Too Close to the Sun (40 page)

That sounded portentous enough to stop him.
"What's up?"

"I've decided how to disburse the cash from
Suncrest."

He frowned. He got no more joy out of talking
about Suncrest now than he ever had. At first he'd been pretty
impressed that his mother had pulled off a deal with Henley, and so
fast, too. Then he'd found out for how much and knew it was no
wonder Henley had bitten. It ate Max alive that the price was so
pathetically low, but there wasn't a damn thing he could do about
it. "What do you mean,
disburse
the cash? You get your half,
and I get mine."

She arched her brows. "You think you're
entitled to half?"

"Isn't that what Dad always intended?"

She looked down at the desktop. "Your father
intended a lot of things that will never come to pass."

Max rolled his eyes. He hated when she
started delivering melodramatic lines that sounded like they came
right out of a B-movie script. "So what am I gonna get?"

She said nothing for a while. And when she
finally did speak she didn't look at him. "I'm giving you a million
dollars."

His immediate reaction was to laugh. Then to
think for sure he'd heard wrong. "What? What did you say?"

Her face turned toward his, and the
expression on it freaked him. Because it was so damn serious. "I
said I'm giving you a million dollars."

"But . . ." This was weird, in fact so beyond
weird that he wasn't really worried. It couldn't possibly be true.
"But you sold the winery to Henley for twenty million."

"Which I know you think is absurdly low. I
don't care to get into that with you again."

They'd had a battle royal about it. "No
kidding! You sold my legacy out from underneath me for a
pittance!"

She shook her head but he got the feeling she
wouldn't get mad at him again. She was too tired or fed up or . . .
something. "I find it curious that Suncrest is your legacy when you
want the cash from it and that it's your burden when you don't care
to exert yourself to run it. But be that as it may"—she raised her
hand and her voice both when he started to object—"the fact is that
the deal is done and the proceeds are twenty million dollars. That
will not change."

No, it wouldn't. Amazing.

He took a deep breath, struggled to control
himself. "Okay. So you sold it for twenty million. That's still ten
for you and ten for me. The way Dad intended."

She tapped her pen against the table.
Tap.
Tap. Tap
. "The way I see it is this. When you took over the
winery, Will Henley offered us thirty million dollars for it. That
figure decreased by a third directly because of your actions." She
looked at him then, and he was surprised that her expression didn't
seem so much angry as sad. That gave him a little worry knot in his
stomach, like maybe she wasn't just trying to scare him. "You cost
this family ten million dollars, Max."

He shuffled his feet. "That's sort of a harsh
way to look at it."

"I've thought about this a great deal." She
turned away from him. "And it's quite painful for me. But the truth
is that I see no reason why I should suffer any more because of
your actions. I also believe this presents an opportunity for you
to learn some long-overdue lessons."

"Okay. Okay." He didn't like the sound of any
of this. He felt himself start to hyperventilate. "So you want
fifteen." That was hard to swallow, but maybe he could get used to
it if he absolutely had to. "But that still leaves five for me. So
where do you come up with one?"

"Well, a portion will go to taxes, of
course." She shuffled around some of the papers on her desk. "And a
few million will go to a nature-conservancy charity. To make up, in
some small way, for the destruction you caused. And to teach you
that actions have consequences. It'll still leave you with a
million dollars, an amount most people would be extremely grateful
for. I certainly would have been at your age."

At that moment it struck Max that she was
completely serious. All of a sudden his head was spinning. He
reached for the chair he'd just vacated and fell into it. "But ...
but I didn't start that fire." Somehow it didn't sound very
convincing when he was stammering. "And I don't want to give
millions of dollars to charity."

"We'll make the donation in your name." She
just kept going. She wore a faraway expression, as if she was
talking to herself and he wasn't even there. Max, panting, thought
I hate her. I actually hate my own mother
. "Of course we
won't tell anyone that you yourself started the fire that destroyed
your own vineyards. I'm certainly not going to put myself, or you,
through that ridicule." She turned her eyes on him again. "People
will say you're very generous and sensitive. You don't care nearly
enough how people think of you. But I do. And that's the impression
I'd rather they have."

