An Exquisite Challenge

by Jennifer Hayward

  Dannazione. He jammed his hand against the desk and ruthlessly pushed the image away. It had taken him ten pages of sales figures to wipe it from his head last night, but apparently it was of the recurring variety. Not a positive thing, when she was the employee he intended to tear a strip off of as soon as he could get his hands on her.

  He stood to greet Frank. This afternoon he was getting rid of that particular problem. One way or another.

  Frank Thomas, a fifty-two-year-old cop–turned–private investigator, gave Gabe’s hand a hearty shake and made himself at home on the leather sofa. Gabe followed and stood opposite him, too restless to sit down.

  “The rumors are true,” Thomas announced. “Jordan Lane is developing a Devil’s Peak look-alike.”

  His heart dropped. “How do you know?”

  “A source in the restaurant industry. He’s been chatting it up, apparently.”

  “How close is it?”

  The investigator shook his head. “Talking’s all he’s doing. But I hear close.”

  Gabe shoved his hands in his pockets and paced to the window. “It doesn’t fit with his current strategy. I don’t get it.”

  “I think that’s the point. It isn’t about strategy. He’s after you.”

  A sense of foreboding settled over him, an uneasy feeling pulling deep down in his gut. The Devil’s Peak wasn’t your run-of-the-mill, ordinary blend. A great deal of proprietary processes and ingredients had gone into it that hadn’t been done in a Californian wine before.

  He looked at Thomas. “He’s got someone on the inside.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” The wily investigator cocked a brow at him. “Any idea who it could be?”

  No. He thought about Pedro, his head winemaker, whom he’d brought with him from the Tuscan De Campo vineyard after the older man’s wife had died. The men and women he’d handpicked to work alongside Pedro. “No—I trust them all implicitly.”

  Thomas pursed his lips. “Someone in the office? Suppliers, distributors, customers?”

  Gabe shook his head. “They wouldn’t have the knowledge. You can’t copy the structure, the composition of a wine without knowing what you’re doing.”

  “Then you’ve got to go through your people again. Take a closer look. See if you’ve missed something.”

  He nodded. The uneasy feeling in his gut tightened. He was close, so close to achieving what he’d set out to do eight years ago—to put De Campo in the upper echelon of Californian winemakers. So close he could almost taste it. He would not, could not allow a disloyal team member to destroy his dream. There was another wine, a far more important wine, in the works, too. The wine only he and Pedro knew about.

  He had to find the bad apple before whoever it was found out about that wine as well. The game changer. If it wasn’t too late.

  “Give me an hour and I’ll get a list to you,” he said to Thomas. “We’ve done background checks on everyone, but dig deeper. See what you can find. Meanwhile, I’ll go through them all with Pedro. See if anyone sticks out.”

  Thomas nodded. “If there’s something there I’ll find it.”

  * * *

  Gabe got back to the vineyard at two and went directly into another meeting. Alex waited until she saw one of the men leave at three-fifteen, tucked the folder with the approvals she needed under her arm and marched into the house, determination fueling her every step. Down the gleaming hallway to Gabe’s office she went, a closed door greeting her. She knocked and reached for the handle. Elena held up a hand. “I wouldn’t—”

  “Bother him,” Alex finished. “I know.” She turned the handle and swung the door open, her legs planted wide in a fighting stance. “This time your guard dogs aren’t going to work. I need y—”

  Two men were seated near the window, staring at her. She did a double take. Oh. Only one had left.

  “Whoops,” she muttered. “I thought you were done.”

  The room was silent. Gabe said nothing, his gaze resting on her with a stillness that drew her attention to the furious gleam in those spectacular green eyes. “We’re almost done,” he said in a deadly quiet voice. “Would you wait for us in the living room?”

  She backed out, thinking she really might have done it this time, but past caring because he was impossible and she had to get her job done. Closing the door, she retreated to the kitchen instead, a tiny rebellious part of her refusing to let him order her around.

