Too Close to the Sun

Diana Dempsey

Published by Diana Dempsey at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 by Diana Dempsey

This book may not be reproduced in whole or
in part without permission. It is licensed for your personal
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author appreciates that consideration.

Gabriella DeLuca stood alone at dawn among
the grapevines. To her east, beyond a stand of towering oak and
eucalyptus, the sun poked above Napa's Howell Mountains, struggling
to banish the fog that on this June morning hung heavy on the
valley floor. Within hours the sun would win the battle, bathing
the earth in hot light and pushing the grapes, olives, and walnuts
toward harvest.

She stared at the small blaze she'd carefully
set beside the steepest hillside vineyard owned by her employer,
Suncrest Vineyards. In one hand she clutched a photo, in the other
a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses Vittorio had given her, in
another country, in another life. The roses were dry now with age,
and brittle to the touch. Without allowing herself another
thought—for already she had given this thought enough—she tossed
the desiccated blooms into the fire.

Whoosh!
The flames shot high into the
air as they greedily consumed their prize. Gabby watched the last
petals fall into ash.

"Vittorio Mantucci," she whispered,
"
arrivederci
…" She closed her eyes, mentally saying
good-bye to the only man she had ever loved. Whom she'd also lost,
unfortunately, meaning she had a grim record of oh-for-one in the
amore
department. But this morning—one year to the day after
Vittorio had pulled the heart out of her chest and stomped on it
with his Gucci loafer—wasn't about heartache or fury or regret. The
last 364 had been about those. This morning was about ending it,
for now and forever.

Gabby lowered her gaze to the glossy
five-by-seven Kodachrome in her left hand. It showed her and the
former love of her life in brilliant Chianti sunshine, grinning
idiotically, him dark and gorgeous, her blond and unbelievably
happy, vineyards and olive trees and promise all around them.

She remembered that day clearly. They had had
a picnic. They had sparred over the relative merits of Tuscany
versus Lombardy, never agreeing whether his family province won out
over her ancestral home. They had made hasty but wonderful love on
a gingham blanket, then thrown on their clothes so Vittorio could
snap a photo, setting his self-timed camera on a tree stump before
scampering back toward her to get in place on time.

It took great force of will for Gabby to toss
the photo on the conflagration. But toss it she did—then she
watched it disappear, edges first, till finally Vittorio's face
caved in on itself and melted away. She stared at the space where
it had been for some time, then threw in a whole packet of photos.
Those took longer to be annihilated but eventually they were. That
seemed to prove something.

"How's that for an Italian exorcism?" she
murmured, then had to laugh, choking on her tears, both regretting
the past and not regretting it, wondering if ever again she could
think the name Vittorio Mantucci without a fresh gash in her
heart.

So she'd traded Italy's wine country for
California's. Tuscany for Napa Valley. Not such a bad deal, really.
It was home, she loved it, her whole family was nearby. What did
she have to complain about? And she'd traded Vittorio for—who?
Someone wonderful
, she told herself. Someone American like
her, who she'd understand through and through. Someone who'd stick
by her even if everybody in his family howled objections.

Or—and this poked a hole rather quickly in
her romantic bravado—maybe she'd traded Vittorio for nobody.

Oh, and don't forget. She hadn't traded
Vittorio. He'd traded
her
.

Gabby flopped down onto the vineyard dirt and
eyed what remained of her exorcism stash. All of it reminded her in
one way or another of her three years interning for the Mantucci
family winery. There was the one-pound box of fettuccine,
Vittorio's most admired noodle, and a box of wine. Yes, a box of
wine, because Gabby knew there was no greater insult to her former
lover's memory than wine so cheap it was packaged like fruit
punch.

She was just feeding a fistful of fettuccine
into the fire when she heard a shocked male voice call out behind
her.

"Gabby, what in God's name are you
doing?"

It was Felix Rodriguez. He walked toward her,
a heavyset mustachioed man who'd been vineyard manager at Suncrest
as long as her father had been winemaker, meaning ever since Gabby
was five years old. Like her, Felix wore jeans and work boots.
Unlike her, he sported a helmet similar to the kind coal miners
wear, with a sort of flashlight mounted on the forehead. Perfect
for keeping one's hands free while traipsing around vineyards. To
put out rogue fires, for example.

"It's not in God's name, Felix," Gabby told
him. "It's in Vittorio Mantucci's."

Felix's eyes flew open at the accursed name,
which all DeLucas, and Felix by extension, were banned from
uttering. Then he looked at her stash, and his eyes widened
further. "You're barbecuing spaghetti?"

"It's pasta, Felix, pasta. And I'm not
barbecuing it. I'm just burning it." She sighed. This was a hard
ritual to explain.

No doubt Felix would lump in this lunacy with
her other inexplicable behavior. Like renting a house far up-valley
and a difficult half-mile drive up an unlit, unpaved road. It
screamed isolation, and she knew what everybody thought about that.
She wants to be alone because of that Italian boy who broke her
heart
. The heads shook; the tongues clucked. Sometimes it
seemed that the old families like hers majored in grapes and
minored in gossip.
She should have known he'd marry one of his
own
.

She sort of had known, but had ignored it.
And she rented the house not only because nobody lived nearby but
also because it allowed her to live right next to vineyards. Which
unlike Italian lovers had a certain predictable, soothing rhythm to
them.

Felix harrumphed. "You shouldn't have come in
so early today. You should be home sleeping so you're not tired for
Mrs. Winsted's party tonight."

