Too Close to the Sun (21 page)

"Mmm?"

"Is it still possible you might buy
Suncrest?"

That jolted him awake. "Why are you thinking
about Suncrest now?"

"I don't know." She twisted to face him, and
he relaxed, a bit. He saw joy in her eyes, and trust. "It's just on
my mind, after we talked about it before."

I wish it wasn't
. He tried to chuckle
it away. "I don't want to talk about business now."

She half rose on her elbow and rested her
head on her hand. She looked deliciously sweet and tousled, and the
last thing she made him want to think about was work. "Are you
saying it is possible?"

That was easy enough to answer. "Anything's
possible."

"So you might still buy it," she murmured.
Then she frowned slightly and her voice grew more serious. "If you
do, will you promise to try to keep it the same?"

"Gabby . . ."
What?
Those wide hazel
eyes of hers were looking more worried now, more discerning. About
all he was sure of was that he wouldn't lie to those eyes. "I can't
really promise, no. If GPG ever does get to acquire Suncrest, I
don't know what the deal will look like. It's not entirely up to
me. You understand I'm a junior partner, right? I don't get to
decide everything myself."

"But you'll try?"

Somewhere the old house groaned.
How many
midnight promises had been made here?
he wondered suddenly. In
this old house, born a barn. In beds all over creation.

"I'll try," he said finally, which was true,
and which seemed to satisfy her. She smiled and returned her head
to her pillow, and drifted away.

He stared at her face for some time, then
twisted onto his back to stare at the ceiling, unfortunately a
little more awake now.

He would try, though he seriously doubted
that would be enough.

Five o'clock on a sweltering Saint-Tropez
summer afternoon. Ava stood alone on the narrow balcony of her
hotel suite, her eyes scanning the view for something new of
interest. Beyond the centuries-old houses that covered the slope
down to the harbor, the French Riviera sun glinted off the
Mediterranean. Yachts bobbed in the water or plied its expanse,
their decks covered by topless sunbathers supine on colorful
rectangles of towel.

With a sniff, Ava drained her second
limonata
. She was no prude but no layabout, either, and
disapproved of daytime nappers she strongly suspected were sleeping
off one night's indulgences just so they could indulge in the
next.

Refusing to think about her son—who no doubt
would melt right into that indolent circle—she pushed the
white-blond hair back from her forehead, damp with perspiration.
Maybe a walk would calm her nerves. Jean-Luc's flight wouldn't land
at Toulon for a half hour, after which he'd have to make his way
back along the coast road, which had been known to take forever.
She had plenty of time, far more than she needed.

Funny how she still had the sensation time
was slipping away.

In white linen capris and matching sleeveless
top, black-lensed movie-star sunglasses on the sweat-slick perch of
her nose, she slipped the cell phone Jean-Luc had lent her into her
handbag and set off for the shadowy cobblestone streets that
zigzagged downhill to the harbor.

Saint-Tropez had begun life as a sleepy
fishing village and centuries later played host to Impressionist
painters drawn by the Cote d'Azur's crystalline light. But it was
director Roger Vadim who put the hamlet on the jet set's radar
screen when he cast wife and fledgling actress Brigitte Bardot in
his scandalous 1956 film
And God Created Woman
.

Ava—who considered herself as much God's gift
as La Bardot—strolled past a red-awninged café where lunch was just
getting started. Tourists noshed on oysters and seafood salad and
steamed artichokes washed down with wine and Perrier. Given
Saint-Tropez's rigorous nightclubbing, meals occurred at what Ava
considered highly irregular hours—breakfast at noon, lunch at six,
dinner at midnight. Though she felt terrifically unchic to admit
it, her habits were far too American for that schedule. She and
Jean-Luc dined at eight and bypassed the clubs, Ava secretly
relieved not to have to compete with the hoi polloi for entry to an
ill-lit cave where her eardrums would only split from the
racket.

She meandered right at the next corner, past
a bookstore whose yellowing wares cascaded onto the street, and a
charcuterie where sausages hung in links over a white-tile
delicatessen counter stuffed with pates and
jambon
. She
passed two aged men hunched over a chessboard and a group of boys
who'd commandeered an alley for soccer. No one from either extreme
of the age spectrum bothered to turn his head to give her the
eye.