  “Lemonade,” she murmured in response to Elena’s curious look.

  “You’re in trouble?”

  “I would say so.” She retrieved the carton from the fridge and sloshed some into a glass. “Got any advice?”

  “Normally I would say appeal to his reasonable side. But these days?” Elena shrugged. “Keep your head down.”

  Which was obviously not what Alex did when Gabe found her there ten minutes later, chatting with his housekeeper. “You,” he snarled. “In my office.”

  She followed him, wincing as he slammed the door behind her.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing walking into the middle of my meeting?”

  “I didn’t know it was still going on,” she said calmly. “I’m sorry.”

  “I told you I’d come get you.”

  She set the lemonade down on his desk. “You keep disappearing, Gabe. We are behind. Significantly behind. Emily needed an approval on the catering yesterday, I need an approval on this interview list now or we aren’t going to have any one-on-one media interviews at the event.”

  “To hell with the media,” he roared, making her take a step backward. “They can wait.”

  Her stomach clenched at the fury streaking across his face. “There’s no need to shout,” she murmured. “And they can’t wait, Gabe. You need them if you want this launch to be a success.”

  “What do you think, Alex? That I’m working twenty-hour days because I don’t?” He took a step closer to her, then another, until two hundred pounds of pure male aggression was staring her in the face. Her heart started to pound furiously in her chest. She tumbled back in time to another room, to another big male bearing down on her, laying his hands on her, and her breath came quick and hard. This is Gabe, she told herself, sucking in a breath, not him.

  Breathe.

  Gabe scowled. “I want you to stop disobeying my orders and start doing what I say, because you are treading very, very close to the line.”

  That snapped her out of it. “What line?” she demanded.

  “The creative differences line. The one where I fire you.”

  “Fire me?” She let out a bark of laughter, releasing the tension inside of her. “I only wish you would fire me, you’re such a pain in the ass.”

  His hands clenched at his sides. “I am not having a good day, Alex. Rein it in.”

  “No.” She stuck her chin out. “You are killing us, Gabe. You need to start letting us make decisions.”

  “Like adding people to the guest list I haven’t approved?”

  She frowned. “Your PR agency missed some key influencers.”

  “You added my ex-girlfriend and her husband.”

  “Oh.” Her fingers flew to her mouth. “Who is that?”

  “Darya Theriault.”

  She thought hard. “Right. Yes, well, she and Peter are a Bay Area power couple. Don’t you think you can swallow your pride for one night and do what’s right for the event?”

  “No, I cannot,” he yelled at her. “She is not coming to this event.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. This was getting just a little out of control. “Okay, maybe I should have checked with you on that. I should have checked with you on that. But it isn’t my fault you fired the last agency and left us with zero time. It isn’t my fault you can’t prioritize what’s important and it isn’t my fault you are a serial perfectionist.”

  He gave her a dangerous look. “A serial perfectionist?”

  She opened her eyes, looked up into his furious face. “You have me chasing down
Ligurian anchovies. How stupid is that? Ligurian anchovies, Gabe.”

  “It is a treasured cultural food for Italians,” he bit out.

  She waved a hand at him. “It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. However, I would be inclined to pander to your little whims if you would just give me my goddamned approvals before we all go down in a big, fiery flash.”

  “You are driving me crazy,” he rasped, taking another step forward until she was backed up against the desk. “You have been deliberately antagonizing me. You don’t like someone to control you, so you decided to bury me in paper. I ask you to do something, you do the opposite. And when all of these things don’t work, you go your own renegade way and do exactly what you like.”

  “I do not do the opposite of what you say.”

  His gaze flashed. “I asked you to wait in the living room and found you in the kitchen.”

  She stared at him. “Do you know how ridiculous you sound? It’s control freak gone crazy.” She shook her head. “Is this how you are in bed, Gabe, because I’m gobsmacked that so many women in this day and age would go for it.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he grated. “Maybe that’s why you were strutting around in that outfit last night? Because you still can’t admit you’d like to try it on for size?”

