Eli looked helplessly at Chloë. He seemed bewildered by his grandmother’s reaction.
“Why are you grief-stricken, Sarah?” Chloë gently asked. “If you never met Massimo, why do you care?”
Eli moved back to give Sarah space to speak.
“I was born into the Depression, and I vividly remember those years—the poverty, the struggle to survive, how everything was gray and hopeless. My father told stories, and in those stories, Massimo sounded like Robin Hood, disappearing to rob from the rich and bring back to us, the poor. Massimo made good wines when it was illegal. He was hope, and when he disappeared and I asked my father where he had gone, my father said he had taken his fortune and retired to the Old Country. There, in my mind, he was eternally alive.” Sarah brushed a tear off her wrinkled cheek. “Now you say he was cruelly murdered. For me, it’s the death of a legend.”
The breeze whispered through the wisteria leaves and made the vine’s purple blossoms twist and dance, and the first fading petals whirled in circles as they slowly descended to earth.
Sad and thoughtful, Sarah watched them. “But I’m a foolish old woman to mourn for a man who died before I was born.”
“Not so foolish. Someone should mourn for that man. Why not you? And me?” Chloë shared a smile with Sarah, all the more painful for its poignancy.
“Thank you, dear. You’re very sweet.” Sarah stood. “Shall we go in?”
Chloë rose and began to collect the glasses and cookies and return them to the basket.
Sarah started toward the house.
Eli gave Chloë a meaningful glance and a push.
Chloë hurried after Sarah, took her arm, and walked with her.
Eli followed. Although he made no sound, Chloë knew he was close behind, watching them, listening to every word . . . and hanging back from his beloved grandmother’s wrenching emotion.
Not that most guys liked tears. Chloë knew they didn’t. But he was so openly affectionate to his grandmother, and so visibly afraid of her tears. It was as if he thought they were catching, and yet . . . she couldn’t imagine him ever crying.
Of course, two days ago she couldn’t imagine him ever smiling. But on rare occasions he did, and that made those occasions worth celebrating.
“Have you figured out why Massimo was tortured?” Sarah asked.
Chloë waited for Eli to answer, and when he didn’t, she said, “Not yet.”
“Or who did it?” Sarah pressed Chloë’s hand.
“I wish we knew.” That was completely honest, anyway.
“I wonder if it had something to do with Anthony’s bottle of wine,” Sarah said.
Chloë would almost bet on it. Again her suspicions trembled on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed them and asked, “Can I see the wine cellar?”
Sarah laughed a little shakily. “Of course. Everyone else has tried to find the bottle. You might as well take a stab at it.” She glanced behind them. “Take her down, Eli, and be careful on the stairs. They’re steep and narrow.”
“Like these.” Eli stepped up to hold her arm as they climbed the front porch steps, the three of them together. “We’ve got to replace them, Nonna.”
“Rafe has already said he’s going to do it,” Sarah said.
“Let me know when and I’ll come to help.” A few beats, and Eli said, “I thought Rafe and Brooke were leaving for Sweden soon?”
Sarah stopped in front of her door. “They’ve postponed their trip.”
“Really?” As if astonished, Eli shook his head slightly. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said.
But Chloë didn’t believe it. Not the way Sarah’s eyes were twinkling.
They walked through the hallway straight back to the kitchen. There Bao and Olivia were chatting quietly as they finished the luncheon cleanup.
Olivia took one look at Sarah’s puffy eyes. “How about a nap?”
Sarah sighed and said to Chloë, “When you are eighty, dear, do try to remain healthy, or all of a sudden your life is not your own.” But she kissed Chloë’s cheek, and Eli’s, and, with Olivia at her side, she started toward her bedroom at the front of the house.
Chloë watched until she was out of sight. “What happened to her?”
“Joseph Bianchin sent a man to attack her here in the house. She received a broken arm and a concussion.”
“You’re joking.” Chloë turned to him in a fury. “The baby who got the rattle? The rat who pillaged your grandparents’ wedding reception and tried to kill your grandfather? He’s still alive and after the elusive bottle?”
