Love in the Vineyard (The Tavonesi Series Book 7) (34 page)

“May I see these papers you received from the court?”

She nodded toward the kitchen counter. He was reluctant to let her go, but he had to read the summons, had to know what she faced. And he had to get the information the document contained.

His anger flared as he flipped through the pages. If family law in the States was anything like in Italy, unless this guy Eddie was a real reprobate, he’d be able to secure visitation rights. But he didn’t have to marry Natasha to do that.

She tapped his arm. “I could pay back the money Enrique took, a little at a time,” she said. “He’d help too, I know he would.”

Enrique. Maybe there was more to Natasha’s relationship with Enrique than Adrian was allowing himself to see. He cursed himself silently; maybe he’d just better stop jumping to conclusions.

“You have bigger problems than Enrique. I’ll handle him.”

“What will you do?”

He hated the accusatory look in her eyes.

“I need to talk with my father, but we’ll take care of it. You focus on you and Tyler.”

The front door banged open.

“Yo! Adrian!” Tyler’s voice boomed as he barreled into the apartment. “I saw your car.” He looked at his mother’s red-rimmed eyes. “You okay, Mom?”

“I just caught my finger in my car door,” Natasha said convincingly. “Why aren’t you in school?”

She was a woman who could lie when she had to. And now that he understood her reasons for hiding the truth, Adrian sure couldn’t blame her for protecting the boy she loved. He’d do the same.

“We had a half day, remember? Teacher conferences. Can I go over to Brandon’s? He’s having a pool party. They rented a snow cone machine.”

“I’m headed across town; I could drop you off,” Adrian said. Though he didn’t want to leave Natasha, the summons had set a clock ticking. If he was going to help her, he’d have to act quickly.

“I’ll grab my swim trunks.” Tyler looked to Natasha. “I mean, can I go? All my friends are going.”

“I’ll pick you up in time for dinner. And then it’s homework time.”

Adrian had to admire the way Natasha had pulled herself together and back into mom-mode fast.

Tyler screwed a silly smile up to Adrian. “Bet your mom wasn’t so tough.”

“Tougher,” Adrian said with a forced laugh.

Over Tyler’s head he saw the worry in Natasha’s eyes. And his inner voice, the voice he trusted, told him that Eddie Markiston had hidden motives for returning to Natasha’s life. Whatever the guy’s plan, and whether she wanted him to or not, Adrian swore he’d limit the damage any way he could.

Tyler chattered all the way to his friend’s house. Adrian had forgotten the joys of being a child. Before he could stop himself, he’d made promises to show Tyler his polo horses, to take him and his friends out riding in the hills, and to let them come at harvest time to help stomp the grapes. If the drive had been longer, God only knew what else he might’ve thrown in.

Adrian went around to the trunk to get Tyler’s gear bag. Before he could lift the bag, Tyler caught him in an awkward hug.

“Mom can be really nice,” Tyler said, backing out of the hug. “And she’s a really good cook. She makes me pies too. You should come to our house for dinner sometime.”

Tyler’s innocent lobbying on behalf of his mom cracked Adrian’s heart open. He’d grown to love the boy with a love he really didn’t understand. He’d never imagined being a dad, wasn’t sure he was cut out for it. His brother Rafe, and maybe even Gaetano, would be great fathers.

He waved at Monica and pulled away from the curb. A block down the street, he nosed his car to the side of the road, pulled his notebook and a pen from the glove compartment, and wrote down every relevant detail from his conversation with Natasha.

Edward Markiston had better have a perfect motive for making Natasha’s life hell.

Chapter Twenty-Four

SITTING IN A GROWER’S CONFERENCE WAS not the way Adrian had hoped to spend the past two days. Although securing the appellation for the wines grown in the coastal gap had once been at the top of his wish list, it sure wasn’t anymore. At least not today. He drove straight to the Casa after the final meeting of the day. He’d given his father a copy of the court summons and had asked him to turn up everything he could on Edward Markiston. Two days wasn’t much time, but he had faith in his father’s team of sleuths. That they might bend a few rules getting information didn’t matter. Helping Natasha was the goal, and he wasn’t letting go of it.

