by Nora Roberts
The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 3
The Villa
Midnight Bayou
Three Fates
Birthright
Northern Lights
Nora Roberts
Nora Roberts
Hot Ice
Sacred Sins
Brazen Virtue
Sweet Revenge
Public Secrets
Genuine Lies
Carnal Innocence
Divine Evil
Honest Illusions
Private Scandals
Hidden Riches
True Betrayals
Montana Sky
Sanctuary
Homeport
The Reef
River’s End
Carolina Moon
The Villa
Midnight Bayou
Three Fates
Birthright
Northern Lights
Blue Smoke
Angels Fall
High Noon
Tribute
Black Hills
The Search
Chasing Fire
Series
IRISH BORN TRILOGY
Born in Fire
Born in Ice
Born in Shame
DREAM TRILOGY
Daring to Dream
Holding the Dream
Finding the Dream
CHESAPEAKE BAY SAGA
Sea Swept
Rising Tides
Inner Harbor
Chesapeake Blue
GALLAGHERS OF ARDMORE TRILOGY
Jewels of the Sun
Tears of the Moon
Heart of the Sea
THREE SISTERS ISLAND TRILOGY
Dance Upon the Air
Heaven and Earth
Face the Fire
KEY TRILOGY
Key of Light
Key of Knowledge
Key of Valor
IN THE GARDEN TRILOGY
Blue Dahlia
Black Rose
Red Lily
CIRCLE TRILOGY
Morrigan’s Cross
Dance of the Gods
Valley of Silence
SIGN OF SEVEN TRILOGY
Blood Brothers
The Hollow
The Pagan Stone
BRIDE QUARTET
Vision in White
Bed of Roses
Savor the Moment
Happy Ever After
Nora Roberts & J. D. Robb
Remember When
J. D. Robb
Naked in Death
Glory in Death
Immortal in Death
Rapture in Death
Ceremony in Death
Vengeance in Death
Holiday in Death
Conspiracy in Death
Loyalty in Death
Witness in Death
Judgment in Death
Betrayal in Death
Seduction in Death
Reunion in Death
Purity in Death
Portrait in Death
Imitation in Death
Divided in Death
Visions in Death
Survivor in Death
Origin in Death
Memory in Death
Born in Death
Innocent in Death
Creation in Death
Strangers in Death
Salvation in Death
Promises in Death
Kindred in Death
Fantasy in Death
Indulgence in Death
Treachery in Death
Anthologies
From the Heart
A Little Magic
A Little Fate
Moon Shadows
(with Jill Gregory, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Marianne Willman)
THE ONCE UPON SERIES
(with Jill Gregory, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Marianne Willman)
Once Upon a Castle
Once Upon a Star
Once Upon a Dream
Once Upon a Rose
Once Upon a Kiss
Once Upon a Midnight
Silent Night
(with Susan Plunkett, Dee Holmes, and Claire Cross)
Out of This World
(with Laurell K. Hamilton, Susan Krinard, and Maggie Shayne)
Bump in the Night
(with Mary Blayney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)
Dead of Night
(with Mary Blayney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)
Three in Death
Suite 606
(with Mary Blayney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)
In Death
The Lost
(with Patricia Gaffney, Mary Blayney, and Ruth Ryan Langan)
The Other Side
(with Mary Blaney, Patricia Gaffney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)
Also available...
The Official Nora Roberts Companion
(edited by Denise Little and Laura Hayden)
Table of Contents
The Villa
Midnight Bayou
Three Fates
Birthright
Northern Lights
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE VILLA
A G. P. Putnam’s SonsBook / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2001 by Nora Roberts
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://us.penguingroup.com
ISBN: 1-101-14634-6
A G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS®
G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books first published by The G. P. Putnam’s Sons Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons and the “PUTNAM” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
First edition (electronic): October 2001
To family, who form the roots.
To friends, who make the blossoms.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE The Pruning
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PART TWO The Growing
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PART THREE The Blooming
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
PART FOUR The Fruit
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
PROLOGUE
On the night he was murdered, Bernardo Baptista dined simply on bread and cheese and a bottle of Chianti. The wine was a bit young, and Bernardo was not. Neither would continue to age.
