by Nora Roberts
He glanced around the room, noting the wine, the candles, the bed already turned down and heaped with pillows. “The thought’s just going to have to count for tonight. Come on, baby,” he whispered as he slid his arms under her. “Let’s put you to bed.”
She stirred, shifted, snuggled. He decided there had to be a medal for a man who would tuck in a woman who looked, smelled, felt like this one and not crawl in eagerly after her.
“Hmmm. Ty.”
“Good guess. Here you go,” he said, laying her down. “Go back to sleep.”
Her eyes fluttered open as he pulled the duvet up. “What? Where are you going?”
“For a long, lonely walk in the cold, dark night.” Amused at both of them now, he leaned down to brush a chaste kiss on her forehead. “Followed by the requisite cold shower.”
“Why?” She took his hand, tucked it under her cheek. “It’s nice and warm in here.”
“Baby, you’re beat. I’ll take a rain check.”
“Don’t go. Please, I don’t want you to go.”
“I’ll be back.” He leaned down again, intending to kiss her good night. But her lips were soft and tasted of lazy invitation. He sank into them, and into her as she reached for him.
“Don’t go,” she said again. “Make love with me. It’ll be like a dream.”
It was dreamlike. Scents and shadows and sighs. Slow, and tender where neither had expected it, where neither would have asked. He slid into bed with her, floated with her on the easy stroke of her hands, the gentle rise of her body.
And the sweetness of it drifted through him like starlight.
He found her mouth again, and everything he’d ever wanted.
Her breathing thickened as sensations began to layer. His hands were rough from work, and smoothed over her like velvet. His body was hard, and covered hers like silk. His mouth was firm, and took from her with endless and devastating patience.
No wildness here, no greed. No brilliant flashes of urgency. Tonight was to savor and soothe. To offer and welcome.
The first crest was like being lifted onto clouds.
She moaned under him, one long, low sound as her body bowed fluidly to his. Satisfaction and surrender. She skimmed her fingers in his hair, saw the shades of it shift in the light and shadow. He did that, she thought as she lost herself in him. Shifted and changed. There were so many facets to him.
And here, gently, he was showing her yet another. Her fingers curled, drawing him down until mouth met mouth, and she could answer.
In the dark, he could see the glint of the candlelight in her eyes, gold dust splashed over rich pools. The air was scented sweet. She watched him, and he watched her as he slipped inside her.
“This is different,” he told her, and touched his mouth to hers as she shook her head. “This is different. Yesterday I wanted you. Tonight, I need you.”
Her vision blurred with tears. Her lips trembled with words she didn’t know how to say. And then she was so full of him, she could only sob out his name, and give.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
What did a seventy-three-year-old winemaker from Italy have in common with a thirty-six-year-old sales executive from California? Giambelli, David thought. It was the only link he could find between them.
Except the manner of their deaths.
Tests on the exhumed body of Bernardo Baptista had confirmed he’d ingested a dangerous dosage of digitalis, along with his Merlot. It couldn’t be construed as a coincidence. Police on both sides of the Atlantic were calling it homicide and the Giambelli wine the murder weapon.
But why? What motive linked Margaret Bowers and Baptista?
He left his children tucked in their beds, and after checking on the Giambelli vineyards, drove toward MacMillan. As the temperature had dropped, he and Paulie had turned on the sprinklers, had walked the rows as water coated the vines and the thin skin of ice formed a protective shield against the threatening hard frost. He knew Paulie would stand watch through the night, making certain there was a constant and steady flow of water. Pre-dawn temperatures were forecast to hover near the critical twenty-nine-degree mark.
In an instant, vines could be murdered as efficiently and as ruthlessly as people.
This, at least, he could control. He could understand the brutality of nature, and fight it. How could a rational person understand cold-blooded and seemingly random murder?
He could see the fine mist of water swirling over the MacMillan vines, the tiny drops going to glimmer in the cold light of the moon. He pulled on his gloves, grabbed his thermos of coffee and left the car to walk in the freezing damp.