  She winced at the innuendo. At the hard heat of his body that had her trapped against the desk. “This is not professional.”

  “This hasn’t been professional since day one.”

  “Still—” Her pulse went into overdrive as he reached up and slid his hand into her hair. “Gabe—”

  “Shut the hell up, Alex.”

  He brought his mouth down on hers in a hard, punishing kiss that held more than its fair share of anger. She should have stopped it, should have immediately pushed him away, but unfortunately intense sexual frustration made her highly susceptible to the command behind it. To the insistence she open her mouth and let him in. She did and he made a sound in the back of his throat and explored her with an erotic thoroughness that made her hot all over. Desperate for more.

  The desk was hard against her back. She moved against him and he picked her up and set her on it. Braced his hands on either side of her and took her mouth in another heated exploration that sent her pulse soaring.

  “Gabe,” she murmured, hoping to inject some sanity into the situation. He dragged his mouth down the line of her neck to the raging pulse at the base of it. “I think we should—”

  His hands moved to the top button of her shirt. The second. His mouth at her most sensitive place between shoulder and neck, teeth scraping across her skin, made her shiver with want. Somehow she couldn’t make herself move or get the rest of the words out. He pushed her shirt aside, his gaze hot on her. “Dio. You are so beautiful.”

  Alex forgot her name then, squeezing her eyes shut as he ran his thumbs over the hard tips of her breasts. Shaped the weight of them in his hands. It felt good, so exquisitely good to finally have them on her that she let out a low moan.

  He moved his mouth back up to her lips, set them ablaze with another scorching kiss and slid his hands around to the back clasp of her bra.

  She stiffened. He was her client. She could not have sex with him on his desk.

  “Gabe—” She pushed a hand against his chest. His fingers stilled on the clasp. “We—we can’t do this.”

  He pulled back and looked at her, the hazy desire in his eyes sending another wave of heat through her. Strength, she needed strength...

  “We— I—” she stumbled, “whatever is happening here, we need to figure it out and not...do this.”

  His mouth tightened. His hands fell away from her. “Fix your shirt.”

  She moved trembling hands to the buttons. “Gabe—”

  “Fix your shirt.”

  She did the buttons up with unsteady fingers that didn’t seem to want to work. Tucked her shirt back into her skirt. Gabe shoved his hands in his pockets and walked to the window. “You’re right,” he muttered harshly. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

  Only for a million different reasons. She offered up the most convenient excuse. “We’re both stressed.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, sarcasm lacing his tone. “Let’s go with that.”

  She pushed off the desk. He turned around, his face grim and forbidding.

  “I’ll have the catering menu to you within the hour. What else do you have?”

  “It’s all in here.” She pushed the folder across the desk. “The menu and the interview schedule are the priorities.”

  “Bene.”

  “Gabe—”

  “Leave it alone, Alex. That was an act of insanity on both our parts. Enough said.”

  She swallowed hard, tried not to be intimidated by the coldness coming off him like an arctic current. “I know how much this means to you. Let me do my job and I will not let you fail.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, then his dark lashes came down to veil his gaze. “No more executive decisions, Alex. Or two days, two hours before the event, I will fire you. I promise you that.”

  She nodded. And got the hell out of there before she did something else that was incredibly stupid.

  CHAPTER SIX

  GABE SPENT THE next week reviewing every person who’d ever been involved in the development of The Devil’s Peak with Pedro, from those who’d supervised the pruning of the vines to get the tannins just right, to those in the lab who were intimately familiar with the finished product, hoping to find something, anything that would point to a leak.

