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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Joyce,
thank you for so many years of sharp critiquing
and true friendship.
Cilantro will always burn in our firepit
on the summer solstice
in remembrance.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Leslie Gelbman, Kara Welsh, and Kerry Donovan, my appreciation for your support. Thanks to NAL’s art department led by Anthony Ramondo. To Rick Pascocello, head of marketing, and the publicity department with my special people, Craig Burke and Jodi Rosoff, thank you. My thanks to the production department and, of course, a special thank-you to the spectacular Penguin sales department: Norman Lidofsky, Don Redpath, Sharon Gamboa, Don Rieck, and Trish Weyenberg. You are the best!
Thank you to Roger Bell for reading
Betrayal
, and always being so kind in your critiques.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
F
or Penelope Alonso Caldwell, the distance between Portland, Oregon, and Bella Terra, California, was five hundred miles and nine years.
She hadn’t expected to remember the way. As she and her mother left Bella Terra, Penelope had been crying so hard.… Her eyes had been swollen; every breath had hurt; her eighteen-year-old self had thought she would die of agony.
But she must have soaked it all in: the scent of pine, the asphalt slashed by sun and shadow, the sudden descent into the valley, where grapevines stretched in unending rows, where boutique wineries nestled in groves of trees, where here and there an old-fashioned farmhouse sat sometimes ramshackle and abandoned, and sometimes… sometimes it was tended lovingly by the descendants of the very family that had built it.
The highway plunged from the mountains to the flats
created by the wanderings of the Bella River and took a turn to the south.
Then she knew she was close to her destination. She knew by the strength of the sunshine against her knuckles on the steering wheel, by the breeze against the arm she rested through the car’s open window, by the intoxicating scents of sunshine on fresh-turned earth, of ripening peaches and wine-scented oak barrels. Here in Bella Terra, spring hung on the cusp of summer, and the air smelled like broad green leaves, like freshly mown grass, like breathless first love and young hope dashed.
What a fool she’d been.
So why did this place smell like home?
It did not. Could not. She would not let it.
Penelope had been raised in Los Angeles and Portland, and she’d lived most of her adult life in Cincinnati. Hot pavement defined the smell of home, so she concentrated on the odor of asphalt baking beneath the California sun, and watched for her destination.
She’d been afraid she wouldn’t recognize the Sweet Dreams Hotel, but there it was on the right, twenty-five rooms of ramshackle inn glowing with the same violent turquoise paint that had graced it nine years ago.
She turned into the parking lot and noted the changes: The doors had been replaced; a new sign pointed the way to the office; the trim had been changed from vibrant peach to staid white, as if that change made any difference to the overall tackiness of the place.
The Beaver Inn was next door, a rough-and-tumble bar that used to be the hangout for the farmworkers in the valley, a place where fights were a nightly occurrence and everyone carried knives. Nothing about it said the
bar was anything different today: A variety of fluorescent beer signs blinked in the windows, the smudged door had a high, diamond-shaped window, and a flatbed truck was pulled into the shade with the hood open and two guys armed with wrenches staring disgustedly into the engine compartment.
Right now, with her finances iffy, she could afford this place.
She parked her mother’s aging yellow Volvo C70 in front of the motel office and walked in.
A large man with massive shoulders and no neck sat reading something on an e-reader.
He looked like a football player. He looked like a
familiar
football player.
She delved into the depths of her memory for his name.
Primo Marino
.
When she’d lived here, he’d been the town’s pride and joy, a running back for UCLA and one of the NFL’s most dazzling candidates for the draft. Apparently his bright career had ended here, working behind the counter at his family’s dilapidated motor inn.
She wondered what had happened to dash his bright future… but mostly she hoped he didn’t remember her.
From the bored way he surveyed her, she would guess he didn’t.
“I’d like a room for a week,” she said.
“A week?” He looked her up and down, then glanced around at the worn office and raised his eyebrows. “Really? A week?”
“Yes. I’ve got business in Bella Terra and I need a room for a week.” He scrutinized her with more interest, as if she were an anomaly in this place—she was wearing flip-flops and jeans and a T-shirt that said, L
ORD OF THE
O
NION
R
INGS
, so she wasn’t overdressed. But maybe she was overclean.
As intently as he viewed her, she feared some of his brain synapses would start to fire. So she handed him her credit card.
