Too Close to the Sun Page 7

  "So do we!" Max laughed again, "That's why we don't want to sell."

  Will leaned forward and set his elbows on his knees, gearing up for the core of his pitch. "Your family has built a tremendously successful winery, thanks to enormous effort, persistence, and skill." He raised his head to catch Ava's eye. "Yet I can imagine that you might be in a chapter of your life when you want to move in a different direction, be free of a winery's constant demands. Enjoy the fruits of all that labor."

  "You make a good point," Ava murmured.

  Will almost fell out of his chair. That was the most receptive comment Ava had ever made to him on this subject. Then he had a revelation.

  She was using him to frighten Max. She had no more intention of selling Suncrest to GPG than she ever had. But she wanted Max to believe she might sell.

  Ever the actress, Ava Winsted was playing a part, for an audience of one. And Will was, for lack of a better term, her prop.

  Fine. He was unfazed. She had given him the opportunity to repeat his case to her, and to make it for the first time to Max. These transactions were never sealed on the initial meetings, anyway. They were based on trust, earned over time. Emotions, ego, ambition invariably played a role. The human factor was huge.

  Will continued. "GPG is prepared to invest in Suncrest and assume control of the winery, leaving you with cash and a substantial stake in the upside. Or"—and he leaned closer to Max for the kill—"we could take Suncrest entirely off your hands. Free you up. Provide to you, in cash, the substantial value of your holdings." He paused for dramatic effect. "For thirty million dollars."

  Will watched Max's pupils dilate. He'd seen that before, too.

  "Thirty million dollars," Ava repeated softly. "You see, Max, why I find Will's offer so compelling."

  This time, Max made no kneejerk comment about "no interest in selling." He was notably silent and contemplative.

  "This is a lot for you to digest," Will told Max, "especially as you've just come home to California. Here." He handed Max a business card. "Call me anytime to talk further. I know that once you start to chew on this, you'll have all kinds of questions."

  Ava rose to shake his hand, an unmistakable gleam of satisfaction in her light blue eyes. "You certainly have given us food for thought today, Will. Thank you again for coming all this way." Then she led him and her son out the way they had come.

  *

  Gabby had just reached the main winery building when she ran right into Will, standing next to Max. She spied Mrs. W some distance away, walking along the path toward her house.

  "Will!" Flummoxed, Gabby tore the ratty baseball cap off her head, the first thing she could think of doing to improve her appearance. It was woefully inadequate, she knew. In the ninety-degree heat, after four hours of helping Felix and Pepe spray three mite-infested vineyards, she was sweat-stained, dirt-smeared, and stank to high heaven of pesticides. "What brings you back to Napa?"

  One look and she realized that though she was thrilled to see him, he wasn't in the least excited to see her. Quite the opposite, in fact. He wore a wide-eyed stare, like the Ghost of Christmas Past had just appeared on his doorstep.

  That's it, she thought, and her heart plummeted. It was over before it had even started. She'd misread him, misread feeling in tune with him. Those shivers had only been going up her spine, because now he made her feel about as desirable as a social disease. Then again, who could get jazzed about a woman who smelled like one part lime-sulfur to two parts methyl bromide?

  He jerked his thumb back to indicate the winery building behind him. "I just had a chat with Ava and Max."

  "More than a chat." Max laughed. "FYI, Gabby, Will here made an offer to buy Suncrest."

  Immediately Will piped up. "I'd rather not get into that, Max."

  Gabby frowned. "Made an offer to do what?"

  "Oh, I understand." Max shook Will's hand. "We'll talk soon," he said, then nodded at Gabby with a weird smile and took off after his mother at a half jog.

  Will turned toward her. "So how's your father?"

  What did Max mean, Will made an offer to buy Suncrest? "He's better all the time." She gave him a brief rundown, concluding with the mysterious move to the telemetry unit. "I guess that's good but I don't really know what it means."

  "Telemetry means being measured from a distance. They'll put lots of sensors on him so they can track any changes to heartbeat and intercede immediately if they have to. Of course, that's what they do in ICU, too, but this allows them to staff at a lower level."

