Chapter Thirty-four

Brody drove toward Farallon Vineyards, cursing himself. Why had he let Tori talk him into this? He didn’t want to interfere in the life of a man he’d just met. Okay, okay. Alex was his half brother, and he’d been surprisingly candid, but Brody couldn’t imagine Alex would want to hear anything negative about Rachel no matter how carefully Brody put it.

“Copulate Don’t Populate,” he said, reading the bumper sticker on the seventies style VW van on the road in front of him.

He shook his head, smiling and turned down the drive leading to the winery. He couldn’t help thinking of Tori. It had taken all his willpower to leave her this morning. Not that he had any choice. She’d gone off to work, but he’d been tempted to follow her.

She was great, and not just at sex, he thought, again smiling. She made him happy, and he enjoyed just being with her. As weird as it seemed, he wasn’t looking forward to returning to base for another assignment.

That was a first.

He loved his job. It was his life, just the way this winery was Alex’s life. He turned off the motor, but he didn’t get out. He looked around, thinking there was more to his half brother’s life than the vineyard. Alex had a father he loved and worried about and a woman he would like to marry.

Tori had put it so well. All we have is the present.

A depressing thought, he decided, getting out of the Porsche he’d rented. Was living in the moment all there was to his life?

He walked to the entrance of the building, forcing his thoughts elsewhere. Before leaving the bed and breakfast, he’d talked to Lou. Tori’s father had seemed inordinately happy this morning, but Lou refused to say anything except he thought Katherine Wilson was a very nice person. From the gleam in Lou’s eye, Brody suspected there was a whole lot more to their relationship than Lou had told anyone.

“Everyone has a secret in this damned place,” he muttered under his breath.

Inside the starkly modern reception area, a pert brunette smiled at him, asking, “Mr. Hawke?” He nodded. “Tori said to call her the minute you arrived.”

“Thanks,” he replied and she pushed a telephone across the desk. Brody pulled Tori’s business card out of his pocket, then dialed her office. She answered on the first ring.

“Hey,” he said, unexpectedly glad just to hear her voice. “What’s up?”

“Elliott called, looking for you.”

“I told him I would be there after lunch.”

“I know,” she said. “He wanted to let you know he’s going to the bank to apply for a loan and might be late. A deal Rachel made for supplemental grapes fell through. Worse, a container of wine set to be sent by air to France has been impounded. An anonymous tipster said there were drugs packed with it.”

“Sounds like deliberate sabotage. Did you mention what you’d seen?”

“No. Elliott has enough trouble. I want to verify what’s on Rachel’s computer.”

“Right. I’ll go with you, but it won’t be tonight unless I finish with Katherine Wilson really early.”

He thanked her, then hung up, and listened to the receptionist give him directions to the section of the winery where Alex was waiting. Unlike the warren of caves comprising Hawke’s Landing, Farallon Vineyards was an ultramodern facility with twenty-foot-high ceilings and security cameras posted at regular intervals.

Alex was in a room of stainless steel counters and conveyor belts. Dozens of oak casks lined one wall, stacked to the ceiling. The barrels appeared to be old, a stark contrast to their surroundings.

“We’re about to decant these barrels,” Alex told him with obvious enthusiasm as a worker wheeled the first barrel over to the conveyor belt.

“These barrels are huge. How many bottles will they fill?”

“Each contains twenty-five cases of wine. What we have here is Farallon’s Private Reserve. It’s aged longer than our other wines, and it’s our best.”

Brody watched while they tapped the keg. A small portion was drawn off into a glass cup about half the size of a coffee cup. Alex swirled the burgundy liquid twice, then sniffed it, breathing deeply. He exhaled and took a small sip.

“Try it.” He handed the glass cup to Brody.

He swirled the cup and took a whiff. His nostrils filled with a light but pungent smell.

“That’s the nose, which means the smell of the wine before you taste. Afterward, we call it the aroma because you’re tasting as well as smelling it.”

Brody sipped a bit and his tongue puckered just slightly, but it wasn’t an unpleasant taste. In fact, it was quite good, but he still preferred Scotch.

“The tannin makes your tongue react. It’s a trace of acid left by the grape skins. This tannin is very mild.”

Brody finished off the cup. “It’s good, really good, even so early in the morning.”

Alex chuckled and signaled to his men to attach the cask to the bottling machine. They stood aside watching while the high-tech contraption siphoned the wine out of the old wooden cask.

“It looks as if you’ve used this barrel before,” Brody said.

“Sure. A new barrel runs about six hundred dollars. We use them as many times as we can. The oak is what gives wine its flavor.”

Alex explained some of the finer points of making wine. Brody thought he sounded slightly off key, as if his mind was elsewhere. Hey, he could be mistaken. He’d met Alex only yesterday.

“You know, if you stick around, you might find you have a talent for wine,” Alex said with a smile.

Brody shook his head, unable to envision himself living here even though the valley appealed to him. Tori appealed to him. Hell, more than appealed to him. He did like it here, but he didn’t see himself in a vineyard. Maybe when his SEAL days were over, he would start a second career in the valley.