Money always claimed people’s attention.
He held the silver plastic between two massive fingers and studied it, his brow wrinkled. “Don’t you want to see the room first?”
“Is this still Arianna Marino’s property?”
“Yeah. Aunt Arianna. You know her?” He handed Penelope a clipboard with a form to fill out.
She took it gratefully and wrote down her name, home address, and her car’s license plate number. “The motel gets good ratings on Yelp, and she’s cited as the reason.” Which was true. It was also true Penelope knew her, and intended to stay out of her way. “As long as the room is clean, I’ll be happy.” And it would be. She’d stayed here with her mother that whole long, lovely summer, and she knew that with Arianna Marino in charge, the place might be shabby, but it would be spotless. And quiet. And there would be no renting of the next room for an hour.
Arianna Marino was a force to be reckoned with.
Not to mention that Penelope found a measure of comfort in the memory of that time with her mother, and these days Penelope took comfort where she could.
“Okay,” Primo said. “I need a photo ID before I run this credit card.”
She passed her Oregon driver’s license over the counter.
“Penelope Caldwell,” he read aloud, then compared the two and held the license up to compare the photo with her face. “Looks good.”
She sighed in relief. Her last name had changed, but her first name was fairly uncommon. If Primo was going to remember, he would have when he looked at her license. He really wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box.
“No one else in your party?” He looked at her car, searching for another guest.
“I’m alone.” An understatement.
“Okay, I’ll put you in number fourteen. It’s far enough away from the bar to be quiet, but not so far you couldn’t yell for help if you got into trouble.”
She didn’t like that comment. “What kind of trouble would I get into?”
“Sometimes the guys at the bar misunderstand about a single woman at the motel, especially after a hard night of drinking. Don’t worry. You’ll be safe.” Primo shrugged his massive shoulders. “I do security. Aunt Arianna says it keeps me off the streets.”
Penelope relaxed. “I’m sure you do a good job, too.” She couldn’t imagine any man going up against a behemoth like Primo.
“I’ve had a few guys who thought they could take me,” he said.
“What happened?”
“They lived.”
She laughed.
He didn’t.
He handed her a key card. “The ice machine’s in here. We had to move it inside when the drunks started peeing in it. But you can always get ice—we keep the office manned at all times. No cooking in your room.” He spread a map out on the counter, then got an envelope and stuffed a bunch of slips of paper inside. “Present one of these tokens at any of these fine eateries in town”—
his big finger moved from one mark to another—“and they’ll give you breakfast, a value of up to ten dollars.”
Since the room was sixty-two fifty a day, she thought that was a pretty good deal. “Thank you.”
“You can always ask us for recommendations—wineries, restaurants, activities. The Marinos have lived here for over a hundred years. We know the valley inside and out. We won’t steer you wrong.” He pointed toward his right. “Number fourteen is that way. Park in front. Welcome to Bella Terra.” In a none-too-subtle invitation to buzz off, he picked up his e-reader, flipped it on, and stared at the screen.
He was probably “reading” the swimsuit edition of
Sports Illustrated
.
“Thank you,” she said again, and backed out the door, immeasurably cheered to have the first hurdle of her visit to Bella Terra successfully leaped.
She might just pull this off after all.
Primo waited until Penelope had moved her car into the parking space in front of her room. Putting aside his e-reader and the open file of
Dante’s Inferno
, he picked up the chipped pink princess phone—Aunt Arianna didn’t believe in replacing perfectly working equipment, even if it was fifty years out of date—and placed the call. “Aunt Arianna, you aren’t going to believe who just pulled into the motel and booked a room.”
Chapter 2
A
t the Di Luca family home, the pounding of hammers and the sound of nails being wrenched from old wood echoed through the open front door screen and down the hall to the kitchen. There Sarah Di Luca placed a King Ranch casserole into the three-hundred-fifty-degree oven. The chicken dish was loaded with fat and sodium, cheese, sour cream, and canned cream soups, but the boys—her grandsons, Eli, Rafe, and Noah—loved it, and working as they were in the heat, they’d burn off the calories.
Her bodyguard, Bao Le, stuck close most of the time, but right now Bao had gone to check on the security guards who patrolled the perimeter of the Di Luca property.
Her granddaughters-in-law, Brooke and Chloë, had left to pick up a flat of strawberries for shortcake.