  They racked their brains but could find no one with the right combination of access, motivation or strange behavior of late to warrant looking into. Thomas’ background checks didn’t turn up anything. It was distressing, to be sure, that a Devil’s Peak imitator supposedly existed, but Gabe wasn’t prepared to go on a witch hunt and alienate his employees on the basis of rumor. He didn’t even know how close the wine was to his. Which meant he hadn’t told Riccardo or Antonio about it and didn’t plan to until he had more to work with.

  He sat back in his chair and looked over at Pedro, the sixty-two-year-old, third-generation winemaker who’d taught him everything he knew about blending. “We need to get our hands on Lane’s wine. You have any friends in the valley who can help?”

  Pedro shrugged. “No one wants to cross him. But I can try.”

  “Grazie.” Jordan Lane was the undisputed king of wine in California. No one wanted to touch him, because they’d be blackballed within a minute of doing so.

  Pedro sharpened his gaze on him. “Have you thought about moving our special project up? Going with that instead for the fall campaign?”

  “It’s not ready.”

  Pedro shook his head. “You’re not ready. The wine is.”

  “You know the plan,” Gabe reminded him, a tad defensively.

  “Sì. You are focusing on The Devil’s Peak because you know Antonio will support a traditional blend more than the Malbec.”

  “It’s not about what Antonio wants. It’s about doing the right thing for the market. Launch a superior wine that gets us noticed to pave the way, then hit them with the game changer.”

  “You may not have a choice.”

  No, he conceded. He might not. But what he needed to focus on now was what he could control, which was getting The Devil’s Peak out the door. And these bloody launch events, which were eating him alive.

  He stayed and went through some approvals for Alex, but every time he looked at the gleaming desk in front of him, a vivid picture filled his head of what had almost happened between them. He couldn’t say he would have stopped. Infatti, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have. The desire to assuage the frustration she roused in him as easily as taking her next breath had been too strong.

  Was still too strong for reason. Cristo. He tossed the pen down and raked his hands through his hair. She was making him lose it. Lose the control he was legendary for.

  She had stopped him from breaking his own r
ule.

  One complete loss of control with a woman was enough for a lifetime.

  Darya had stolen his breath the night he’d met her at a cocktail party in Pacific Heights. Younger and less jaded then, he’d fallen for her long blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and aggressive desire for him. Bright, on the fast track at the partnered law firm she worked for, she’d whispered something overtly sexual in his ear in the middle of a crowded party and they’d ended up in bed together that night and every other night for the next eight months. She’d pretty much moved into his San Francisco condo and the rumor had flown: Gabe De Campo might finally have been caught. He, in his misplaced belief that he could have a relationship that rose above his parents’ business partnership, had thrown himself into it like a man without a brain.

  Big mistake. Maybe he should have seen it coming. Maybe he should have seen how Darya’s ambition was a match for his, how she never would have been happy running the vineyard with him instead of climbing the corporate ladder. Maybe he should have recognized the distance growing between them as they pursued their separate agendas. But he hadn’t. He’d been too blind with the bright light Darya had been, until the Sunday when he’d returned home from New York to find that note. The note that had taken his uncertain belief in relationships and crushed it as easily as his machines annihilated a ton of grapes.

  His mouth tightened. He hadn’t tried to call her. Hadn’t tried to get her back. Because from that moment on, before he’d even heard the senior partner had left his wife and married Darya, Gabe had ceased believing in love. His parents’ marriage might rival the arctic in its coldness, but it worked. And that’s what he would have. It was simpler that way.

  Which made him wonder exactly where his fascination with Alex lay. He watched her out on the lawn, directing traffic like a law enforcement official. She drove him pazzo, no doubt about it. But on another level, he had to admit she intrigued him. Not just the fact she’d been bright enough to make it to the top of her profession without postsecondary education. That didn’t surprise him in the least. It had been the look on her face when she’d admitted that chink in her armor to him. Those words from that day in the cellar kept coming back. I was a bad girl, she’d said, as if she’d expected that to shut him down. Instead he wanted to know more. Much more.