Adrian found his father with his feet propped on an ottoman in front of a fire in the Casa’s library. They’d had unusually cool nights, but so far, no frost. Frost would take out the budding grapes. Frost would be a possible disaster. But he hadn’t come to discuss the vineyard.

“Any progress on sorting out what happened to those missing funds?” his father asked. Santino Tavonesi was known for never beating around the bush.

Adrian drew in a slow breath. “One of our workers took the money. He got the passwords for the accounts from Natasha.”

“I never suspected her involvement.”

“You should’ve told me.” Adrian kicked himself. He should’ve known that with the network of intelligence available to his father that he’d have already traced the flow of the funds.

His father eyed him. “Some truths we have to discover for ourselves.”

Adrian told him about Natasha’s disability, how she’d hidden her dyslexia from everyone out of fear. And then he told him of Enrique’s dilemma. His father was no stranger to the ruthlessness of drug lords. A Colombian cartel had murdered Santino’s best agent.

“I don’t want to prosecute Enrique,” Adrian added as he paced the carpet in front of the crackling fire. “I want to give him a chance to make a new life, offer him the number-two position in the native garden business. He can pay the money back gradually—as he can afford it.”

His father kept his face placid, unreadable, the face Adrian remembered from days long ago when as youngsters, he and his siblings pelted him with questions, questions he hadn’t answered.

“I want to build a program that attacks scarcity head-on, to provide opportunities for men and women to get on their feet, learn job skills, improve their lives,” Adrian continued.

Santino liked facts. Adrian had loaded up on just the sort of facts he was sure would sway his father to support his plan.

“I’ve studied the research—scarcity begets scarcity. People with a mindset of ‘not enough,’ of poverty, make bad decisions in the moment, decisions that create a never-ending cycle. Stress overtakes them and forces more bad decisions, makes them think there’s no way out. Enrique made a bad decision because he was stressed. I want to change that.”

“There are social programs for that, Adrian.”

“But social programs don’t see
people
—we can help real people, identifiable individuals and their families. So maybe it’s only a few, but we can help. Hands-on programs have the highest success rates. I’ve thought this through. I want to create ten positions, temporary, but long-term enough to help workers in the program build skills. Once they’ve mastered key skills, we can help them find the next position, positions suited to them, permanent positions. People can learn here and then move on stronger.” He was repeating himself now, his father would see that.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes, son, okay. It’s a good plan. Calls to integrity. I like it. And I admire what you’re doing here, what you’ve accomplished in so little time. I see the light in your team’s faces. More than hope, you’ve given them a tool for reaching toward their futures, a stake in the stream of resources they might never have had.”

He shifted so he was facing Adrian full on.

“But in the end, Adrian, people have to save themselves—they have to step up. You can only offer the opportunity. There will always be individuals that you can’t help. Enrique may be a good soul under it all, but there are others who aren’t. There are those who don’t care who their actions hurt.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not sure you do.”

Santino stood, strode to the fireplace and idly poked at a log already burning well.

“You can’t always be a step ahead of such people, Adrian. The powers that drive them are deep, hidden, hard to imagine. I worked in the shadow world. Maybe for too long. Working in such a world can make a man cynical. I admire your optimism, but you have to balance it with the facts of the real world, where dozens of factors influence actions and choices.”

His father’s words hit home. In his driving desire to help, he hadn’t seen what was happening under his nose. He hadn’t registered Natasha’s actions, hadn’t imagined Enrique’s.

Some truths slice deep. He’d seen what he wanted to see, not what was.

“It’s true. I ignored the facts.”

“You ignored the facts because you don’t want to believe that true evil exists. I wish recognizing the powers of the dark side were a lesson no one had to learn, especially one of my children. But what we ignore can be harmful, especially if it’s driven by a cut-off part of ourselves. You have to look hardest at what you don’t want to see.”

He let out a deep sigh as he turned from the fire and faced Adrian.

