Revenge at Bella Terra (18 page)

His large office seemed more cluttered than the living room, more lived-in. A dusty black marble-topped desk faced the windows where another view spread out before them—and from this height, it was even more magnificent than the one below. The wide, short file cabinet sat behind the desk with a multifunction printer perched on top. A door went out on the small deck, and there an iron chair and small round iron table beckoned.

Walking to the desk, he picked up piles of papers and stacked them on the floor. “I wasn’t planning for guests,” he said.

His excuse made her feel better, eased that discomfort she felt whenever she remembered the clutter he’d seen yesterday in her work area.

“You can do whatever you want, but try not to mess up the piles,” he said. “I know you don’t believe me, but there’s a method to my madness.”

Bookshelves lined the large room, magnificent bookshelves that reached all the way to the twelve-foot ceiling. Books filled them. Books and bookends made of marble and alabaster, heavy stone bookends carved to resemble grapes or wine bottles.

Eli saw her looking at them and ran his hand over one of the shelves. “The carpenter who made the cabinets in the kitchen and the bathrooms created these for me. We recycled the redwood from the massive old barrels used to store wine in the early twentieth century.”

“They’re gorgeous.” She pulled out a book and looked at it.

Like Beast offering Beauty her heart’s desire, he said, “You can read whatever you like.”

She flipped through a book on the French wine country, put it back, pulled another book off the shelves, a book on the theories of trellising grapes. She suspiciously examined the rest of the titles . . . all tomes on viniculture, winemaking, and wine history.

“Do you ever read for pleasure?” she asked.

His eyebrows went up as if he were startled, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

In exasperation, she asked, “Do you ever do anything for pleasure?”

When he looked at her, his brown eyes amber with light, she wished she hadn’t asked.

Time to change the subject. “You’ve got some great books here.”

“Thank you. Someday when I’m retired, I’ll get to read them all.”

“Do you have an e-reader, too?” Because her book was definitely not on these shelves.

“No. Nor will I ever have one. I want paper.”

Silly to feel hurt. Millions of people had never read her book, and hundreds of thousands more would never go see the movie. Wasn’t he curious about her and her writing? If he had written a book, she’d be interested enough to read it—she glanced again at the shelves—unless it was about how to recognize the noble rot on Riesling grapes.

Okay. He would probably publish his book on viniculture and she would probably not read it. But at least she’d buy it!

“I’m a writer,” she said mildly. “I don’t care how you read, as long as you read. Can I scoot some of your books aside so I can put out my books?”

“My home is yours. Do whatever you like.”

“I know. Just don’t disturb the piles.” She got the skull out of the bag of office supplies and placed it on the desk facing the chair. Carefully, she pulled a tissue out of the bag and, on top of the stone surface, she spread it open to reveal the diamond. With a flourish, she placed it once more between its grinning front teeth. “I’m set!”

“I’m off to pull something out of the freezer for dinner. Steak okay, or do you not eat red meat?”

She looked at him as if he were crazy. “I’m from Texas.”

“I’m sure there are vegetarians in Texas.”

“I’m sure there are smokers in California, too, but they don’t brag about it.”

“Steak and salad. Come down when you’re ready.” He ran down the stairs, one of those half smiles on his face.

“Not too much longer,” she told the place where he had been standing, “and I’ll teach you how to smile a whole smile.”

With a towel from the bathroom, she wiped the dust off the desktop and the one-foot-tall marble figurine of some Roman god reveling in debauchery. The attached plaque identified him as Bacchus, the god of wine.

So even in art, Eli stuck with his theme.

Sitting down in the chair, she played with the adjustments until her feet touched the floor. She looked in the drawers. Lots of pencils, pens, pads. A stapler and a staple remover. The kind of stuff she expected to see in a home office. One drawer was full of computer programs. The other drawer, the desk’s file cabinet, was locked, probably filled with tax stuff. When she opened the belly drawer, she expected to see his keyboard.

Instead, there was a small stack of envelopes, all from the same foreign postmark. From Chile.

And at the bottom of the stack, a piece of paper had been crumpled up, then smoothed out, then crumpled up, then smoothed out . . . The scent of tobacco clung to the letter. The paper itself looked worn, as if he wanted to throw it away and couldn’t.

