I toss aside my bouquet and help Sally Anne eject herself from the Rolls, no easy task given her heft, her bridal gown’s voluminous sateen, and the fact that neither one of us can see more than two inches in front of her face.
But lack of visibility doesn’t prevent Sally Anne from stomping up the aisle once she’s cleared the vehicle. “Where the hell is my wedding consultant?” she hollers. “And what’s she using for brains? We could all choke to death in here!”
I watch Frank emerge from the fog, waving his arms in front of him as if he’s cutting a swath through the stuff. He tries to calm Sally Anne by taking hold of her arms but she’ll have none of it.
“I was promised perfection and this sure as shootin’ isn’t it!” Sally Anne pushes past Frank to go further up the aisle. I’m right behind her. I am her bridesmaid after all, and my duty is to serve.
I would say that the main goal has been achieved. Someone did turn off the fog machine and the air is starting to clear. I can—sort of—see again.
Sally Anne is about to accost the reverend when she trips over something on the carpet. I squint a few seconds and then realize that a man—in fact, the best man—is sprawled there, face down.
“Just what I need!” Sally Anne yells down at him. “What did you do last night, Danny, go on a bender?”
“Sally Anne!” I grab her arm to pull her back. “Maybe he fainted because he couldn’t breathe.”
I kneel down and gently roll Danny over. It rapidly becomes clear that he may not be breathing but it’s not because he fainted. The bloodstain blooming on his chest is my first clue that it wasn’t pink smoke that did in Danny Richter.
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Continue reading for an excerpt from Diana’s novel Too Close to the Sun, a selection of the Doubleday Book Club that Romance Reviews Today called “an absolute must-buy for everyone.”
TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN
“This is one of those books that you don’t want to put down …” Romantic Times
A once-in-a-lifetime romance that blossoms beneath Napa Valley’s sizzling sun …
Winemaker Gabby DeLuca is back from Italy, nursing a broken heart and doing her best to create wonderful vintages she can be proud of. Then hotshot financier Will Henley appears on the scene, prowling for an acquisition. Will could be big trouble—for Gabby’s heart as well as her winery. Or his ingenious proposition might just prove to be the best deal of both their lives.
REVIEWS: “Wit, charm, and undeniable chemistry drive the red-hot romance between Gabby and Will … Ms. Dempsey delivers another compelling story which is sure to solidify her place as one of today’s hottest authors!” Melissa Fowler, The Romance Readers Connection
Chapter 1
Gabriella DeLuca stood alone at dawn among the grapevines. To her east, beyond a stand of towering oak and eucalyptus, the sun poked above Napa's Howell Mountains, struggling to banish the fog that on this June morning hung heavy on the valley floor. Within hours the sun would win the battle, bathing the earth in hot light and pushing the grapes, olives, and walnuts toward harvest.
She stared at the small blaze she'd carefully set beside the steepest hillside vineyard owned by her employer, Suncrest Vineyards. In one hand she clutched a photo, in the other a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses Vittorio had given her, in another country, in another life. The roses were dry now with age, and brittle to the touch. Without allowing herself another thought—for already she had given this thought enough—she tossed the desiccated blooms into the fire.
Whoosh! The flames shot high into the air as they greedily consumed their prize. Gabby watched the last petals fall into ash.
"Vittorio Mantucci," she whispered, "arrivederci …" She closed her eyes, mentally saying good-bye to the only man she had ever loved. Whom she'd also lost, unfortunately, meaning she had a grim record of oh-for-one in the amore department. But this morning—one year to the day after Vittorio had pulled the heart out of her chest and stomped on it with his Gucci loafer—wasn't about heartache or fury or regret. The last 364 had been about those. This morning was about ending it, for now and forever.
Gabby lowered her gaze to the glossy five-by-seven Kodachrome in her left hand. It showed her and the former love of her life in brilliant Chianti sunshine, grinning idiotically, him dark and gorgeous, her blond and unbelievably happy, vineyards and olive trees and promise all around them.
