As intently as he viewed her, she feared some of his brain synapses would start to fire. So she handed him her credit card.
Money always claimed people’s attention.
He held the silver plastic between two massive fingers and studied it, his brow wrinkled. “Don’t you want to see the room first?”
“Is this still Arianna Marino’s property?”
“Yeah. Aunt Arianna. You know her?” He handed Penelope a clipboard with a form to fill out.
She took it gratefully and wrote down her name, home address, and her car’s license plate number. “The motel gets good ratings on Yelp, and she’s cited as the reason.” Which was true. It was also true Penelope knew her, and intended to stay out of her way. “As long as the room is clean, I’ll be happy.” And it would be. She’d stayed here with her mother that whole long, lovely summer, and she knew that with Arianna Marino in charge, the place might be shabby, but it would be spotless. And quiet. And there would be no renting of the next room for an hour.
Arianna Marino was a force to be reckoned with.
Not to mention that Penelope found a measure of comfort in the memory of that time with her mother, and these days Penelope took comfort where she could.
“Okay,” Primo said. “I need a photo ID before I run this credit card.”
She passed her Oregon driver’s license over the counter.
“Penelope Caldwell,” he read aloud, then compared the two and held the license up to compare the photo with her face. “Looks good.”
She sighed in relief. Her last name had changed, but her first name was fairly uncommon. If Primo was going to remember, he would have when he looked at her license. He really wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box.
“No one else in your party?” He looked at her car, searching for another guest.
“I’m alone.” An understatement.
“Okay, I’ll put you in number fourteen. It’s far enough away from the bar to be quiet, but not so far you couldn’t yell for help if you got into trouble.”
She didn’t like that comment. “What kind of trouble would I get into?”
“Sometimes the guys at the bar misunderstand about a single woman at the motel, especially after a hard night of drinking. Don’t worry. You’ll be safe.” Primo shrugged his massive shoulders. “I do security. Aunt Arianna says it keeps me off the streets.”
Penelope relaxed. “I’m sure you do a good job, too.” She couldn’t imagine any man going up against a behemoth like Primo.
“I’ve had a few guys who thought they could take me,” he said.
“What happened?”
“They lived.”
She laughed.
He didn’t.
He handed her a key card. “The ice machine’s in here. We had to move it inside when the drunks started peeing in it. But you can always get ice—we keep the office manned at all times. No cooking in your room.” He spread a map out on the counter, then got an envelope and stuffed a bunch of slips of paper inside. “Present one of these tokens at any of these fine eateries in town”—his big finger moved from one mark to another—“and they’ll give you breakfast, a value of up to ten dollars.”
Since the room was sixty-two fifty a day, she thought that was a pretty good deal. “Thank you.”
“You can always ask us for recommendations—wineries, restaurants, activities. The Marinos have lived here for over a hundred years. We know the valley inside and out. We won’t steer you wrong.” He pointed toward his right. “Number fourteen is that way. Park in front. Welcome to Bella Terra.” In a none-too-subtle invitation to buzz off, he picked up his e-reader, flipped it on, and stared at the screen.
He was probably “reading” the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated.
“Thank you,” she said again, and backed out the door, immeasurably cheered to have the first hurdle of her visit to Bella Terra successfully leaped.
She might just pull this off after all.
Primo waited until Penelope had moved her car into the parking space in front of her room. Putting aside his e-reader and the open file of Dante’s Inferno, he picked up the chipped pink princess phone—Aunt Arianna didn’t believe in replacing perfectly working equipment, even if it was fifty years out of date—and placed the call. “Aunt Arianna, you aren’t going to believe who just pulled into the motel and booked a room.”
Chapter 2
At the Di Luca family home, the pounding of hammers and the sound of nails being wrenched from old wood echoed through the open front door screen and down the hall to the kitchen. There Sarah Di Luca placed a King Ranch casserole into the three-hundred-fifty-degree oven. The chicken dish was loaded with fat and sodium, cheese, sour cream, and canned cream soups, but the boys—her grandsons, Eli, Rafe, and Noah—loved it, and working as they were in the heat, they’d burn off the calories.