Ava was painfully reminded, yet again, that
she was too old for the lascivious leer. The raw truth of it made
her feel as dull and passed-over as the decaying volumes at the
secondhand bookstore. Apparently the only man whose lust she could
inspire was Jean-Luc, and she feared he was as washed up as she was
terrified of becoming.

Jean-Luc. She passed through an opening in a
shoulder-high stone wall to find herself at the harbor, remembering
what he'd told her about his impromptu overnighter in Paris. It was
to solidify the movie project, he said. The deal was struck, script
revisions would ensue, casting would begin.

Yet she couldn't get past the idea that
Jean-Luc was deluding himself. Ava settled on a bench to eye the
goings-on in the harbor, most of which involved fishermen bringing
in their hauls for the day. She knew enough French to understand
the negative phrases that peppered Jean-Luc's phone conversations
with his agent. She needed no dictionary to decipher his slumping
body language. Though she didn't want to believe it, it seemed to
her that his much-ballyhooed movie deal was as close to dead as the
halibut twitching on the pier thirty yards away.

That Jean-Luc was out of France's cinematic
loop had become painfully clear once she arrived at his Paris
apartment. This was a man whose phone did not ring. Who took few
meetings. Whose scripts were returned by the French equivalent of
parcel post. Certainly he'd written—and sold—important screenplays
in the past. But that was it: they were
in the past
.

Even his suggesting they repair to
Saint-Tropez was another clue that his best days were behind him.
Everyone knew the most fashionable destinations were seventy miles
east, between Cannes and Monte Carlo. To holiday in a has-been
hangout was not Ava's idea of a comeback.

But a comeback was precisely what she needed.
Otherwise what would she do? Resort to animal preservation, that
timeworn fallback of past-it starlets like Tippi Hedren and Bardot
herself? She wondered what Saint-Tropez denizen Catherine Deneuve
might be up to nowadays. Perhaps making a full-time career of
attending fashion shows?

Ava set her jaw. The same determination that
had driven her from Houston to Hollywood at age eighteen flooded
her spirit anew. Fortunately for her, Jean-Luc Boursault was not
her only contact in the European film industry. If she needed to
cast her net wider to entrap the prize she sought, then she would
do so.

From inside her handbag, her cell phone rang.
It had to be either Jean-Luc or Max. "Working on your Saint-Tropez
tan?" It was Max.

"Trying not to get one. What's new at
home?"

"Same old, same old. Except for one thing.
You know that deal I told you about, to acquire premium chardonnay
grapes? I negotiated the guy down even further. The price is
rock-bottom now."

Porter's gravelly voice reverberated in her
memory.
You get what you pay for
. She shook her head. "I
don't know, Max. With the economy like it is, how can it be a good
time to add a new varietal?"

"What it's time for, Mom, is to take Suncrest
to the next level." Now Max was sounding like Will Henley. She
wasn't sure if that was good or bad. "Besides," he went on,
"chardonnay's a solid performer. We should've added it a long time
ago."

Napa's not known for chardonnay
,
Porter said in her head. Leave that to Sonoma Valley.

But how could she squash Max's enthusiasm?
Second-guess him at every turn? If she wanted him to run the
winery, she had to let him run it, mistakes be damned. It was also
a wonderful contrast to his lackadaisical past that he was taking
such an active interest. And for all his caution, Porter had made a
few early misjudgments that nearly killed Suncrest. Her son
deserved the same latitude.

"Well, use your own judgment," she told him,
and rang off a minute or so later, having no triumphs of her own to
impart. She didn't want to admit that no, she wasn't having the
time of her life; no, she wasn't conquering the
cinema
francais
; no, she wasn't head over heels for Jean-Luc.

Who by now was most likely waiting for her at
the hotel.

Duty forced her back up the hill. Gravity and
reluctance dragged at her legs. Ahead, atop Saint-Tropez's highest
peak, the Hotel Byblos shimmered in all of its stuccoed glory. It
echoed the patchwork of colorful shuttered buildings that rose in
tiers from the harbor—one sunflower yellow, one terra-cotta red.
Yet the bold colors of Provence failed to cheer her.