  She took that in. He sounded cool, businesslike—not warm and easy like the Will from the other night. What happened? And what is this business about Suncrest? "What did Max mean, you made an offer to buy Suncrest?"

  He stared at her with a funny expression, as if she'd caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. Then, "I really can't talk about it, Gabby."

  "Does that mean it's true?"

  He said nothing, just looked at her like all he wanted in the world was to get away. But no way she would let that happen. Not after this bombshell.

  "Before you said you were in investments. But what you actually do is buy companies? I don't understand."

  Was this guy a liar? Was he some kind of corporate raider? Was he not at all what he seemed to be? Was he another Vittorio?

  Will rubbed his forehead, hard, looking away from her at the long drive that sloped down to Suncrest's bronze gates on the Silverado Trail. Then once again his eyes met hers, and her breath caught as she read the truth in their blue depths. "Do you have time to take a walk?" he asked her.

  She most certainly did, so they set off. Silence ballooned between them, broken only by the crunch of their shoes on the gravel that bordered the drive.

  Finally, he spoke. "This is confidential information, Gabby, and I really should not be discussing it with you. But I will tell you if you promise to keep it to yourself. It is very important that you tell no one."

  She didn't like the sound of any of that but by this point would rather hear it than not. "I won't say a word."

  They walked farther. She heard him take a deep breath, and steeled herself. Then, "It's true. I'm a partner with a firm called GPG and we've made an offer to buy Suncrest."

  There it was, out. It was true, as she had known it would be from the moment Max spilled the beans. She said the first thing that came into her head. "But Suncrest has always been in the Winsted family."

  He said nothing to that.

  "Did Mrs. Winsted approach you?"

  "No, I approached her."

  "Does she want to sell?"

  He shook his head. "She says no."

  "But you don't believe her?"

  "I'm hoping I can persuade her to change her mind."

  "Is this the first conversation you've had with her about it?"

  He hesitated on that one. Then, "No. I've had several meetings with Ava. This is my first with Max."

  Things were starting to click into place in her mind, building a jigsaw whose picture she wasn't at all sure she liked. "Mrs. Winsted doesn't want to sell but you're hoping Max will convince her to go along."

  He didn't seem to like that line of reasoning. "We've made a proposal that we believe both of them should find very attractive."

  "Who's this we you're talking about?"

  "As I said, I'm a member of a partnership. General Pacific Group."

  She thought maybe she'd heard of them, though she'd never been much for the financial pages. "Why couldn't you tell me this before?"

  "Because it's the first commandment of my job not to discuss the offers we make. It's highly confidential, Gabby. I shouldn't be telling you any of this."

  Am I supposed to be flattered? She wasn't. Mostly she felt that he'd misled her somehow, if he hadn't actually lied. At the party he'd dodged her questions about what he did—very deftly, too. Now she knew why.

  Thoughts bobbed and weaved in her mind like the birds that cavorted in the cloudless sky above. Acre
s of Suncrest vineyards lay on either side of them, the vines heavy with grapes, getting sweeter every second under the heat of the sun. On the Trail twenty yards ahead, perpendicular to the drive, cars sped past at high speed, going sixty, seventy miles an hour, as fast as they could get away with.

  They halted at the winery's bronze gates. She turned to face him. The late afternoon sun glinted on his blond head, caused his blue eyes to squint. She noticed for the first time how long his lashes were, and how fine the bones of his nose. He looked the same as ever—intelligent, steady, honorable. Vittorio had appeared to be all those things, too. In fact, in many ways he had been. But not in all.

  "You didn't want to run into me today," she said, "because you didn't want to have to tell me what you were doing here."

  He met her eyes. "That's true."

  "You knew I wouldn't like it."

  He said nothing.

  "Well, you were right."

  She turned away from him. Ahead of her rose the Mayacamas range; beyond her sight, miles away, roared the Pacific. Purple mountain majesty, above the fruited plain.

  "Do you know what those mountains are called?" she asked him.

