Too Close to the Sun

by Dempsey, Diana

  Will's voice interrupted her thoughts. "I'll be going then," she heard him say. "I just wanted to let you know."

  And to rub her face in it, at least a little. That didn't really seem like Will, but apparently she'd read him wrong. A mistake she'd made before, with another man. In another country, in another life.

  Something, perhaps a last frantic bid to keep him from leaving, possessed her to call after him. "I gather Vittorio didn't make an offer for Suncrest?"

  Will halted, half turned. "No. He didn't."

  "But you still can't forgive me. Or understand why I did what I did."

  At that his eyes, as cold a blue as the frigid North Atlantic, rose to hers. She had a moment's thrill thinking he might actually pick up the bait, get down in the muck with her and yell and scream and shout, which would be so much better than this chilly interchange. But he only shook his head, and she knew she'd lost again. He wouldn't bother. Only people who cared about each other fought. People who were walking out of each other's lives didn't go to the trouble.

  "I understand everything I need to," he said, then turned again to go.

  Hollow tomorrows stretched out in front of her, gray and without definition. Rainbow colors gone, everything dull and faded. Nothing as it ought to be.

  And Will was lying. Supposedly honest, trustworthy Will. He said he understood but he didn't. He wasn't even trying.

  She watched him walk away for good, heels clacking in efficient rhythm on the concrete floor he now owned, the floor he'd won, the floor of her undoing.

  The big oak door closed behind him. Somewhere the winery building groaned in an unseen settling of its old bones.

  She told herself, as the tears came, that this was how it must be. For after the debacle with Vittorio, she had to be with a man she understood, and who understood her. Didn't she? Otherwise what did she have, really? Something impermanent. Something throw-away. When what she needed was something that could last.

  It still eluded her. And might always.

  Chapter 18

  Late afternoon on Labor Day, when most valley residents were firing up their barbecues while chugging down a cold one, Max got home from a weekend trip to find himself getting grilled. Not surprisingly, by his mother.

  She was sitting at the antique desk in the living room writing something, wearing her typical laze-about outfit—white pants, white top, white headband, white sandals. She'd worn that sort of thing all his life. The incredible thing was, he'd never once seen a stain on her. "Did you have a nice time?" she asked him.

  He dumped his duffel on the floor, slumped onto a chair. "It was fine."

  She kept her eyes on her writing. "How was the surfing?"

  "Fine."

  "The water wasn't too cold?"

  "Mom, it was Malibu."

  "Hm, I suppose you're right." She looked up, then over at him. "How are Rory and Bucky?"

  He took a deep breath. "Fine." It'd been sort of fun to get away with them, but he was ready for them to leave Napa Valley already. Seeing them sort of made him feel like a failure. Though he wouldn't be for long. Not once he got away from Suncrest. And pocketed his cash.

  "Bucky flew you down?" she asked.

  "Yeah." That was another annoying thing in a growing list. Not only did every female on the planet think Bucky was hot, he was in med school, so everybody took him for a brainiac. And then he went and got himself a pilot's license, so now he was flying around this hot-shit Cessna he rented out of Angwin airport. If that wasn't a babe magnet, Max didn't know what was.

  Max kicked at his duffel, which skidded a few feet along the whitewashed hardwood. Bucky had it so easy. Rory, too. Unlike him, they weren't plagued with life's big questions, like what the hell to do with the years that stretched ahead of him like the runway for a 747. I must be more complex than they are, Max told himself. That's why I've got all these challenges.

  His mother was talking to him again. "Did you tell me Rory is joining a law firm?"

  "Yeah."

  She waited. Then, "Care to tell me where it is?"

  "DC."

  "What sort of work will he do?"

  "Corporate."

  She sighed. He was irritating her, he knew, but he was too hot and tired to be a scintillating conversationalist. Then, when he was about to hoist himself off the chair to go in search of a beer, she spoke up. "Since it's fairly clear I can't get anything out of you but monosyllabic replies, perhaps I should do the talking. There's something I need to discuss with you, anyway."

  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 f
ew 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."

  She paused, regarding him. Then, "I don't mean to downplay his contribution, Will, which I'm sure is substantial. But the person I'm thinking of is truly exceptional. He's one of the top talents in the valley. And unlike Mr. DeLuca, he's accustomed to a larger operation."

  "Perhaps down the road," Will said, "it would make sense—"

  "He won't be available down the road."

  This had become a pissing match, Will realized, one Dagney and Jacob were finding both instructive and entertaining. It was time for him, as Hannah's boss, to end it.