Her bodyguard, Bao Le, stuck close most of the time, but right now Bao had gone to check on the security guards who patrolled the perimeter of the Di Luca property.
Her granddaughters-in-law, Brooke and Chloë, had left to pick up a flat of strawberries for shortcake.
So Sarah was alone in the kitchen, and these days that was a rare thing.
Wiping her hands on her apron, Sarah listened as, with well-controlled violence, the boys—she never thought of them as her grandsons—tore apart her front steps. But she heard no voices, no banter, and they worked with an unceasing urgency, as if the stairs that had stood with the house for a hundred and twenty years needed to be demolished now.
The boys said the steps were too steep for her. Which wasn’t true. She’d lived sixty years in this house, since she’d come here as Anthony Di Luca’s bride, and she’d never once fallen down those stairs.
But ever since she’d been attacked here in her home, the boys had been anxious, solicitous, and bossy. That didn’t surprise her; in her life she’d learned a lot of things about men, and number one was, when they were scared for someone they loved, they didn’t say they were scared. They didn’t express affection. They didn’t give solicitous cards or boxes of candy.
Darn it.
Instead, they fixed things. Things like the stairs. Her security system. They had even provided her with a nurse and a bodyguard. Putting things to rights made men feel better. Made them feel in control.
Which was great for them, but she could stand only so much of their fixing before she wanted to knock their stubborn heads together. Because they hadn’t solved anything. Instead… now they were angry at each other. Furious.
She hated that.
It wasn’t as if they had never fought before. They’d grown up together (mostly) in her house (mostly) and had always made Sarah’s life interesting. But when they were boys, their fights had resulted in scrapes and bruises and the occasional black eye. This time… this time they nursed a corrosive fury that, if not resolved, could dissolve the sense of family and affection they felt for one another.
Taking three bottles of water from the refrigerator, she walked down the hall, past the second bedroom and the bathroom and the dining room, past her bedroom and the front room. She bumped her hip against the screen door. It swung open, and she walked out onto the high front porch.
The house was old, built at the turn of the twentieth century by Ippolito Di Luca for his bride. At the time, the farmhouse had been the height of style and comfort, with two bedrooms, a spacious kitchen, and even an indoor toilet. By modern standards, it was tiny and worn, but every time Sarah stepped out onto her porch, she knew she had the best view in the world.
Her home sat perched high on the south end of long, narrow Bella Valley, and from here the vista spread out in a glorious, constantly changing array of browns and greens and golds. With a glance, she could see the lush bottomlands and the silver trickle of the Bella River that had, through thousands of years, carved the basin.
Outside of the town of Bella Terra, swaths of orchards rustled with leaves that protected the burgeoning fruit from C
alifornia’s sun, and long stripes of grapevines rose from the valley and crested the neighboring hills. Beyond that, the mountains cradled the valley in rocky arms, protecting it from the harshest ocean storms and the blustery winds that swept down the Sierras.
Throughout Sarah’s eighty years, she’d watched as Bella Terra grew from a tiny country town to a bustling urban area; right now, she could almost hear summer’s influx of tourists buzzing like bees as they set out from the hive to tour the vineyards and sip their finest wines.
Much of the land she could see was Di Luca land. The family was a kind of nobility here, first among the Italian families to realize the potential of the soil and take it as their own. Sarah supposed it wasn’t a gracious thing to exult in the Di Luca possessions. But she did. She loved it all: their acres of grapes, their illustrious winery, their luxurious resort.… More than all of it put together, though, she loved her grandsons.
She stood staring down at Rafe and Eli, at the tops of their heads, hair matted with sweat and exertion. Rafe attacked her steps with a pry bar. Eli, hampered by one cast on his arm and another on his foot, tossed the splintered wood into a pile.
