The Truth About De Campo (4 page)

Matteo pointed toward the terraced vineyards that extended from the top of the mountain to the bottom. “The De Campo estate is actually a constellation of vineyards. The different slopes and elevations of the mountain offer each varietal the optimum growing conditions. Some of the whites such as the Chardonnay, for instance, are planted further above sea level, where the nights are cool and the ripening season long, whereas the Brunellos, the king of our reds, thrive at a lower level.”

“Margarite is obsessed with your Brunello.”

“Who?”

“My head sommelier.”

“So she should be,” he murmured cockily. “We’ll have one tonight.”

She was so exhausted she might fall flat on her face if she drank anything. But Margarite would kill her if she passed up the opportunity to try the famous, lusty De Campo red.

“The scale is breathtaking,” she said to him. “How many varietals do you produce?”

“Fifteen.” He flicked her a glance. “Do you ride? I thought we would do the tour by horseback tomorrow.”

“Not well,” she admitted. She was suspicious of horses. They were big, heavy, unpredictable animals. Kind of like men. She didn’t need either of them in her life.

It was impossible not to think how much more history De Campo had than Silver Kangaroo as Matteo parked the car in front of the magnificent
castello
and carried her bags inside. It was everywhere. In the century-old, mature vineyards surrounding the castle, in the family crest on the building as they came in, in the third generation of winemakers producing the glorious vintages here. Silver Kangaroo was only twenty years old. Although there was something to be said for such a young winery winning so many awards in such a short amount of time, it couldn’t compare to De Campo in lineage.

Matteo led her into the magnificent tiled hallway of the west wing which was the personal residence of the De Campo family. With its cathedral ceiling and stunning frescos it was truly amazing. Like she’d walked into the home of royalty.

Matteo introduced her to Maria, the Italian housekeeper who had run the De Campo household since he was a boy, then led her up a winding staircase to a turret bedroom that took her breath away. The exposed brick walls of the
castello
extended into a double-arched stone wall that separated a sitting room with a fireplace from the bedroom and its huge canopied bed. The beautiful, rich fabrics covering the room cast everything in a golden, luxurious hue that might have been a royal princess’s bedroom.

It evoked a strange feeling in Quinn. She’d spent much of her life feeling like the imposter princess. Her birth father, a factory worker in Mississippi, even now worked two jobs to make ends meet for his family. She knew because she’d hired a private detective to find them and learned the real truth about her adoption. Unlike the story she’d been fed by a well-meaning Warren and Sile, it hadn’t been as simple as her mother having an affair with a married man and giving her up because of the complications of their relationship. Her mother had gone on to marry her father and they’d had another girl. Her sister.

To replace the girl they’d given away.

“Quinn?” Matteo was looking at her with a raised brow. “Everything okay?”

She blinked. “It’s stunning, thank you. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to grow up in a castle.”

“I have stories.” A wry smile tipped his mouth. “You can imagine the hiding spots three industrious boys found.”

She smiled. “Some impossible to find ones, I’ll bet. Will I get to meet your parents tonight?”

He shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. Antonio serves on the boards of a couple of major corporations. He’s in London right now for meetings and my mother is in Florence where she prefers to stay.”

Interesting arrangement
. While her mother was alive, Warren would fly all night to get home to her. They hadn’t spent a night apart that wasn’t business. Her stomach twisted. In many ways, Sile’s tragic death at a far-too-early age had turned her father into a different man. Taken the small amount of softness Warren possessed with her, his anger at her death so raw and all-consuming.

“Does seven suit for dinner?” Matteo asked. “If you sleep after that you should be able to get into the time.”

“That’s perfect, thank you.”

“
Fino a stasera
. Until tonight...”

And why did even that sound sexy? She closed the door behind him and blamed it on the accent. Accents were always sexy on a man. His, particularly so.

She looked longingly at the bed.
Just a couple more hours,
she told herself, intending on showering first and catching up on email. But her eyelids burned from fatigue and she felt as if her body had been pummeled in a boxing match. Maybe a few minutes with her eyes closed on the high canopy bed in the beautiful, fairy-tale-ish room would refresh her enough to make it through dinner.

