“I’m not nervous. I just don’t do it.”
She hesitated. “There are courses, classes you can take to help—”
“Yes,” he cut in. “I took them. I was in the middle of one when my sister died three years ago. In a plane crash in South America.” He glanced at her coldly. “I lost my entire family to plane crashes, Miss Brown. Perhaps you won’t harass me if I prefer to remain on the ground.”
She took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “It’s awful. I know.”
You don’t know, he wanted to snap at her. How could she?
But her parents had died too. Maybe she did know.
Rosalie looked out the window, but before she turned her head he saw a tear streaking down her cheek.
She pitied him.
Alex wondered what Rosalie would think if she knew the whole truth. How he’d indirectly caused his family to die.
His sister, Margaret, the middle child and only daughter, had been Alex’s ally growing up. She’d been the peacemaker in an angry family. Thomas, the eldest brother and heir, had all the worst qualities of their parents—a hair-trigger temper, a chip on his shoulder and a habit of screaming at the slightest insult. Alex, the youngest, had learned to keep his own resentments bottled up beneath silence and sarcasm.
As Thomas would inherit the title and the responsibility for running their family’s company, Margaret had buried her head in books and research. Alex similarly had fled, to study viticulture at Cornell, and he’d dreamed of starting his own wine label in America. After graduation, he’d promised his mother he’d go home for Christmas, especially since Margaret had just started her new job as a research scientist in Antarctica. But, unwilling to face the family drama, Alex had broken his promise and stayed in New York.
And so his parents and older brother, finding the holidays unmanageable without the emotional buffer of Margaret or Alex, had decided at the last moment to go skiing in the Alps.
After their deaths, Alex had found himself unable to get on a plane, even a big commercial jet. Margaret had been sympathetic at first, but as years passed, she’d finally demanded that he get his problem sorted out because, as she’d said during a satellite phone call from Antarctica, “I can’t help you. You can only help yourself.”
“I will. I promise,” he’d told her.
He’d returned to Italy, where he’d focused on the old vineyard owned by the Falconeris for generations. He knew he should take an interest in the financial institution his mother had inherited in Boston, which provided the bulk of their family’s fortune. But when it was threatened with a hostile takeover, he’d wanted to sell their shares, and let it go.
“You can’t,” Margaret had begged him from Antarctica. “It’s mother’s only legacy. Promise you’ll go to the shareholders’ meeting in two weeks and fight it. You have to convince them not to sell!”
“
I promise,” Alex had told her reluctantly.
But the day before the meeting, when she’d called to make sure he’d made it to Boston, he’d been forced to admit that he was, in fact, still in Italy with no intention of getting on a plane.
Margaret had been upset. “Fine, I’ll go. Even though this is a really bad time to try to leave. You should have told me from the beginning that you had no intention of going.”
“I’m sorry,” he tried, “I never meant to—”
“Whether you meant it or not, you lied to me. I’m disappointed in you, Alex. I’ll call you when I reach Boston.”
It was the last time he’d ever spoken to his sister.
Everyone said the two crashes were totally unrelated. His father had been piloting a private jet, and drinking, and likely arguing both with his wife and with his eldest son, screaming as he always did, causing them to scream back. While Margaret had been traveling to Chile on a chartered jet when a bird strike blew through the engine. There was no obvious connection between the two incidents.
Only Alex knew that there was.
Him.
If he had been honest with himself about his fear of flying, he could have booked passage on a ship to Boston in plenty of time for the shareholders’ meeting. If he’d been honest with his sister, he could have told her frankly that he’d never intended to help run the investment firm. Either way, he’d broken promises, forcing his sister to leave her research station in Antarctica. Just as he’d broken that promise to his mother to come home for Christmas.
At Margaret’s funeral in Venice, dry-eyed, numb, Alex came to a decision. He obviously had no idea how to love anyone. But he would never break a promise again. For any reason.
His family’s investment firm had been lost in the hostile takeover, and Alex had let it go. He’d quietly accepted a fortune in cash for his family’s shares. He’d tucked away the money and buried himself at the vineyard, blocking everything from his mind except the need to produce a truly stellar wine—as if that could save him.