Do Not Disturb (50 page)

But the fund’s performance wasn’t the only reason Anton had to celebrate. The share price of his Tischen Hotel Group had gone up sixteen points on the news that the Herrick had been nominated for the coveted number one spot in the Relais Chateaux rankings. And he had the incomparable Ms. Kamalski to thank for that.

When Petra had first contacted him after he’d fired Lucas, suggesting herself for the Herrick managership, he’d thrown her
CV in the trash along with all the others. But a few days later she had the good sense to e-mail a second version—this time with a photograph—and at once his interest was piqued. Something about her stark cheekbones and cold, predatory eyes spoke to him. She looked simultaneously sexual and frigid; controlled, but with the promise of raging passions bubbling beneath the skin. His original intention was to fly her to Geneva, string her along until he got her into bed, then get rid of her. But from the moment he saw her in the flesh and their eyes locked, everything changed. He recognized a kindred spirit.

For one thing, she hadn’t needed the slightest encouragement to sleep with him. She agreed immediately to his request that they have the interview at his home, then showed up for it wearing nothing but a trench coat and patent black stilettos. Thinking about that afternoon now, as his limo surged smoothly out of the airport onto the M, he felt his cock start to harden. After almost three years, he still wanted her constantly.

From that very first time, sex with Petra had been a revelation. Insatiable, athletic, submissive, yet strong, she was like the missing piece of the jigsaw that Anton had been searching for his whole life. In the past he’d had to pay girls to do the depraved things he wanted. With Petra, he was begged for more. He only had to look at her wildly dilating pupils, or her nipples, hard as frozen berries, arched longingly toward him, to realize her excitement was every bit as real and intense as his own.

Not only was she a world-class fuck, she was an astonishingly gifted hotelier. Lucas had gotten the Herrick off to a flying start, but Petra took those early seeds of success and multiplied them a hundredfold. She’d broadened their guest list, from the New York–centric music-business types that Lucas had exclusively gone for to the new superrich from across the globe, and she was also a genius at schmoozing stuffy industry types like the buffoons at Relais Chateaux. The locals might not like her, but who cared? The time when Anton had needed their support
was long since past. When Petra had confided to him one night in bed that her main motivation in applying for the job had been to put one over on Lucas—the two of them were lifelong enemies, apparently—Anton’s admiration for her became complete. He admired people who pursued their vendettas to the end, who didn’t get distracted or allow the passage of time to smother their righteous indignation. Petra was a woman after his own heart.

“Your tea, sir.”

Gavin, the butler Anton always brought with him when traveling, handed him a bone china cup brimming with piping hot Earl Grey. Anton had had his entire fleet of cars fitted with tea-making facilities, along with the standard plasma screens and state-of-the art phone systems. He took the cup wordlessly and settled down to peruse the last week’s papers. See what he’d missed while he’d been stuck at St. Hubert’s.

Two minutes later, he let out a roar so loud it sent his driver skidding all over the road and promptly spilled scalding tea down his Turnbull & Asser silk shirt.

“
Sheisse!
” he roared, pulling the wet cloth away from his skin, but not before a spreading red burn had formed across his chest and stomach like a birthmark. “The little shit.”

Lucas, it appeared, had taken advantage of his absence to give an interview to the
London Times
. And it wasn’t pretty.

The Tischens have become a victim of their own success
, he was quoted as saying, in response to a question about whether he saw himself as being in competition with Anton.
When a brand explodes to that degree, it soon becomes corporate and faceless, like every other global five-star chain. Mr. Tisch doesn’t like the word “chain,” but that’s what his hotels have become. And I should know. I ran one of them.

White-lipped with rage, Anton read on.

Luxe offers something very different. Personal. Unique. So in that sense, no, I don’t see us as competing, not directly anyway.
Once we open in the Hamptons, I guess some people might choose to see it that way. But that’s not my view.

“Get Petra on the phone,” Anton barked at Gavin.