Help her figure out exactly how she was going to avoid the inescapable attraction she felt toward her host. Her reaction to him, she decided, curling up on the satin comforter, was probably due to the fact she hadn’t looked at a man since Julian had left. Had buried herself in work lest the humiliation of it all become simply too much to bear. She hugged the pillow to her. Quinn never intended to feel that kind of humiliation ever again. From any man. So she was missing the gene that allowed her to be truly intimate with another person.... The way she’d survived in this world, the way she’d survived as a Davis was to shield her heart. To not let herself feel.

It was easier that way. To not
need
anyone. And she wasn’t changing her strategy now.

* * *

Matteo knocked on the heavy wooden door of Quinn’s suite just after seven, his game plan firmly in place. Ply her with an incomparable Brunello, impress her with the history and atmosphere of De Campo over dinner in the cellar and, most importantly, find out why she’d ranked them fourth on her list.

A piece of cake, as the Americans would say.

When there was no response to his knock, he rapped again, harder. Nothing. Strange. Quinn seemed like the overly punctual type. He was knocking on the two-inch-thick door a third time when it flew open and she stood before him, bleary-eyed, dark hair flowing over her shoulders in a jumbled mass of curls.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “I fell asleep.”

He wasn’t. She had the face of an angel when she wasn’t frowning. Her big green eyes had a sleepy, muted golden edge to them, an intense vulnerability he couldn’t tear his gaze from. He had the feeling this was the
real
Quinn Davis. The softness behind the hard edge she liked to present to the world. Unfiltered.

His gaze drifted down over the flushed, rosy skin of her cheeks, her full, pouty lips that were the kind a man imagined wrapped around a certain part of his anatomy...

Matteo’s body temperature soared. Quinn cleared her throat. The flicker of sexual awareness that replaced the vulnerability in her eyes slammed into him with the force of a hammer.
Merda
. Where had he ever gotten the impression this woman was cold? Or maybe it was just that she was a perfect combination of fire
and
ice?

Quinn dropped her gaze to somewhere around his shoulder and waved a hand at him. “Give me five minutes and I’ll be ready.”

He nodded. The click of the door brought back his sanity. Bringing Quinn Davis to her knees in that particular fashion might have been the natural order of things for him—but, regrettably, he needed to use his brain on this one, not his body.

Unfortunate. But not nearly as unfortunate as the consequences of not playing this one by the book.

Quinn emerged in a navy dress that made the most of her voluptuous curves in her usual, conservative fashion. Her ultracomposed, cool demeanor was firmly back in place.

“I hope this is okay?” She smoothed her hands over her hips. “You didn’t specify.”

“Perfetto.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry, I should have mentioned it was just the two of us dining in the cellar. Anything goes.”

A wary look crossed her face. His lips curved. “I promise my best behavior, Quinn. We can recite every last statistic on De Campo over dinner. I’ll even tell you what we polish the floors with.”

“Ha, ha,” she murmured, long lashes coming down to veil her expression. “I wasn’t worried.”

Si,
you were.
He wasn’t the only one having a hard time handling the chemistry between them, but he instinctively knew Quinn Davis had to feel in control of a situation for him to accomplish anything tonight, so he let it go.

Fortunately, he was an expert at the slow, insidious penetration of a woman’s defenses.

He took her on a tour of the west wing, showing her the centuries-old library, the opulent, chandelier-encrusted ballroom and the music room with the grand piano. When she had a suitably glazed-over look at the pure scale of things, he took her through the stone hallways to the east wing where the restaurant was just starting to fill up with locals and tourists. She was unfailingly polite and charming to his chef, making Guerino Pisani smile broadly and insist she come back after dinner to let him know how she liked it.
Was it just him, the playboy, she disliked then?

His ego slightly dented, Matteo led Quinn down the dark, winding stone stairwell to the cellar. “You weren’t kidding,” she murmured, craning her neck to take in the two ancient skulls that sat backlit in one of the alcoves. “Do you know who they belonged to?”

