The Wake-Up Call(102)

“And what insults did you have for Arjun when you failed to seduce him?” Lucas asks politely. “Is he a small, mousey nobody, too?”

Louis’s eyes flick to mine. I smile, as if to say, Yes, of course I told him everything. Yes, we are mutually deciding not to destroy you. No, I am not confident I can prevent him from breaking rank and beating you to a pulp if he so chooses.

Louis swallows. “Look, like I say, I just wanted to give you the heads-up. There’s a bit of competition on the horizon.”

I pull myself up as tall as I can, and only wobble slightly in the process—not bad, three cocktails down.

“Well,” I say, in my sweetest voice. “That won’t be a problem. Lucas and I love a bit of competition.”





Lucas


“The thing about true love, right, is that sometimes you have to really push yourself out of your comfort zone to find it?” Ruby Hedgers tells me, from the top of the frame of a four-poster bed in one of the newly refurbished upstairs bedrooms (closed off to party guests, discovered by Ruby when the clock hit bedtime). “Like, Hamza from my class at school fancied Sophie, and everyone said she was sooo out of his league, but then he gave her the cake his mum made him for his lunch and she said he could be her boyfriend.”

“Ruby,” I say, “aren’t you six?”

“Yes,” she says with great solemnity. “Yes, I am.”

“Isn’t that a bit young for boyfriends?”

“Totally,” she says in the same tone. “But Sophie doesn’t know that. Which is lucky for Hamza.”

“There you are,” Mrs. Hedgers says, entering the room behind me. “Lovely to have your lifts back in order, Lucas. I particularly enjoyed the slow jazz and gold-embossed wallpaper—hello, Ruby, I bet you can’t climb down that post like a fireman’s pole, can you?”

Ruby promptly begins climbing down to prove her mother wrong. I give Mrs. Hedgers an impressed look, which she takes with the nod of a woman who knows her own talents.

“Lucas,” she says. “There is a young couple trying to—”

“There you are,” says Izzy’s friend Grigg, bursting into the room behind Mrs. Hedgers. His wife, Sameera, runs in behind him, coming up short, slightly out of breath.

“Oh, look. Everyone has been looking for us,” Ruby says with delight, pausing mid descent.

“Lucas,” Grigg says.

I have never seen a man with such bulging bags under his eyes—but the eyes themselves are steady and kind. Grigg is one of those people who would manage to make something look crumpled even if it were very recently ironed, while his wife is just the opposite: she exudes the sort of effortless glamour that makes her stained white T-shirt look vaguely iconic.

“We don’t want to bother Izzy, because she’s talking to the project manager of the building team about a local property looking for someone to coordinate a redesign for them . . .”

He smiles as my eyebrows shoot up.

“But I think one of your colleagues may be having a minor panic attack in the swimming pool,” he finishes, and my eyebrows drop into a frown again.

Merda.

“Have you . . .”

“Go. I’ll take it from here,” Mrs. Hedgers says as Ruby clings to the post of the bed like a koala, contemplating her path down.

I don’t run, of course—that’s against hotel policy. But I do walk very, very fast.



* * *



? ? ? ? ?

The swimming pool should be locked to guests today—much like the upstairs bedrooms. But when we get there, the door is ajar. Poor Mandy is sitting on the edge of the pool, trousers rolled up to the knees, feet dangling in, with Pedro and Jem on either side of her and a mobile phone in each of her hands.

“I just wonder if keeping all these expensive phones directly over a body of water might not be the smartest move, sweetie?” Jem is saying, reaching tentatively for the phone nearest her.

“Mandy?” I say.

Her head snaps up. Her eyes remind me of a horse that has been startled and is likely to stand on your foot.

“Lucas,” she breathes. “There’s just . . . so much to do. So many people.”

I look around. The spa area is an oasis of calm, the noise from the party a low background hum behind the sound of the water.

“Mandy . . . why do you have two phones?” I ask, approaching.

I catch Pedro’s eye. He mouths No sudden movements at me in Portuguese.

“What? Oh.” Mandy looks from one to the other. “I thought if I put Twitter on this one and Instagram on this one then all the notifications wouldn’t be quite so overwhelming. But then I couldn’t get Twitter off this one and Facebook wouldn’t update on this one so now I’ve got everything everywhere and . . . it’s just . . . so . . . much.”

“I’m thinking maybe you’ve had enough screen time . . . Mandy?” Jem says, looking at me for confirmation.

She eases the nearest phone from Mandy’s hand and tosses it to me. I catch it. Thankfully. That was a very confident throw, and while I’m quite pleased that Jem rates my catching skills, I would also prefer her to never do that again, particularly this close to a swimming pool.

“Oh, wow,” Pedro says. He’s bent over Poor Mandy’s other phone while Mandy stares listlessly at the garden through the window opposite, eyes glazed. “You guys have ninety thousand Instagram followers?”