He found Tyler sitting on an overturned crate, sipping from his own thermos. “Thought you might be by.” In invitation, Ty banged the toe of his boot on another crate. “Pull up a chair.”
“Where’s your foreman?”
“Sent him home just a bit ago. No point in both of us losing a night’s sleep.” The truth was Ty liked sitting alone in the vineyard, thinking his thoughts while the sprinklers hissed.
“We’re doing all we can do.” Ty shrugged, scanning the rows that turned to a fairyland of sparkle under the lights. “System’s running smooth.”
David settled down, uncapped his thermos. Like Ty he wore a ski cap pulled over his head and a thick jacket that repelled both cold and damp. “Paulie took the watch at Giambelli. Frost alarms went off just after midnight. We were already prepped for it.”
“This one’s usual for the end of March. It’s the ones that sneak in on you at the end of April, into May. I got it covered here, if you want to get some sleep.”
“Nobody’s getting much of that lately. Did you know Baptista?”
“Not really. My grandfather did. La Signora’s taking it hard. Not that she’ll let it show,” he said. “Not outside the family, and not much inside, for that matter. But she’s knocked back by it. They all are—the Giambelli women.”
“Product tampering—”
“It’s not just that. That’s the business end. This is personal. They went over for the funeral when he died. I guess Sophia thought of him as a kind of mascot. Said he used to sneak her candy. Poor old bastard.”
David hunched forward, holding the thermos cup of coffee between his knees. “I’ve been thinking on it, trying to find the real connection. Probably a waste of time since I’m a corporate suit, not a detective.”
Tyler studied him over his coffee. “From what I’ve seen so far you’re not much of a time-waster. And you’re not so bad, for a suit.”
With a half-laugh, David lifted his own coffee. Steam from it rose and merged with the mist. “Coming from you, that’s a hell of a kudo.”
“Damn right.”
“Well. From what I can tell, Margaret never even met Baptista. He was dead before she took over Avano’s accounts and started the travel to Italy.”
“Doesn’t matter if they were random victims.”
David shook his head. “It matters if they’re not.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking that, too.” Tyler got up to stretch his legs, and they began to walk the rows together.
Somewhere along the way, he realized, he’d lost his resentment of David. Just as well, he thought. It took so much damn energy to hold a grudge. And it was a waste of that energy and valuable time when both of them were on the same page in any case.
“They both worked for Giambelli, both knew the family.” Ty paused. “Both knew Avano.”
“He was dead before Margaret uncorked the bottle. Still, we don’t know how long she had it. He’d have had plenty of reason to want her out of the way.”
“Avano was an asshole,” Tyler said flatly. “He was a prick on top of it. But I can’t see him as a killer. Too much thought, too much effort and not enough guts.”
“Did anybody like him?”
“Sophie.” Tyler shrugged and wished he could keep her out of his mind for more than ten minutes at a time. “At least she tried to. And yeah, actually, plenty did, and n
ot just women.”
It was the first time David had been offered a straight and uncensored picture of Anthony Avano. “Because?”
“He had a good line, put on a good show. Slick. I’d’ve said grease through a goose slick, but he got away with it.” As his own father did, Ty mused. “Some people, they just slither through life, knocking over bystanders with, you know, impunity. He was one of them.”
“La Signora kept him on.”
“For Pilar, for Sophia. That’s the family end. On the business front, well, he knew how to keep the accounts happy.”
“Yeah, his expense account shows just how much he put into that effort. So with Margaret leapfrogging over him, he was losing his opportunities to wine and dine on Giambelli’s tab. Had to piss him off. At the company, at the family, at her.”
“His style would’ve been to try to fuck her, not kill her.”
Tyler stopped, his breath streaming out as he looked over the rows, scanned them line after line. It was colder now. His internal farmer’s gauge told him it was edging down toward thirty degrees.