Like his bread and cheese, Bernardo was a simple man. He had lived in the same little house in the gentle hills north of Venice since his marriage fifty-one years before. His five children had been raised there. His wife had died there.
Now at seventy-three, Bernardo lived alone, with most of his family a stone’s throw away, at the edges of the grand Giambelli vineyard where he had worked since his youth.
He had known La Signora since her girlhood, and had been taught to remove his cap whenever she passed by. Even now if Tereza Giambelli traveled from California back to the castello and vineyard, she would stop if she saw him. And they would talk of the old days when her grandfather and his had worked the vines.
Signore Baptista, she called him. Respectfully. He had great appreciation for La Signora, and had been loyal to her and hers the whole of his life.
For more than sixty years he had taken part in the making of Giambelli wine. There had been many changes—some good, in Bernardo’s opinion, some not so good. He had seen much.
Some thought, too much.
The vines, lulled into dormancy by winter, would soon be pruned. Arthritis prevented him from doing much of the hand work, as he once had, but still, he would go out every morning to watch his sons and grandsons carry on the tradition.
A Baptista had always worked for Giambelli. And in Bernardo’s mind, always would.
On this last night of his seventy-three years, he looked out over the vines—his vines, seeing what had been done, what needed to be done, and listened as the December wind whistled through the bones of the grape.
From the window where that wind tried to sneak, he could see the skeletons as they made their steady climb up the rises. They would take on flesh and life with time, and not wither as a man did. Such was the miracle of the grape.
He could see the shadows and shapes of the great castello, which ruled those vines, and ruled those who tended them.
It was lonely now, in the night, in the winter, when only servants slept in the castello and the grapes had yet to be born.
He wanted the spring, and the long summer that followed it, when the sun would warm his innards and ripen the young fruit. He wanted, as it seemed he always had, one more harvest.
Bernardo ached with the cold, deep in the bones. He considered heating some of the soup his granddaughter had brought to him, but his Annamaria was not the best of cooks. With this in mind, he made do with the cheese and sipped the good, full-bodied wine by his little fire.
He was proud of his life’s work, some of which was in the glass that caught the firelight and gleamed deep, deep red. The wine had been a gift, one of many given to him on his retirement, though everyone knew the retirement was only a technicality. Even with his aching bones and a heart that had grown weak, Bernardo would walk the vineyard, test the grapes, watch the sky and smell the air.
He lived for wine.
He died for it.
He drank, nodding by the fire, with a blanket tucked around his thin legs. Through his mind ran images of sun-washed fields, of his wife laughing, of himself showing his son how to support a young vine, to prune a mature one. Of La Signora standing beside him between the rows their grandfathers had tended.
Signore Baptista, she said to him when their faces were still young, we have been given a world. We must protect it.
And so they had.
The wind whistled at the windows of his little house. The fire died to embers.
And when the pain reached out like a fist, squeezing his heart to death, his killer was six thousand miles away, surrounded by friends and associates, enjoying a perfectly poached salmon, and a fine Pinot Blanc.
PART ONE
The
Pruning
A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots,
whose flower and fruitage is the world.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
CHAPTER ONE
The bottle of Castello di Giambelli Cabernet Sauvignon, ’02, auctioned for one hundred and twenty-five thousand, five hundred dollars, American. A great deal of money, Sophia thought, for wine mixed with sentiment. The wine in that fine old bottle had been produced from grapes harvested in the year Cezare Giambelli had established the Castello di Giambelli winery on a hilly patch of land north of Venice.
At that time the castello had been either a con or supreme optimism, depending on your point of view. Cezare’s modest house and little stone winery had been far from castlelike. But his vines had been regal, and he had built an empire from them.
After nearly a century, even a superior Cabernet Sauvignon was likely more palatable sprinkled on a salad rather than drunk, but it wasn’t her job to argue with the man with the money. Her grandmother had been right, as always. They would pay, and richly, for the privilege of owning a piece of Giambelli history.
Sophia made a note of the final bid and the buyer’s name, though she was unlikely to forget either, for the memo she would send to her grandmother when the auction was over.