"God, Felix, don't remind me." She tossed in
the rest of the fettuccine, box and all. "Why anyone would
celebrate Max Winsted coming back to Napa Valley is beyond me."

"She's his mother."

"All I can say is, Ava Winsted proves that a
mother's love is blind." It wasn't often that Mrs. W drove Gabby
crazy, but she was doing so now. Hand over Suncrest to that
nincompoop son of hers? "What is she thinking, Felix? He's going to
kill this place. He's going to come in here and run it in whatever
asinine way he wants to and he's going to kill it."

Felix wouldn't respond to that. He would keep
his mouth shut and his head down and not risk his job, which was
probably what Gabby should do, too.

She shook her head. That was the problem with
working for a family-owned winery. If the family ran out of
sensible people to run the place, the winery got screwed. And all
the employees along with it.

"Maybe Max learned something in France,"
Felix offered.

"All Max Winsted learned in France is how to
say
'Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?
' in three
different levels of politeness," she shot back. But Felix didn't
seem to get the reference.

Gabby poked a stick at her fire. It was all
so frustrating. And scary. She'd come back to California to pick up
the threads of her life, grow into the winemaker she knew she could
be, maybe even recover enough to love again. After losing Vittorio,
all she wanted was the bulwark stability of her family and of
Suncrest, both steady, unchanging, the Rocks of Gibraltar of her
emotional landscape. The DeLucas were fine, thank God, but the
winery? With Max Winsted taking over, all bets were off.

She'd known him since she was five years old
and he was a newborn, and pretty much from the day he was out of
diapers he was a jerk. He got more smug and self-satisfied every
year. And the biggest irony of all was that even though he was born
to Suncrest and the employees only worked there, sometimes she
wondered if he loved it as much as they did.

He sure didn't act like it.

Gabby felt Felix's eyes on her, and she
forced a smile. "I'm sorry, Felix, I shouldn't be so negative." She
knew she shouldn't, since as assistant winemaker she was fairly
high up the management ranks and should be rallying the other
employees around their new boss. "It's just hard for me to imagine
working for that . . . buffoon."

He stifled a smile, then his face turned
somber. "I know you love this place, Gabby."

She stared at him. "You do, too, Felix."

He sighed, his eyes skidding to the fire. "We
all do."

A wind came through, riffling the flames.
Gabby shivered, half wishing the sun would halt its rise, the day
would never dawn, the homecoming party would never happen. But
she'd learned the hard way that wishing didn't always make things
so.

*

Will Henley Jr. was proud of himself. He'd
positively blasted through his morning ritual. Once the alarm at
his San Francisco bedside blared at the usual 4:30 AM, he did a
killer half hour on the rowing machine—a holdover from his years as
stroke for Dartmouth's lightweight crew—then noted the workout's
intensity and duration on a chart. He scarfed a few bowls of
whole-grain cereal, showered, shaved, and selected a pin-striped
suit and lightly starched French-cuff dress shirt from his custom
collection. Then he sped his silver BMW Z8 the two fog-bound miles
from his Pacific Heights Victorian to his corner office in a
refurbished redbrick warehouse on the Embarcadero.

That put him at his mahogany desk at 5:45 AM,
a ball-busting early arrival even by the type A standards of Will's
employer, the private-equity firm General Pacific Group, known
among the business and financial cognoscenti as GPG.

Will settled in to sip the low-fat latte he'd
had sent over from the building's dining room. Strewn across his
desk and file cabinets and handcrafted bookshelves were dozens of
Lucite cubes, each representing a GPG deal he'd helped transact. On
the north wall hung a flat-panel screen flashing real-time stock
quotes from Europe and the closing numbers from Asia. Wall Street
wouldn't begin trading for nearly another hour.

But Will's first task that morning had
nothing to do with financial markets or private-equity
transactions. He lifted his phone and punched in a Denver number he
knew by heart. And even though a voice-mail announcement came on
saying Rocky Mountain Flowers wasn't yet open for business, Will
began speaking at the tone.

"Hey, Benny, pick up." He waited a beat.
"Pick up, Benny. I know you're there. It's Will Henley in San—"

"Hello." The voice was slightly out of
breath.

"Hey! Thanks, guy. Did I catch you
sweeping?"

"First thing every a.m."

"Sorry to interrupt."

"No problem." Benny clattered around a bit.
"So what is it this time, Will? Anniversary? Birthday?"

"Birthday. Beth's."

"Roses or tulips? Or I could do some sort of
combo for you—"

"Do a combo." Will squinted, thinking. "Pink
and yellow—she'd like that. And send it to the office, not the
house."

Benny laughed. "So everybody can ooh and aah
over it. The usual message?"

"Please." Will smiled. It was a good message.
It made her happy every year.

"You got it, sir."

"Put 'em in a vase rather than a box, please,
Benny, and try to deliver them early in the day, okay?" Will
glanced up to see Simon LaRue, one of GPG's general partners and
hence a truly big dog, hovering at his door. He waved him in. "Very
good," he said into the phone. "Thanks, my man."

Will hung up while LaRue halted in front of
his desk, six feet two inches of perfectly groomed American male in
a three-thousand-dollar handmade suit. Simon LaRue might be
dark-haired, but he was a golden boy, just like Will, just like all
the partners at GPG.

He arched a brow. "Sending some lucky lady
flowers, Henley? Anybody we should know about?"

Will laughed and tried to look enigmatic.
Given his perennial bachelor status, which at age thirty-four was
rapidly becoming a point of fascination not only within his family
but also among his conservative colleagues, he didn't want to admit
the bouquet was for his sister.