Relax. It’s just a party. Everything’ll be fine.
How on earth her friend Alexia De Vere coped with the stresses of running a country, Lucy Meyer had no idea. She found running a home quite exhausting enough.
Alexia De Vere’s world was as far removed from Lucy Meyer’s as it was possible to be. But what made the friendship work was that neither woman would have traded her life for the other’s. Lucy loved being a homemaker and a hostess every bit as much as Alexia loved politics and the trappings of power. Both women excelled at what they did. And despite their different lives, they did have some things in common. Both were married to wonderful, supportive husbands who worked in the finance industry. Teddy De Vere was a hedge fund manager, with a niche but lucrative European business. Arnie Meyer was a venture capitalist with stakes in funds across the continental United States as well as in Asia and now the growing Middle Eastern market. The two men had never worked together directly, but they understood each other’s business. From day one they had gotten along like a house on fire.
It was hard to believe that more than twenty years had passed since Arnie Meyer sold the De Veres their summer home. The Gables was a comfortable, midsize property on the edge of the Meyer’s Pilgrim Farm estate, with a pool, a small guesthouse, and an attractive backyard filled with clematis and roses and towering hollyhocks. Arnie and Lucy lived in the much grander “big house,” a spectacular eighteenth-century farm with high ceilings, original wide oak floorboards, and vast, airy rooms filled with light. Alexia and Lucy had both been young mothers when they met, the summer that Teddy bought the Gables. Lucy remembered her first meeting with Alexia as if it were yesterday. Already a British MP, she was clearly extremely ambitious even then. But no one, least of all Lucy Meyer, imagined that her new neighbor would one day reach the dizzying heights of power that she now occupied.
My friend the British home secretary.
Lucy quite literally never got tired of saying it.
Tonight was an extra-special occasion. Not only because Alexia and Teddy were back on the island for the summer after Alexia’s triumphant appointment. But because Michael, their ridiculously good-looking son, was joining them for the first time in many years. Roxie always came out for the summers. Poor girl, she had nothing else to do, and of course, since the accident, she and her father had become pretty much inseparable. But Michael De Vere hadn’t been to the Vineyard since his teens. Lucy Meyer couldn’t help but think how wonderful it would be, how darling and perfect and just wonderful, if Michael De Vere were to fall in love with her daughter, Summer. Then we could all be one, big, happy family.
Lucy’s twenty-two-year-old daughter had recently broken up with her college boyfriend, the dreadful, pompous Chad Bates. (Chad. I mean, really. Who has a perfect little newborn baby boy and calls him Chad?) In Lucy’s book, this meant that Summer was ripe for a new romance. And just imagine if Summer and Michael got married and had babies! Lucy and Alexia could be the doting grannies together.
It could happen. Lucy Meyer could make it happen.
And it all starts tonight.
Michael De Vere sat in the back pew of Grace Church on Woodlawn Avenue, snoring loudly while the congregation sang “Bind Us Together.”
“Wake up!” His sister, Roxie, nudged him in the ribs. “People are staring.”
Michael jerked awake. Immediately a wave of nausea hit him like a punch in the gut. What the hell was he doing here? What madness had possessed him to come, not just to this church full of uptight Episcopalian Americans, but to this island?
He knew the answer, of course. He was here in an effort to appease his father. Teddy had been so furious about Michael dropping out of Oxford that he’d threatened to disinherit him.
“I’ll leave every penny to your sister! Don’t think I won’t!”
But Michael had stood his ground, pressing ahead with his plans for Kingsmere Events and renting office space in Oxford with his friend Tommy. By an incredible stroke of luck they’d immediately landed a huge gig in the Hamptons, organizing a sixtieth birthday party for a billionaire real estate developer on his new Oceano superyacht. Just forty-eight hours ago, Michael had been lying back in a luxury tender with a supermodel under each arm, gazing up at a hundred grand’s worth of fireworks exploding across the East Hampton sky and mentally calculating his profit. (Okay, so perhaps “supermodel” was pushing it. The girls were actually high-class Russian hookers, but they charged like supermodels and looked like goddesses, so who was counting?) The last thing on earth Michael wanted to do the next morning was catch a plane over to sleepy Martha’s Vineyard, the island with the world’s biggest stick up its ass. But Teddy had insisted. “It would mean a lot to your mother if you came out this year.”
