Ellen Crosby - The Sauvignon Secret

“Maybe you should just do the wine deal and forget the rest,” he said. “Why get in the middle of it anymore, especially the way it’s turning out? Let Charles and Theo—if he’s still alive—sort out their own skeletons in the closet.”

“I can’t.” I picked up Stephen Falcone’s photo and turned it over, setting it on the counter in front of him. “Charles talked about Stephen like he was a lab rat in an experiment. He was a person , Quinn, and his death troubled Maggie so much that she wanted to tell the truth about what happened, regardless of the consequences.”

Quinn stared at Stephen’s photo, a muscle tightening in his jaw.

“Okay,” he said. “Then do what you have to do.”

He stood up and paced in the little kitchen. “God, I’d love a cigar right now. You’ve got me all stirred up, you know that? But if I light up, Harmony’d know and she’d kill me for stinking up the place.”

I reached for my cane and stood, too. “Forget the cigar. I have a better idea for stirring you up.”

He stopped pacing and stared at me, a slow smile lighting his eyes. “Is that a threat or a promise?”

“You’ll just have to find out, Mr. Italian-Who-Thinks-He-Invented-Love.”

He leaned my cane against the counter and took me in his arms. “You won’t be needing that, Ms. Kinky-Nuance. At least not for the rest of tonight. I’m expecting you to live up to your French reputation.”

“Bet on it.”

He led me upstairs to the bedroom. From somewhere on the boat, a clock with a lovely clear chime rang twice.

“You look beautiful in this light.” He pulled on the bow to my robe, untying it. The soft silk slipped off my shoulders and the robe dropped to the floor in a puddle.

I closed my eyes and let Quinn lay me back down on the bed, his hands moving over me sure and strong. But for the rest of the night, as our bodies rose and fell in the old, familiar rhythm, I knew—I could feel it—that the face of Stephen Falcone now haunted him as much as it haunted me.

Stephen probably hadn’t asked for much in this world. Charles may have paid off his sister, but I suspected there had been a threat attached to that payoff, something he’d been able to hold over her head—a warning about violating national security or some super-secret hoo-ha she would be too scared to question—just as he’d done to the members of the Mandrake Society. Blood money wasn’t justice.

Maybe it was time Stephen Falcone got justice.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, Quinn was already awake, propped on an elbow watching me. He ran the back of his finger down my cheek.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” he said.

“How long have you been up?”

“Not long. I was just making sure you were still breathing. Last night was pretty intense. That Italian thing, you know.”

I grinned and stretched, and he kissed me. “Could you remind me again?”

This time it was gentle, unrushed … nostalgic. Afterward Harmony’s tiny shower was practically too small to fit two people, but we managed.

As it turned out he did have bacon and eggs in the refrigerator— more advance planning—and I fixed it while he made his usual brand of coffee. If they were ever looking for a “green” fuel with enough kick to blast the space shuttle into orbit, someone from NASA needed to contact Quinn.

I packed my small suitcase, carefully folding the silk robe, while he cleaned up and then we were back in the Porsche, driving through a pea-soup marine layer.

“Is it going to rain?” I asked as he drove down Bridgeway and we left Sausalito, now nearly invisible in the fog, behind. San Francisco could have been swallowed up by the Pacific overnight; there was no trace of it.

“Yup,” he said. “In November. Don’t worry, in a few hours it will burn off like it does every day and the weather will be sunny, clear, and California perfect.”

“Always?”

He gave me a slant-eyed look. “Unless there’s a wildfire somewhere.”

“That sounds scary.”

“It is.”

We drove north following the curve of San Pablo Bay and took Highway 121 toward Sonoma. After a while, Quinn turned east, which eventually brought us to the main north-south highway through the Napa Valley.

“We’ll take this up to Calistoga,” Quinn said. “Highway 29 is the main drag. You’ll see all the legendary places like Martini, Mondavi, Inglenook, Beaulieu—the first-generation wineries that really got us started, put us on the map.”

“Great.” I smiled and willed myself to stop thinking about whether he was sending me another coded message that he wasn’t coming back to Virginia when he talked about “us.”

If Quinn noticed that I seemed subdued, he didn’t let on and kept going with his cheerful travelogue.

“When we get up near Calistoga, we’ll cut across the mountains and drop down into Sonoma Valley near Santa Rosa. There’s a place I want to show you. It’s the long way, but I want you to see Napa,” he said. “After that we’ll double back to Brooke’s winery. It’s on the Silverado Trail, just below Calistoga. A bunch of terrific wineries but the Trail doesn’t get the high tourist traffic 29 does.”

“Sounds like a lot of driving.”

“Not really. The entire Napa Valley is only thirty-five miles long and about four miles wide, so it’s not that big,” he said. “Bigger than Sonoma Valley, though.”

“Is this the famous rivalry between Napa and Sonoma surfacing?”

He grinned. “Sonoma’s jealous of Napa. That’s the rivalry.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

A truck hauling two tankers with white and red wineglasses painted on them passed us on the other side of the road. Wherever I looked there were acres of vines as far as I could see bounded by the rugged, deeply folded Mayacamas Mountains to my left and the less steep Vaca Range on my right. As we drove through the town of Napa and continued through Yountville, Rutherford, St. Helena, heading north, the storied vineyards flashed by as Quinn promised—a who’s who of California winemaking royalty.

Eighties tunes blared on the radio, the music Quinn grew up with. The Police, “Every Breath You Take.” I leaned back against the seat, listening to him sing in his warbly baritone and watching the mountains grow grander and more imposing.

Quinn’s surprise was a pilgrimage to the oldest vineyard in Sonoma Valley, a historic site. Gianni Bellini had been a major force in the first wave of Italian immigrants who settled here, along with Louis M. Martini and Cesare Mondavi. Three generations of Bellinis owned Gianni’s far-flung holdings, which included land next to the Russian River, an estate near Mount St. Helena in Napa Valley, and his pride and joy: this vineyard on the slopes of the Mayacamas in Sonoma County. A decade ago Gianni’s grandchildren, who lived and worked in San Francisco, Paris, and Hong Kong, sold it all to Pépé’s friend Robert Sanábria.

Quinn seemed to know the place well, driving past the sign indicating that this was private property as though it were meant for real trespassers and not us. The paved road wound around the side of a mountain and cut through immaculately terraced acres of vines before turning to dirt and gravel. Quinn stopped and put the top up on the Porsche to protect against the swirling red dust that coated the car until it turned rust colored. When the road ran out, he parked on a grassy hilltop overlooking the valley. The Sonoma Mountains bracketed the vast, sweeping view of overlapping vine-covered hills and crisscrossing mountains, which grew lighter as they receded and faded into the sky.

We stood next to each other without touching on the crest of that hill with only the sound of the whistling wind behind us and the chirping of birds somewhere in the trees.