Too Close to the Sun (10 page)

"You didn't want to run into me today," she
said, "because you didn't want to have to tell me what you were
doing here."

He met her eyes. "That's true."

"You knew I wouldn't like it."

He said nothing.

"Well, you were right."

She turned away from him. Ahead of her rose
the Mayacamas range; beyond her sight, miles away, roared the
Pacific. Purple mountain majesty, above the fruited plain.

"Do you know what those mountains are
called?" she asked him.

Silence. Then, "I know the ones behind us are
the Howells."

"These are the Mayacamas. Do you know what
the tallest mountain around here is?"

"Are you having fun quizzing me, Gabby?"

"Yes, I am. Do you want to answer?"

"I can't."

"I didn't think so. It's Mount St. Helena to
the north, forty-three hundred and forty-three feet." She shook her
head, anger starting to build in her chest. Mixed with fear, spiced
with disappointment. "You don't know anything about this place. You
don't care about it. You're like those huge liquor companies that
come in here and buy up the wineries. All they care about is making
as much money as possible, as fast as possible. To hell with the
rest of us."

"Look, Gabby." He tugged on her arm, forced
her to abandon the view to look at him. "I'm not ashamed of what I
do. I work for a reputable organization with lots of good people in
it that's helped many struggling companies survive."

"But Suncrest isn't struggling! We're doing
just fine, thank you. And I don't care how so-called
reputable
your company is." She forced herself to take a
breath, though it didn't calm her in the least. "You just don't get
it. The whole valley is changing. It's not the way it used to be,
the way it was when I was growing up."

He threw out his hands. "What
is
the
same?"

"I am!" She pointed at her chest, heard the
frustration in her own voice, though she knew it was unfair to
blame him and him alone for the world shifting around her.
"
I'm
the same as I always was, and so is my family. So is my
father, who makes wine the old-fashioned way. That's the way I want
to make it, too, one bottle at a time, not off some assembly line
like it's Coca-Cola."

He shook his head. "That's not going to
happen."

"Oh, no? How can you be so sure?"

He hesitated. Then, "It's true that some of
the employees of the companies we acquire—"

"Lose their jobs." She didn't usually
interrupt, but she didn't want him to get away with some euphemism.
"They get canned. They get fired. They lose their pensions and
their health care."

"Very often a lot more of them would've
gotten fired without us, because their company would've gone
entirely out of business."

"You know what's going out of business? The
family-owned wineries. Pretty soon they're all gonna be gone, like
the mom-and-pop hardware stores. There's going to be the Wal-Mart
of wineries and that's it."

He shook his head. Maybe he was getting
angry, too. "I don't feel too sorry for those families, Gabby. They
walk away with a great deal of money. They're hardly taken
advantage of."

Gabby wanted to cry. There was no way Max
wouldn't want "a great deal of money." He'd looked so cocky
standing there next to Will, spouting off about the offer. And then
what would happen to Suncrest? She knew what a sea change occurred
when a winery changed hands, especially when the new owner was an
outsider. It would go all corporate. Suncrest would be so
different, she wouldn't even recognize it anymore.

And her father. What would happen to her
father? Maybe it was good she couldn't tell him about this. The
stress might make him have another attack. Then again, she might
explode from having to pretend she didn't know.

All she knew at that moment was that she
wanted to get away from Will Henley. How ironic, because right then
he was saying the very words that ten minutes earlier she'd been
dying to hear.

"Gabby, I don't want this to make a
difference between us. I'm really glad I met you the other night
and I want to get to know you better."

"Well, it does make a difference." She backed
away from him. Why did everything have to go wrong? First Vittorio.
Then her father getting sick. And Suncrest would never be the same
whether Max ran it or Will bought it. She'd come back to California
hoping some things at least would be the same as they always were.
What a pipe dream that had been.