“She won’t be up, sir,” he stammered timidly, shrinking back in his seat like a mouse before a rattlesnake. “It’s not even six on the East Coast yet.”

“Don’t tell me what fucking time it is, you stupid fuck,” bellowed Anton. “Just get her on the line.” Already his buoyant mood of a few minutes ago had evaporated completely. Fuck Lucas. Who the hell did he think he was dealing with?

When Anton killed off an enemy, he expected them to stay dead, and he saw Lucas’s revival of fortunes as a personal affront. He’d been too busy with the fund in recent months to take any further concrete action against him. But he saw now that that had been a mistake. He’d given Lucas an inch and he’d taken a mile, threatening to open a new Luxe in the Hamptons, of all the outrageous…

“About time.” Petra’s sleepy voice ricocheted around the limo in surround sound. “Where the hell have you been all week?”

“Never mind that,” snapped Anton. He wasn’t about to admit his surgical sabbatical to anyone, least of all the woman he was sleeping with. “I just read Lucas’s interview. He claims he’s setting up shop in East Hampton. Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

“How was I supposed to tell you?” Petra snapped back. “By carrier pigeon? I’ve left you about a hundred messages; you never returned a single one. I haven’t even been able to make a statement to the press. Where
were
you?”

“Don’t challenge me,” said Anton.

He sounded angry, but Petra could sense the lust simmering underneath. Their role-play was always the same: she was the petulant schoolgirl, he the disciplinarian teacher. But Anton never seemed to tire of it.

“Speak to me like that again and I’ll spank you,” he said.

Gavin the butler blushed scarlet and stared firmly out the window.

“Apologize.”

“Sorry,” purred Petra meekly.

In the back of the car, Anton’s hard-on was now clearly visible through the twill of his suit pants. How he wished Petra were here in the quivering, pliant flesh, and not on the other end of a phone line. But she wasn’t. And they had business to discuss.

“So,” he said. “Our friend Mr. Ruiz has crawled out from under his stone while I’ve been gone, has he?”

“It’s pathetic,” said Petra, her voice dripping with vitriol. “He opens two paltry hotels in Europe—Luxe Paris is so small it’s practically a guesthouse—and already he thinks he’s Rande Gerber. He’s a joke.”

Anton didn’t find the prospect of a Hamptons Luxe remotely amusing. But neither was he intimidated. Being forced to crush Lucas a second time was an unwanted irritation—like finding a cockroach you thought you’d killed still wriggling on the bottom of your shoe. But it was hardly a serious concern.

“Lucas is all talk,” said Petra. “He always has been. He clearly hasn’t found a site for this mythical new Luxe yet, or he’d have been boasting about that too.”

“And he’s not going to find one,” growled Anton menacingly.

“To be honest,” said Petra, “That stuck-up bitch Honor Palmer worries me far more than Lucas does.”

Honor’s dislike of Petra was nothing compared to the boiling hatred that Petra harbored for her local rival. Not since Lucas had tried to eclipse her in college had she felt so threatened and, at the same time, so irrationally resentful of another human being. She despised everything about Honor, from her deep, growling voice with its faint Bostonian twang, to her tiny, doll-like body, to the easy way with which she seemed to wrap all the local snobs around her little finger. People treated her like aristocracy, and Petra like some low-life immigrant, when in reality Petra’s family
was far older, grander, and richer than the Palmers. Honor was also routinely described in the press as “cute” and even “beautiful,” which incensed Petra, who thought her own physical charms outshone Honor’s like the sun outshone a candle.

“Honor?” Anton sounded amazed. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s no threat to us. I’ve seen Holiday Inns in Des Moines with better occupancy rates than Palmers.”

“Hmm,” said Petra skeptically. “Maybe.”

Now that Palmers was clearly on its way out, Anton was perfectly content to watch the old hotel die a slow, lingering death. Cancer, as long as it was terminal, was as good a way to finish off a rival as the firing squad. But Petra remained much more antsy. As long as Palmers was standing and open for business, and as long as that poisonous dwarf Honor Palmer hung around like a bad smell, playing the town sweetheart, she would never feel completely secure, no matter how many Relais Chateaux accolades they won.