She remembered that day clearly. They had had a picnic. They had sparred over the relative merits of Tuscany versus Lombardy, never agreeing whether his family province won out over her ancestral home. They had made hasty but wonderful love on a gingham blanket, then thrown on their clothes so Vittorio could snap a photo, setting his self-timed camera on a tree stump before scampering back toward her to get in place on time.
It took great force of will for Gabby to toss the photo on the conflagration. But toss it she did—then she watched it disappear, edges first, till finally Vittorio's face caved in on itself and melted away. She stared at the space where it had been for some time, then threw in a whole packet of photos. Those took longer to be annihilated but eventually they were. That seemed to prove something.
"How's that for an Italian exorcism?" she murmured, then had to laugh, choking on her tears, both regretting the past and not regretting it, wondering if ever again she could think the name Vittorio Mantucci without a fresh gash in her heart.
So she'd traded Italy's wine country for California's. Tuscany for Napa Valley. Not such a bad deal, really. It was home, she loved it, her whole family was nearby. What did she have to complain about? And she'd traded Vittorio for—who? Someone wonderful, she told herself. Someone American like her, who she'd understand through and through. Someone who'd stick by her even if everybody in his family howled objections.
Or—and this poked a hole rather quickly in her romantic bravado—maybe she'd traded Vittorio for nobody.
Oh, and don't forget. She hadn't traded Vittorio. He'd traded her.
Gabby flopped down onto the vineyard dirt and eyed what remained of her exorcism stash. All of it reminded her in one way or another of her three years interning for the Mantucci family winery. There was the one-pound box of fettuccine, Vittorio's most admired noodle, and a box of wine. Yes, a box of wine, because Gabby knew there was no greater insult to her former lover's memory than wine so cheap it was packaged like fruit punch.
She was just feeding a fistful of fettuccine into the fire when she heard a shocked male voice call out behind her.
"Gabby, what in God's name are you doing?"
It was Felix Rodriguez. He walked toward her, a heavyset mustachioed man who'd been vineyard manager at Suncrest as long as her father had been winemaker, meaning ever since Gabby was five years old. Like her, Felix wore jeans and work boots. Unlike her, he sported a helmet similar to the kind coal miners wear, with a sort of flashlight mounted on the forehead. Perfect for keeping one's hands free while traipsing around vineyards. To put out rogue fires, for example.
"It's not in God's name, Felix," Gabby told him. "It's in Vittorio Mantucci's."
Felix's eyes flew open at the accursed name, which all DeLucas, and Felix by extension, were banned from uttering. Then he looked at her stash, and his eyes widened further. "You're barbecuing spaghetti?"
"It's pasta, Felix, pasta. And I'm not barbecuing it. I'm just burning it." She sighed. This was a hard ritual to explain.
No doubt Felix would lump in this lunacy with her other inexplicable behavior. Like renting a house far up-valley and a difficult half-mile drive up an unlit, unpaved road. It screamed isolation, and she knew what everybody thought about that. She wants to be alone because of that Italian boy who broke her heart. The heads shook; the tongues clucked. Sometimes it seemed that the old families like hers majored in g
rapes and minored in gossip. She should have known he'd marry one of his own.
She sort of had known, but had ignored it. And she rented the house not only because nobody lived nearby but also because it allowed her to live right next to vineyards. Which unlike Italian lovers had a certain predictable, soothing rhythm to them.
Felix harrumphed. "You shouldn't have come in so early today. You should be home sleeping so you're not tired for Mrs. Winsted's party tonight."
"God, Felix, don't remind me." She tossed in the rest of the fettuccine, box and all. "Why anyone would celebrate Max Winsted coming back to Napa Valley is beyond me."
"She's his mother."
"All I can say is, Ava Winsted proves that a mother's love is blind." It wasn't often that Mrs. W drove Gabby crazy, but she was doing so now. Hand over Suncrest to that nincompoop son of hers? "What is she thinking, Felix? He's going to kill this place. He's going to come in here and run it in whatever asinine way he wants to and he's going to kill it."
