Take Me Higher (14 page)

Paula rose from her chair and went to stand next to her husband. ‘I love the vineyards and the winery just as much as you do, Caleb. You can’t, after so many years of having me working by your side for Richebourg-Conti, believe otherwise. But we have always wanted more from this place, to move with the times, for it to become even more profitable, create things with its revenues. We have done well for ourselves using the power of the Richebourg-Conti name, which we have enjoyed to the fullest, but that power could have been doubled or trebled had Ethan given us our chance to expand and that’s what is going to happen for us now. You’ll see. I trust Ira. He’s too greedy for us not to do well out of this.’

‘I enjoy to the full my lifestyle: working with you as a co-director of Richebourg-Conti, sitting on the boards of two museums, raising funds for the Republican Party, sponsoring two university seats, doing the lecture circuit talking about wine for the Napa Valley Wine Association, living in a grand house in a grand manner.

‘Don’t you think I know I only hold those positions because of who I am, what I have? Do you think for a minute I’ll allow Ira or that bitch of a sister of yours to take one bit of that away from me, no matter what they’re wanting or plotting. Not on your life or mine, my darling husband. Get what’s mine? I think not! Nor is what we have enough. I want more. And most of all I want Ruy Blas. We need it, yes, but that’s not the only reason why we should never let Syrah have it. She doesn’t
deserve
it, hasn’t earned it as we have, because she got a fortune from
Ethan that was rightfully ours as well as hers.’

Caleb listened. How many hundreds of times had he heard his wife’s rhetoric? But this was the first time he realised she was more intent on depriving Syrah of her legacy than he was. He was so stunned that he said nothing, merely walked from the room, lost in thoughts about himself and his wife. On the porch he sat on the top step and viewed the glorious vista of Richebourg-Conti. His Richebourg-Conti. He loved it more desperately than ever he had.

He felt like a drowning man as his life flashed before him. He had always seen himself and his wife as having very different personalities; his had been a softer, more generous heart. He’d had a more passive nature when they had met and had fallen instantly in love. He’d admired her strength and her passion, above all her ambition. Living with her had made him hard and ruthless and he had loved the fact that she had instilled that in him. He had loved her blindly and allowed her to dominate him, his life, his work.

He loved her even more because of her devotion to their children, her ambition and expertise in working alongside him in Richebourg-Conti as well as being a loving wife and mother. Such behaviour had convinced him he could never live without her, and that was how her every wish became his command. Over the years her every ambition became his. But what he had not realised until now was that it had come about because of his fear of losing her and a desire above all for peace to reign in his marriage.

Paula had seen something in Caleb’s eyes as he had walked from the room. Had it been pain, anxiety, or the weakness in him she so despised and yet loved him for because he always conquered it to please her? His weaknesses excited something in Paula. She actually loved him on many counts: he gave her a life she might never have had without him and which she liked very much indeed, he was a marvellous father to their children and, while not an imaginative lover, their sex life was all she could ever want and more. And she loved him because he allowed her complete control of their lives and always had.

It was this obsessive need to control that made Paula reach a decision. She would approach Syrah with a deal, one she would surely not refuse. It still niggled that Caleb had gone to Malibu without her to make that first offer to buy his sister out. Nothing would have brought Richebourg-Conti
to the state it was in now had the spoiled brat sold out to them then.

The following morning, much to the relief of Caleb and Paula, Ira called, suggesting a meeting to discuss Richebourg-Conti. Paula took the call and was not terribly pleased with the tone of his voice or the manner in which he spoke to her. It was friendly, polite enough, but sharp and to the point. It was his manner that made her refuse to see him straight away and put him off for five days. He accepted her date and time but was curt about it.

Paula took it upon herself, as a last resort, to meet Syrah. The invitation was to a talk over lunch. Paula had chosen a small, out-of-the-way inn, believing that this meeting would be best held on neither side’s territory.

She was already there, seated at a table, when Syrah arrived. As she walked towards her sister-in-law she had to admit that Paula was a beauty and could understand her brother’s passion for her. But it was a cold, rigid sort of beauty, sexual but mean of heart. Once Syrah was at the table, Paula looked up from the menu she was reading.

‘Thank you for coming, Syrah. We should have done this directly after Ethan’s death,’ were her first words.

Syrah took the other seat at the table. Paula snapped her fingers at the waiter. He rushed to her signal and she ordered drinks for them both.

‘You remember what I drink?’ said Syrah.

‘Why so surprised? I remember many things about you. Shall we order?’