“You mustn’t fret so much, darling,” said Anton, reading her mind. “The locals can huff and puff for Honor as much as they like. They won’t blow our house down. And nor will Lucas. We’ll see to that.” The limo eased to a halt outside his Mayfair mansion, and Anton hung up and hurried inside, leaving Gavin and the driver to manage his cases.

His week away had been rejuvenating. But now there was work to be done. This time around, he’d make damn sure he finished off Lucas Ruiz for good.

A
FEW MILES
north of Mayfair, in the grounds of another mansion in St. John’s Wood, Sian Doyle crouched uncomfortably in the bushes, trying to calculate exactly how many minutes she had left before her bladder gave out and she was forced to pee right here in the rhododendrons.

She wouldn’t have minded so much if it weren’t for Keith, the lecherous photographer crouched beside her. Watching her take her pants down would be the closest thing he’d come to a sexual experience (with something that didn’t take batteries or need blowing up with a foot pump) since high school.

There were days when Sian loved working at the
News of the World
. Like this Monday, after one of her pieces ran, and Simon Davis, the features editor, told her it was “only slightly crap”—praise indeed from a man known affectionately to the rest of the desk as Satan. His wife had once berated a man for calling Simon a cunt on the grounds that it was an insult to women’s genitalia.

But Monday’s praise already felt like a distant memory. Today was Thursday, and Sian was on the worst of all possible assignments—a stakeout. After the crappy pay (she was pretty sure trash collectors made more than she did per week) and even crappier hours (whoever scheduled her shifts had clearly been raised in a cave, by bats), stakeouts were the worst part of her job.

This was the third day running she’d spent with Keith, knee-deep in foliage at the house of Sir Jago Wells, a Tory grandee that the paper suspected of having an affair with a stewardess. In thirty-six hours of mind-numbing surveillance they’d only seen the man twice, for a total of about sixteen seconds. Both times he’d been alone, hurrying to and from his Jaguar with a sheaf of papers under his arm. Given that Sir Jago must weigh about the same as a smallish hippo but with a markedly less attractive face, the absence of a girlfriend failed to surprise Sian as much as it did her editor.

“It’s incredible he convinced one woman to do him, never mind two,” she’d told a seriously unimpressed Simon an hour ago. “He makes Jabba the Hutt look like George Clooney.”

But Satan wasn’t in the mood for jokes. If she and Keith didn’t have the goods on his desk by the end of their shift tomorrow, they could both “sling their ’ook,” as he so poetically put it.

Sian was under no illusions. He meant it. No pictures, no tearful interview with the wife, no job.

“At this rate you’re gonna ’ave to sleep wiv ’im yourself, love,” said Keith, licking his lips.

Sian looked at him witheringly.

“What?” He tried to look innocent. “It’d make a lovely picture.”

He had so many pimples on his face they outnumbered the patches of clear skin, and his round, owlish glasses were so grimy it was a wonder he could see anything at all. Sian’s mind wandered bitterly to Paddy, her boyfriend, who was on assignment in Dubai for the
Telegraph
. He was probably yukking it up with some billionaire sheikh and his harem right now, having a fabulous time. Paddy was an Irish racing journalist whose assignments always seemed to involve being sent to hot countries and/or luxury hospitality tents at race courses, swilling Guinness and eating strawberries until his stomach exploded, while Sian’s were all about bushes, perverts, and outdoor urinating. It wasn’t fair.

“Why don’t you quit the Screws and get yourself a proper job?” he’d asked her in bed the other morning, after another of her hour-long moan-a-thons. “Show most editors a pretty face and a bit of leg and you’re in like Flynn. My boss’d snap you up in a heartbeat. I can see the interview now.” He fluttered his eyelashes coquettishly and put on his best Renée Zellweger voice: “You had me at hello.”