‘I’VE HAD A personal invitation.’
Evelyn Scott pushed the handwritten note across the kitchen table to Izzy. The salad the elderly woman had prepared earlier, using produce from the vegetable patch at the end of her garden, had been eaten, the home-made lemonade drunk and outside a burning orange sky signalled the arrival of dusk.
Here in Napa Valley, the horizons seemed limitless and the vast expanse of sky was a canvas upon which every shade of colour begged to be painted, depending on the time of the day and the vagaries of the weather. Izzy could have lain on her back in a field for hours, just appreciating its spectacular, ever-changing beauty.
‘A personal invitation?’ She reached forward to take the note and realised that, while they had been lazily conversing for the past hour and a half, while the older woman had listened and responded to everything Izzy had had to report, she had been busily hiding the fact that she was worried sick. And Izzy knew the source of that worry.
She read the note.
It was written on a piece of heavy, cream parchment paper, the sort of paper she associated with aggressive bankers calling in loans or hard-nosed lawyers threatening jail.
The writing confirmed that first impression. Long, determined strokes issued an invitation to tea, during which the sale of the cottage could be discussed ‘face to face’. The invitation looked more like a summons.
‘It’s the first time I’ve been approached by the man himself.’ Evelyn rose to her feet and began clearing the plates and glasses, waving aside Izzy’s offer to help. ‘You don’t need to concern yourself with an old woman’s problems. That’s not why you came here in the first place.’
‘Evelyn, your problem is my problem.’
It still felt weird after nearly a month to call the older woman ‘Evelyn’ instead of Nanny Scott, which was always how her mother had referred to her. To this day, Izzy had vivid memories of sitting in her mother’s bedroom, watching as Beverley Stowe brushed her hair and dabbed on lipstick, smacking her lips together to distribute the colour evenly, inspecting her face from every angle as she chatted away. Izzy had listened avidly. She’d thought her mother to be the most beautiful woman in the world and she had drunk in every single thing that had passed her lips with the fervent adoration only a child was capable of.
There had been a thousand tales about Nanny Scott. Izzy had met Evelyn Scott for the first time on her one and only trip to California when she’d been nine, a year before her mum and dad had died in a plane crash. That holiday was etched in her mind because holidays with her parents had been few and far between. She could still relive the high-wire excitement of being with her parents for that heady, hot, lazy month in summer as though it had happened yesterday and not thirteen long years ago.
So now, sitting here, seeing the worry on Evelyn’s face, Izzy felt anger surge inside her at the preposterous and intimidating antics of the billionaire who wanted to buy the cottage out from under the seventy-nine-year-old woman’s feet, and to heck with what happened to her after that. He had sent his minions, but the message had not been delivered to his satisfaction, so here he was, knife at the ready to cut an old woman loose for the sake of money.
‘No,’ Evelyn said firmly. She placed a plate of home-made pumpkin pie in front of Izzy and sat back. ‘You have enough on your plate without all of this nonsense. No one can force me to do anything.’
‘My plate is looking very clean and empty at the moment,’ Izzy returned.
‘So you finally took my advice and picked that phone up and spoke to your brother?’ Evelyn’s brown eyes sparked with lively interest, her own problems temporarily set aside. ‘I knew there was something you wanted to tell me. An old woman can sense these things.’
Izzy reflected that this was exactly why she had no intention of returning to Hawaii until she had sorted out the situation here. No, she wasn’t obliged to, but where did decency and a sense of fair play go if you only did what was right because you were obliged to?
Izzy had fled Hawaii after her heart had been broken. And she had fled to the place where her mother had grown up, feeling an overpowering need somehow to be close to her mum in the wake of her disastrous affair with Jefferson.
The yearning just to feel that the spirit of her mother was close by had been silly, childish and irrational, but it had also been overwhelming enough for her to heed its insistence.
She’d rooted out the tin that was stuffed with old photos, postcards and pretty much everything she had gathered over the years before her parents had died. She had pored over faded photos of the sprawling ranch where her mother had spent her childhood before she had left home at eighteen and begun a second life in England. She had squinted at pictures of Nanny Scott, the grandparents she had only met once and all the pretty young people who had crowded her mother’s teenage years. And then, heart swollen with sadness, whimsy and nostalgia, she had dumped all her responsibilities at the hotel where she had been working and quite simply fled.
