He buttoned his jacket with a smug smile. “Didn’t they teach you anything at Wharton? All’s fair in love and war, Fifi.”
“Stop calling me that!”
Weston picked imaginary lint off the arm of his overpriced suit. “Would you like me to fill you in on what you missed?”
“Of course I would, asshole. Because it’s your fault I wasn’t here.”
“No problem.” He folded his hands and looked at his nails. “Over dinner.”
“I am not having dinner with you.”
“No?”
“No!”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself. I was trying to be a gentleman. But if you prefer to go straight to my suite, I’m good with that, too.”
I cackled. “You’re out of your mind.”
He leaned forward. Because I was blocking his way, I had nowhere to go. And I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of flinching. So I stood my ground while the idiot who still smelled delicious brought his lips to my ear. “I know you remember how good we were together. Best hate fuck I ever had.”
I spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m sure you’ve never had any other kind. Because no one in their right mind would like you.”
He pulled his head back and winked at me. “Hold on to that anger. We’ll make good use of it soon.”
***
By eight o’clock that evening, I really needed a drink. This had been the never-ending day.
“Can I order food here, or do I need to get a table?” I asked the bartender at the hotel restaurant.
“You can order at the bar. Let me get you a menu.”
He disappeared, and I settled onto a stool. Pulling a notepad out of my gigantic purse, I started to scribble down everything my father had said in the last twenty minutes. I used the word said loosely. Because what he’d actually done was scream at me from the minute I’d answered the phone. Not even a hello—he’d just started to rant, yelling question after question. Had I done this yet or done that yet, but never taking so much as a breath so I might actually get a few words in and answer.
My father hated that Grandfather had assigned me to look after The Countess. I’m sure he would have preferred my half-brother, Spencer, do it. Not because Spencer was competent in any way—make enough donations to an Ivy League school and they miraculously let anyone in—but because Spencer was his puppet.
So when my cell phone flashed Scarlett’s name, I put my pen down for a much-needed break.
“Isn’t it, like, one in the morning there?” I asked.
“Sure is, and I’m bloody knackered.”
I smiled. My best friend Scarlett was just so British, and I loved every knickers, knackered, and knob that came out of her mouth.
“You have no idea how much I needed to hear your terrible accent right now.”
“Terrible? I speak the Queen’s English, my dear. You speak Queens English. Like, as in that dreadful borough stuck between Manhattan and Tall Island.”
“It’s Long Island. Not Tall Island.”
“Whatever.”
I laughed. “How are you doing?”
“Well, we hired a new woman at work, and I thought she might be a possible replacement for you as my only friend. But then we went to a movie last weekend, and she wore leggings with the outline of her thong showing through.”
I shook my head with a smile. “Oh boy. Not good.” Scarlett worked in fashion and made Anna Wintour look tolerant of a style faux pas. “Let’s face it. I’m just irreplaceable.”
“You are. So have you grown bored with New York and decided to return home to London yet?”
I chuckled. “It has been a trying twenty-six hours since I departed.”
“How’s the new job?”
“Well, on day one, I was late for a meeting with the hotel’s attorney because the representative of the family that now owns the other part of the hotel sent me on a wild goose chase.”
“And this is the family of the man who fifty years ago was boinking the woman who owned the hotel, at the same time your grandfather was boinking her?”
I laughed. “Yes.” While it was a bit more complicated than that, Scarlett wasn’t wrong. Fifty years ago my grandfather, August Sterling, opened a hotel with his two best friends—Oliver Lockwood and Grace Copeland. The story goes that my grandfather fell in love with Grace, and they became engaged to wed on New Year’s Eve. The day of the wedding, Grace stood at the altar and told my grandfather she couldn’t marry him, confessing she was also in love with Oliver Lockwood. She loved both men, and refused to marry either, because marriage was an act of dedicating your heart to one man, and hers was not available for only one.
The men fought over her for years, but ultimately, neither could steal half of her heart away from the other, and the three eventually went their separate ways. My grandfather and Oliver Lockwood became bitter rivals, spending their lives building hotel empires and trying to best each other, while Grace concentrated her efforts on building one luxury hotel, rather than a chain. All three were enormously successful in their own right. The Sterling and Lockwood families grew into the two biggest hotel owners in the United States. And though Grace only ever owned one hotel, the first that the three of them had started together, The Countess, with its sprawling views of Central Park, grew to become one of the most valuable single hotels in the world. It rivaled the Four Seasons and The Plaza.
Three weeks ago, when Grace died after a long battle with cancer, my family was shocked to find out she’d left forty-nine percent of The Countess to my grandfather and forty-nine percent to Oliver Lockwood. The other two percent went to a charity, one that was currently auctioning off their new ownership to the highest-bidding family—which would in turn give one of us a very important fifty-one percent controlling interest.
Grace Copeland had never married, and I saw her final act as a beautiful Greek tragedy—though, I guess to outsiders it seemed crazy to leave a hotel worth hundreds of millions of dollars to two men you hadn’t spoken to in fifty years.
“Your family is nuts,” Scarlett said. “You know that, right?”
I laughed. “I absolutely do.”
We talked for a little while about her last date and where she was thinking of going for holiday, and then she sighed.
“I actually called to tell you some news. Where are you right now?”
“In a hotel. Or rather in The Countess, the hotel my family now owns part of. Why?”
“Is there alcohol in your room?”
My brows knitted. “I’m sure there is. But I’m not in my room; I’m at the bar downstairs. Why?”
“Because you’re going to need it after I tell you this.”
“Tell me what?”
“It’s about Liam.”
Liam was my ex. A playwright from West London. We’d broken up a month ago. Even though I knew it was for the best, it still caused an ache in my chest to hear his name.
“What about him?”
“I saw him today.”
“Okay…”
“With his tongue down Marielle’s throat.”
“Marielle? Marielle who?”
“Pretty certain we both know only one.”