  Silence. Then, "I know the ones behind us are the Howells."

  "These are the Mayacamas. Do you know what the tallest mountain around here is?"

  "Are you having fun quizzing me, Gabby?"

  "Yes, I am. Do you want to answer?"

  "I can't."

  "I didn't think so. It's Mount St. Helena to the north, forty-three hundred and forty-three feet." She shook her head, anger starting to build in her chest. Mixed with fear, spiced with disappointment. "You don't know anything about this place. You don't care about it. You're like those huge liquor companies that come in here and buy up the wineries. All they care about is making as much money as possible, as fast as possible. To hell with the rest of us."

  "Look, Gabby." He tugged on her arm, forced her to abandon the view to look at him. "I'm not ashamed of what I do. I work for a reputable organization with lots of good people in it that's helped many struggling companies survive."

  "But Suncrest isn't struggling! We're doing just fine, thank you. And I don't care how so-called reputable your company is." She forced herself to take a breath, though it didn't calm her in the least. "You just don't get it. The whole valley is changing. It's not the way it used to be, the way it was when I was growing up."

  He threw out his hands. "What is the same?"

  "I am!" She pointed at her chest, heard the frustration in her own voice, though she knew it was unfair to blame him and him alone for the world shifting around her. "I'm the same as I always was, and so is my family. So is my father, who makes wine the old-fashioned way. That's the way I want to make it, too, one bottle at a time, not off some assembly line like it's Coca-Cola."

  He shook his head. "That's not going to happen."

  "Oh, no? How can you be so sure?"

  He hesitated. Then, "It's true that some of the employees of the companies we acquire—"

  "Lose their jobs." She didn't usually interrupt, but she didn't want him to get away with some euphemism. "They get canned. They get fired. They lose their pensions and their health care."

  "Very often a lot more of them would've gotten fired without us, because their company would've gone entirely out of business."

  "You know what's going out of business? The family-owned wineries. Pretty soon they're all gonna be gone, like the mom-and-pop hardware stores. There's going to be the Wal-Mart of wineries and that's it."

  He shook his head. Maybe he was getting angry, too. "I don't feel too sorry for those families, Gabby. They walk away with a great deal of money. They're hardly taken advantage of."

  Gabby wanted to cry. There was no way Max wouldn't want "a great deal of money." He'd looked so cocky standing there next to Will, spouting off about the offer. And then what would happen to Suncrest? She knew what a sea change occurred when a winery changed hands, especially when the new owner was an outsider. It would go all corporate. Suncrest would be so different, she wouldn't even recognize it anymore.

  And her father. What would happen to her father? Maybe it was good she couldn't tell him about this. The stress might make him have another attack. Then again, she might explode from having to pretend she didn't know.

  All she knew at that moment was that she wanted to get away from Will Henley. How ironic, because right then he was saying the very words that ten minutes earlier she'd been dying to hear.

  "Gabby, I don't want this to make a difference between us. I'm really glad I met you the other night and I want to get to know you better."

  "Well, it does make a difference." She backed away from him. Why did everything have to go wrong? First Vittorio. Then her father getting sick. And Suncrest would never be the same whether Max ran it or Will bought it. She'd come back to California hoping some things at least would be the same as they always were. What a pipe dream that had been.

  And Will! She'd just met him, she shouldn't give a damn, but still she felt a crushing disappointment. He was a big corporate raider guy, which was about as different from her as a man could get. They didn't see the world the same way at all. Somehow she'd gotten the idea they did. Apparently she hadn't learned a single thing from the catastrophe with Vittorio. She'd been blind or a fool or both. Again.

  "Gabby ..."

  "No." She turned away from him and went back the way she had come, up the drive toward the old stone winery, which looked so vulnerable, so honey-gold and luscious in June's clear light, so ripe for the picking. It was getting hard for her to see it, though, it was getting blurry, and she knew her tears were mixing with the dust on her face to make her look like the lost soul she felt herself to be.

  "Wait, Gabby, stop .. ."

