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plans for the future. But he realized now how futile that would be. There was nothing about his world or his friends that Ines would understand. Nothing at all. The education that had liberated him had also driven a wedge between the two of them that made communication impossible. He may as well have been talking Urdu.
    By the time he left, the house was at least clean, and the flowers he’d brought his mother added a tiny touch of color and joy to the otherwise cheerless kitchen. That had made her smile, as had the rolled-up wad of bills he’d pressed into her hand despite her protests and made her promise to hide from Jose.
    Even so, when they said their good-byes, Lucas drove straight down to the first dive bar he could find and drank until he couldhardly stand. He didn’t think he’d ever felt so depressed in his life.
    “Ibiza Town!” The bus driver’s voice jolted him back into the present.
    “Everybody off, please.”
    Wearily, Lucas got to his feet and staggered down the steps into the harbor. It was after two now, and the early afternoon sun beat down on his head remorselessly, reawakening the hangover that his tryst with Carla had made him temporarily forget.
    He’d go back to the guesthouse and sleep. And then tomorrow he’d look into booking himself onto an earlier flight to London. Summer in Ibiza had seemed like a great idea when he was back in Lausanne. But now that he’d done his duty by the lovely Mrs. Leon, he realized there was nothing left here for him to stay for.
    The Tischen Cadogan. That was the future.
    And as far as Lucas Ruiz was concerned, the future was all that mattered.

CHAPTER THREE

    A FTER AN UNPLEASANTLY humid and muggy start to the summer, July brought a welcome still, dry heat into Boston that was already starting to turn the city’s leaves a glorious pale gold. Like most college towns, Boston sank into a weird sort of suspended animation during the summer. The sedate flow of the Charles was no longer disturbed by rowdy rowing squads every morning, and America’s gilded youth with their armfuls of books suddenly vanished into the ether, replaced by flocks of summer tourists who crawled all over Newbury Street with their cameras and fanny packs like so many heat-exhausted ants.
    With the students gone, city gossip shifted from academic backstabbing and faculty affairs to the comings and goings of the great old Boston families. Gossip, Honor had often thought, was Boston’s lifeblood, and this past summer it had been her family’s turn to provide the civic entertainment. Everyone who was anyone in Boston society had an opinion about Trey Palmer losing control of the family assets to his headstrong elder daughter. Most of them, Honor was all too uncomfortably aware, seemed to have decided that she was the villain of the piece.
    “Do you still prefer to wait, Miss Palmer, or would you like to order an appetizer now?”
    The waiter hovered awkwardly by Honor’s table, waiting for a response. He looked barely old enough to have left high school and seemed to suffer agonies of embarrassment every time she looked him in the eye. Beautiful women clearly made him nervous, poor kid.
    “I guess I’ll order,” she sighed, glancing again at the understated antique man’s watch on her wrist. “Fucking Tina,” she added under her breath.
    She ought to have gotten used to her sister’s lateness by now, but somehow it still pissed her off every time. How come she, with a vast business empire to run and a schedule so rammed with work it made the president’s look lightweight, could manage to show up to lunch on time; but Tina, who appeared to do nothing but paint her nails all day and get her picture taken, was incapable of getting her shit together?
    What made it worse was that they were meeting today at Tina’s request. She was demanding an astronomical raise in her monthly allowance from the trust, which Honor had flatly refused to authorize. But Tina wasn’t about to take no