She was attending the event not only as the public relations executive who had designed and implemented the promotion and catalogue for the auction, but as the Giambelli family representative at this exclusive, precentennial event.
As such, she sat quietly in the rear of the room to observe the bidding, and the presentation.
Her legs were crossed in a long, elegant line. Her back convent-school straight. She wore a black pin-striped suit, tailored and Italian, that managed to look both businesslike and utterly feminine.
It was exactly the way Sophia thought of herself.
Her face was sharp, a triangle of pale gold dominated by large, deep-set brown eyes and a wide, mobile mouth. Her cheekbones were ice-pick keen, her chin a diamond point, sculpting a look that was part pixie, part warrior. She had, deliberately, ruthlessly, used her face as a weapon when it seemed most expedient.
Tools, she believed, were meant to be used, and used well.
A year before, she’d had her waist-length hair cut into a short black cap with a spiky fringe over her forehead.
It suited her. Sophia knew exactly what suited her.
She wore the single strand of antique pearls her grandmother had given her for her twenty-first birthday, and an expression of polite interest. She thought of it as her father’s boardroom look.
Her eyes brightened, and the corners of her wide mouth curved slightly as the next item was showcased.
It was a bottle of Barolo, ’34, from the cask Cezare had named Di Tereza in honor of her grandmother’s birth. This private reserve carried a picture of Tereza at ten on the label, the year the wine had been deemed sufficiently aged in oak, and bottled.
Now, at sixty-seven, Tereza Giambelli was a legend, whose renown as a vintner had overshadowed even her grandfather’s.
This was the first bottle of this label ever offered for sale, or passed outside the family. As Sophia expected, bidding was brisk and spirited.
The man sitting beside Sophia tapped his catalogue where the photograph of the bottle was displayed. “You have the look of her.”
Sophia shifted slightly, smiled first at him—a distinguished man hovering comfortably somewhere near sixty—then at the picture of the young girl staring seriously out from a bottle of red in his catalogue. “Thank you.”
Marshall Evans, she recalled. Real estate, second generation Fortune 500. She made it her business to know the names and vital statistics of wine buffs and collectors with deep pockets and sterling taste.
“I’d hoped La Signora would attend today’s auction. She’s well?”
“Very. But otherwise occupied.”
The beeper in her jacket pocket vibrated. Vaguely annoyed with the interruption, Sophia ignored it to w
atch the bidding. Her eyes scanned the room, noting the signals. The casual lift of a finger from the third row brought the price up another five hundred. A subtle nod from the fifth topped it.
In the end, the Barolo outdistanced the Cabernet Sauvignon by fifteen thousand, and she turned to extend her hand to the man beside her.
“Congratulations, Mr. Evans. Your contribution to the International Red Cross will be put to good use. On behalf of Giambelli, family and company, I hope you enjoy your prize.”
“There’s no doubt of it.” He took her hand, lifted it to his lips. “I had the pleasure of meeting La Signora many years ago. She’s an extraordinary woman.”
“Yes, she is.”
“Perhaps her granddaughter would join me for dinner this evening?”
He was old enough to be her father, but Sophia was too European to find that a deterrent. Another time, she’d have agreed, and no doubt enjoyed his company. “I’m sorry, but I have an appointment. Perhaps on my next trip east, if you’re free.”
“I’ll make sure I am.”
Putting some warmth into her smile, she rose. “If you’ll excuse me.”
She slipped out of the room, plucking the beeper from her pocket to check the number. She detoured to the ladies’ lounge, glancing at her watch and pulling the phone from her bag. With the number punched in, she settled on one of the sofas and laid her notebook and her electronic organizer on her lap.
After a long and demanding week in New York, she was still revved and, glancing through her appointments, pleased to have time to squeeze in a little shopping before she needed to change for her dinner date.
Jeremy DeMorney, she mused. That meant an elegant, sophisticated evening. French restaurant, discussion of food, travel and theater. And, of course, of wine. As he was descended from the La Coeur winery DeMorneys, and a top account exec there, and she sprang from Giambelli stock, there would be some playful attempts to pry corporate secrets from each other.