‘I suppose we’d better. That
is
what we’re here for, to have lunch and try to mend broken fences, isn’t it?’ answered Syrah.

‘That’s quite an assumption and it’s wrong. To make you a very wealthy woman – that’s why we’re here,’ said Paula expansively.

Syrah began to laugh. ‘Now how do you expect to do that? Make me an offer for the legacy Ethan left me? Don’t even try. It’s not and never will be for sale.’

‘Fifty million dollars, cash, delivered to you within three days,’ Paula pressed on.

‘No! You don’t listen, Paula. You and Caleb can never have Ruy Blas or Ethan’s wine cellar. If he had wanted you to have them, he
would have left them to you. I have wondered for a long time why he left them to me. Now I’ve worked it out and you had better too. That said, I did come here believing you might want to end this feud going on between us and become a family again. Maybe not as loving as I might like but at least friends. Caleb is my brother after all,’ added Syrah.

Paula could barely contain herself. For several seconds she remained silent while years of resentment, pure hatred for Syrah, rose like bile within her. The thousand and one instances when Syrah and Ethan had, throughout her life, been cruel to her swept like a rushing stream before her eyes.

Finally she spoke. When she did she was out of control. ‘Friendship? With you? You’re as stupid and insensitive as you have always been, I see. You are behaving true to form: the selfish, self-centred, playgirl whore funded by a daddy who loved you too much – incestuously for all I know – and even after death left you what was rightfully Caleb’s and mine. We need that legacy Ethan threw away on you, but do you care? Not even for fifty million dollars.’

Paula never let up. She seemed to gather strength in her vindictiveness by grinding Syrah into the ground. Beaten into submission she could not even find the strength to rise from her chair and leave. It was Paula who finally walked away from the table, shaking with rage, leaving Syrah on her own to deal with this abuse.

Chapter 12

James Whitehawk was dining at a small table in a corner of the restaurant when first Paula and then Syrah were shown to their table. Neither of the women had seen him. The scene between them was embarrassing for the few other diners in the room. Once Paula had taken her leave, James went over to Syrah and drew a chair up to sit next to her.

As it had been for them in the garden at Richebourg-Conti and every time since, when they were together, the outside world fell away and the joy of life, the strong erotic attraction they felt for each other, was paramount. What they were together wiped out all thoughts of the hideous meeting Syrah had just endured. James took a room for them in the picturesque town that was reminiscent of St Paul de Vence in the South of France.

There seemed no point in discussing what had happened between Syrah and Paula. The incredible coincidence of James having been there too was more important, more meaningful, something full of love, instead of the hatred of a soulless, greedy woman. They spoke of their incredible luck in finding one another, how the intimacy they felt together was stronger than either one of them. Then they stopped talking and made love, had sex that was thrilling and filled with passion, the desire to pleasure each other, again and again.

Ready to leave, they could not bear to be apart and so Syrah left her car in the village, to be retrieved by one of James’s workers, and he drove them back to Ruy Blas.

Leaning against him, Syrah told him in a soft and sensual voice, ‘I am always very much aware that there is something about our togetherness that is thrilling and mysterious, the adventure of a lifetime that neither of us will ever truly understand.’

It had been some time now since James and Syrah had become an
open secret, a permanent presence in each other’s life around the vineyards, their wine friends and Keoki. New joys were added to their relationship when James decided that his daughters Betsy and Carrie, should become part of their lives and brought them round to play with Keoki. He wanted Syrah and her son to have a chance to learn to love his girls as he did.

Always cautious, never wanting to offend, as the children moved in on their lives, James and Syrah kept their sexual life played out in romantic meetings in hideaways and were discreet because Katherine Whitehawk was more dangerous to them now than ever. She had found out James was having an intimate relationship with Syrah.

In those weeks when Syrah was seeing other men, James’s life became unbearable, full of fear that she might indeed find someone and finally leave him, against her will but because she wanted to have a full, rich life shared with a man who was hers and hers alone. James’s fear drove him once more to ask Katherine to set him free.

It had come about one evening when they were dining at home. Betsy and Carrie, having finished their dinner, went to their rooms to do homework. Katherine and James were sitting at the head and the foot of the long mahogany dining table. Candles were burning in their tall silver sticks, the antique Chinese wall paper glowed softly and the marble commodes and Ming Dynasty jardinières were dazzlingly impressive. This was James’s favourite room in the house, though there was not one he did not like.

