Do Not Disturb by Tilly Bagshawe Read Free Book Online Page B

here in almost seven years, not since she first started college, and already she was regretting her long absence. Despite everything, the Hamptons still felt like home.
    Not that today was likely to be much of a homecoming. Though she feigned indifference, the spiteful whispers about her “conning” Trey out of Palmers and “stealing” her inheritance had left her deeply wounded and insecure about the reception she’d receive. She was also acutely aware that most of the industry shared her father’s view that she was far too young and inexperienced to turn around the failing hotel. They’d written both her and Palmers off, and beneath all the spiky bravado, Honor worried herself sick that they might be right.
    She’d deliberately decided to show up unexpected a day early so that Whit Hammond, Palmers’ dilettante manager for the past decade, wouldn’t have a chance to get too prepared. However bad things had gotten at the hotel, she needed to see the reality, not the edited, Sunday-best version.
    As always when there was a confrontation looming, she’d been horribly stressed the night before. Twitching with nerves and frustration in her lonely king-size bed, she’d tried to masturbate but was so tightly wound she found she couldn’t come. Thanks to her short hair and deliberately masculine dress sense, most people assumed she was either a lesbian or just not interested in sex. In fact her boyish look, like her punchy, aggressive personality, was only a disguise, armor she’d donned in her teens to protect her from her father’s rejection and never quite learned how to take off. She yearned to be loved and desired, but sex was a game she simply didn’t know how to play. The few lovers she’d had had all tended to be older men, fairly obvious father figures, but they never lasted for long. Her longest relationship, of eight months, had been with one of her professors at Harvard, a kind, bookish divorcée in his early fifties. Drawn by her fierce beauty and intelligence, he had done his best to coax her out of her shell as a lover, constantly assuring her of her beauty and gently offering his love. But Honor’s insecurities were so huge—deep down she loathed the athletic boy’s body she went to such lengths to maintain, and she hadabout as much sexual confidence as a pimply teenager on a first date—that in the end he, too, gave up.
    Sexual frustration added to the tension that snaked its way around her heart now, in the back of the limo, at the prospect of returning to Palmers. She was coming back not just as Trey’s daughter and Tertius’s granddaughter, but as the boss. It was a strange and, at times, terrifying feeling.
    Thankfully, by the time the car swung into the grand graveled forecourt, she’d pulled herself together sufficiently to make a suitably confident entrance. The hotel’s timeless, half-timbered elegance was just as she remembered it. Originally built as a wealthy merchant’s summer home in the late eighteenth century, Palmers had always exuded a sort of genteel restfulness, with its wraparound wooden porches and forests of trailing wisteria clinging to the ancient walls like barnacles. Most of the older homes in East Hampton were made of gray, weathered wood. But Palmers stood resplendently white, a single iridescent flake of snow amid the verdant green of her gardens.
    To Honor, that pristine whiteness had always been a large part of the hotel’s magic. But today she could see that the paint was not only fading but actually peeling away in places. Even worse, nickel-sized pieces of facade had begun breaking off in chunks and had been left lying scattered on the steps and front lawn like giant crumbs from a wedding cake. As for the gardens themselves, Tertius would be spinning in his grave to see how overgrown and neglected they’d become, with dead leaves blowing everywhere and weeds left to multiply unfettered amid his beloved English rose garden.
    The place was a