Quinn came over and pulled me into his arms, wrapping me in such a tight embrace, I could scarcely breathe. The smokiness of the wood fire had embedded itself in his flannel shirt, and after Gino’s disturbing departure and ugly threats, the comforting, homey scent calmed me down.
“I am so, so sorry,” he said, his lips against my hair. “I never should have gotten you involved in any of this. If he does anything to harm you or the vineyard, I swear I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”
I slid my arms around his waist and closed my eyes. “You didn’t do anything,” I said. “I got myself involved, especially since I’m the one who found those letters. And please don’t make threats like that, saying you’ll kill Gino, okay? You scare me.”
“Gino plays rough,” he said. “He has to win and he thrives on being pushed or challenged. He craves it and it’s what fuels him. He’s a scary guy.”
“You never told me you came from a family of pyromaniacs,” I said with a shaky laugh. “Getting rid of the evidence by burning it. Both Gino and Angelica. My God, I still can’t believe he threw those letters in the fire.”
Quinn loosened his grip on my shoulders and stepped back so he could look down into my eyes. “I can fix this, you know? Gino won’t touch you if I’m not around. He only cares about hurting me. You’d just be collateral damage.”
“No,” I said in a firm voice. “We’re not having this discussion. I won’t listen to you. You’re not going anywhere. You’re not leaving. Whatever Gino throws at us—if he even bothers doing anything—we’ll handle it. Right now all he cares about is not losing Dante Bellagio and the Italian deal. He won’t waste time on you and me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” he said. “Don’t underestimate Gino.”
“I don’t. Believe me, I don’t.”
“I’ll make you a promise,” he said. “I won’t talk about leaving unless Gino makes good on his threat and goes after you or the vineyard to get to me.”
“No.”
“You don’t get a vote.” He tilted my face and kissed me. “It’s almost eleven-thirty. Let’s get out of here before the place opens and the Romeos find us. We’ll never hear the end of it.”
“You go ahead,” I said. “I need to see Dominique and break the news that Gino had to leave unexpectedly and so she probably won’t be making a deal with him to serve his wines at the Inn. At least not today.”
“Or any day, unless it’s over my dead body,” he said. “And Lucie?”
“What?”
“This business with Gino, what happened to Zara, her baby, the person who’s blackmailing him … it’s over now. Okay? You’re out of it,” he said. “For good.”
“What about you?”
He gave me a searing look that told me he wasn’t walking away from Gino, in spite of what he’d just said. That he would make good on his promise if Gino ran those two vineyards out of business.
And that scared me.
* * *
I FOUND DOMINIQUE SITTING at her desk in her office a few minutes later, studying what looked like sheaves of menus. It also looked like she had just slipped a pack of cigarettes underneath a folder.
“Gino Tomassi had to leave unexpectedly, so he can’t make your meeting,” I said. “He sends regrets.”
She gave me an ironic look. “Lucky for you that the walls of the Inn are so thick. Even so, everyone could hear shouting, and Hassan saw Gino leave. He said he looked madder than a nest of wet hens.”
“He was.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. If I had known it was going to deteriorate into that shouting match, I would have told Quinn that we should meet somewhere else. Like a cave.”
She laughed. “No harm done, I’m sure.”
I decided to let that one pass. “Have you figured out your White House menu yet?”
She sighed. “No, but I need to decide soon. I’m running out of time, and they want me to submit a grocery list.”
“Why don’t you just make something you serve here? The food is fabulous.”
She considered the idea. “You could be right. Maybe it’s better to go with what you know rather than the devil in the deep blue sea.”
“I would if I were you.” I blew her a kiss. “Good luck. Will you let me know how it goes?”
“Of course.”
I was halfway down the hall when I turned around and stuck my head through her doorway again. “And since my secret is safe with you, yours is safe with me. For God’s sake, have a cigarette. You can quit after the interview.”
“Merde,” she said. “Everyone’s a spy.”
Hassan was at the maître d’ station and nodded to me as I left the Inn. “I hope everything is all right, Mademoiselle Montgomery,” he said.
I smiled. “No broken china or overturned furniture, so it’s fine. Thank you for your discretion, Hassan.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Believe me,” he said, “I’ve seen it all.”
Quinn’s car was gone when I got to the parking lot. Either he’d gone back to the vineyard or he’d just taken off for a while to clear his head. Knowing him, it would be the latter. I hit the Unlock button for the Jeep as my phone rang in my coat pocket.
