Yet . . . Bella Terra.
Geez
. As far as Brooke could see, her mother’s choice was arbitrary, not close to Oklahoma or even Minnesota, where their families lived. Bella Terra was this random little town north of San Francisco and east of nowhere.
Everything Brooke knew had changed, and even her body had betrayed her, growing in the last year to a freakish height of five feet, nine inches. She was taller than every other kid in seventh grade. She hunched her shoulders and wouldn’t look at anyone, sure they were laughing at her.
For sure they were staring.
Until Rafe strolled in. He was taller than her, topping every boy by at least six inches. He was older than all of them, held back because his schooling had been hit-or-miss. He was darkly tanned, extravagantly handsome, with black curly hair, darkly lashed blue eyes, and the most amazingly effective sneer Brooke had ever seen. As he swaggered down the corridor, she stared—all the girls stared—mesmerized. The local girls told her he was from one of the premier families in the valley, the Di Lucas, and it was clear that meant more in this town than the fact that he had already been a movie star before the age of nine.
Brooke was impressed.
Man. What a fool she’d been. What a sucker she’d been.
Now, turning her head away from the open window, Brooke looked at Rafe: at his sharp profile silhouetted against the blue sky, the bold jawline, the black, curly hair swept back from his forehead, the broken, flattened nose so out of place on his noble face, the lips that every straight woman on the planet wanted to kiss. . . .
As she stared, she saw his expression shift from blissful thoughtlessness to sharp curiosity, and she didn’t like it . . . but once again she knew what his next move would be.
The Mustang slowed. Rafe’s attention moved from the road . . . to his investigation. He pulled into a turnout, put the car in first gear, cut the engine.
Silently she counted down . . .
Three, two, one.
He turned to face her, slung his arm over the back of her seat. “Who do you suspect attacked my grandmother?”
Good to see you again, Brooke. I dream about you every day I’m not holding you in my arms.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You know everyone in town. You must have some ideas.”
I’ve been remembering every moment we ever spent together.
“I don’t suspect anyone and I’m not accusing someone simply for points with the local law enforcement—or you,” she said.
“So you agree with Bryan DuPey? You think it was a vagrant?”
You look better than ever, and I’ve missed you more than life itself. My darling, I’m so sorry for the horrible way I’ve treated you. I am nothing without you, and all I want is to come home . . . to you.
“I don’t think anything. I don’t think Bryan DuPey is a moron. I don’t think it was a vagrant. I don’t think it was one of the winery workers or one of my employees. I’m as bewildered as anyone.” She focused on his chill, still expression. “Tell me who you think did it.”
He waved her question away. Obviously, he intended to do the interrogation. “Who discovered Nonna?”
She sighed. “Didn’t your brothers tell you?”
“No. Who got to her first?”
He wasn’t going to like this. “I did.”
Those lushly lashed eyes narrowed. “After she’d called emergency.”
“Yes.”
“But not much after.”
“I heard she was hurt and started up to the house ahead of the ambulance.”
“Where did you get that information?” He shot words at her like bullets.
“I didn’t exactly get the information. One of my gardeners looked miserable and when I asked him what was wrong, he told me how much he enjoyed working on old Mrs. Di Luca’s yard because she gave them lemonade in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter. . . .” She wanted to gesture nervously, but forced herself to remain motionless. “Part of my job is hearing what people aren’t saying.”
“You heard him not say that he had hurt her.” Rafe put just the right note of disbelief into his tone.
Her hackles rose. “No. I heard him not say he knew she’d been hurt.”
Rafe’s blue eyes held all the warmth of an iceberg. “I want to interview him.”
“He’s gone.”
“Where?”
“When I came back from the hospital, he’d left town. No one’s seen him since.”
Rafe’s teeth snapped like a wolf’s on the attack. “How very convenient.”