She was crazy. There was no other
explanation.

"It's very difficult to be a parent," she
went on. "It's very hard to know what is the right thing to do. I
know I've made many mistakes where you're concerned. I've coddled
you far too often. But I'm hoping this will finally force you to
grow up."

She'd gone certifiably nuts. But maybe he
could still reason with her. "Mom, remember when we were in Paris
and we talked about how important it is for me to do my own thing
in life? Like you did when you became an actress?" He watched her.
She seemed to be listening. "Well, if you go ahead and do this,
that'll be impossible for me."

She actually had the nerve to chuckle. "Max,
most people don't have a penny to help them make their own way.
You'll have a million dollars."

"But why not give me a leg up? It's really
competitive out there, you know."

"If it weren't for the fire, perhaps I'd
agree with you. But that was the last straw. You still won't admit
the truth, Max. You still insist on lying. I'm sorry but"—she threw
out her hands—"this is my final decision."

He stood up and started to pace. He wasn't
shocked anymore. He was pissed.
Man!
Money really showed
what people were made of, didn't it? Even his own mother. He
pointed at her from across the living room. "You just want the
fifteen million! And you're willing to screw your own son to get
it. That's what this is really all about."

She rose from the desk. "I knew you'd be
angry. Perhaps someday you'll understand. When you're a parent
yourself."

"So what the hell am I supposed to do in the
meanwhile?" he yelled at her as she walked past him. "You're the
one with all the answers. You tell me that!"

"I suppose you'll have to get a job."

"A job?" He was incredulous. "But what am I
trained for?"

"That," his mother said as she exited the
living room, "is a very good question."

*

On Friday afternoon, at the end of the
shortened work week that had begun with Labor Day, Will was
attending a meeting held in the living room of one Hannah Harper,
the crack CEO he'd just hired to run Suncrest. She owned a
stunningly decorated home in Sonoma Valley, another gorgeous swath
of wine country just west of Napa. Will was trying hard, without
much success, to pay attention to what was going on around him, and
attributed his distraction to the fact that he spent too much of
his life in meetings. More than half, for sure. As much as two
thirds? He did a quick mental calculation. Possibly.

He didn't like that idea. It raised a
life-passing-him-by issue of some type or other. But he was too
busy preparing for meetings, attending meetings, or doing the
follow-up to meetings to have time to figure it out.

From the country-casual upholstered chair to
his left, Hannah spoke. She was a late-thirties brunette, razor
sharp and city slick. "It seems to me we have two immediate
concerns. First, we need to cut costs to get them in line with the
reduced revenues Suncrest will generate. Second, we need to
minimize the revenue loss by seeking alternative sources of
grapes."

Will watched Dagney and Jacob nod solemnly.
Both were clearly cowed by Ms. Harper, and it was no surprise. She
was a business supernova who until recently had been running the
wine division of a major beverage company. Will wooed her with a
can't-refuse offer and her first CEO title. He suspected she was
already picturing her face on the cover of
Forbes
or
Fortune
.

"Suncrest's revenues will take a hit for some
time," Hannah continued, "but we're in a good position to build a
platform for the future."

"Speaking of which," Dagney piped up from the
couch across the room, "here is the worksheet Jacob and I drew up
analyzing some other wineries we might acquire and merge into
Suncrest." She handed around a thin sheaf of papers.

"About a third of them are in Napa," Jacob
said, "but there are some here in Sonoma Valley and also a number
of options in Mendocino and Santa Barbara counties."