Of course, she’d felt guilty at leaving her brother in the lurch, but she had made sure that everything was up to date, and she’d known that Nat would be able to take over temporarily. She’d also known that Max would descend and everything would be sorted because that was what he did. He wielded a rod of iron, gave commands, issued orders and things got done.
She’d felt far too bruised for any residual guilt about running away to anchor her in a place she no longer wanted to be, doing a job she hadn’t the heart to do, however privileged she might be to have had it in the first place.
It was as if her wounded heart had made her face all those long years of living in a wilderness, learning how to manage a life without the love and input of parents, watching and envying her friends and the relationships they had with their parents.
So often her youthful heart had twisted when friends had moaned, because at least they’d had a mum and dad to moan about. Max and James had both done their best for her but there’d been only so much her brothers were capable of doing. She had stared deep into the void left by her parents’ death and, in the wake of Jefferson and her bitter disillusionment, had been driven to confront it, to search for that missing something, which foolishly she had thought she might find if she went back to where her mother had lived.
She’d known that the big house, as her mother had called it, had long been sold, along with the vineyards. She hadn’t gone there expecting to walk into her mother’s childhood home. But just being in the area was soothing and she had been over the moon to find that Evelyn was still there when she had visited the cottage.
She’d half-expected her brother to ferret her out. He had sufficient clout to get someone to locate her within seconds, but he hadn’t, and it had given her a chance to really connect with Evelyn. And, over a couple of weeks, she’d heard about the problems she was having, trying to hang onto the cottage in the face of ever-insistent demands that she sell to the guy who had bought the big house, and the even bigger house that adjoined it, so that two medium-sized vineyards could be turned into one enormous one. Another greedy developer with no scruples.
Evelyn had also been there to hear about her troubles and she had no intention of abandoning the older woman now, in her hour of need.
Not if she could help it.
‘Well?’ Evelyn pressed. ‘I’m tired of thinking about my dreadful woes. Tell me some good news. And I know you’ve got good news! I may be old but my eyes are in perfect working condition. What did that brother of yours have to say? Gosh, my dear, I wish I had had the opportunity to meet all of you so that I could put faces to the names. I wish I knew what James and Max looked like in the flesh, and not just in those pictures you showed me on your phone.’
Izzy surfaced from her thoughts. Obligingly, she told Evelyn about her phone call, which she had been hugging to herself for the past few hours. Yes, she had spoken to Max, after a lot of procrastination. He hadn’t hunted her down he had listened to Mia, thank God, and had chosen to hang back but, even so, he would only have done so reluctantly.
Izzy had been terrified when she’d made that call to tell him that there was a chance she would be staying on in California because of a muddle with Evelyn’s accommodation.
She had worried that he would be fuming. Silently, aggressively, scarily fuming. She’d expected him to order her back and had been geared for an argument. But he’d been great. He’d told her he’d been touring the islands, much to her amazement, because she couldn’t remember her brother ever doing anything that didn’t involve an office, a computer and an army of yes-men lining up to do as told. And he’d assured her that everything was covered. Had told her that when she did return they would talk about what she wanted to do instead of what he wanted her to do.
Rather than ask Who? What? Why? and When?, and risk a change of heart, she had rung off and counted her blessings.
She reached for the note again and gazed at it before looking at Evelyn.
‘You won’t be going to have tea with that guy,’ she said quietly but firmly. She reached across the table and held the older woman’s hands between hers. Evelyn was as thin as a bird and Izzy could feel the bulge of her veins under her transparently pale skin. She was strong enough, and got a lot of exercise tending to her garden, but it still felt as though a puff of wind might blow her away.
‘I’ve got to get it out of the way.’ Evelyn sighed.
‘No,’ Izzy said. ‘You don’t. I do.’
Gabriel Ricci looked at his watch and frowned because the woman was running late.
