Revenge at Bella Terra

  She crawled off the bed, grabbed her phone from the bedside table, and walked out onto the deck.

  Good thing she and Eli had agreed they were incompatible.

  He wouldn’t have to look at her.

  She wouldn’t have to smell him.

  The jerk.

  She dialed her mother’s number.

  Out here, the breeze puffed into her face and the view caught her by surprise again. She contemplated the valley, the winding river, and grass and trees and vineyards. It reminded her of her father’s estate in Italy . . . but not really. After the endless freeway that was southern California, this felt newer, fresher, more open, refreshingly rural yet not remote.

  She could live here forever—although she was pretty sure Eli Di Luca would mightily object to her infinite occupation of his cottage.

  The phone rang. Her mother picked up.

  “Hi, Mom, I got here at last.”

  She listened to her mother’s sigh of relief. “It’s a long drive, isn’t it, honey?”

  “Whoo, boy.”

  “Any problems?”

  “Not till I got here and met Eli Di Luca. You were wrong about him.”

  “He’s not your dad’s next candidate for your husband?” Her mother’s voice developed a lilt.

  “I would say not. He’s good-looking—a prime marital candidate—but what a crank!” Although that was not strictly true. He was critical, a guy who thought he was superior because he had a penis and could pee at a picnic. For sure he didn’t approve of her. “I finally told him I knew that Papa was setting us up and that it was no big deal; Papa did it all the time and I’m not desperate. Then he seemed to loosen up a little.”

  Lauren’s laugh warmed her. “I’ll bet that took him aback.”

  “I think so. But he took me aback, too. After the way Papa described Eli Di Luca as this big, buff winemaker, I didn’t even think it was him for the first few minutes. He came out of the vineyard covered in mud. I didn’t expect that; I figured he was a hired hand or something. Do winemakers usually work in the grapes?”

  “Dear, what I don’t know about winemaking could fill a large book. Now, wine drinking . . .”

  Chloë chuckled.

  Her mom continued. “How is this place? Is it comfortable? Can you work there?”

  “It’s gorgeous, Mom, so much more than I expected. I’ll take a picture of the view and send it to you.”

  “But can you work there?”

  Chloë heard that note in Lauren’s voice, the one that said she was worried about her daughter.

  Truth to tell, Chloë was worried herself.

  But she put a reassuring note in her voice. “I can work here. I wish you could have been here to see Di Luca’s face when I put out my skull.”

  “I can imagine. That thing gives me the creeps.”

  “Him, too, I would guess. Best gift Papa ever gave me.”

  Her mom got quiet. She usually did when Chloë talked too much about her father. Telling Chloë about him had been difficult for her, and she always acted oddly about him, not as if she hated him, exactly, but as if the memory of him hurt her.

  For all Conte’s weird insistence that Chloë marry as soon as possible, she loved the old guy. How could she not? He was so thrilled at her mere existence. Who else would ever believe her to be a miracle of love?

  “Mom, I need to unpack and go to work.” Briefly Chloë toyed with telling her about her hair, then decided against it.

  It was her hair. She’d live through the good choices and the bad choices. She half smiled. In fact, with her writing schedule, no one would see her for so long. It would grow out before she saw sunshine again.

  Chapter 9

  Eli stood outside looking at the cottage.

  Chloë had been in there for days. Weeks. He’d seen nothing of her except a light that burned far into the night. He’d heard nothing from her except once, when he sat on his own deck, he’d thought he heard a cry of rage and frustration.

  Or maybe it was an injured vulture falling to its death over the vineyard.

  Her father wanted to know how his courtship was going.

  His grandmother was bugging him to bring her to dinner.

  More to the point, he needed the money he’d get from marrying her.

  Needs drove him. He responded to those needs.

  When he married that young woman he would never cheat on her. Certainly she would never know he didn’t love her. She’d be happy. He’d make sure of it.

  But if she never came out . . . he would have to go in.