Will glanced briefly at the worksheet, which
he'd seen before. A few times. He let it drop onto his lap and
again his mind wandered. It was funny. His plan, conceived months
before, was unfolding before his eyes, and yet he wasn't nearly so
jazzed as he would have expected to be. As he had envisioned,
Suncrest Vineyards was becoming the linchpin of a much larger
winemaking enterprise. Its brand, though battered, was still
valuable; and its land, burned or not, remained underutilized. Over
time, several less well-known labels would be subsumed under the
Suncrest umbrella, and volume would be ramped up. Profits would
soar. His partners would be positively delighted. As had become his
habit of late, Will didn't allow himself to think about those
people who would have quite the opposite reaction.

He looked past Jacob's head out the front
window of Hannah's six-thousand-square-foot "cottage," to the
designer-perfect porch complete with pristine white railing, wicker
rocking chair, and side table laid with a vase of summer blooms and
an apparently untouched paperback. The scene looked posed, but then
again the house did, too: its furnishings too coordinated, its
casualness too contrived for real life. It was as if the prior
owners had staged the property for sale, and Hannah hadn't bothered
to move her own things in after taking possession.

He eyed Hannah, who was leading Dagney and
Jacob in a detailed discussion of how appropriate grapes might be
acquired. They were spellbound, clearly hoping she'd drop nuggets
of wisdom they could parlay into their own business success. She
was an impressive woman, Will agreed, and attractive, too—if you
glossed over the fact that she might eat her young to get
ahead.

Will guessed that quite a number of
attractive women would have to cross his path before he would be
willing to plunge again into romance. His current modus operandi
was to pretend that such a thing didn't exist, at least not for
him. His life was focused on work and on working out, and he was
doing both with grim gusto. Some days he put himself through his
rowing-machine regimen twice, in the morning and evening both.
Paired with a fourteen-hour workday, it allowed him to drop into
bed exhausted. It allowed him to shorten that dangerous interval in
the dark when his thoughts might drift to Gabby, to where she might
be and what she might be doing and whether she was thinking of
him.

He thought of her constantly, was forced at
all hours to push thoughts of her away. Even still, treacherous
ideas would dip their toes into his mind.
Maybe she's right that
you didn't even try to understand her. Maybe it's true that she did
what she did for her family. Maybe her motives are more pure than
you're giving her credit for.

But he drowned those ideas under waves of
resentment.
No, she betrayed me. She used her old lover to do
it. She betrayed me. She knew how much I needed Suncrest; she knew
how much I needed that deal. She cares only about herself and her
naive business ideas. She betrayed me.

He couldn't get past it. And, he told
himself, there was no reason to. The last thing he needed was a
woman he couldn't trust. The right thing to do was cut her out now,
like an impacted tooth. And it would help that Hannah Harper was on
board at Suncrest. She would free him up, allow him to spend less
time at the winery. Then he wouldn't keep running into Gabby. The
less he saw her, the less he had those rebellious thoughts.

He turned his attention back to Hannah.
"There's no question there's fat at Suncrest," she was saying.
"It's been run loosely, like so many family wineries. It needs a
shake-up."

That concept should be music to Will's ears,
but it disconcerted him. "Along what lines, Hannah?" he asked.

"Well, first of all I want to make sure we
have the right people in place. Not everybody there is totally
motivated. But there are some people I've worked with in the past
that I think are terrific and want to bring in."

He nodded. It was true that Hannah's
wine-industry contacts were part of the reason he'd hired her. And
as CEO, she certainly had primary say over staff. Still, he had his
own opinions. And as the representative of Suncrest's owner, he had
say, too.

"For example," Hannah said, "there's a
vineyard manager I'm very excited about hiring. And a winemaker
I've worked with before has just come available. The timing
couldn't be more perfect."

Will sat up straighter. "In terms of the
winemaking," he heard himself say, "it's important that we maintain
continuity. We don't want to make too radical a shift."

Hannah turned her gaze on Will's face. "I
understand that Cosimo DeLuca has been at Suncrest for a long time.
And I'm sure he's very good at what he does. But—"

"Not just a long time," Will said. "25 years.
From the founding of the winery. And his judgment and skill are the
reasons Suncrest has had so many award-winning wines, Hannah."