He had issued the invitation for five-thirty. He’d figured that that would be roughly when someone in her late seventies would probably be sitting down for a cup of tea, coffee or hot chocolate and a slice of cake, having had an afternoon nap of some sort. It was an assumption made on absolutely no concrete evidence because he hadn’t actually had a cup of tea with anyone elderly at five-thirty in the afternoon in his life before.
Five-thirty was the very peak of his working day. Cups of tea and slices of cake were the last things on his mind. However, needs must. But it was still irritating to find himself waiting, because he had reached a position of such power and influence in his life that he usually never had to wait for anyone any more. He beckoned, and they duly appeared exactly when they were meant to.
How life had changed, he reflected idly. He looked around the stunning sitting room with its pale colours, lavish artwork and its view of acres upon acres of vineyards outside, rows upon rows in perfect symmetry, marching in exquisite formation towards the horizon.
He could still remember the cramped house he had grown up in—the dingy paintwork, the meagre patch of grass outside that had had to multi-function as back garden, vegetable plot and place to hang the washing on those hot summer days in Brooklyn. He and his parents had lived cheek to jowl with their neighbours, and life had been crowded and chaotic. It was a place where the toughest rose to the surface and the weakest were either to be protected or allowed to sink to the bottom.
Against this backdrop, his devoted parents had managed to nurture the importance of education and the need to get out or go under. There were many times when Gabriel had resented the repeated mantra to ‘study hard and make something of yourself’. Because slacking off and having fun had been an irresistible temptation, especially when he’d known that he could have been the leader of the pack with the snap of a finger. He was big, he was street-sharp and he was fearless. But the mantra had sunk in and he had had too much love and respect for his hard-working Italian parents to walk away from their teachings.
He’d studied. He’d worked hard. He’d ended up at MIT studying engineering, and after that at Harvard, doing a PhD in business. He hadn’t set his sights on climbing the ladder. Climbing wasn’t going to do. He’d set his eyes on soaring to the very top of the ladder. Soaring was something he was in favour of. He wasn’t going to replicate his father’s life, taking orders from people dumber than him but with money, lineage and connections. He’d raced to the top of the food chain and savoured the freedom and respect that came with great wealth and even greater power.
He had politely turned away all the lucrative offers from the giants and instead, unannounced, had headed straight through the front door of a small, family-run investment company that was slowly being ground into the dust by the big boys in the business.
Sitting here now, Gabriel could still smile at the memory of that small company, with whom he still kept in close contact, because that had been his springboard and he had chosen wisely. He had catapulted them out of gridlock, got them back on the race track and had seen them steer a course through the minefield of threatening competition all around them. When they’d sold the company two years after he’d joined, they’d made millions and Gabriel had made even more.
The rest... Well, he was feared now. He had long ago said goodbye to that street-fighting Brooklyn boy who had never quite belonged because he’d been too ambitious, too smart, too focused on finding a way out. Life hadn’t been easy in the years since but it had been good, at least financially—better than good.
Good enough not to sit here, at nearly six in the evening, waiting for the Scott woman to show up.
He was standing up, impatiently moving to pace the room, when the door to the sitting room was pushed open and he looked round, seeing first Marie, his housekeeper, and then immediately behind her...
Gabriel stopped dead in his tracks.
He’d been expecting a woman in her late seventies. He’d known what she looked like. He’d had a photo of her emailed to him prior to this meeting.
Instead, he was looking at a young woman, as slender as a reed with silvery white-blonde hair that tumbled in curls past her shoulders and down her back. Her skin was satin-smooth and her eyes cornflower blue—as clear as crystal.
She was dressed in dungarees and one of the straps had slipped off her shoulder, revealing a cream vest underneath and the shadowy curve of a small breast.
He was annoyed at the sudden lapse of self-control but, even as he stifled it, he could still feel the stirring of his libido and the uninvited, utterly misplaced notion that this sort of immediate, knee-jerk physical reaction was just not him—and that annoyed him even more.
He abruptly broke the silence while moving forward.
‘And you are?’
His voice was cool and soft, and feathered down Izzy’s spine like the promise of danger.
What had she been expecting? Not this.