Nor did Jean-Luc's expression when she pushed
open the door to their suite and he turned to face her. Her friend
looked old and discouraged, and weary.

Even before she was fully inside the suite,
Ava began to plan her flight out.

*

It was very hard to work when all Gabby could
think about was sex.

Midmorning in the vineyards, the foggiest it
had been in weeks, and she was doing her rounds. Theoretically she
was thinning the crop, which involved yanking the mediocre-looking
fruit so the vine could focus its energy on what remained, giving
those grapes a deeper, more complex, nuanced flavor. But every time
she tossed a cluster of grapes onto the dust, she remembered being
there herself.

Her blouse torn open and breasts naked to the
air. Her skirt bundled around her waist. Will's body above her. His
hands, demanding. His tongue, insistent. The hard rough need of him
that had her bucking and moaning …

Stop it. Stop it
.

She took a ragged breath, forced the image
out of her mind. Off came her baseball cap, followed by a rough
smoothing back of her hair. Then she smashed the cap back on her
head.

What the hell was it about sex? She'd gone
without for a year and managed just fine, thank you. Then one
reintroduction and she's as good as in season.

It's not the sex. It's the man
.

That was the worrying truth of it. The good
news was that Will had blasted Vittorio from her fantasies. The bad
was that he'd claimed center stage for himself. And though right
now he seemed sent from heaven, she feared that in the end he would
prove no more dependable than Vittorio had been.

About a hundred yards away, two men stood
amid the vines calling instructions to each other. They were young,
Hispanic, male—typical Napa field workers—but Gabby didn't know
them. That was because they were temporary hires, brought in not
long after Max had insisted Felix fire several full-timers. Now
they were making a meal out of spraying fertilizer, but it was
probably the first time they'd done it.

All the arguments she could muster about how
it was too close to harvest to get rid of experienced workers meant
nothing to Max. He didn't care that she and Felix didn't have the
manpower to handle routine tasks, like mowing the grassy ground
cover beneath the vines, whose presence increased the fire danger
as the season got hotter.

Gabby shook her head. Max could be such a
moron. He didn't care about the crop. He didn't care about the
workload. He just wanted to cut budget, even though what he saved
was paltry compared with what he'd wasted on the rebottling. And
all that had gotten them was a lower-quality sauvignon blanc.

Disgusted, distracted, she headed for the
Jeep, skirting the grape clusters lying on the ground, primed to
rot. Talk about throwing money away. But unlike all Max's
directives, this more selective yield would actually benefit the
wine, which in Gabby's estimation should be everybody's top
priority.

Will might not agree with that
. She
got in the Jeep, got it rolling toward the winery.
But wouldn't
he try to understand it? For me?

He might still buy Suncrest someday. She'd
been stunned to hear it. She'd believed the promise she'd badgered
out of him—that he would try to keep Suncrest the same—but then
again she'd heard promises before. In Italian. And now in
English.

She should be more careful what she told him
about Suncrest. After all, she had a duty to her employer, and to
her coworkers. She shouldn't say anything that might make the
winery more vulnerable, or lower its price if it did go on the
block. Now she could kick herself for having told him about the
rebottling.

It was weird, having to keep basic
information from Will. She drove the Jeep through Suncrest's entry
gates and up the long drive to the winery. With Vittorio, she'd
been able to share everything. But then again, until the end
there'd never been any question that they were on the same
side.

She bumped to a stop in the employee parking
lot and pulled the keys from the ignition. Was she waging a war on
all fronts or what? She had to protect herself from Max the
Ignoramus and Ava the Absent. And until she heard otherwise, she
had to protect Suncrest from Will.

She walked into the winery. "Felix?" Silence.
He wasn't in the break room. He must be out in the fields. She
meandered back outside, along the winery's east wall, where they
stored vineyard supplies. A few fertilizer barrels were open,
presumably the ones the temps were using. She pulled out her
walkie-talkie to hail Felix.