  He was behind her, calling, but she just shook her head and sped up, started running, then heard the muffled ring of the cell phone in her shorts pocket. Damn!—but she had to answer, it might be somebody from the hospital.

  But it wasn't. She knew that instantly. She recognized the voice in less than a heartbeat. Maybe she'd recognized the breathing.

  "Gabriella," the caller said. "It's Vittorio."

  Chapter 5

  Early Tuesday evening, with the sun still shining in the June sky, Max stood in his father's old office with a pretty young thing who worked for St. Helena's best stationery store. "I don't think you get it," he told her. "I need the invitations done in 48 hours, not ten days. You told me you have an in-house calligrapher, right?"

  She nodded, tendrils of blond hair bobbing around her little heart-shaped face. "We do, but—"

  "Then what's the problem?"

  She seemed scared to say it. Her voice got all breathy, which Max quite liked. "But she's got other projects ahead of yours. And June's one of our busiest times."

  Very gently, Max put his arm around her shoulders and gazed into her eyes. He watched her catch her breath. Very sweet. "Amy, that's your name, right? Amy?"

  She nodded, mute.

  "Amy, what I want you to do is put this project ahead of everybody else's. First in the line. Top of the pile. And to make that easier for you, I'll offer to pay a little extra. Say"—and he cocked his head, very much enjoying the feel of her eyes on his face—"five percent." He arched his brows. "Wouldn't you say that's generous of me?"

  "Well . . ." She seemed confused. "Can I ask my boss?"

  "Yes, you may. And you tell her"—he knew it was a woman; no man would be caught dead working in Primrose Paperie—"that Suncrest will keep using your store if you'll do us this one little favor this one little time." He smiled and lowered his voice. "Now that I'm back in California, we're going to be doing a lot of entertaining here at the winery. And I would really like to work with you again, Amy."

  Her blue eyes got even wider, and Max felt that old familiar tightening in the groin. All that white skin, all that curly shining blond hair, that pert little tipped-up nose: he couldn't help but wonder how much of
little Amy was exactly what shades of blond and pink. Maybe someday he'd find out. She might be a bit low wattage, but who said he had to talk to her for longer than the duration of one meal?

  "Now you run along," and he helped her gather up her bulky stationery binders. "First thing tomorrow morning my assistant will fax over what you need to know. And she'll pick everything up late Thursday."

  The moment the girl scuttled away, Max slammed the door after her and pulled out a cigarette from his trouser pocket. He felt like a model using nicotine as a weight-control device. Yet he wanted to lose the France avoirdupois but quick. And his favorite French Gauloises cigarettes were helping.

  He raised a Roman shade and cranked open a window, then leaned out to encourage as much smoke as possible to flow away from the office. His mother hated the smell of tobacco. And these days, what his mother hated, Max too abhorred. He was a perfect son—considerate, somber, attentive—all to encourage her to go wheels-up for Paris and leave him free to run Suncrest as he desired.

  The little junket he and Miss Amy were planning was a step in that direction.

  Max half shut his eyes, watching his cigarette smoke curl into Napa's aqua blue sky. What a perfect scheme he had hatched. An overnight in Pebble Beach for a handful of important men, complete with golf at Cypress Point—of course that exclusive club counted Max as a member—exquisite lodgings, and a fabulous meal served alongside Suncrest's most cherished vintages. And on the guest list? Orwell Hampton from The Wine Watcher and Joseph Wagner from Wine World, two men whose wine scores translated into prestige and best-seller status for those few labels it ranked most highly. Two men whose favor his father had been above coddling, because his father believed the wine alone should be judged. As if that worked in the real world.

  Max felt a surge of anger, which he tamped down with a second cigarette. He would not allow either parent to upset him—either the dead one or the live one. Though he had a gripe with both. It annoyed him that his father had not made more of Suncrest, made it into a bigger and more profitable enterprise. No, Porter Winsted had left that to his son to do. And his mother! She had truly pissed him off, not once but twice—by not handing him control of Suncrest right after his father died and then repeating the insult when Max came back from France.