The house she had approached only distantly resembled the much smaller place her grandparents had owned, the one captured in that handful of faded photographs Izzy had lovingly stashed. It had clearly been extended over the years and was now the fitting palace of a billionaire, although she wasn’t quite certain how long the guy had owned it. According to Evelyn, it had been bought and sold twice and, she had confided the evening before, he was the last buyer and recently on the scene. He’d done all the renovations, though, and Evelyn knew that because she had seen those very renovations in progress over the better part of a year, during which time the vineyards continued to be maintained to the very highest standard.
Yet she had still been impressed by the scale of the place. It was vast. A vast white mansion fronted by a courtyard that could have housed a hundred cars with room to spare.
She’d stared but was undaunted. She was familiar with staggering wealth. She knew what it could and couldn’t buy, and a seventy-nine-year-old woman was not one of those things on the table for sale, and she intended to make that very clear.
She’d been shown in by a young girl with a cheerful demeanour and not many words, and she’d been feeling pleasantly bolshie until now. Until she stood in this exquisite sitting room, with the door quietly shutting behind her, staring at the most beautiful man she had ever seen in her life.
He was tall, a few inches over six feet, with a body that was lean and muscular, as sinewy as an athlete’s. He was wearing a short-sleeved white polo shirt and dark trousers that rode just low enough on his lean hips to emphasise the taut narrowing of his waist and the length of his legs. His dark hair was slightly too long, curling against the collar of his polo shirt, and he had lashes to die for, lush and dark, shielding eyes that were as cool as black ice. And he was burnished bronze, exotically stunning.
He took her breath away and the confidence with which she had sauntered into the house evaporated as fast as dew on a summer’s morning.
‘Well?’
Izzy discovered that her mouth was dry and she averted her eyes because the temptation to stare was overwhelming. Unfortunately, eyes averted, she could still see the image of him in her head, so drop-dead gorgeous with olive skin, eyes as dark as midnight and features that were so perfectly chiselled that for a second you could almost overlook the glacial lack of welcome in his expression.
Not for long, though, as his coldly delivered question snapped her right back down to earth with a bump.
‘Izzy Stowe,’ she said abruptly. He strolled towards her and she backed away a couple of inches and folded her arms in a gesture that was semi-belligerent, semi-defensive.
‘And you are standing in my living room because...?’
‘You sent a note to Evelyn Scott. You wanted to discuss the business of bullying her into selling the cottage.’ Defiant words, she thought, which was precisely the opposite of how she was feeling. Intimidated, was more like it. She shuddered to think how Evelyn would have coped. Evelyn was lively, but she was older, and might have been easily cowed by this kind of man. Frankly, who wouldn’t? He looked the sort who’d had dungeons constructed for anyone who dared get in his way.
‘I have no desire to talk to anyone but Mrs Scott. The door is behind you, Miss Stowe.’
With great effort, Izzy stayed her ground.
How rude! But why should she be surprised? Anyone who was happy to use bully-boy tactics on an old woman wasn’t exactly going to be the sort who prioritised good manners and common courtesy, was he?
‘Evelyn has given me full permission to deal with this situation.’ She remained where she was but she badly wanted to turn tail and flee.
‘Your qualifications being...?’
‘We’re old friends and I want to look out for her.’
‘Isn’t she capable of looking out for herself? She seemed very determined in her replies to my legal team when they’ve been in contact with her.’
‘Would you mind if I sit?’ Izzy noted his hesitation and knew that he was weighing up his options. He was a busy man, she guessed, with limited time to spare running round for an elusive old woman. Another day waiting for a meeting would be an unnecessary delay and maybe he was weighing up the odds of the result being exactly the same—no Evelyn but her again.
He nodded curtly to one of the chairs and Izzy tentatively inched towards it and sat. Immediately she felt at a disadvantage, because he continued to tower over her, but her legs had been wobbly.
‘Speak.’
One word delivered as he continued to stand over her, staring down through narrowed eyes.
Izzy noted that the invitation to take tea had obviously been rescinded now that she had been the one to show up rather than Evelyn. He hadn’t even offered her a glass of water and he showed zero signs of remedying the oversight.
‘Would you mind sitting?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to have this conversation craning my neck.’