Beautiful houses had always been a part of Katherine’s life, she had been born into them whereas James had not. When they had fallen in love it had been their differences that had seduced each of them. She was fine as porcelain, complex, feminine and needy for something James thought he could give her. She demanded one hundred per cent attention from him, had thought he would pander to her every whim, that there would be no other life or friends, just the two of them together for always. He had never understood that and she’d spent her entire life from the day they had met trying to change him into the image of him she had created in her own mind.

As James gazed down the table, past the peonies and the flickering candle flames, not for the first time he wondered why the beautiful and elegant Katherine would not let him go. There were an infinite number
of men who had courted her once and would still. Men who could make her happy. He could only believe what their years together had shown him, that her fragile, deeply disturbed mind, with its twists and turns, demanded that they should remain married, no matter the hatred and unhappiness between them.

‘I want to talk to you, Katherine,’ he told her as he rose from his chair and went to sit next to her.

She looked at her husband. She still found him handsome, still sexy. For a fleeting moment she thought she might seduce him into her bed right then and there. He never could resist her sexually. He yearned for her, and that was why she teased and taunted him with her flirting, why she never let him have her unless it was to torture him about his inadequacies as a husband, the man who should care for her no matter what.

‘To say you’re sorry, beg my forgiveness for being such a cheating bastard?’ she asked.

‘No. To ask you for a divorce. There’s no point in our staying together,’ he answered.

‘I would say two daughters might be the point.’

‘Don’t do that, Katherine. I beg you, don’t deprive me of my children’s love. This is nothing to do with them. This is something between us. You keep using them as a shield to hide behind, blackmailing me with them.’

‘Yes, I do. And so what?’ she replied.

‘If you could only hear yourself! Don’t you love them? How can you do this to them, use them to keep me in line?’

‘Oh, that’s easily explained. I’m obsessive and unbalanced about you, James. Always have been since that first night we met. I want you to love me the way
I
want to be loved. For you to give up your life for me, stand by me in everything I do, give me everything I want. You never have unless blackmailed to do so. Why do you want a divorce anyway? To marry Syrah Richebourg?’

With that Katherine scraped back her chair and, rising from it, threw her dinner napkin in her husband’s face. She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she stalked angrily away. Halfway between the table and the door she stopped and turned round to face her husband. James rose from his chair. He recognised a certain wildness, an out-of-control look
in her eyes. Katherine at her most dangerous.

‘No divorce for you, my handsome Indian brave. Not even a separation. I have no problem with the world knowing Syrah Richebourg is a whore who can’t keep her hands off my husband. How you must hate her having to live a backstreet life with you! That does give me some little satisfaction, I admit.’

Then she turned on her heel and walked from the room. James sat down in his chair and poured himself a glass of wine. He sipped it and contemplated his situation. His wife was on a knife edge. All through dinner he had seen signs of her slowly slipping off the rails of sanity. Hatred was now pathological with her. She was frightening in her madness – and there was no doubt in James’s mind that she
was
a mad woman, though for most of the time had control of her madness. Paradoxically, the more bizarre her behaviour, the more beautiful and sweet she appeared. Tonight at dinner she had looked so lovely, been so nasty.

Throughout the evening she hardly let up for a minute on Betsy and Carrie with constant criticism and threats of retribution if they did not obey her every command: they should eat more slowly, faster, no playing with their food. At one point Carrie, the younger of the girls, had answered back and Katherine leaned forward and pinched her wrist so hard that the child screamed, broke away and ran to James. He had seen it all before, this love-hate thing she had had right from the time the children had been born. They were why he took the abuse he did from her. The safety of his children, their love and their happiness, was everything to James.

Finally he went to Katherine’s bedroom where he found her lying on a chaise-lounge reading. She did not look up from her book. He walked directly to her and snatched it from her hands, throwing it across the room. Then, grabbing her by the wrist, he pulled her from the chaise to stand next to him and held her in a tight grip. She struggled to free herself but in vain. Tears of frustration came to her eyes and she was breathing hard.

‘If I ever catch you abusing the girls again as you did this evening, I will kidnap them from you and go directly to the police. I will declare you an unfit mother and give the media the sorry story of how a society beauty such as yourself, a worker for so many children’s charities, is a
loveless and sadistic mother, mentally unbalanced by adoration of herself and no other human being.

‘Oh, I’ll stay with you. Syrah is happy to be my mistress so that vindictiveness of yours means nothing to her. You see, it is and always has been for the girls that I remain. You threaten to turn them against me, true, that’s one reason why I stay with you. Another is that I fear for their safety, even were I to leave and take them with me. But the final reason is because they love their mother, make excuses for your meanness to them, are always defending your cruelty in one pathetic way after another. They are loving and caring girls and they know how unhappy you are and only want to make you well and have you love them.’