It was Frankie.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I hate to bother you with this,” she said. “Uma Lawrence’s credit card was declined. She bought three bottles of the special reserve Cab that Quinn made from the vines your parents planted. Our oldest vines. She said she wanted the most expensive wine in the house. So it was a six-hundred-and-sixty-dollar charge.”
The headache that had started behind my eyes after the Gino incident now started to pulse. “Well, isn’t that interesting,” I said.
We see this more often than I care to admit. Bad checks, credit card fraud, even counterfeit money. It never fails to anger me, especially because we always deal with everyone in good faith—and more often than not, we can’t ask them simply to return what they purchased. Usually because they’ve drunk it.
“I’m sorry, Lucie.” Frankie sounded mad, and I didn’t blame her.
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
Maybe it was an honest mistake. But what was surprising was that Uma Lawrence, the town’s newest heiress and an overnight multimillionaire, couldn’t cover the purchase of a couple of bottles of wine. If her credit card had bounced anywhere else, it wouldn’t be long before word got around. Small town.
“I’m at the Inn,” I said. “I’ll drive by Roxy’s house on the way back to the vineyard. Mac told me Uma’s staying there while she’s here. I’ll have a chat with her, and I’m sure she’ll make good on what she owes.”
“If she doesn’t, then get the wine back. We’re not a charity.”
Frankie wasn’t usually this grumpy so I knew it irked her, especially after the way Uma had treated Father Niall yesterday. “I wonder if she knew the card was bad when she gave it to me,” she added.
“I guess I’ll find out,” I said.
* * *
ROXY WILLOUGHBY’S HOUSE HAD been built in the early 1800s, a stately two-story brick mansion with wide steps leading to a white-columned veranda, the kind of graceful antebellum estate where you could imagine Roxy sitting in a wicker rocking chair on a warm summer evening while a ceiling fan turned lazily and she sipped sweet tea laced with bourbon as fireflies danced on the lawn and the moon rose above a weeping willow that dominated her front yard.
Today in the frigid cold, it was hard to think of summer, especially because the long gravel driveway had not been plowed since yesterday’s storm, so the Jeep rocked back and forth as I drove over icy ruts left by the multiple tire tracks of previous cars.
A pearl gray Land Rover sat parked in front of the house. I pulled up behind it and noticed the rental sticker on the bumper. Obviously, Uma had used a different credit card if she’d managed to rent that car. At least I knew she was there.
She answered the door on the third ring, dressed in a pair of lime green sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, which made me think they were her pajamas. Her dark red hair was scraped in a high offside ponytail and she wasn’t wearing makeup. Still, she was breathtakingly lovely.
From the expression on her face once she realized who I was it was clear she knew what I was doing on her doorstep. She wound the end of her ponytail around a finger like a corkscrew.
“Hullo,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”
“You can,” I said. “May I come in?”
I placed the tip of my cane across her threshold in case she got the bright idea that the answer to that question was no. At least she didn’t say she was surprised to see me. She opened the door wider and I stepped inside.
“The credit card you used yesterday to make a six-hundred-and-sixty-dollar purchase for the wine you bought at my vineyard was declined,” I said. “I’m sure it’s some mistake on the company’s end. You know how careful credit card companies are these days if you make a purchase that they don’t think is really yours. Maybe you forgot to tell your bank you’d be traveling to America.”
Her eyes darted back and forth as she seemed to be considering what I’d said. “Oh, my goodness, how dreadfully embarrassing. Yes, that’s probably precisely what happened,” she said. “I do apologize and, of course, I’ll settle this at once. And I shall ring my bank and get to the bottom of what went wrong.”
She had said all the right things and it seemed to me she was genuinely upset. Maybe I’d been wrong and it was, after all, just an honest mistake.
“Thank you, I appreciate that,” I said. “Then I can be on my way and that will be the end of it. I’m sure you’ve got enough on your mind as it is.”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “My wallet is upstairs. I’ll just fetch it. Would cash be all right?”
“Of course.”