For all his apparent independence of spirit, Michael De Vere was devoted to his mother, and to his inheritance. He had no intention of losing either. So here he was, hopelessly hungover, trussed up like a Christmas turkey in a jacket and tie, trying not to puke during the Lord’s Prayer.
At long last the service was over. Michael pushed Roxie’s wheelchair out into the bright sunshine, wincing in pain behind his Ray-Bans.
Alexia slipped a slender arm around his waist. “Are you all right, darling?” she asked. “You don’t look well.”
“I’m fine, Mummy, thanks.”
“He’s hungover,” growled Teddy.
“Lovely service.” Michael forced a pious smile, but Teddy wasn’t buying it.
“Please. Pull the other one. I can smell the booze on your breath from here.”
In his regulation corduroy trousers, sport jacket, and brogues—Teddy De Vere wore the same clothes to church every Sunday of the year, and saw no reason to change because he happened to be in America, or because the temperature was nudging well into the nineties—Michael’s father was like Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey, as English as PG Tips tea and cucumber sandwiches. If Disneyland had an England theme park, Teddy De Vere could have been one of the characters.
Alexia winked at Michael. “Hungover or not, we’re glad you made it, darling. Aren’t we, Teddy?”
“Humph.”
“Now we must go and say hello to Father Timothy. We’ll see you two at dinner tonight.”
“Dinner?” Michael frowned.
“At the Meyers’,” said Alexia, kissing him on the cheek and wiping off a lipstick mark with her handkerchief. “Drinks are at six.”
“No kiss for me?” Roxie said sarcastically.
Alexia yawned. “Do change the record, Roxanne. I wonder sometimes if you have any idea how boring you can be.”
“Bitch,” muttered Roxie under her breath as her mother walked away.
Michael winced. He hated the conflict between his mother and sister more than anything. Pushing Roxanne’s wheelchair across the street to the Even Keel coffee shop, a favorite hangout since their teens, he bought her a conciliatory frappucino.
“I suppose you’re going to defend her now, are you?” said Roxie.
“No. I’m going to keep out of it.”
“You and Dad are as bad as each other. You never stand up to her.”
“I seriously don’t know if I can make it to the Meyers’ drinks party this evening,” said Michael, adroitly changing the subject. “My head feels like someone dropped an anvil on it.”
“Yes, well, I’ll drop an anvil on it if you abandon me tonight. You can’t leave me to cringe through hours of Mummy’s boasting on my own: G7 Summit this, Ten Downing Street that. Lucy Meyer lapping it all up like a poodle. Blech.”
Michael frowned but said nothing.
“Summer’s flying in specially for it, you know,” Roxie teased. “I know you wouldn’t want to miss her.”
Michael rolled his eyes to heaven. Summer Meyer had been his and Roxie’s childhood playmate. She’d always had a quiet but burning crush on Michael. Shy even as a little girl, as a teenager poor Summer had gained a huge amount of weight. The last time Michael saw her, she must have been seventeen, weighed around a hundred and eighty pounds, and was so silent in his presence she was borderline autistic. The thought of sitting through a four-hour dinner trying to make polite conversation with a sweet but mute Rosie O’Donnell look-alike was stomach churning. And Michael De Vere’s stomach was already churning.
“If I come, will you make Dad put me back in the will?”
Roxie laughed. “No. But if you don’t come, when I have all the family money and you’re completely financially dependent on me, I’ll send you to the workhouse.”
“Fine. I’ll come. But I am not sitting next to Summer Meyer and that’s final.”
“Michael. You’re sitting there. Next to Summer. If she ever gets here.”