Noah was nowhere in sight.
She viewed the two oldest sternly. “Where’s Noah? Did he leave?”
Rafe and Eli scowled, lowered their tools, and reached up to her for their water.
She held the bottles out of their reach. “Well?”
Eli wiped his forehead on the arm of his blue denim shirt. “We buried him under the hydrangea.”
Sarah wouldn’t have minded the sarcasm… but beneath his mockery lay that wealth of anger. “Where is he?” she insisted.
Rafe raised his voice and called, “Hey, Noah! Come out; Nonna thinks we’ve killed you.”
Using the tall hole where the stairs used to be, Noah ducked out from beneath the porch. He grinned up at her, a half-cocked grin she recognized from his childhood. Whenever he looked like that, it meant he was in trouble and hoped to charm his way out.
She didn’t think he could charm his way out of this.
“I’m okay. But I need to get you some mouse killer for under the porch. When one ran across my foot, I jumped so hard I about knocked myself out.” He rubbed his head.
His brothers laughed, and Rafe smacked him on the place he rubbed.
Noah socked Rafe in the belly, and for good measure smacked Eli on his fit arm.
For a moment, things were almost normal.
Then the laughter died and Eli and Rafe stepped away from Noah as if he sported a suspicious rash.
“Drink some water,” Sarah said hastily. “I don’t want you boys getting dehydrated.” She handed out the bottles, and though she was upset with her grandsons… pride swelled in her.
Even covered with dirt and sweaty with exertion, they were long limbed and healthy, filling out their T-shirts and jeans in a way that made young women watch with profound appreciation.
Of course, how could these boys be anything but attractive? Their father was a movie star, as charismatic as the full moon and with just about as much parenting sense. Gavino, her only son, careless, unfaithful, selfish—and her greatest failure. But he’d produced sons, and these boys were everything for which a grandmother could hope.
Eliseo—Eli—was the oldest, thirty-four, with the Di Luca family’s dark hair and his beauty-queen mother’s big brown eyes. He was tall and lanky, muscled by long hours working in the vineyards. At the same time, he had the rare and exquisite sensibilities of a man who produced wines that tasted of green grass and spring, of red ripe berries and summer, of warm spice and autumn. He was a genius with the grapes, and for that, he was venerated, adored, and feted.
Luckily for him, he’d recently met the love of his life, and Chloë had cut him down to size and made him human again.
Raffaelo—Rafe—was thirty-one, with dark hair and electric blue eyes. His mother, one of the world’s foremost Italian movie stars, and his father had created a young man so handsome that before the age of ten, he’d been a star himself. But he’d hated the phony emotions that his parents portrayed so convincingly, and as an adult he’d become a real hero. He’d joined the military, then created his own security firm and done everything he could to protect Sarah and everyone he loved from harm.
But he had almost lost the woman he loved. He’d almost lost Brooke. That had broken his false pride, given him new perspective, and now he treasured his wife in a way that made Sarah proud.
If only… if only she understood what madness drove Noah.
Genoah—Noah—at twenty-eight was the youngest of Gavino’s boys. His dark hair was his father’s. His guileless green eyes… Sarah didn’t know whom he’d inherited his eyes from. She didn’t know his mother. She’d never met his mother. As far as she knew, no one had ever met Noah’s mother—except Gavino, of course. Sarah had never doubted Noah was Gavino’s child; he possessed the arrogant Di Luca bone structure as well as the Di Luca allure.
When Gavino brought Noah home and placed the red-faced, squalling baby in Sarah’s arms, Gavino had no longer sported his usual bland, uncaring, movie-star charm. He had been angry, embarrassed, and defiant, and he had refused to say how he came by the child—and that was unlike the Gavino she knew, who enjoyed hugely public marriages and affairs with a parade of gorgeous women.