She half-expected him to ignore her but instead he dragged a footstool over and positioned it directly in front of her so that she had no option but to look at him. Up close like this, he was even more forbidding, because he was so much closer—close enough for her to breathe in the warm, woody scent of whatever aftershave he was wearing, and definitely close enough to see the unforgiving coldness in his dark eyes.
‘Evelyn has confided in me about her situation.’ Izzy kept her voice even and calm. His eyes were sooty-black and scarily watchful, and she could sense her every word being carefully dissected and meticulously inspected from every angle. She shivered.
‘Are you related to Mrs Scott?’
‘Miss Scott. Evelyn never married.’
‘That’s of little relevance to this situation.’
‘Is it, Mr Ricci?’ Izzy asked quietly. ‘That cottage is where Evelyn’s lived most of her adult life. Well over five decades. It’s all she’s ever known. She has no husband, no partner and no children. Do you really think she’s going to jump for joy at the thought of leaving the one place in the world that represents stability for her? Furthermore, she has all her friends within driving distance, and all her social meetings happen in the town. Yet you want to drive her away from the one place she’s ever called home.’
‘That’s a very rousing speech, Miss Stowe, but I don’t care for the emotive vocabulary. I have not been using bullying tactics and my desire is not to drive anyone anywhere. Nor, for that matter, is it any of my concern whether the woman never chose to get married.’
‘You want to buy her cottage!’
‘At a price that’s way over the market odds.’
‘There’s no price high enough to dislodge someone from the only place they know as home.’
‘I beg to differ.’
Without warning, he vaulted upright, and Izzy followed his unhurried progress to a buzzer on the wall. Within seconds, the very same young lady who had shown her to the sitting room was knocking on the door.
‘Something to drink, Miss Stowe? Before I persuade you that it would be in Miss Scott’s best interests to take the offer I’m making and run with it.’
The sheer arrogance of the man was mind-blowing, Izzy thought. He was prepared to hear her out but it was clear that his mind was already made up. As Evelyn had pointed out, though, no one could force her hand. He’d probably figured he’d be onto a winner by confronting Evelyn face to face, oozing menace, muttering veiled threats and then just waiting for her to crumble in fear.
Gabriel Ricci, Izzy concluded, was everything she disliked in a person. He was rude, ruthless, arrogant and utterly incapable of seeing anyone’s agenda but his own.
She was guiltily aware that in many respects he reminded her of Max, although her brother had very logical reasons for being the way he was.
When she’d been much younger—too young after the death of their parents really to understand the complexities of the situation—she had absolutely hated her older brother for his inflexible, disciplinarian approach. He had overseen everything she’d done with a baleful and unforgiving eye, forcing her to toe the line, refusing her all the little liberties her friends had enjoyed. Permission had had to be granted for the smallest of excursions and, as she had become a teenager, he had become stricter yet.
Only when James had sat her down one afternoon, and gently tried to explain why Max felt driven to protect her, had she come close to understanding those heavy-handed tactics. He had taken over as the head of the household and it had fallen to him to make sure as little changed as humanly possible for both James and her. It had fallen to him to run the company until James had been able to step up to the plate and help, which he had. So he had ruled with a rod of steel, and it was only recently that she wondered what had been lost for him in the process.
But what was this man’s excuse for being a complete bastard?
He clearly wasn’t in the business of trying to buy the cottage because he cared about the fate of the occupant. This was the first time he had even deigned to make personal contact with Evelyn. Prior to that, he had handed the messy business to one of his underlings to sort out.
‘I’ll have a glass of water,’ she said coolly and he shrugged and turned to the young girl.
‘A glass of water,’ he said. ‘And a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon—with two glasses.’
‘I won’t be drinking any wine,’ Izzy informed him abruptly. ‘I’m not here to have drinks, Mr Ricci. I’m here to tell you that Evelyn won’t be selling the cottage and, if you don’t stop pestering her, I’ll have no option but to get in touch with a lawyer.’
‘This particular Cabernet is extremely good. Powerful yet elegant, and one hundred percent sustainable.’
‘Have you heard a word I’ve just said?’ She fell into temporary seething silence until the housekeeper returned with drinks as requested, carefully pouring Gabriel a glass and handing Izzy the water she had asked for.