Slowly, wanting to know what drove him, recklessly needing to know his secrets, she pulled it out from beneath the envelopes and started to read.

Chapter 23

E
li knew Chloë trusted him.

She trusted him partly because he’d won her trust, partly because she refused to be as cynical as her mother.

If she only knew . . .

No time for regrets.

He had to close this deal.

He had to make her marry him as quickly as possible. He had a plan. It should work.

First step: Get her into the house with him. Scare her a little about bad guys chasing her. Make himself look like the one man who could save her.

Check.

Embarrassing as hell to act like a thirteen-year-old boy trying to impress a girl, but he didn’t have time to plan something clever, and anyway—it looked like this was working.

Because she trusted him.

Second step: Feed her, give her wine, finish the seduction he’d started before he’d had an attack of conscience.

Third step: Tell the kind of lie he had never told in his life.

He was going to tell her he loved her. If he had to. And if it took more wine and more sexual persuasion to convince her, he’d do it. He’d do whatever he had to do to save his winery.

Fourth step: Convince her to go through with the ceremony and actually marry him. Thanks to Conte and his schemes, she was wary. But Eli had thought he had time to carry off this seduction, and that had turned out to be an advantage. She believed he wasn’t one of her suitors, or at least, one who didn’t give a damn about marrying her.

After that, it was a short drive to the Santa Rosa airport, a short flight to Reno, a quick wedding, and home again to collect his payment from her father.

It would work. It had to. Failure was not an option.

He heard her coming downstairs. Poured the first glasses of wine, picked them up, turned with a smile to offer her one—and saw her standing on the bottom step, Abuela’s crumpled letter clutched in her hand. “Eli, what’s this?”

“What are you doing with that?” He put the glasses on the counter with controlled force. “Did you read that?”

“I did. I didn’t mean to, but the foreign postmarks got my attention, and this . . .” She lifted one of the sheets. “It was crumpled up, so I noticed it. Then I saw the shaky old handwriting and I thought . . . I guess I thought it was something from your grandmother. And it is, but from your other grandmother. Your mother’s mother. In Chile.”

“I know who she is. I know where she’s from. You shouldn’t have read it. You invaded my privacy.” He wanted to shout at her, to stomp like an infuriated child.

“I know. I’m sorry, but, Eli, why would you ignore a plea like this?” Chloë’s eyes were worried, her delivery fast and anxious. “She’s an old woman. She wants to see you one last time before she dies.”

Chloë didn’t understand. She could never understand. “I will not see her.”

“How can you say that?” She lifted the letter and read, “‘It’s been too many years since I last beheld your face, my most beloved of grandsons, and in the deep cold of a mountain winter when I know I’ll not see another autumn, I would beg that you come to me and allow me to make amends for the—’”

“I know what it says.” Striding to Chloë, he snatched it out of her hands and crumpled it up. Again.

“You’ve done that before. You always spread it out again. She wrote it six months ago and you haven’t thrown it away yet. No matter what she did to you, no matter what you say about not wanting to see her, you can’t let it go.” Chloë
sounded
sensible. She
looked
bewildered and almost hurt by his cruelty.

He didn’t care. “I
can
let it go.” Going to the brushed stainless-steel trash can, he lifted the lid and tossed it inside.
Threw
it inside.

But the scent of Abuela’s little cigar clung to his skin, and he washed his hand once. Twice. “I can’t let go of the anger. Never. For what that woman did to me, she deserves to burn in hell.”

“It sounds as if that may be happening sooner rather than later. She’s an old lady.” Chloë gestured widely. “She’s dying!”

“Maybe. Or lying. She does that with unparalleled skill. She’s had enough practice.”

“Eli, if you really, really believed that, you wouldn’t have kept the letter.”

“I kept the letter to remind me of how much I hated . . . hated . . .” Loathing bound him in its cruel shackles, and he could hardly get his breath.

“Why?” Chloë spoke softly, pleading for an explanation. “What happened in Chile that you can never forgive or forget?”

He wanted to scream.

He wanted to cry.