People who lost their tempers easily were ill suited to the job of concierge, and Brooke’s early life with her parents had taught her the advantages of a placid disposition. Yet every time Rafe came into town—every time—she found herself riding a series of highs and lows best suited to a drama queen. Now, although she knew better, she got mad. “Are you accusing me of being behind the attack on your grandmother? Or perhaps even attacking your grandmother?” She was pleased to note her tone remained even.
A beat. “No.”
“Generous of you.” She smiled faintly, and looked him right in the eyes, challenging him.
“Yes.” He seemed serious. “What was this gardener’s name?”
“Luis Hernández.”
“I’ll get his Social Security number from the office. See if I can track him down. He’s got to be somewhere.” Turning back to the wheel, Rafe put the car in gear and drove on up the road toward the home ranch.
Brooke turned her face back to the breeze, let the wind cool her cheeks, and tried to be glad of the reminder of Rafe’s suspicious temperament before she tumbled back in love once again.
B
ella Terra was just a place.
Ever since he could remember, Rafe had been making this drive up to the home ranch. Before he was five, he had strained to see past the sides of the car seat, uncaring of the vineyards and the olive trees, the signs advertising little wineries and the long driveways leading into them. He had longed for that first glimpse of Nonna’s house, decorated for Christmas with its lights like beacons leading him home. Even in the chilliest weather—and the hills of central California got occasional blasts of cold—she was always there on the porch, waiting for them to drive up so she could unhook his seat belt and carry him inside. His grandfather had a deep, gruff voice. His brothers were whirling dervishes. The smells had flooded Rafe’s senses: evergreen, cinnamon, and Nonna’s warm scent, like flowers dipped in vanilla. The tastes had been glorious: ham, turkey and dressing, fruit salad with whipped cream, cranberry apple pie, and fruitcake bursting with dried fruits and walnuts.
It had been a horrible shock the day he’d eagerly accepted a piece of fruitcake from a friend’s mother and discovered it was nothing like Nonna’s.
But then, no one was like Nonna.
He glanced at Brooke, who stared pensively out the window.
Brooke was just a woman.
On the first day of school in the first year he’d returned from Italy, fresh from his movie career, hating himself and everyone else, Brooke had been standing in the corridor, hunching her shoulders and clutching her books. Something about the way she had looked—wretched, depressed, and terrified—appealed to him. After all, misery loved company.
He had been two years older than the rest of his classmates because he hadn’t gone to school, not consistently, and the schools he had attended had been Italian or Indonesian or Australian. Wherever his mother filmed, he went to schools or had a tutor.
So Bella Terra didn’t know where to place him. He was miles ahead in logic and math; he read and spoke English perfectly—and about five other languages—but didn’t understand a speck of English grammar. He didn’t play baseball or football, not the American kind, or basketball, and he refused to have anything more to do with acting. And he had a surly attitude, one developed during all the years of listening to his parents and their shouting matches, then of watching his mother conduct her flamboyant love affairs and constantly profitable marriages. She’d finally given up and sent him to live with his Nonna, his half brother Noah and his half brother Eli, who was back from Argentina and closed up tighter than a drum.
But Nonna always made everything better.
Brooke was the same personality type. Loving, generous, understanding. He’d been attracted to her not because she was like his Nonna but because . . . well, because she was tall with a nice rack and good legs. Not admirable reasons, Rafe now admitted, but hell—he’d only been fourteen. At that age, higher aspirations were beyond him.
So he’d hauled her along in his wake as he swaggered and sneered his way through seventh grade.
By eighth grade she was a habit.
By the time they reached high school, she had grown into her awkward beauty and every guy envied him. Not that he laid a hand on her. She was too young, too innocent, too adoring of him, and he was by God determined not to be the jerk his father was, grabbing at every young woman bowled over by his looks. So he kept her at arm’s length, and kept all the other guys there, too, and he was pretty proud of his restraint right up to the time when her crap-ass father came for graduation. When he left, she told Rafe everything went well.
He snorted.
She looked at him, blue eyes wide and unblinking, and even he, dumb, insensitive guy that he was, saw the anguish she concealed. What was he supposed to do? Leave her to suffer alone?