Eli put a comforting hand on Chloë’s shoulder. “Nonna’s fine, but for the moment we’re keeping Olivia around to care for her, and Bao to protect her.”
Bao leaned against the counter, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Bianchin broadcast enough information about that bottle to bring every repeat offender in the Western states down on our heads, and yet for the last few weeks there’s been no sign of anyone on the property. I can’t decide what it means, but I am uneasy every minute.”
Chloë looked at her in a different light and realized . . . the young woman was smiling, relaxed, but she moved with the economy of motion and the intent directness of a martial artist, and that constant pacing from window to window . . . She wasn’t nervous. She wasn’t watching the flowers bloom. Bao was guarding Sarah and her home.
What had started out yesterday as a fun excursion to see a historic still became abruptly real and perilous. “Is Joseph Bianchin in jail for his crime?”
“We caught the guy he hired, but Bianchin covered his tracks too well for us to get him.” Eli clearly despised the old man. “But he as good as told Nonna he was guilty, and for that, my brother Noah gave him reason to be afraid. Bianchin’s left town, and the fervor has died down . . . it seems. . . .”
“It’s too good to be true,” Bao said dourly.
“Honestly?” Chloë didn’t believe the mystery couldn’t be solved. “No one can find this bottle of wine?”
“I’ve searched, too.” Bao gestured around the kitchen.
“We’ll go down in the cellar and you can try. Maybe a fresh pair of eyes will see what we can’t.” Eli opened the narrow wooden door next to the counter. “The stairway is truly steep, so let me go first.”
The stairway was nothing but treads and risers strung together and painted white, and Chloë followed him down into the cool darkness, clutching the banister and wishing it weren’t quite so precipitous.
Windows at ground level provided feeble illumination: The cellar was a generously sized room, twenty by thirty, with a high ceiling and rough cement walls. It smelled earthy and rich, like an orchard where the fruit ripened in the sun.
Eli reached the bottom and flipped a switch, and a fluorescent fixture flared to life. “This is nothing but an old basement dug when they built the house. The Di Lucas have used it to store their vegetables and their wine for a hundred and twenty years.”
“No matter how they look, every cellar feels the same, doesn’t it?” She walked over to the wall, pressed her hand against the chilly concrete, and felt the weight of the earth pressing back.
Most of the long wall was covered by a wine rack: well made, but rustic and unfinished. Bottles old and new filled the slots, and that accounted for the scent of fruit; wine had an intoxicating odor of its own. Dust coated the floor, and, as Chloë watched, more dust sifted down from the ceiling. She looked up, wanting to see a wine bottle dangling up there by the pipes; there was nothing but sturdy oak beams and looping electric cables.
“It has appeared basically the same ever since I can remember, except now a precious bottle of wine has gone missing, and that makes me actually scrutinize it. We—my brothers and I—have tapped on the walls. We’ve searched in the window wells. We’ve tried to slide the wine rack aside in hopes there is a hidden cubbyhole. We’ve dusted every bottle and read the label and the markings.” He shook his head. “But I’m not in an Agatha
Christie novel, and whatever secrets this cellar holds . . . it keeps.”
They were alone, with no one to hear their conversation, and finally Chloë was able to voice her suspicions. “You think Massimo hid the Beating Heart in your grandfather’s bottle of wine, don’t you?”
He shot the question right back at her. “Don’t you?” “If what we read and surmise is correct, he made a habit of stealing valuables, probably on commission, and then picked up a few jewels on the side and smuggled them back into the United States. In 1930, it couldn’t have been difficult. Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in what?” She couldn’t remember.
“Nineteen twenty-seven,” Eli said.