He wanted to fling himself on the floor in the kind of tantrum he had never in his life thrown.

He couldn’t do that.

He couldn’t be like . . . them. Like her.

Like his mother, Valentina.

Everything faded to black, the vortex of rage spinning, tightening on him. His focus narrowed to one point, to Chloë’s face, to calm himself. And for the first time in his life, he began to tell his story.

“My first memory is setting the table with Nonna for Christmas.” Toddling around the table, trying to do everything right, to make his Nonna happy. “I broke a glass, and I cowered away from her. I remember I was so surprised when she hugged me and swept it up with no reproaches. Later, I heard her speaking to my father the way a biblical mother would speak to a son who reveled in the pleasures of Sodom and Gomorrah. I was surprised that she dared, but I knew it would make no difference. It wasn’t my father who made me cower. It was my mother. She had a temper that at the slightest provocation rampaged out of control.”

“Your mother . . . hurt you? Abused you?”

“You wanted to hear this. Now listen.” He waited until Chloë sat down on a counter stool and folded her hands in her lap. “My second memory is hearing my father scream when my mother stabbed him.” He paused, watching her, cynical and sneering. “You know about that, right? That my mother stabbed my father?”

“I read about it. On the Internet. Yes.” She glanced down.

Good. She was embarrassed. “Because you thought you had the right to know my secrets.”

She looked up again, looked at him as if he puzzled her. “Because I was curious about you. I like you, but you’re . . . not easy to know.”

“Of course. That makes snooping all right.”

Chloë’s feet hit the floor, and her eyes flashed. “When my father sold me to you as a guest, did you check my Web site? Read an excerpt, try to figure out why someone like me would write a murder mystery? I know you, Eli—you knew what my father was up to and you at least looked at my photo to see if I was the ugliest dog in the world.”

“What . . . your father . . . was up to?” he repeated. For a moment, he thought she knew the awful truth.

“Matchmaking. Remember?” Now
she
mocked
him
. “We talked about that on my first day here, and we said we didn’t have to freak out because my father had a thing about getting me married. And I wasn’t freaked-out, but I’ll bet you were, as fond as you are of your privacy and your cool emotions. You checked me out, too. Didn’t you?”

“Yes.” He’d give her this point—because he’d checked her out by holding her photo in his fingers and listening to her father propose marriage on her behalf.

“All right then.” She subsided back onto the stool. “I know your mother stabbed your father because she found out he was in love with Francesca Pastore.”

Eli snorted. “He wasn’t in love with Francesca. But he was screwing her. Probably she was pregnant.” Eli loved his brother. And he had come to terms with the lovely Francesca’s role in his life. But when he remembered that terrifying night, he lived it all again. “I was asleep. I woke up to that scream—sometimes at night, I still hear it in my dreams—and her shrieking at him. Lights. Sirens. People taking photos, lots of them, and yelling questions at my parents and at the police. I crept out of bed and watched men and women in uniform take both my parents away, my father on a gurney and my mother with her hands cuffed behind her. She saw me watching from the top of the stairs and shouted that I should stay there; she’d return for me. I remained frozen in place, thinking that if I moved before she returned, she’d hurt me as she had hurt my father.” For a moment, that little boy and his fear were alive in Eli. “The chaos slowly cleared. The servants left. No one called child services. The next day, Nonna found me there, still in my pajamas, afraid to move. She brought me to her home.”

“Oh . . . Eli.” Chloë offered her palm to him.

“No. You wanted to know about Abuela. Let me tell you.”
And don’t say anything. Don’t touch me. Don’t show sympathy.

Chloë withdrew her hand, clutched the sides of the seat instead, as if she feared she would fall off.

“I lived with Nonna for five years, until my mother got out of prison. Five years of normal life. Of swinging in the yard, eating Nonna’s cookies, going to school, riding my bike. Relatively normal, anyway. There was always my father falling in and out of love and begetting sons and abandoning them, but to me that was normal, too.” Chloë ought to know what she was getting into, he supposed, although a smart woman would be running the other way. “During that five years, whenever Nonna took me to see my mother, Valentina was behind bars and the old fear of her faded.”