He wasn’t inexperienced sexually, hadn’t been since his earliest adolescence. He knew better than to sleep with her, but my God! They were best friends . . . who fell so wildly in love.
First love, bright and clean. Forever.
Except, of course, it wasn’t forever.
His own fault, he guessed. Because ever since Rafe figured out his own father was far from the hero he portrayed on the screen, since Rafe had done his role in that dragon movie and realized people expected him to be who he had pretended to be—Rafe had been determined to become the real thing. Not some silly on-screen superman, but a brave man. A man of integrity. A true hero.
At the end of that magical summer, he had followed his dream and joined the military.
When Brooke found out, she had thrown a fit unlike anything he had ever imagined from the cool, composed girl. She said he should have consulted her.
Now, looking back, he knew why she’d thought that. They had a relationship.
And she talked. She talked about going to college and what she was going to study. She discussed her mother’s puzzling behavior in moving them here, and how it was fate that Kathy Petersson had chosen Bella Terra and he’d moved in with his grandmother at the same time. She speculated about their future, painting mental pictures of their lives entwined together forever.
But it never occurred to him that his plans mattered to her, or that she’d consider his determination to join Special Forces a clear sign that he would turn into a jerk like her father. She hadn’t understood that his decision had nothing to do with her father and everything to do with his.
In the annals of arguments, theirs had been epic, and by the time he boarded that plane to go to basic training, their relationship was over and she vowed never to speak to him again.
That hadn’t worked out so well. Her senior year in college . . .
He sighed.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” They were like two planets circling each other, and each time it was a cosmic event filled with light and heat and always, always a colossal explosion.
They pulled up to Nonna’s house and Rafe had a choice—get right down to business or have a frank and open discussion about their relationship.
He got down to business. Not because he was a coward, but because his priority was Nonna’s safety. He told Brooke, “I want you to follow me through the house. I’m looking for something, anything that strikes you as odd. Anything out of place. Anything . . . anything.”
“You want a second pair of eyes,” she said.
“I want a feminine perspective. You taught me early on that women look at things differently.”
“Not differently. Women look at things properly.” She grinned.
“Hm.” He didn’t grin back, but not because he wasn’t amused. Because when he saw that impish smile light her whole face, it tugged at his heart, his memories, his . . .
Damn it.
At his groin.
He needed to get this mystery solved, and soon, so he could clear out.
At his lack of response, her pleasure faded and she got out to stand beside the car.
He got out, too, and listened. It was quiet up here. A light breeze ruffled the leaves on the trees and brought the scent of spring from the orchards and vineyards. Nonna was a sharp old lady. If it had been this quiet up here that day, she would have heard an accomplice moving around outside. So probably there was the one guy in the cellar.
Rafe looked up and down the driveway, then up at the house. At the steep steps, clean of any betraying footprints. At the wide covered porch with the swing that hung from chains from the ceiling, Nonna’s rocking chair and table beside it, the hanging baskets filled with fluorescent orange impatiens. He gazed thoughtfully at the tall blue-flowered hydrangeas that flourished on either side of the steps and down the sides of the house.
“I don’t see anything,” Brooke said.
He walked into the flower bed, pushed aside first one hydrangea, then another, until he found what he was looking for. “Here.” He pointed at the track of the single wide tire. “Did DuPey note this? That the perp arrived by motorcycle and hid it in the bushes?”
“No.” Brooke looked at Rafe with a renewed respect.
Stupid to want to preen.
Plunging deeper into the foliage, he found the marks made by shoes with a distinctive tread, and came out satisfied that he’d made a start. He headed up the steps—listening to them creak, he made a note to replace and paint them while he was here—and onto the porch.
Brooke followed.
Up here, everything looked routine, including the condition of the lock on the front door. There were no scratches, no sign of forced entry. As he knew and his brothers had said, if the intruder had come from this direction, he’d have walked right in.
Rafe unsuccessfully tried the door. At least now it was locked.