  Climbing the stairs to the porch, he knocked on the cottage door.

  Immediately she flung it open.

  The smell of a burned something gusted out the door.

  “Is there a fire?” Alarmed, he pushed his way inside.

  “I put frozen lasagna in the oven and forgot about it.” She sounded exasperated, as if that should be only too obvious.

  He looked around.

  The air was hazy with smoke. The blinds were shut. The only light came from the desk lamp.

  The bed was unmade. She’d hung a bra on her chair. Books filled with paper sticky notes were piled beside the desk and open on top of the desk. One e-reader was flung on the sheets; another was propped against the desk lamp. The trash can overflowed. The place looked like hell.

  Chloë looked like hell. She wore some kind of green plaid flannel pants with an elastic waist and a green top. Her fluff-ball hair drooped. She was pale as death, and she glared through bloodshot eyes. “What?”

  He didn’t know where to start. “Is the maid from the resort not coming up to clean?”

  “Once a week. She was here”—Chloë ruffled her hair—“yesterday, I think.”

  He looked around. The poor maid. “Why are the blinds closed?”

  “The view’s too good. It distracts me.” Again that snappish, impatient tone.

  “How’s the book going?” It seemed like a pertinent question.

  Until she burst out, “Fine! Just fine! Writing a book is easy, isn’t it? All you have to do is put your fingers on the keys and type out your dreams. Anybody can do it. Right?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  She flung out an arm like he’d just made an obvious point. “Thank you!”

  Things were not going well, he surmised.

  “Did my mother call you?” Chloë asked suspiciously.

  “No.” Possibly Chloë’s intensity, her angst, her anguish provided an opportunity he could manipulate to his advantage. With a persuasive ability he hadn’t known he possessed, he said, “You need a break. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll buy you some lunch?”

  “I have to work. I’m late on my deadline.” She sounded petty and disagreeable.

  He was not, he realized, going to take no for an answer. “Lunch. Then I’ll show you around Bella Valley.”

  “I don’t want to be shown around Bella Valley.” And cranky. She sounded cranky.

  “A lot of Italian, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants settled here, mingled with the Americans, native and otherwise.”

  “Shut the door when you go.” She started back toward the desk and her open computer.

  He continued. “The early days were rife with carnage, murders.”

  She paused, her hand on the back of the chair.

  “Unsolved murders. When Prohibition took effect, the violence escalated. The economy collapsed two years later. Life was desperate. The cops were called revenuers. Half of them were corrupt.” Walking to the French doors, he flung them wide. Light poured into the room. A draft between the open front door and the deck sucked away the smoke. “The revenuers destroyed the breweries, the liquor distilleries. The river ran red with wine.”

  She stared at him with an arrested expression.

  He was starting to enjoy enticing her with brutality and death. “Men who had been perfectly respectable vintners were suddenly criminals. They went to prison. Their families were fatherless.”

&nbs
p; Slowly she said, “I thought all the crime during Prohibition was in New York and Chicago. Back east.”

  “Think again. According to federal law, during Prohibition every family could make two hundred gallons of their own ‘nonintoxicating juice’ for personal use. Who do you think raised the grapes? We did. The Italians in California.”

  “Whoa.”

  “We had our moonshine, too, mostly brandy, but . . . Come with me. Bring your notebook. I’ll show you the water tower I recently acquired.”

  “A water tower?” She edged closer. “Why should I care about a water tower?”

  “I bought that water tower because it’s sitting in the middle of a vineyard planted with Alicante Bouschet grapes, grapes that were planted in the early nineteen twenties.” Clearly she didn’t understand, so he continued. “When Prohibition went into effect, the wine producers in this valley—people who had been very successful—became nothing more than grape growers. But the kind of delicate wine grapes grown in Bella Valley couldn’t make the train journey east, where the Italian families were waiting to manufacture their own . . . nonintoxicating juices. So the wine producers ripped out the delicate grapes and replaced them with grapes like the Alicante Bouschet varietal because they were hearty and could be shipped back east without spoiling.”