James released his wife and pushed her away. She sat down hard on the chaise and hissed back at him: ‘You are a puppet of a man, James, and I still pull the strings. You would do well to remember that.’

He went from her bedroom to the girls rooms. With the help of their nanny he packed their school uniforms and some toys. ‘We’re going to stay the night at Keoki’s house,’ he told them. ‘Nanny is coming too. Let’s be quiet about it, though.’ Glee appeared on the girl’s faces. This was a game for them and so they tiptoed round the room and, still in their night dresses and wrapped in their robes, stole from the house.

The months following that night were busy for Syrah. James, her work, all the pressures and financial problems, the coming and going of James’s children, the excitement of studying wine so that she might become one of the two hundred odd Masters of Wine, her fight with her colleagues against the land developers in the valley, her flying work, all gave her a life that was rewarding but undeniably hectic. She often wondered what she had done with her life before Ethan’s death had changed it for her. She’d seemed to seek nothing yet remarkably everything had come to her. Though always pinched for money, at times not knowing where she would find next week’s housekeeping, Syrah was having the happiest, most fascinating time of her life. Until a cloud in the form of James’s wife cast a dark shadow.

It came without warning months after James had arrived unexpectedly with the girls and their nanny to stay the night. He had told Syrah about the scene at dinner that had convinced him his wife was now so emotionally twisted and out of control that he saw her as
not only a danger to his children but to Syrah and even to herself. He had begged Syrah that night to be cautious if ever Katherine should suddenly appear. But she never had appeared nor had she done anything to be annoying to Syrah. Like everyone else, as time passed and nothing happened, Syrah tended to think James might be exaggerating his wife’s neurotic behaviour. And then one day, as Syrah was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with rubbish from the vineyard past the entrance to Ethan’s wine cellar, there leaning against a yellow Porsche stood Katherine.

Syrah stopped a few feet away from the woman and wiped her brow with a red spotted handkerchief she retrieved from round her neck. Though she had never seen Katherine Whitehawk, instinct told her immediately who this beautiful petite woman was. Seeing her there, seeing her at all, did come as a surprise. Syrah had not imagined that Katherine was as charismatic as she appeared to be. There was, apart from her beauty, a seductive quality about her that made Syrah understand why James must have been enchanted by her. Why her daughters praised their mother even when they were victims of her wickedness. She emanated a certain honey-coated nastiness that disconcerted Syrah. It might have been merely the fact that she was confronting Syrah on her home ground and without warning. Or could it be that that beauty of hers was obviously combined with a wide streak of self-absorption. Yes, thought Syrah, she is dangerous because she uses people up and leaves them broken by her selfishness.

The two women stood eye to eye, taking the measure of each other, before Katherine broke the silence. She was icily civilised but menacing when she addressed Syrah. ‘The wife confronting the mistress … cheap novelette stuff, not worthy of my time or my emotions, so I will come straight to the point. My husband says he loves you. My girls adore you and your son. On the other hand your feuds with your brother and his wife are common gossip and most embarrassing. You have made no social inroads to assure you of some standing in this community. So I strongly suggest you sell out and leave the valley.

‘You see, I will never divorce James, you will never be any more than a mistress to him. You will however gain a reputation for alienating me from him and my children, which is in fact exactly what you’re doing. Remain here and usurp my position with my husband and family
and I guarantee I will see to it you are labelled a whore and your dirty laundry hung out for all to see. You may not care about that but your bastard son will.’

‘Your threats are wasted on me. I will never give James up. It’s enough for me to know he would like to marry me. I love him and your girls and will gladly be part of an extended family for them. Give them the love you ration out to them depending on your mood swings. My love is unconditional. Now we’ve met and we both know where we stand. There’s nothing more to say so I suggest you leave my vineyard and never attempt to return.’ Having said her piece Syrah walked to the door on the driver’s side of the Porsche and opened it.

Katherine walked up to her and said, ‘I think you should know that I hold the purse strings of a vast fortune, if that is what you’re after, so forget any money coming from James. It would also be better if you behaved more properly towards me because I know how to make James suffer and, rest assured, I
will
make him suffer for his disloyalty to me. I am clever when I am deliberately nasty and I am only nasty deliberately. I warn you, I will be that way, like plucking feathers off a humming bird, until none of you can bear it any longer. In time the end will come for you and James and you will give each other up.’