Maybe. That was a long way off.

They toured the facility, Alex showing him with pride the innovations that were ahead of those used at Hawke’s Landing. Many of them had been Alex’s own ideas, and Brody had to applaud him.

They were out on the loading dock where wooden crates of wine were being loaded by conveyor belt into refrigerated trucks. Brody checked his watch, surprised at how much time had passed. It’s now or never, he told himself.

“How did it go last night?” he asked as casually as he could manage, considering he rarely asked a personal question.

Alex stared straight ahead. “It didn’t.” Alex slowly turned toward him, hesitated a moment, then added, “Don’t ever confuse great sex with love.”

Uh-oh. Brody couldn’t help thinking about last night.

“Rachel and I’ve had a thing going for years. When I asked her to marry me”—Alex shook his head—“she dropped a bombshell.”

She said she loves Elliott, he thought.

“Ever heard of Kevin Puth?” Alex asked.

“The name sounds familiar.” Brody had been expecting him to say something about Elliott. It took a second to get back on track. “You mean the Dot-Com king?”

“That’s the guy. A nerd with an attitude.” Alex huffed his disgust. “He offered me a once-in-a-life-time deal. He’d finance a vineyard and give me part of it to run the thing. I turned him down.”

From what Brody had heard about Puth, getting turned down was probably a first and damned good for the nerd’s ego.

“I had mentioned the offer to Rachel. Know what she did? She contacted Puth and volunteered her services. She’s going to work for him. The last thing she wants is to marry me.”

Personally, Brody thought Alex had dodged a bullet, but didn’t say so. He didn’t mention Elliott either. Rachel was out of Alex’s life, but from what Tori had told him, Rachel was determined to sabotage Elliott.

“Alex, there you are. I’ve been looking for you.” It was the perky brunette from the reception desk. “Elliott Hawke telephoned. Your father collapsed at work. Mr. Hawke took him by ambulance to the hospital in Yountville.”

So this is where I was born, Brody thought as he drove Alex up to the hospital. The news had shaken Alex, and Brody hadn’t wanted him to drive the winding road south through St. Helena and several smaller towns to Yountville, site of the best hospital in the region.

During the trip, Alex hadn’t talked except to point out two shortcuts to their destination. Brody had no idea what to say except to tell him about their mother.

“Mom knew she had terminal cancer for months,” Brody began as he drove into the parking lot. “She didn’t send for me until the very end. I was in the Middle East on a mission and had to be pulled off. Her condition took me by surprise. She had seemed so healthy.”

“Where was she living then?”

“Sarasota, Florida. The minute I began making money, I bought her a small condo there. She loved the western shore of Florida.”

He could still remember seeing the wasted woman in the hospital bed. Mother? Couldn’t be. The old, frail woman had to be someone else.

“I’d seen her six weeks earlier, but she’d deteriorated fast,” he said, preparing Alex for who knew what? “She lived another two days, is all.”

“You loved her a lot.”

“Yes.” He pulled into a parking space. I loved her but I didn’t know her.

“What will I do if something happens to my father?”

Brody knew if Aldo died now, his share of Hawke’s Landing would go to the Barzinis and the Rittvos. Without Aldo’s financial backing, Alex couldn’t purchase Farallon Vineyards. But that wasn’t what Alex meant. The anguish in his voice made it plain how much he loved his father. The vineyard wasn’t in his thoughts at the moment.

Elliott met them in a small waiting room on the second floor. “The doctor’s still with him, Alex. They’ve been in there a while.”

“What happened?”

“We were beginning the second fermentation. I said something and Aldo didn’t answer. He stared and me, then collapsed without a word. We revived him enough to keep him breathing until the ambulance arrived.”

Alex nodded slowly. “He has prostate cancer. It’s been getting worse.”

Elliott’s body stiffened in shock. “What? He never told me.”

Alex didn’t respond. He just stood there, his normally erect shoulders hunched forward. It reminded Brody of the way Aldo’s shoulders were permanently bent from years of riddling.

“I never would have allowed him to work—”

“That’s why he didn’t tell you. Can you imagine my father sitting around?”

Brody listened to the exchange, wishing there were some quick, silent way he could tell Elliott that Alex was his brother. But even now, faced with death, he sensed a certain friction between the two men.

“No, I can’t—”

A nurse swung the door open. “The doctor wants to see you,” she told Elliott.

Alex stepped forward. “I’m his son. I just got here.”

The door closed behind them as the nurse said something to Alex in a voice too low to hear.

“Oh, Christ! I can’t believe this.” Elliott threw himself into a nearby chair, and the frame groaned at the sudden weight. “I can’t imagine Hawke’s Landing without Aldo. He’s more a part of it than my father was.”

Brody sat in the chair beside him and studied his brother. Elliott’s head was flung back and he was staring up at the ceiling.

“I wish I could do something. Aldo made the winery what it is today, not my father. Aldo’s a great guy. Alex is lucky, really lucky.”

“He knows it. Alex loves his father very much.”

The door swung open again, and the nurse reappeared. “Mr. Abruzzo would like to see you.”

Elliott jumped to his feet, then walked toward her.