“So Massimo was making the crossing on a ship. There were customs, but no X-rays. A clever thief could hide jewels in his shoes or the lining of his suitcase, or he could swallow them. He’d come back to his home in Bella Valley, bottle his wine with the gems inside, and give them as gifts to newborn sons with the expectation that the wine would be put away out of sight until the child’s twenty-first birthday.” She pressed her hand a little harder against the wall, giving birth to the half-formed thoughts in her mind. “When an appropriate amount of time had passed, he retrieved the bottles and replaced them with bottles without jewels. The families got what they expected—a good bottle of wine for the birth of their sons—and Massimo escaped suspicion until he was able to sell the gems.”
“Foolproof,” Eli said. “Except when it wasn’t.”
“Somebody somewhere figured out he was the diamond thief. Somebody caught him and tortured him to death trying to find out where he’d hidden the gems.” The cellar grew suddenly colder. “But he didn’t confess.”
Without pause, Eli followed her logic. “Because if he had confessed, there would have been a wave of crime as the men who wanted those diamonds acquired every bottle of Massimo’s wine by whatever means necessary.”
“Massimo was your grandmother’s Robin Hood to the very end—and Joseph Bianchin is a troll.” Chloë had never even met the man and she hated his guts.
“The question is—why now? Why after all these years is Joseph Bianchin after that bottle of wine?” Eli met her eyes across the width of the cellar. “Because he’s an old man and this is his last chance?”
“Or because he figured out there were diamonds in the bottle?” The cellar air was cool in her lungs, and she felt so alive she was almost sparkling.
“We know he collects Massimo’s wines and has for years.”
“So he’s the one with more money than sense,” she said.
Eli half smiled, and nodded. “Yes, he’s the one. As I said, he’s old. He’s eighty-one. He’s had some health problems. So let’s assume when he gets a bottle, he drinks it.”
“In one bottle, he found a stash of diamonds. Not the big diamond. But diamonds of enough value to pique his interest.” Eli and Chloë knocked ideas back and forth like tennis balls, and with such a grim subject, she hated to say she was having fun . . . but she was.
“More important—they were pink diamonds, and those are rare enough to give him the lead he needs,” Eli added.
“Sure. If I can do the research and find out about the Beating Heart, so could he—and he did. Once he figured out the way Massimo worked and what was probably in Massimo’s last bottle of wine—the bottle of wine Massimo gave to the Di Lucas as a baby gift—Bianchin wanted it.” She waved her arms in emphasis. “He’ll stop at nothing to get it!” She felt like Sherlock Holmes. Or maybe Watson, since she really couldn’t imagine Eli playing the supporting role.
“I think we’ve got it.” He sounded quietly appreciative, and looked at her as if he thought she were a miracle.
The only other person who had ever looked at her that way was her father. To him, as his only child, she was.
Down here in the cellar, when she was alone with Eli, the atmosphere swirled with currents of mystery and desire, and she didn’t know whether to fling herself at him or run away.
She settled for a joke. “Have I got chocolate-chip cookie crumbs on my face?”
He smiled, slow and warm, catching her gaze with his . . . and she couldn’t look away. “You look beautiful, and I was thinking . . . having my own private mystery writer to figure out all the angles is an immense amount of help.”
“Not if I can’t help you find the bottle of wine.” But his compliment pleased her a little too much.
He paced toward her. “I thought when you came to Bella Terra you’d be a moody, spoiled princess whose muse needed her own room.”
Chloë laughed nervously and backed toward the stairs. “No. No muse. The bitch never sticks around when I need her.”
“Instead you’re strong and smart.” He stalked after her. “You smell like ripe berries and warm spice.”
She laughed again, all too aware that they were alone, her halter dress was short, and his brown eyes flattered and desired. “Isn’t that the way you describe wine?”
“Yes, and I want to drink you in. Chloë . . .”
“You guys!” Olivia called down the stairs. “Nonna wants to see you before you leave.”
The mood broke.
For one moment, Chloë saw naked frustration on his face.
He looked down, took a breath, looked up. “All right, we’ll be right up!” he called. In a voice both calm and reasonable, he said, “It’s probably for the best. It was getting a little heated in here.”
“We can’t have that. Bad for the wine.” Bad for her, too, to get so involved with a man she barely knew, a man who made her back away from that danger he projected.
