Too Close to the Sun

by Dempsey, Diana

  All he was waiting for was the right woman, a woman he could truly imagine sharing the rest of his life with. He hadn't known Gabby long, but by age 32 his ability to give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to a particular female was honed damn near to perfection. Some judgments took less than a minute. And with her, he experienced something truly exceptional. Every time he saw her or spoke to her—every single time—he liked her more. Found more to enjoy, more to admire.

  If that keeps happening, he told himself, this is it.

  Only one obstacle stood between them.

  He pushed Suncrest from his mind as he made his way through St Helena's Main Street—traffic stop-and-go on a Friday at dinner hour as tourists and locals alike crowded the chic little eateries. Finally Highway 29 again opened up before him, and Gabby's house lay only a few miles ahead. As his anticipation mounted, his cell phone rang.

  He glanced at the readout of the incoming number and frowned—9 PM on a Friday, Denver time, wasn't a standard hour for his sister to call. He pushed the connect button. "Hey, Beth."

  "Hey, yourself. You sound like you're in the car."

  "You'll be happy to hear I'm heading up to see that woman I told you about."

  "The one who thinks you're a capitalist pig?"

  "Apparently I've convinced her I'm not that bad."

  "Well, good for you."

  She fell silent. Or, rather, stopped speaking, because Will heard sounds coming from her end, but they couldn't be described as speech. "Beth?" He paused. "Are you crying, sweetie?"

  Full-out sob, followed by a loud sniffle. "Yes."

  "What's wrong?"

  "It's Bob."

  Damn. "Is it the Philadelphia thing again?"

  "He's there now. Interviewing. He just called. He had dinner with people from some company that he says is thinking of hiring him."

  "Did you fight over the phone?"

  "No. Because I hung up."

  More sobbing, so gut-wrenching that Will wished he could beam himself right over to Denver to console his sister, tell her it was all right, that somehow it would all work out in the end. "So he's still serious about this?"

  "He wants me to put the house on the market."

  Will did not like the sound of that. "What did you tell him?"

  "That I wouldn't do anything irreversible until he had an actual offer. And then we'd talk about it. Hold on, it's call-waiting. It might be him."

  Beth clicked off. Will shook his head. So this problem wasn't going away, as he had hoped it would. What if Bob actually accepted an offer? Beth would have to move to Philly then, wouldn't she? And what would that mean for Henley Sand and Gravel?

  She came back on. "It is him. He's waiting." She sniffled. "I think he wants to apologize."

  Good. "Call me if you need to talk." He hoped she didn't, for all sorts of reasons.

  "I will. Have a good time tonight. Have a better time than I'm having." Then she was gone, off to try to keep her marriage on track, a marriage Will had never expected would be in trouble.

  He made the sharp left turn onto Crystal Mountain Road. Apparently none of this was easy. Not the part about finding the right woman, not the part about keeping her. It got all mixed up with the chaotic rest of life. It was a wonder people ever stayed together.

  But they did. His parents had. So had Gabby's.

  He arrived at her house, and since he didn't have a timid cell in his body that night—he wouldn't make that mistake again—he called out her name and pushed open her front door and found her in the kitchen. She was wearing a long flowing skirt and a sort of blouson top that drooped off her shoulders in a way that said Take me off. Take me off.

  His pulse quickened. He kissed her, and her lips were as soft as his feverish dreams had remembered them.

  "Did you have a good week?" she asked him.

  "Very good." He nipped at her mouth, swayed her in his arms.

  She smiled, cocked her head to the side. "Did you miss me?"

  "You don't know the half of it."

  She slipped away from him, called back over her shoulder. "We finished the rebottling. I tell you, Max is such an idiot that sometimes I think Suncrest would be better off if you bought it."

  He wanted no dash of cold water on this night. He went into the kitchen after her, came up from behind to nuzzle her neck. "Let's not talk about Suncrest."