She ran lightly up the wide-planked staircase and disappeared into a bedroom at the back of the house. While I waited, I looked around. Roxy’s house was laid out much like mine, the same kind of symmetry that was common in these old Colonial homes: a wide foyer, a central staircase, and four large rooms downstairs, two on each side of the foyer. Though Roxy hadn’t lived here for the last year and a half, Mac had moved in, and I reckoned the place looked exactly as she’d left it—furnished with fine Early American and English antiques—with the exception of whatever she had taken with her to Foxhall Manor.
Uma had obviously made herself at home, and I hope she’d clean up the opened cartons of Chinese food that sat on the enormous inlaid mahogany dining room table before they left grease stains on the beautiful old wood and Mac found out about it. Two of the three bottles she’d bought of Quinn’s Montgomery Vieilles Vignes Cabernet sat there, as well. A closer look and I saw they were empty. That was a lot of wine to consume in an evening. Though judging by the number of white cardboard boxes littering the table, either she ate like a horse or she’d had company.
I heard footsteps and looked up as Uma came clattering down the stairs clutching a fistful of bills in her hand. She paused mid-step when she realized my attention was directed at the food-strewn table in the dining room.
“Checking up on me?” She bounded down the rest of the stairs, a scowl on her face. “Do I need to give a full report of everything I do while I’m in this bloody town? Doesn’t anyone here respect a person’s privacy?”
She pronounced privacy in the English way, so it rhymed with privy rather than private. And sounded a lot more accusing.
I held my ground. “I wasn’t doing anything other than waiting for you to get the money you owe me for my wine. Which you obviously already enjoyed. It’s your business what you do here. I just came to collect an unpaid bill.”
Her eyes flashed. “I’m not a lush, if that’s what you’re implying.” She gestured to the table. “My cousin had some of my grandmother’s furniture brought back here because he had to clear out her flat at Foxhall Manor, since they want to rent it again. The guy who takes care of his deliveries happened to come by with some of it yesterday evening, so I asked him if he’d care to stay for a take-away meal. We got Chinese and opened your wine.”
“Will Baron,” I said. “Yes, I know who he is.”
“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “He’s rather gorgeous.”
I gave her a pointed look. “He’s also rather married. I know his wife. She’s a lovely person.”
Her cheeks turned pink, but she said, “I’m aware that he’s married. And his wife, Vivienne, did heaps of research on my grandmother, so over dinner Will told me stories about her, her World War Two squadron and how courageous she was.” She gave an impatient shake of her head, which made her ponytail bounce like an angry exclamation point. “This isn’t a very hospitable town. To be honest, I feel like some kind of pariah. Will was kind enough to stay and talk to me. I was grateful for his company.”
She held out the bills between two fingers like they were contaminated. “Here. This should settle what I owe you.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.” I took the money. “Maybe you just haven’t gotten to know us. If you’re going to be here on Saturday, why don’t you come to our Roaring Twenties party at the vineyard? It’s a fund-raiser for Veronica House, the local homeless shelter and food pantry that Father Niall runs. You’ll meet loads of people.” I paused. “Perhaps you should give us another chance.”
For a moment, she seemed flustered. “I was planning to go home this weekend.”
“What day are you leaving?”
“I’m not sure yet. I haven’t decided.”
“If you’re still here on Saturday, why don’t you come by? It’s dinner and dancing. Everyone’s dressing up in clothes from the Roaring Twenties. It’ll be a lot of fun and it’s for a good cause,” I said. “Your grandmother was a big patron of Veronica House.”
She fiddled with her ponytail again. “Yes, so Father O’Malley said yesterday.”
I looked at the money in my hand. “You gave me seven one-hundred-dollar bills,” I said. “I’m afraid I haven’t got change. Not that I’m trying to strong-arm you, but the tickets for the dinner dance are forty dollars. Or else you can stop by the winery and pick up your change.”
“Just keep it.” She sounded irritated. “I really need to get back to something I was working on.”
“I won’t hold you up,” I said. “But I hope we’ll see you Saturday night.”
She gave me a coy smile. “I rather doubt it. And please don’t think just because you’ve invited me to your little affair that I’m going to change my mind about supporting my grandmother’s charities, because it won’t happen. I’m not Roxy, you know. I have my own interests.”
I opened the front door. “Yes,” I said, “I can certainly see that you aren’t Roxy.”
When I was halfway down the stairs, she slammed the door behind me. I got into my car, thinking that this was the second time this morning someone had banged a door after a conversation that hadn’t gone well. First Gino Tomassi. Now Uma Lawrence.