“I’m not a corporate suit, but I’ve got to figure all this trouble is costing the company plenty in profit and in appearances, which can translate to the same thing. If somebody wanted to cause the family trouble, they found an inventive and nasty way to do it.”
“Between the recall, immediate public panic and long-term consumer distrust in the label, it’s going to cost millions. It’s going to affect profit across the board, and that includes what’s yours.”
“Yeah.” He’d already faced the grim reality of that. “I figure Sophia’s smart enough to take the edge off that long-term distrust.”
“She’s going to have to be more than smart. She’ll have to be brilliant.”
“She is. That’s what makes her a pain in the ass.”
“Stuck on her, are you?” David waved the comment away. “Sorry. Too personal.”
“I was wondering if you were asking as a corporate suit, an associate or as the guy who’s dating her mother.”
“I was aiming toward friend.”
Tyler thought about it a moment, then nodded. “Okay, that works for me. I guess you could say I’ve been stuck on her on and off since I was twenty. Sophie at sixteen,” he remembered. “Christ. She was like a lightning bolt. And she knew it. Irritated the hell out of me.”
For a moment, while the misting water sizzled and froze, David was silent. “There was a girl when I was in college.” He was pleasantly surprised when Tyler tugged a flask from his pocket and offered it. “Marcella Roux. French. Legs up to her ears, and this sexy little overbite.”
“An overbite.” Ty settled into the image. “That’s a good one.”
“Oh yeah.” David drank, letting the brandy punch into his system. “God, Marcella Roux. She scared the hell out of me.”
“A woman who looks like that, who is like that, just wears you out.” Tyler took the flask, drank. “Me, I figured if you had to be stuck on a woman, which is an annoyance itself, you might as well get stuck on one who’s easy to be around and doesn’t make you jumpy half the time. I put considerable effort into that theory the last ten years. Didn’t do me a damn bit of good.”
“I can beat that,” David said after a moment. “Yeah, I can beat it. I had a wife, and we had a couple kids—good kids—and I figured we were chasing the American dream. Well, that went into the toilet. But I had the kids. Maybe I screwed up there a few times, but that’s part of the job. And my focus was on the goal. Give them a decent life, be a good father. Women, well, being a good father doesn’t mean being a monk. But you keep that area down on the list of priorities. No serious relationships, not again. No sir, who needs it. Then Pilar opens the door, and she’s holding flowers. There are all kinds of lightning bolts.”
“Maybe. They still fry your brain.”
They walked the rows in the coldest hour before dawn, while the sprinklers hissed and the vines glittered, iced silver, and safe.
Two hundred and fifty guests, a seven-course dinner, each with appropriate wines, followed by a concert in the ballroom and ending with dancing.
It had been a feat to pull off, and Sophia gave her mother full marks for helping to perfect each detail. She added a pat on the back for herself for carefully salting the guests with recognizable names and faces from all over the globe.
The UN, she thought as she sat with every appearance of serenity through the aria by the Italian soprano, had nothing on the Giambellis.
The quarter million raised for charity would not only do good work, it was damn good PR. Particularly good since all members of the family were in attendance, including her great-uncle the priest, who’d agreed to make the trip after a personal, and insistent, call from his sister.
Unity, solidarity, responsibility and tradition. Those were the key words she was pounding into the media. And with words went images. The gracious villa opening its doors for the sake of charity. The family, four generations, bound together by blood and wine, and one man’s vision.
Oh yes, she was using Cezare Giambelli, the simple farmer who’d built an empire on sweat and dreams. It was irresistible. And while she didn’t expect it to turn the tide of adversity, it had stemmed it.
The only irritant in the evening was Kris Drake.
Missed a step there, Sophia decided. She’d issued an invitation to Jeremy DeMorney quite purposefully. Inviting a handful of important competitors illustrated Giambelli’s openness, and again a sense of community. It hadn’t occurred to her Jerry would bring a former Giambelli employee as his date.
Should have, she reminded herself. It was clever, sneaky and slyly amusing on his part. And just like him. On top of that she had to give Kris credit for sheer balls. Brass ones.