  “I still don’t understand why I should care about your water tower.”

  “The older vines produce mature grapes. I wanted to try my hand at producing Alicante Bouschet, so when this vineyard came up for sale, I bought it. It’s passed through a lot of hands in the last ninety years, so I checked to see who had owned the vineyard and planted the grapes in the early twenties. I laughed when I discovered a man named Massimo Bruno had owned that vineyard.”

  She looked him up and down. “You laughed?”

  “You don’t have to sound incredulous. I laugh . . . when something is funny.”

  “Of course,” she said politely. “I didn’t mean to imply you were humorless.”

  She made him sound as if he were humorless. That wasn’t true. There just wasn’t much that was funny in this world.

  “Who’s Massimo Bruno?” Chloë shuffled through the piles on her desk until she found a ragged spiral notebook and a pen.

  Nothing funny in this world except perhaps the thought of him romancing a pretty girl by tantalizing her with murderous mysteries. God forbid his brothers ever found out. “Massimo Bruno produced the most famous, most expensive wines ever produced in California. They were known for their subtlety, their smoky undertones, their ability to age well . . . and it didn’t hurt that in 1930, Massimo disappeared without a trace. Because wines are like diamonds—if they have a dramatic history, they’re priceless.”

  Chloë cradled the notebook in her arm and started scribbling. “He disappeared? Where? Why?”

  “He vanished before my grandmother was born, but Nonna says her mother didn’t trust Massimo, said he was a thug.”

  Her eyes narrowed. He could almost see her mind racing.

  Good. He had her hanging on his every word. “I decided to take down the old brick water tower before it fell down. I ordered my men to remove it brick by brick—”

  “Why brick by brick?”

  “I resell them. Old bricks bring a premium on the market.”

  “You don’t miss a trick.”

  “I like to think of it as recycling.”

  For the first time today, she grinned and relaxed. “Nice spin.”

  “You should hear me give my ‘Italian men make better lovers’ speech. It’s a guaranteed seller.”

  She chuckled, then saw him watching her—she was lovely, even in plaid flannel, even when she looked tired—and stopped.

  He held her gaze.

  Color climbed in her face. She looked down at her notebook.

  At last, she had noticed him not as a landlord, not as her father’s friend, not as a nuisance suitor, but as a man.

  Good. Because he had definitely noticed her not as a wife to be acquired for her dowry, but as a woman he’d like to find naked in his bed on warm, dark night. Apparently he had a thing for green plaid flannel.

  As if nothing had happened, he said, “My men started at the roof of the water tower to remove the brick veneer. While they were still within three feet of the top, part of the wall collapsed. They expected to see a water tank. Instead they saw the lid of a water tank, and on top of that, a couple of copper barrels and the glint of metal pipes. They backed off and called me. Because inside the water tower, there’s a still.”

  “What?” Chloë stepped closer, eyes shining, irresistibly drawn by the story. “What? There was a still in the water tower? A still, like where they distill wine into brandy?”

  “It’s 1930 and it’s Prohibition. Revenuers are using their axes on every barrel of liquor and wine they find. Can you think of a better place to hide it?”

  “That’s brilliant!” She ran to her desk and stuffed her computer case with the spiral notebook, five different-colored pens, and her MacBook Air. “You’ll take me there?”

  “After lunch.”

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  He fought a smile. “I don’t know a lot about fashion, but aren’t those your pajamas?”

  Looking down at herself, she said, “Shit!” grabbed an outfit from the closet, and ran into the bathroom.

  When he heard the shower running, he went out on the deck and waited—and made his plans.

  Chapter 10

  Chloë came out of the bathroom dressed in what she considered appropriate field gear: faded jeans and a pink button-up shirt over a black, short-sleeved tee. Sitting down in the chair, she laced on a pair of low-rise hiking boots—they were new; she hoped she wasn’t screwing up taking a chance on them—then checked her computer case again.