Felix wouldn't respond to that. He would keep his mouth shut and his head down and not risk his job, which was probably what Gabby should do, too.
She shook her head. That was the problem with working for a family-owned winery. If the family ran out of sensible people to run the place, the winery got screwed. And all the employees along with it.
"Maybe Max learned something in France," Felix offered.
"All Max Winsted learned in France is how to say 'Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?' in three different levels of politeness," she shot back. But Felix didn't seem to get the reference.
Gabby poked a stick at her fire. It was all so frustrating. And scary. She'd come back to California to pick up the threads of her life, grow into the winemaker she knew she could be, maybe even recover enough to love again. After losing Vittorio, all she wanted was the bulwark stability of her family and of Suncrest, both steady, unchanging, the Rocks of Gibraltar of her emotional landscape. The DeLucas were fine, thank God, but the winery? With Max Winsted taking over, all bets were off.
She'd known him since she was five years old and he was a newborn, and pretty much from the day he was out of diapers he was a jerk. He got more smug and self-satisfied every year. And the biggest irony of all was that even though he was born to Suncrest and the employees only worked there, sometimes she wondered if he loved it as much as they did.
He sure didn't act like it.
Gabby felt Felix's eyes on her, and she forced a smile. "I'm sorry, Felix, I shouldn't be so negative." She knew she shouldn't, since as assistant winemaker she was fairly high up the management ranks and should be rallying the other employees around their new boss. "It's just hard for me to imagine working for that . . . buffoon."
He stifled a smile, then his face turned somber. "I know you love this place, Gabby."
She stared at him. "You do, too, Felix."
He sighed, his eyes skidding to the fire. "We all do."
A wind came through, riffling the flames. Gabby shivered, half wishing the sun would halt its rise, the day would never dawn, the homecoming party would never happen. But she'd learned the hard way that wishing didn't always make things so.
***
Will Henley Jr. was proud of himself. He'd positively blasted through his morning ritual. Once the alarm at his San Francisco bedside blared at the usual 4:30 AM, he did a killer half hour on the rowing machine—a holdover from his years as stroke for Dartmouth's lightweight crew—then noted the workout's intensity and duration on a chart. He scarfed a few bowls of whole-grain cereal, showered, shaved, and selected a pin-striped suit and lightly starched French-cuff dress shirt from his custom collection. Then he sped his silver BMW Z8 the two fog-bound miles from his Pacific Heights Victorian to his corner office in a refurbished redbrick warehouse on the Embarcadero.
That put him at his mahogany desk at 5:45 AM, a ball-busting early arrival even by the type A standards of Will's employer, the private-equity firm General Pacific Group, known among the business and financial cognoscenti as GPG.
Will settled in to sip the low-fat latte he'd had sent over from the building's dining room. Strewn across his desk and file cabinets and handcrafted bookshelves were dozens of Lucite cubes, each representing a GPG deal he'd helped transact. On the north wall hung a flat-panel screen flashing real-time stock quotes from Europe and the closing numbers from Asia. Wall Street wouldn't begin trading for nearly another hour.
But Will's first task that morning had nothing to do with financial markets or private-equity transactions. He lifted his phone and punched in a Denver number he knew by heart. And even though a voice-mail announcement came on saying Rocky Mountain Flowers wasn't yet open for business, Will began speaking at the tone.
"Hey, Benny, pick up." He waited a beat. "Pick up, Benny. I know you're there. It's Will Henley in San—"
"Hello." The voice was slightly out of breath.
"Hey! Thanks, guy. Did I catch you sweeping?"
"First thing every a.m."
"Sorry to interrupt."
"No problem." Benny clattered around a bit. "So what is it this time, Will? Anniversary? Birthday?"
"Birthday. Beth's."
"Roses or tulips? Or I could do some sort of combo for you—"
"Do a combo." Will squinted, thinking. "Pink and yellow—she'd like that. And send it to the office, not the house."
Benny laughed. "So everybody can ooh and aah over it. The usual message?"
"Please." Will smiled. It was a good message. It made her happy every year.
"You got it, sir."