And Will! She'd just met him, she shouldn't
give a damn, but still she felt a crushing disappointment. He was a
big corporate raider guy, which was about as different from her as
a man could get. They didn't see the world the same way at all.
Somehow she'd gotten the idea they did. Apparently she hadn't
learned a single thing from the catastrophe with Vittorio. She'd
been blind or a fool or both. Again.

"Gabby ..."

"No." She turned away from him and went back
the way she had come, up the drive toward the old stone winery,
which looked so vulnerable, so honey-gold and luscious in June's
clear light, so ripe for the picking. It was getting hard for her
to see it, though, it was getting blurry, and she knew her tears
were mixing with the dust on her face to make her look like the
lost soul she felt herself to be.

"Wait, Gabby, stop .. ."

He was behind her, calling, but she just
shook her head and sped up, started running, then heard the muffled
ring of the cell phone in her shorts pocket.
Damn!
—but she
had to answer, it might be somebody from the hospital.

But it wasn't. She knew that instantly. She
recognized the voice in less than a heartbeat. Maybe she'd
recognized the breathing.

"Gabriella," the caller said. "It's
Vittorio."

Early Tuesday evening, with the sun still
shining in the June sky, Max stood in his father's old office with
a pretty young thing who worked for St. Helena's best stationery
store. "I don't think you get it," he told her. "I need the
invitations done in 48 hours, not ten days. You told me you have an
in-house calligrapher, right?"

She nodded, tendrils of blond hair bobbing
around her little heart-shaped face. "We do, but—"

"Then what's the problem?"

She seemed scared to say it. Her voice got
all breathy, which Max quite liked. "But she's got other projects
ahead of yours. And June's one of our busiest times."

Very gently, Max put his arm around her
shoulders and gazed into her eyes. He watched her catch her breath.
Very sweet. "Amy, that's your name, right? Amy?"

She nodded, mute.

"Amy, what I want you to do is put this
project ahead of everybody else's. First in the line. Top of the
pile. And to make that easier for you, I'll offer to pay a little
extra. Say"—and he cocked his head, very much enjoying the feel of
her eyes on his face—"five percent." He arched his brows. "Wouldn't
you say that's generous of me?"

"Well . . ." She seemed confused. "Can I ask
my boss?"

"Yes, you may. And you tell her"—he knew it
was a woman; no man would be caught dead working in Primrose
Paperie—"that Suncrest will keep using your store if you'll do us
this one little favor this one little time." He smiled and lowered
his voice. "Now that I'm back in California, we're going to be
doing a lot of entertaining here at the winery. And I would really
like to work with you again, Amy."

Her blue eyes got even wider, and Max felt
that old familiar tightening in the groin. All that white skin, all
that curly shining blond hair, that pert little tipped-up nose: he
couldn't help but wonder how much of little Amy was exactly what
shades of blond and pink. Maybe someday he'd find out. She might be
a bit low wattage, but who said he had to talk to her for longer
than the duration of one meal?

"Now you run along," and he helped her gather
up her bulky stationery binders. "First thing tomorrow morning my
assistant will fax over what you need to know. And she'll pick
everything up late Thursday."

The moment the girl scuttled away, Max
slammed the door after her and pulled out a cigarette from his
trouser pocket. He felt like a model using nicotine as a
weight-control device. Yet he wanted to lose the France avoirdupois
but quick. And his favorite French Gauloises cigarettes were
helping.

He raised a Roman shade and cranked open a
window, then leaned out to encourage as much smoke as possible to
flow away from the office. His mother hated the smell of tobacco.
And these days, what his mother hated, Max too abhorred. He was a
perfect son—considerate, somber, attentive—all to encourage her to
go wheels-up for Paris and leave him free to run Suncrest as he
desired.

The little junket he and Miss Amy were
planning was a step in that direction.