“Our family paid a price for my blindness to my own shadow. My anger put blinders on me. I ignored that anger and put the family at risk. I should never have agreed to head the team that investigated the Gualdieris. I was unbalanced by my grief after your mother died, but that’s no excuse. I was gripped by a dark force, by the blinding drive for retribution, and I let it rule for too long. If Vico Gualdieri had harmed Zoe…” He dragged his gaze from Adrian’s and looked into the fire. “I can’t even think about that night, not even now.”

“Retribution? Retribution for what?” Adrian and his siblings had always wanted to know what had driven their father to take such a personal risk, to accept a mission that brought danger into their home.

“Let’s just say that though Vico couldn’t have known the outcome of his scheme to steal bank funds, his scheme destroyed my best friend’s life and drove him to suicide. I was
crusading
when I took that job, trying to make up for wrongs of the past. My anger and my hunger for retribution, for revenge, blinded me. It took Vico attacking Zoe for me to see that, for me to change.”

Santino returned to his chair. He’s slowed down, Adrian thought. The troubles of the past year were catching up with him. His father was their rock. But it was time to relieve him of some of the burdens he carried.

“You couldn’t have known.”

“Don’t get me wrong, son. Every effort counts
if
it comes from a place of wisdom and wholeness. The trick is not to fool yourself into thinking you have the full picture when you don’t. And the only way to get the whole picture is to look really hard at your motivations. At what’s hidden from you, what you’ve buried. Bring what’s hidden to light, and then you can make better decisions. Perhaps Natasha and Enrique have given you a gift—you have the opportunity to begin to see more clearly without putting lives at stake.”

It was Adrian’s turn to poke at the fire. The flames leaped and then settled, like a cat disturbed from a nap. He did need to sort through his motivations. Was he any different from Eddie? Just because he wasn’t trying to force Natasha into a corner, was the result he sought any different? He wanted her in his life, but she had the right to make her own decisions and to do so without pressure. It would take time for him to examine his motivations, to be honest with himself and with Natasha. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t do what he could to help her in the meantime. And to do that he needed information.

“Were you able to find out anything about Edward Markiston?”

“I’m not sure you’re going to be happy with what my team dug up.”

“I hadn’t expected to be.”

“Mr. Markiston comes from a wealthy West Coast family. He attended Stanford, where he was an honors student. But here’s the odd part, he dropped out before graduating. Went to officer candidate school and then flight school. He did five tours of duty in Afghanistan with the Air Force. Then his parents’ yacht went down. And his grandfather died. The grandfather controlled the family wealth. There’s a will that stipulates that Edward has to have an heir by the time he turns thirty or he won’t receive any of the funds.”

“Sounds like something out of an eighteenth-century novel.”

“People can behave strangely when fortunes, their mortality and their legacies are concerned.”

Adrian knew too well. His own grandmother had made each of his brothers and sisters wait until they were twenty-five before they could control the funds she’d bequeathed to them. But he believed she had their well-being in mind. The old man who had written the absurd will that was making Natasha’s life a living hell appeared only to care about the continuity of his lineage. His genes.

“He turns thirty this month,” his father added.

Rage lit in Adrian’s veins. “He’s using her.”

“Maybe.” His father steepled his fingers and held Adrian with a narrowed stare. “And maybe not. The timing could be a coincidence. Edward might or might not have known about the terms before his grandfather’s death four months ago.”

Santino could turn situations and look at them from all sides. That talent was one that had made him one of the top undercover agents on the planet. And evidently it was a skill Adrian had yet to master.

“Not long after that, Eddie saw Natasha on the Megatron at the game—with Tyler.”

“Precisely. Yet my sources turned up a couple of visits to the casino where she had once worked by tracking his credit cards. He was already looking for her before the ballgame.” Santino lifted an empty tumbler from his desk. “Will or no will, it’s possible that the man really does want to step up and be a father to the boy. And probable that he intended to make amends with Natasha.”

“Then he has a hell of a poor way of going about it, slapping court documents on her like he did.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t trust her. As the biological father, he has rights. The court will see that he hasn’t had any opportunity before this to be in the boy’s life.”