Scored off me this round, she admitted. But felt she’d got back her own by being flawlessly gracious to both of them.
“You’re not paying attention.” Tyler gave her a quick elbow jab. “If I have to, you have to.”
She leaned toward him slightly. “I hear every note. And I can write mental copy at the same time. Two different parts of the brain.”
“Your brain has too many parts. How long does this last?”
The pure, rich notes throbbed on the air. “She’s magnificent. And nearly finished. She’s singing of tragedy, of heartbreak.”
“I thought it was supposed to be about love.”
“Same thing.”
He glanced toward her, saw the sheen of tears, the single drop that spilled from those dark, deep eyes and clung perfectly to her lashes. “Are those real, or for the crowd?”
“You’re such a peasant. Quiet.” She linked her fingers with his, allowed herself to think of nothing, to feel nothing but the music for the final moments.
When the last note shimmered into silence, she rose, along with the others, into thunderous applause.
“Can we get out of here for five minutes now?” Ty whispered in her ear.
“Worse than a peasant, a barbarian. Brava!” she called out. “You go ahead,” she added under her breath. “I need to play hostess. You should grab Uncle James, who looks as miserable as you do. Go out and have a drink and a cigar and be men.”
“If you don’t think it took a man to sit here, and stay awake, during nearly an hour of opera, baby, you better think again.”
She watched him escape, then moved forward, hands extended to the diva. “Signora, bellissima! ”
Pilar did her duty as well, but her mind wasn’t full of music or publicity copy. It was reeling with details and timing. The chairs had to be removed, quickly and smoothly, to clear the ballroom for dancing. The terrace doors would be flung open at precisely the right minute and the orchestra set up there would begin to play. But not before the diva had been allowed her moment of adulation. She waited while Tereza and Eli presented the singer with roses, then signaled David, Helen and a few hand-chosen friends to add their congratulations and praise.
As others followed suit, she
nodded at the waiting staff. Then frowned when she saw her aunt Francesca still sitting, and obviously sound asleep. Sedated herself again, Pilar thought, winding her way through guests.
“Don.” She squeezed her cousin’s arm, smiling an apology to the couple he’d been speaking with. “Your mother isn’t well,” she said quietly. “Could you help me take her to her room?”
“Sure. I’m sorry, Pilar,” he continued as they moved aside. “I should’ve kept a closer eye on her.” He scanned the crowd, looking for his wife. “I thought Gina was with her.”
“It’s all right. Zia Francesca?” Pilar leaned down, spoke quietly, soothingly in Italian as she and Don helped the woman to her feet.
“Ma che vuoi?” She seemed dazed as she slapped at Pilar’s hand. “Lasciame in pace.”
“We’re just going to take you to bed, Mama.” Don took a firmer grip. “You’re tired.”
“Sì, sì.” She stopped struggling. “Vorrei del vino.”
“You’ve already had enough wine,” Don told her, but Pilar shook her head at him.
“I’ll bring you some, once you’re in your room.”
“You’re a good girl, Pilar.” Docile as a lamb, Francesca shuffled out of the ballroom. “So much sweeter of nature than Gina. Don should have married you.”
“We’re cousins, Zia Francesca,” Pilar reminded her.
“You are? Oh, of course. My mind is muddled. Traveling is very stressful.”
“I know. You’ll feel better when you’re in your nightgown and in bed.”
Mindful of the time, Pilar rang for a maid as soon as they’d carted Francesca to her room. Though she was sorry for it, she dumped the matter on Don and rushed back to take her place in the ballroom.
“Problem?” Sophia asked her.
“Aunt Francesca.”
“Ah, that’s always fun. Well, having a priest in the family should help cancel out the odd drunk. Are we ready?”
“We are.” Pilar dimmed the lights. At the signal, the terrace doors were opened and music poured in. As Tereza and Eli led the first dance, Sophia slid an arm around her mother’s waist.
“Perfect. Wonderful job.”