Max half shut his eyes, watching his
cigarette smoke curl into Napa's aqua blue sky. What a perfect
scheme he had hatched. An overnight in Pebble Beach for a handful
of important men, complete with golf at Cypress Point—of course
that exclusive club counted Max as a member—exquisite lodgings, and
a fabulous meal served alongside Suncrest's most cherished
vintages. And on the guest list? Orwell Hampton from
The Wine
Watcher
and Joseph Wagner from
Wine World
, two men whose
wine scores translated into prestige and best-seller status for
those few labels it ranked most highly. Two men whose favor his
father had been above coddling, because his father believed the
wine alone should be judged. As if that worked in the real
world.

Max felt a surge of anger, which he tamped
down with a second cigarette. He would not allow either parent to
upset him—either the dead one or the live one. Though he had a
gripe with both. It annoyed him that his father had not made more
of Suncrest, made it into a bigger and more profitable enterprise.
No, Porter Winsted had left that to his son to do. And his mother!
She had truly pissed him off, not once but twice—by not handing him
control of Suncrest right after his father died and then repeating
the insult when Max came back from France.

Of course, those weren't the only things
she'd done to him. Somehow, even when he was a kid, she'd made him
feel like he was a huge burden to her. He remembered back to his
tenth birthday. Apparently it'd been too much trouble for her to
give him a party. So she made Mrs. Finchley do the entire thing,
from the invitations to the cake to the band to the magicians. She
hadn't even stayed home for it. The other kids noticed she was
nowhere around. He'd been so embarrassed.

Max inhaled a huge hit of nicotine.
Man
. And now the huge irony was that he could relieve her of
the winery, and she wouldn't let him do it. Of course he'd seen
through that little charade with Will Henley; he knew she wanted
him to believe she'd seriously consider selling. But if that were
true, wouldn't she have done it already?

The good news was that this humiliating
limbo—
Is Max running Suncrest? Is he not?
—would end soon. He
could tell that his mother's anger was dissipating. That was the
thing with actresses, of course: they never stayed with one emotion
for long. Chances were good that before long she'd jet off to
Paris, no doubt to get a good thumping from that Jean-Luc of hers.
Actually, it might be just what she needed.

Max stubbed out his cigarette on the exterior
stone windowsill, then stashed both butts in an envelope which he
would hand-carry downstairs to dispose of in the break room trash.
He sat down at his father's old desk, where a small brass clock
informed him that it was already half past six, meaning official
business hours were long over. Was it too late to make the day's
most important call?

No, he decided, and picked up the phone. Will
Henley didn't keep banker's hours. And Max wanted to get this over
with.

He would inform Will Henley that Max and Ava
Winsted did not want to sell Suncrest Vineyards, though thank you
very kindly for your interest. Max had lined up a few reasons to
feed the good investor, though none of them touched on the
truth.

Max Winsted had big plans for Suncrest that
made Will Henley's offer a hopelessly pathetic lowball.

*

It was just after seven when Will put down
the phone from his call with Max Winsted. Immediately his intercom
buzzed. "Your sister is here," his assistant murmured.

Good
. He was curious to hear what had
brought her from Denver on such short notice. He touched the
intercom button. "Please show her in, Janine, thanks."

He rose from his tufted leather chair to
approach the huge paned windows across from his desk, which
provided a sweeping view of San Francisco's Embarcadero. Chichi
restaurants vied with hulking warehouses for waterfront position,
both hiding the piers that jutted into the choppy waters of the
bay. Joggers, dog walkers, and businesspeople—locals all—made up a
small fraction of the foot traffic. Most of the pedestrians could
be easily identified as tourists by their shorts and spanking-new
FISHERMAN'S WHARF or ALCATRAZ sweatshirts. Like most nonlocals,
they had naively believed that San Francisco—being in
California—would be warm in June, and had gotten a chilly surprise.
In the distance, commuter traffic rumbled across the Bay Bridge, a
feat of design and construction that never lost its marvel status
in Will's mind despite how often he stared at it, his brain
finessing the details of whatever deal was top-drawer at the
moment.

One deal that had slid a bit from that
vaunted position was the acquisition of Suncrest Vineyards. Max
Winsted had given Will the official brush-off. What Max didn't
understand was that Will Henley was not deterred so easily.