"Put 'em in a vase rather than a box, please, Benny, and try to deliver them early in the day, okay?" Will glanced up to see Simon LaRue, one of GPG's general partners and hence a truly big dog, hovering at his door. He waved him in. "Very good," he said into the phone. "Thanks, my man."
Will hung up while LaRue halted in front of his desk, six feet two inches of perfectly groomed American male in a three-thousand-dollar handmade suit. Simon LaRue might be dark-haired, but he was a golden boy, just like Will, just like all the partners at GPG.
He arched a brow. "Sending some lucky lady flowers, Henley? Anybody we should know about?"
Will laughed and tried to look enigmatic. Given his perennial bachelor status, which at age thirty-four was rapidly becoming a point of fascination not only within his family but also among his conservative colleagues, he didn't want to admit the bouquet was for his sister.
Nor did he want to admit, even to himself, one tiny part of his motivation for the gift-giving. It was residual guilt, even after all these years, for leaving Beth in Denver to run Henley Sand and Gravel while he traipsed off to chase his dreams. As the elder child and only male, custom demanded that he follow his father at the helm of the family business. But Will had wanted a bigger stage. And by God, had he gotten it.
LaRue smiled. "Ah, those were the days. Bachelorhood with all its infinite pleasures and variety." His slim, manicured fingers lifted a Lucite cube from Will's desk. "So you gonna make lots of money for us in Napa Valley?"
Will settled back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head in a deliberate gesture of confidence, though that was hardly what he felt in this regard. "Don't I always?"
"There's no such thing as always." LaRue toyed with the cube, has dark eyes focused on it as if mesmerized. "There's only your last deal."
That was one of the machismo-laden truisms GPG partners bandied about. There were others, even less clever, all of which basically boiled down to What have you done for me lately?
Will laughed again. "Hey, my last deal made us ten times our money!"
"And is still in business. These days that's a stunning success. But from you we'd expect no less." LaRue replaced the cube, next fingering a framed photo of Beth, posed in Aspen alongside her husband and twin sons and an assortment of skis and poles. All four sported matching sweaters, Will's own Scandinavian coloring, and the goggle-eyed sunburn produced by a Rocky Mountain ski vacation. LaRue
's brow arched. "You ever heli-skied, Henley?"
That was the sort of testosterone-driven extreme sport of which LaRue—and all right-minded GPG partners—would approve. "Do you mean was I ever dropped from a chopper in a remote location to ski solo down a kick-ass pristine mountain with no one around to save me if I screw up?"
LaRue nodded.
"Nope. But it sounds like good old-fashioned fun."
LaRue laughed out loud this time, the desired response. He set down the photo, focused briefly on its mate—a fortieth-anniversary shot of Will's parents—then sauntered back toward Will's door. "Give my regards to the lovely Ava," he threw over his shoulder, and then he walked out.
Will sighed and unlinked his hands, then leaned forward to rest his elbows on his desk and sip his cooling latte. The last thing Ava Winsted wanted from Will Henley—or from anybody else at GPG—was regards. She'd much rather the entire firm disappear from her life and that Will Henley in particular stop making offers to buy her winery. She'd told him no, and apparently she'd meant it.
But that didn't mean Will Henley would give up. He hadn't gotten where he was by caving.
He grimaced, imagining the look on Ava Winsted's Hollywood-perfect features when he crashed her son's homecoming party. Not crash, exactly—he had finagled his way in as an invitee's date—but barging in where he wasn't wanted was not among Will's favorite activities.
Still, he had to go. As far as he could make out, Suncrest was his key to making money in Napa Valley. And he had to make as much money as possible to satisfy GPG's general partners and investors, whose lust for huge returns was unquenchable.
Will drained the last of his latte. Yup, he'd gotten that bigger stage, all right.
***
Ever the actress, Ava Winsted forced herself to laugh—to sound positively gay—as she turned from the French doors in her casually elegant, light-filled living room to face Jean-Luc Boursault, the Paris-based screenwriter she hoped would pen a new, post-Suncrest chapter for her already storied life.
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