  “You might add a hat,” Eli advised from the door that led onto the deck. “You don’t have much hair left, and what you have doesn’t cover your lily-white neck.”

  The short hair/lily-white comment was clearly not a compliment, but she didn’t care. After two interminable weeks of working and getting nowhere, she was going out into the world. The fresh air blowing through the cottage already seemed to be dispersing the cobwebs, and the sight of Eli Di Luca’s dark silhouette against the light was oddly menacing. Or critical. Or something. All she knew was that her heart beat faster knowing he stood there.

  Funny, considering that when she’d gotten here and gone to work on the book, she’d easily dismissed him from her mind.

  “Ready?” He locked the French doors, then came to her and took her computer case. “We’ll eat at the resort; then we’ll drive out to the water tower.”

  “I can carry that,” she offered, and halfheartedly tugged at the strap. She was from Texas; she knew how to let a man perform the little courtesies between a man and a woman. But somehow, that kind of relationship between the two of them made her uncomfortable, as if it moved them to a level of intimacy. Which was stupid when she considered the fact that he was lifting less than ten pounds.

  “Humor me. My old-fashioned grandmother taught me my manners.” He walked away from her. “Do you know how to set the alarm?” When she nodded, he walked out the door and down the steps.

  When she joined him in the driveway, he said, “We’ll need to take the truck. Your little car won’t make it.”

  “Okay.”

  He looked surprised. Probably it wasn’t politically correct for a guy to assume he had to drive, and California was all about being politically correct. But she didn’t equate her femininity with a steering wheel.

  His forest green extended-cab F-250 pickup had big, serviceable wheels and tires and a jacked suspension that lifted it so far off the ground she would need help to get in.

  “Nice truck.”

  He raised his eyebrows at her.

  “I’m from Texas,” she said. “We know our trucks.”

  “I should have known.” He gave her a hand up into the cab. When she was settled, he hande
d her the computer case, walked around, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  The dashboard was dusty and he had a few paper coffee cups rolling around on the floorboard, but she supposed, after the condition of the cottage, she was in no position to criticize.

  The winding road to Bella Terra involved a couple of switchbacks as they descended the ridge, then smoothed out as it joined the highway.

  Eli’s driving wasn’t flashy, wasn’t too slow. He drove skillfully; she didn’t notice the curves. But that didn’t surprise her; Eli seemed to be one of those men who occurred too seldom in life: a man capable of doing whatever he did with a deceptive ease.

  Chloë rolled down the window, let the breeze blast tease her face, and watched the vineyards and wineries and fruit stands go by. They slid from one enclave of Bella Valley to another, the olive and oak trees casting dappled shade onto the two-lane road. The vines stretched in endless rows. Peach trees shed their blossoms as California’s early spring scattered them across the landscape. Here and there a farmhouse or a barn stood on a small plot of grass, and wineries of various grandeurs beckoned invitingly. The air smelled new, as if the vines and trees and the earth itself breathed out the coming summer.

  There was isolation here, and wilderness beckoning just over the hill, yet farmers worked the vineyards, and tourists drove the roads. Maybe in the summer Bella Valley would be hot and crowded, but right now, it was perfect, and it fit Eli Di Luca.

  He belonged here.

  She liked that she didn’t feel as if she needed to entertain him. In fact, she thought she annoyed him so much he’d much prefer if she didn’t talk. Of course, that brought up the question—why had he asked her out?

  Probably her father had called and demanded an accounting.

  Yes, that had to be it.

  Although . . . Eli looked better than the first time she had seen him—he was clean and in jeans, a blue denim shirt, and work boots; he certainly hadn’t gone out of his way to impress her.

  Maybe he wasn’t here at her father’s behest.

  Plus, she still suffered from that gut feeling he didn’t like her, as if he’d been angry at her before he’d even set eyes on her.