“Why would he do this? This isn’t squeezing me financially. This is destroying the vines that produce profit for the winery we’re assuming he wants to own. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if the real treasure isn’t the vines, but the property.”
“You’ve said this before, but what treasure, Nick? What could it be?”
“The options are many: A highway or development coming through here that he’s gotten an ear on. Some natural resource. Leverage on another deal. Even some sort of big-dick play for his wife.See me. I have this family vineyard worth forty million dollars. I’m the man.The reasons are many and they don’t matter at this very moment. Bottom line, I don’t believe this is an accident even if it ends up staged as an accident. And about those cameras that I just ordered Beck to put in place. Those are between you, me, and him. No one else.”
“Not even Kasey?”
“No one. And it’s not about me not trusting him. I don’t know him to trust him or not trust him at this point. But even if I trusted him, we have to worry about who he might decide to trust himself. There’s a saying I never forget: Betrayal doesn’t come from your enemies.”
“That’s the bitter hardcore truth,” I say, turning us down the drive to the mansion, the now familiar flutter of dread in my belly. It’s present every single time I’ve come here since my father’s death, no matter how many times I come here, and even when I was living here. I pull us up to the valet area, and Kasey waits for Nick and me at the top of the steps, his gray suit uncharacteristically rumpled, his thick, dark graying hair also in rare disarray, as if he’d been running his fingers through it.
Nick and I walk up the steps and the two men greet each other, shaking hands. “We aren’t saving those vines, are we?” Nick says, giving him a keen look.
Kasey’s hands settle under his jacket on his hips, his expression stark. “No,” he says, proving Nick has read him right. “Now we just need to stop the bleeding of gallons of water, and start thinking about recovery. A witness saw two teenage boys in the fields but that makes no sense to me. The pipes were hammered and broken in numerous locations.”
“Do we need to go out to the vineyard?” Nick asks.
“Every staffer I could get my hands on is out there, knee high in water with buckets,” Kasey replies. “You don’t want to be out there.”
“Knee high,” I murmur, acceptance sliding through me. “Yeah. The vines are lost.”
Nick’s phone buzzes with a text and he pulls it from his pocket, reads it and says, “Rita has a team on the way.”
Several customers exit the door behind Kasey at the same moment the crew Rita sent turns down the driveway. From there, chaos erupts. I leave the vineyard to Nick and Kasey, while the customers are mine to manage. It’s nearly two hours later that the guests are cleared out of the mansion, the staff that can be sent home are home, and I find my way to the closed restaurant, and sit down at a corner table, a number of things rushing through my mind. One of them is giving whoever did this exactly what they want.I need to sell this place.But I won’t be bullied into doing it now or to sell to any one person.
Nick appears in the entrance and crosses to sit next to me, his hand on my leg. “The crew is good. They shut down the water flow in ten minutes, and they’re extracting the water. We’ll get the right kind of teams out here tomorrow to start the repair process.”
“Thank you, Nick, for helping.”
“No thanks needed. Ever. You okay, sweetheart?”
“Whoever did this won.”
“No. They did not. We’ll rebuild the west vineyard.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I rotate to face him, the realization coming to me. “Keeping this place wasn’t just about satisfying my family legacy for my father. It was safe, although that’s almost a laughable statement right now.”
“An excuse to fail at your art.”
My throat tightens. “How did you know that? I didn’t even know that until just a few moments ago.”
“I pay attention,” he says, and not for the first time. “I care. Everyone was telling you that you’d fail, and this place was both a sanctuary and a prison. But you need to think about this when we’re out of the heat of this fire.”
“I want to sell it, Nick, but I have to rebuild those vines first or it won’t give me a nest egg.”
“Agreed and anyone who thought I’d let you be crazy enough to sell it under those conditions, didn’t think ahead. A year from now, we can not only have it rebuilt, we’ll have time to figure out the hidden value. We’ll get you that nest egg, sweetheart, and I have a pretty good nest egg for us both.”
Trying really hard to get out of my past and my own head, I don’t reject that idea. Instead, I press my hand to his face. “Is it okay if I contribute to it?”
He presses my hand to his lips. “I’m really turned on by the idea of having a famously wealthy artist in my bed.”
My lips curve. “That was a pretty perfect thing to say for such an arrogant bastard.”
“Even arrogant bastards have our moments.”
Footsteps sound and a frazzled-looking Kasey appears and he doesn’t hesitate to cross the room to sit with us. “I need to know a number of things,” he says, his focus landing on Nick. “You’re a stockholder now? Because Rita said that you are.”