But she was still bitterly disappointed to leave that heated moment.
She started up the stairs.
The trouble was . . . she’d begun to be more interested in the enigmatic Eli Di Luca than in the baffling bottle of wine.
Behind that calm facade, what secrets did he hide?
Chapter 20
Eli watched Chloë climb the cellar stairs ahead of him.
He liked this sundress. It bared her back and arms, displaying long, sleek muscles and a lithe, catlike movement that made him want to pet her. Her legs were good, too, really good, and in that skirt and from this angle, he could see a lot of them.
He really, really did like this sundress.
He probably should feel ashamed of himself for leering at an unsuspecting woman. In normal circumstances, he was sure he would.
But these were not normal circumstances. He was going to marry Chloë.
Besides, she wasn’t what he expected. When Conte had proposed the deal, Eli had thought he’d be stuck with a girl without personality or wisdom, someone whose primary ambition in life was to perch on the back of a Jaguar convertible while Eli drove her through the center of town during the annual Wine Crush Parade.
Instead, she drove a blue Ford Focus.
’Nuff said.
Olivia waited for them in the kitchen. “She insisted on staying awake to say good-bye.”
“We’ll get in and get out, I promise. Thanks, Olivia!” Chloë flashed a happy smile and hurried down the hall.
Okay. There was that, too.
Chloë adored his grandmother.
With every new moment, Chloë created layers of interest in him. First she was fascinated by his tales of early Bella Valley. It was as if she felt his passion for this place. Then she mourned over Massimo as if he were a relative, and thirsted to avenge his death. Then she showed the complexity of her mind as she puzzled through the mystery of why Massimo was murdered.
Tamosso Conte was right: His daughter was smart. And while Eli knew a lot of guys didn’t admire a woman with brains, Eli had lived with and admired his grandmother—and she was the smartest woman he knew.
“Children, come in.” Nonna waved them into her bedroom.
Chloë rushed to the bedside.
He followed.
Nonna was propped up on her pillows, and Chloë leaned in to hug her. “Thank you for sharing so much of your
family’s history with me. I’ve enjoyed every minute of today.”
“You will come back to visit?” Nonna put her hands on Chloë’s cheeks and smiled into her face.
“I would love to, and I’ll bring you the first copy of my next book. If not for you and Eli, I’m afraid I would never have had the inspiration to finish it. As it is now, I can honestly say second-book syndrome is nonsense.” Over her shoulder, Chloë flashed him a mischievous smile.
“I’ll hold you to that promise,” Nonna said.
Yes, Chloë adored Nonna, and Nonna returned her affection.
Not that Nonna was ever critical, but she could spot a phony a mile away, and through every moment of lunch and their talk afterward, she had been listening to Chloë as if weighing the young woman’s words . . . and now she genuinely liked her.
As he moved to Nonna’s side, Chloë patted his shoulder. “Sarah, you have a fabulous, caring grandson. You must be so proud.”
“I am proud of all my grandsons.” Nonna took Eli’s hand. “I think this one is going to turn out all right.”
As Eli leaned over and kissed her cheek, she murmured, “Promise you’ll bring her back.”
“I promise.”
This marriage of convenience, as Conte so quaintly called it, was exactly that—convenient. Eli didn’t have time to find a wife; he’d had one delivered to him on a platter.
But conscience jabbed him, cold and sharp. It wasn’t right.
He could not do this. He couldn’t marry Chloë for money.
He couldn’t stand the thought of what his grandmother would say if she knew.
No matter how much he tried to ignore them, his own morals wouldn’t allow it.
Yet he had no choice. . . .
But he did.
He could take the route his pride had refused—he could tell his brothers the truth. He would tell them he got too busy and trusted the wrong man.
Noah would point out that he’d been saying for years that Eli tried to do too much.
Rafe would agree, and add that he’d told Eli to leave the growing of the grapes to Royson and concentrate on his winemaking.
They would both ask—in suggestive tones—whether Eli was trying to compensate for some small deficiency.
Revenge at Bella Terra Page 12