  She twirled to face him, her expression teasing. "You don't want to talk business tonight?"

  "No, I do not."

  "What do you want to talk about?"

  "I don't want to talk at all." I want to take you to bed and do terrible things to you. Repeatedly.

  He might as well have just said that right out loud, for the idea seemed to hover in the air between them like spoken words. Will watched Gabby still and catch her breath.

  He didn't want to think and didn't want her to, either. He sensed that her need ran as deep as his, even if it was hidden under a thicker veneer of control.

  He wanted the control gone.

  On impulse he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder as if he were a firefighter rescuing her from a burning building. Funny, because he was the one ablaze. He made for the front door and on the way out grabbed the ratty old blanket she kept on the back of the couch.

  In a few steps he reached the edge of the vineyard, over which the sun was beginning to set. He tossed the blanket on the ground and took a stab at flattening it out with his foot. He did a makeshift job then laid her on top, like the prize catch she was.

  For a moment he stood and just stared at her. She lay on that rust-colored wool blanket staring back, her skin flushed and her lips parted and her skirt bunched around her hips. Her man-killer legs were slightly spread, and what he was dying to explore was cast in shadow. He was half-delirious as he dropped to his knees, bent over, and wrenched the tantalizing blouson top from her shoulders.

  "You're not wearing anything underneath." He managed to get out that observation as he watched her nipples harden in the cool air. Or maybe, he thought, taking one in his mouth, it isn't the air that's doing it.

  "Oh, God," Gabby said. She plucked at the buttons of his shirt, succeeded at getting most of them undone. Her breathing was ragged. "What in the world made me think you were a conservative businessman?"

  "I have no idea."

  He levered himself up to take off his shirt. He flung it, and it landed on top of the nearby row of grapevines.

  "Let's try not to disrupt the vines," she said.

  "God, Gabby." He tasted her mouth again. Sweet, like wine and summer. Of this woman he'd expect no less. "Don't tell me you're thinking about the grapes now."

  "It's not what you think."

  He used his tongue on her nipples again, made her arch against him in a way that nearly drove him mad. "What is it then?"

  She pulled up his head so their eyes met. "Rattlers. At Suncrest we dislodge them by flinging dirt on the vines." A smile, a tease of a smile, spread over that gorgeous tanned face of hers. "Don't worry, they're shy."

  "For all I care right now, they can come on out and watch the fun."

  She threw back her head and laughed, a throaty roar that fired his imagination. He bunched the skirt up around her hips and got another surprise. "You're not wearing anything underneath this, either." He squeezed the flesh of her buttocks, deliciously firm and tight from all the tromping through the vineyards. He kept his eyes on her face and explored further, into the hidden parts of her, wet and ready.

  She moaned. He bent his head down to her flesh. "Oh, God, Will."

  "Tell me you want it."

  "I do."

  "Tell me you want it."

  "I want it so bad, Will."

  He offered himself to her in every way he knew how, in every way that would tell her how much she meant to him. She was bawdy and sweet, a temptress and an angel, a wonder he would never forget, never get over, and never get enough of.

  He pulled her into the bedroom when the sun had fully set. Th
ough his fever had abated, he wasn't sated yet: he was still as thirsty as a vine seeking water at the end of a hot summer day. The fresh sheets were cool against his skin, the air blowing through the window redolent with the scent of grapes heavy with sweetness.

  *

  Hours later, after food and wine and talk and still more love, Will was exhausted, in the best possible way. Gabby was nestled against him, his left arm stretched beneath her neck, his right cradling her soft naked warmth. Her hair, tickling his nose, smelled faintly of vanilla. Here in her mountaintop house, no city sounds assailed his ears—no sirens or car alarms or maniacs taking advantage of Pacific Heights's abandoned midnight streets to hot-rod it from stop sign to stop sign.

  Her voice, drowsy, wafted toward him. "Will?"

  "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.

  Chapter 10

  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. S
he 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.