant-messaged Petra, before moving on to the interior shots: simple, classic bedrooms with heavy mahogany four-posters and lots of white linen and ceiling fans; bathrooms with freestanding copper tubs and big enough proportions to accommodate the comfy antique armchairs and paintings that gave them the feel of living rooms.
Petra IM’d him back.
“I’ve been trying to tell you for months.
You didn’t want to know.”
Anton scowled. He didn’t appreciate being upbraided by his staff, or his lovers. He’d always felt that Petra overestimated Honor’s significance as a threat, her judgment clouded by her own personal hostility. But perhaps he should have heeded her warnings after all?
Clicking open more of the pictures, he saw that Honor had given more than a nod to her family’s colonial heritage. There was bound to be a pretentious, walnut-lined library in there somewhere, crammed with first editions of Hemingway. And she’d eschewed all the modern touches normally considered to be de rigueur in a top-flight hotel these days. There wasn’t a plasma screen in sight, and the doors all had traditional locks and keys. Still, for a woman who most of the industry had written off as a crackpot, she’d done well. He wondered how on earth she’d raised the money.
“Interesting, but not important,” he wrote back to Petra. “She can’t touch us now.”
Ninety-five percent of him believed this—that with the Herrick so firmly established, and now at world number one, Palmers stood no chance of regaining its old supremacy. But the five percent of doubt irritated him almost as much as the pictures of Honor looking so effortlessly beautiful in that green dress, a perfect match for her defiant eyes, as she lounged on the hard stone bench.
He cheered up when he read the next e-mail, a gloating note from Connor Armstrong about yesterday’s hearing in Paris. Lucas, apparently, had first shot himself in the foot by turning up to court without a tie—Madame Justice Dubois, the lesbian battle-ax judge, was not remotely impressed—and then damned himself further by losing his temper when she’d quizzed him about employing illegal immigrants in the Luxe kitchen.
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