Yet for all that Sarah wanted to unravel the mystery of Noah’s parentage, to raise the child without interference from his parents was easy. Noah had been the golden child, raised in Nonna’s home, a loving, happy, laughing boy. She and her beloved Anthony had been his parents, and she loved Noah so much, her second-chance child, the one she hoped to raise to be a good man.
She had never expressed her hopes to him; looking back, she was sure she had never burdened him with her expectations.
But ten years ago, after Noah graduated from high school, he’d taken a year off to travel the world, and when he came home… she no longer recognized him as the boy she had known. Something dreadful had happened, and no matter how carefully she questioned, he refused to talk. He shrugged and smiled and told her he was fine, and went to college, and excelled in his studies.
Of course, Rafe and Eli were oblivious.
They were such guys, Noah’s older siblings. When Sarah mourned the changes in Noah’s behavior, they patted her shoulder and told her their little brother had become a man. They’d believed it was cool that Noah’s personality had changed, that he’d suddenly become reckless, riding his motorcycle up steep mountain slopes in Colorado, breaking bones in international karate tournaments, handling every kind of firearm with ease… as if his life depended on it.…
Eli and Rafe had been oblivious, as all men were, to emotions and nuances, and the fact that Noah behaved like someone who feared nothing, not even death… and he could no longer quite meet anyone’s eyes. For a decade, she had feared for her youngest grandson.
It had taken this crisis to peel back the truth. Not the whole truth, though, merely a single layer of truth. When Sarah’s nurse had been murdered, Noah had said in a burst of ill-considered grief and passion, “I’m right in the middle of this. These people… they’re ruthless, and they are going to find Massimo’s pink diamonds any way they can.”
Too late, he had reined himself in.
Now Rafe and Eli, Brooke and Chloë—and Sarah—wanted to know it all. Needed to know it all. They had worked out that there could be priceless stolen diamonds hidden in the family’s oldest, missing bottle of wine, but who were these people he spoke of?
Yet Noah refused to talk. He shook his head and said he’d take care of it, and nothing they had said had changed his mind.
Eli and Rafe were furious that they’d been deceived, that their brother knew something he wouldn’t divulge, while if they’d been willing to simply open their eyes, they would have known, as Sarah did, that something horrific had happened ten years ago, something that changed Noah, hurt him, made him afraid.…
Sarah’s unbidden tears splashed
on the dusty white-painted railing.
She hastily wiped them away.
How had everything gone so bad so quickly?
Chapter 3
Noah didn’t need the furious glares of his brothers to know the truth.
He was the biggest shit in the world.
Nonna was crying. He’d made Nonna cry.
And they were going to have to do something about it.
Noah vaulted onto the porch first, then Rafe; then they both helped Eli heave himself and his casts up and over.
Nonna watched them, tears welling in her big brown eyes, splashing down her wrinkled, tanned cheeks, painful sobs racking her shoulders.
Noah felt sick with guilt.
Maybe the other guys did, too, because without discussion or discord, they put their arms around her, surrounding her with love. Her boys. She called them her boys, and they owed her more than they had given her lately.
Eli was the oldest, so he said, “Nonna, it’s okay. We’ll get this mess figured out somehow.”
That didn’t help at all. Instead, she put her head on his chest and cried harder.
Nonna wasn’t a woman given to outbursts of emotion. She was strong, had been strong all her life. But there had been too much turmoil lately.
She’d been attacked by a robber in her own home.
She’d been hospitalized with a concussion and a broken arm.
She’d come home with Bao, her bodyguard, and Olivia, her nurse, and the three of them had formed a tight and loving circle… or so it had seemed.
She’d been betrayed. His sweet, loving grandmother had been deceived by someone she trusted.
In between her sobs, Nonna said, “Poor, stupid, dishonest Olivia. It’s… my fault… she’s dead.”
“What?” Rafe shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d heard her correctly. “How is it your fault?”
Betrayal Page 2