“Both of you,” she said, looking at Brody.

They walked down the long corridor in silence until the nurse stopped them outside the Intensive Care Unit.

“Wait here a moment.”

Brody hoped he wasn’t making a mistake, but an inner voice told him to speak up now. “Elliott, about Mother.” His brother turned to him, listening intently. “She was Aldo’s wife.”

“This is no time to joke,” he snapped.

“It’s not meant to be funny.”

“You are serious.” Elliott’s stricken expression stunned Brody.

“Dead serious,” Brody managed to say.

“Christ! I never knew. I never even suspected.”

“This may be the last time you speak to Aldo,” Brody reminded his brother. “Just realize he’s suffered a lot over the years. Forgive him.”

“Forgive him? I love the old guy.” Elliott stared at Brody, frowning. “Why didn’t he tell me about Mother?”

“I guess everyone was afraid of Gian.” Brody waited a long minute to see if the light would dawn. It didn’t. “That makes Alex your half brother.”

Elliott’s expression stilled and grew even more serious. “I’ll be damned. Of course he is.” He slumped against the wall as if someone had punched him in the gut. “Does Alex know?”

“He’s known for years, but Gian wouldn’t—”

The nurse reappeared, “We’re ready for you now. Mr. Abruzzo’s very weak. Don’t tire him.”

Inside the small cubicle cordoned off from other ICU cubicles by machines and drawn curtains, Alex stood beside his father’s bed, holding his hand. Aldo was attached to a variety of machines by tubes and wires. A bank of monitors stood vigil beside the bed, calculating his heart rate, blood pressure, and other vital signs.

Elliott stared down at the man who’d taught him so much. Aldo’s wife had been their mother. Elliott couldn’t fathom it and hadn’t had time to get the details from Brody. Why hadn’t he suspected?

Alex looked over at him, and Elliott nearly lost it. My half brother. Of course. He could see the resemblance. True, he wasn’t a dead ringer like Brody, but there were obvious similarities—if you knew to look for them.

All those years Alex had been his nemesis, the too-perfect older boy whose ability to make fine wine had been in his genes while Elliott had to struggle to learn the process step by step. All the while, they’d been brothers.

“Ah, you’re all here.” Aldo’s voice cracked with pain as he opened his eyes and gazed at the three men gathered around the hospital bed. “Good.”

“Don’t talk too much,” cautioned the nurse.

“I just … want to tell … my boys …” His voice trailed off.

My boys. The hot sting of tears burned the backs of Elliott’s eyes. Aldo’s voice had all the love and emotion he’d never heard from his own father.

“We know, Aldo,” Brody said. “We all know about Mother.”

The older man closed his eyes, and a moment later a tear seeped from beneath one closed lid. “I loved Linda with all my heart. I-I wanted to talk to you—”

Alex squeezed his hand. “It’s okay, Pop. They understand Gian wouldn’t let you tell.”

Aldo opened his eyes slowly. They were slightly unfocused and glazed with a sheen of moisture. “I want to tell you how Gian died.”

Brody stood stock-still and braced himself, not knowing what to expect. The way things had developed, who knew?

Aldo looked first at Elliott, then at Brody, then at Elliott again. “Your father was a proud, proud man. He hated what he’d become.” He paused, breathing deeply. “He kept saying he wanted to die. Ask Maria. She heard him.”

“He told me, too,” Elliott said. “I never thought he was serious.”

“Dad, are you saying Gian killed himself?” Alex asked. “Why didn’t he wait for Brody to come home?”

“Sending for Brody was your idea, not Gian’s.”

Brody should have been shocked, but he wasn’t. From what he’d gathered about Gian Hawke, the man was not the sentimental type. He hadn’t given a rat’s ass about him—or about Elliott for that matter. Elliott had been selected for his size at birth.

The cardiac monitor beeped, and the nurse dashed over from the adjacent cubicle. She adjusted something, then stood there watching the monitor.

“Maybe we should leave,” Elliott said.

“No!” Aldo cried. “You have to listen. Gian was always, you know, afraid people were after him. He was like that ever since I can remember, only it got worse, much worse, after his stroke.”

The nurse walked away, but her expression remained concerned.

“Gian would go off in his wheelchair and hide from us like we were going to kill him. Maria had told me about the will. That gave me an idea.” He gazed up at his son with a weak smile. “I figured I had worked my entire life at Hawke’s Landing. What did I get for all those long hours? A title, sure, and a salary, but in the end I had nothing to leave my son.”

“I never expected you to leave me—”

“I know, I know, but I want to. It’s important to me, but I was afraid I would die before Gian did. I talked it over with Maria. We decided the next time Gian said he was through with life, we wouldn’t bother him. We’d watch and see what happened.”

Brody waited, half expecting what would be said next, sad, yet relieved to know the truth.

“Gian drove his wheelchair into the pool on purpose. We were following him, hiding in the bushes. He hit his head on the side of the pool … and floated on top for a minute.” Aldo closed his eyes, tears spilling down his cheeks, his voice so low they all bent forward to hear him. “We could have saved him, but we didn’t try.”