She could barely contain her anger at his indifference to what she had to say.
‘Well?’ she snapped, as he took his time appreciating the wine.
‘This is my first foray into the wine business,’ he informed her, swirling his glass and then taking a sip as he coolly looked at her over the rim of the glass. He sauntered to the window and gazed out for a few seconds before turning to look at her.
Izzy said nothing, skewered into silence. Buried under her fury and feeling of impotence was the reluctant recognition that there was something mesmerising about the man. Her mouth wanted to hang open and she desperately had to make an effort to cling to her self-control because she knew with unerring gut instinct, if he sensed any weakness, he would take advantage of it with the ruthless speed of a born predator.
‘I like this part of the valley and I like the size of the vineyards. Combined with the neighbouring estate, I have extremely promising acreage.’ He paused to have another mouthful of wine and then he strolled back to where he had been sitting. This time, he leaned towards her, filling the space between them with such suffocating force that Izzy automatically slightly leaned back. A glass of water gave absolutely no Dutch courage.
‘Here’s the thing,’ he said softly. ‘Your friend is sitting on a patch of land that is in the midst of my vineyards. It is an oasis, I am sure, at this very point in time. However, should Miss Scott fail to sell, I have every intention of buying the land that abuts her oasis. I intend to keep this house for myself, my personal estate whether I am occupying it or not, but I will require suitable accommodation for the man who will effectively be running the show, and his staff. It will be a business of no small scale.
‘There will, first of all, be the chaos of a compound being built. Your friend, I fear, will find herself surrounded by the bustle of people coming and going. It will no longer be quite the oasis it currently is. In due course, I intend to extend further and have a boutique hotel on the grounds for a handful of wine connoisseurs who want to sample the workings of the vineyard first-hand, taste the wines, watch the process from grape to barrel.’ He shrugged elegantly. ‘This, I fear, is the way of the world. Nothing ever stays the same.’
Izzy gaped, fascinated despite herself at the picture being painted before her dismayed eyes. Every word he said left her in no doubt that life as Evelyn knew it would change immeasurably. Perhaps not with the purchase of the vineyards, although all that increased production would surely ramp up activity, but should he buy the land around her then she would no longer have any peace.
‘I have offered Miss Scott a remarkable deal,’ Gabriel continued, while Izzy mentally grappled with how a remarkable deal could incorporate ruining someone’s life. ‘I will personally see to it that she has whatever other house she desires in Napa. Her friends are here? She could be closer to them. Furthermore, I will ensure that whatever house she wants is done to the standard she requires, and has as much or as little land as she deems necessary so that she can continue to fulfil her gardening exploits to her heart’s content.’
‘But it won’t be her home,’ Izzy whispered, fighting off the temptation to be lulled into giving his offer house room despite herself.
‘A home is a moveable feast, Miss Stowe. Should she turn down my offer, I will not pursue the matter, but she could very well find that selling the property at a later date, on the open market, might not get her a quarter of what she would get right now from me. Who would want to buy a dated cottage surrounded by someone else’s land and subject to all the disagreeable bustle that a full-scale business might entail? I certainly wouldn’t, should she contemplate selling to me at a later date when disillusionment has had time to set in.’
He sat back and tilted his head to one side. ‘I should stress that this is a one-time opportunity, Miss Stowe. Convey that message to her. I intend to be here for another fortnight but I will want your friend’s decision by the end of the week. I will begin talks with Ferguson about buying his land at that point and, once that’s been set in motion, this offer will no longer be available.’
This was her cue to leave. She could read it in his expression. He’d allowed her to have her little moment but he’d known that his powerful argument would throw her, as it had.
‘I’m not scared of your threats, Mr Ricci.’ She rose to her feet to find that her legs still felt wobbly.
‘I seldom threaten. I find it’s a tactic that pays few dividends.’
Izzy stared at him. He was so ridiculously beautiful, and yet he chilled her to the bone, because there was nothing there that was warm or even human.
The tense silence was broken by the sound of racing feet, and then the door to the sitting room was flung open and there, standing in the doorway, was a child.
Copyright © 2021 by Cathy Williams