“We assume someone unfit for a Christian burial. Spaniards, the French, the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, they were all imprisoned down here. Also the Aldobrandeschi and the Guelphs of Florence—powerful families at war with the Sienese.”

She followed him down the hallway to the cellar. The stone walls on either side of them were thick slabs of rock that would have made escape impossible. Collections of medieval weapons—swords, pikes, helmets and breastplates—were lit on either side of them.

“It all seems so brutal,” Quinn said, giving them a long look.

“It was. It was hand-to-hand combat in its most savage form.”

That feeling of brutality remained in the majestic cellar Matteo’s grandfather Alfonso De Campo had built. The exposed brick walls rose thirty feet, tiny bar-encased windows the only natural light entering the room. The muted lighting hinted at a history of darkness. But it was the feeling that souls had suffered here that got into your bones. Even with all the elegant touches Alfonso had included—the dark walnut shelving that rose fifteen feet high to house De Campo’s most precious vintages and the elegant, hand-turned showpiece of a bar.

“It’s breathtaking,” Quinn murmured, wide-eyed. “Did they
execute
prisoners down here?”

His mouth tilted. “From what I’ve been told, most died from existing injuries.”

She didn’t look so reassured by the response. He held a chair out for her at the candlelit table for two the serving staff had set in the middle of the room. Then he sat down opposite her and swept his hand toward the bottle of wine breathing in the middle of the table. “You’ll have some?”

She scanned the label. The Brunello he’d chosen was the highest-ranking bottle in De Campo’s one-hundred-year-old history. Apparently, its significance wasn’t lost on Quinn, a wry smile curving her mouth. “Refuse the 1970 De Campo Brunello? I think not.”

He poured the rich dark red, almost brown liquid into their glasses and held his own up. “To a successful partnership.”

She tilted her glass in a mocking salute. “So confident.”

“I don’t intend to lose, Quinn.”

“Then let the best candidate win.” Her green gaze glittered as she lifted her glass and swirled its dark contents around the edge. She closed her eyes and breathed the wine in. He found himself hypnotized by the way she gave herself over to the full sensual experience. Quinn Davis was
definitely
scorching hot on the inside. The type who would be more than a match for any man. The question was, did she ever drop that rigid exterior and let herself go?

Stretch out like a cat and let a man pleasure her until she screamed?

She opened her eyes. Looked directly into his. He was not nearly quick enough to wipe the curiosity off his face. A rosy hue stole over her golden skin, her gaze dropping away from his.

He could work with this.

“So,” she murmured huskily, after their food had been served, “give me your list.”

He sat back in his chair and balanced the Brunello on his knee. “The wine list in your Park Avenue property is far too big. You’re giving people
too much choice.
Distracting them. You need to allow your sommelier to do his job and sell the wines.”

She frowned. “People like choice.
I
like choice. I hate it when I go to a place that tries to tell me what I want to drink.”

“
Si,
but you have
too much
choice. The night Riccardo and I were there, a couple at the table beside us were all set to splurge on an expensive bottle, but by the time they got through your monstrosity of a list, they gave up and ordered a midend vintage they were familiar with. Your sommelier,” he drawled, “never made it to their table that night.”

“We’re short-staffed there,” she said defensively.

“It was a Tuesday night at six. There were empty tables.”

She was silent. Pursed her lips. “Go on...”

“You need more beautiful women working the bar.”

She lifted a brow. “So men can go ogle them and spend their money? This is a high-end restaurant I’m running, Matteo, not a strip joint.”

“Precisely. Seventy-five percent of the patrons at the bar that night were men—financial power players having a drink after work. Those types are all about the eye candy. You put a beautiful woman in front of them, they’ll stay longer, drink more and I guarantee, they’ll keep coming back.”

“I suppose I should have them in short skirts, too?”

“Sex sells, Quinn.”

She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Sometimes I think life would be so much easier if I were a man. You are such simple creatures.”