The Beekeeper's Ball: Bella Vista Chronicles Book 2 (4 page)

But along with the estate’s reversal of fortune came a good deal of unwanted attention. She very much doubted Cormac O’Neill would have anything to do with her grandfather if not for the stories Tess had uncovered in her research. And then there was the lawsuit...brought by Archangel’s most wily lawyer, a woman named Lourdes Maldonado. She was a neighbor and friend—
former
friend—who was suddenly looking for some kind of settlement.

“You’ve had such an amazing career,” she said, pushing aside the troubling thought. “Do you miss it?”

“Every once in a while, yeah. I did have a good job in the city. It was great for a long time. But I found something better here.” Tess’s face softened, as it always did when she thought of her fiancé. “I know, I’m ridiculous. Honestly, Iz, I never knew love could feel this way. You’ll see, one of these days. When the right guy comes along.”

“Not holding my breath,” Isabel said.

“Not even for
this
guy?” Tess handed her the Iron Curtain book.

Isabel took it from her and turned it over in her hands. She studied the author photo on the back. It was an extremely cleaned up version of the grubby, swearing traveler covered in beestings. “Oh, my.”

“You’re welcome,” said Tess, her eyes gleaming. “I mean, obviously we didn’t pick him for his looks but it can’t hurt, right? If we’re going to have someone running around researching the family history, it’s nice that he’s eye candy. He’s single.”

“That means there’s something wrong with him. Or he’s a commitment-phobe.”

“Neither,” said Tess, her smile disappearing. “He’s a widower.”

Chapter Four

“I’ll show you to your room,” Isabel said, approaching Cormac, who was taking his luggage from his Jeep.

He turned and shot her a grin. “I bet you’ve always wanted to say that, right? ‘I’ll show you to your room.’” He spoke with crisp formality.

“Right,” she said. “I mean, right this way.” She mimicked his formal tone.

“Thanks. And thanks for helping me this morning. I’m guessing a trip to the urgent care place wasn’t on your agenda today.”

“It never is. How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Nothing like a shot of artificial Adrenalin to get the day started. I took a hike around the place and made a few calls. Your grandfather around?”

“Always. He likes tinkering in the machine shop, or being out in the orchard with the workers. I’m sure he’s eager to meet you.” She led the way to the entry. It was looking grand these days, a lovely archway framing a view of the big sunny central patio. The wings of the hacienda curved generously around the brow of the hill upon which the house sat, the whitewashed walls expansive and cleanly cut against the blue sky. In the center of the broad, open space, a fountain burbled, the water flashing in the sunlight. Flowers bloomed in pots and espaliers along the walls. Two cats—Lilac and Chips—prowled around, Lilac shadowing the dark gray tabby as if to keep him away from the fountain. The workers were finishing up the pergola, creating a shaded area for café tables.

“This is fantastic,” said Cormac. He glanced down as Chips, the older cat, rubbed up against his ankle. “Hey, buddy.”

“That’s Chips. The white Siamese is Lilac, our latest rescue. We call him Lilac because it was springtime, and the lilacs were in bloom, and he has that unusual color. He takes a bit longer to warm up to people.”

Cormac leaned down to stroke Chips, who turned his head this way and that, his eyes shut in pure indulgence. Then, with slow dignity, he padded away. “Is that guy okay? He seems a bit unsteady.”

“Chips has a kind of feline Parkinson’s, so he has trouble getting around,” said Isabel.

“The white one seems to look after him,” said Cormac, watching Lilac swirl carefully around the older cat.

“He does,” said Isabel. “Chips rescued Lilac, and now Lilac takes care of Chips.”

“He rescued him?” Leaning on his cane, Cormac bent and stretched his hand out toward the white cat. Lilac perked up and sidled closer.

“Well, he brought him home one day and we started feeding him. At first I thought Lilac might be feral. He was so skittish, wouldn’t let anyone but Chips near him. The two were inseparable. Then I noticed that Lilac knew what to do with toys, and seemed to understand what a bowl of kibbles is, so I figured he wasn’t wild after all. He must have been dumped.”

To Isabel’s surprise, Lilac rubbed his head against the guy’s hand. Cormac scratched his finger between Lilac’s tipped ears. “We’ve all been there, buddy. Who dumped you?”

“It happens, unfortunately,” Isabel said. “An owner moves or passes away, and a cat gets turned out into the wild. Lilac just got lucky that Chips brought him home one day. And now Chips is the lucky one. Lilac once saved him from drowning.”

“Seriously?” He straightened up, steadying himself with the cane.

She nodded, shuddering a little at the memory. “We heard Lilac yowling on the patio one day, and came out to find that Chips had fallen into the fountain. He would have drowned, but Lilac got our attention.”

“They both got lucky,” Mac said. “Whaddya think, guys? Am I going to get lucky, too?”

Isabel assumed it was a rhetorical question, so she said nothing.

“Tess told me I was going to like it here,” he told her as the cats wandered away, making the rounds of the patio. “She says it’s like living in a dream.”

“Tess said that?” Isabel couldn’t conceal a smile.

“Yep.”

“Well, she wants you in Erik’s room. It hasn’t been updated yet, but Tess thinks you’ll like it.”

“Who’s Erik?”

“Our father. He passed away before either of us was born. I’m sure you’ll get the whole story out of Grandfather.” She led the way into the vestibule and up the winding staircase, which split into two at the landing like great wrought-iron wings, echoing the outer curves of the house. Bella Vista had originally been built for a large extended family and a staff, as well. Its three stories were filled with room after room, which Isabel was transforming one by one into guest quarters.

They went down a wide hallway to a room on the end. She could tell Ernestina had freshened it up. The linens looked crisp and smelled faintly of lavender, and the dormer windows were open to let in a breeze. A bowl of fresh fruit sat on an antique washstand, and the fixtures in the adjoining bathroom gleamed.

“After my father died, my grandparents never changed anything in here, just closed it off,” she said, turning to Cormac. He was so close behind her that she nearly ran into him—into that broad chest. He smelled even more manly than he had this morning.

As Isabel grew older, she had begun to understand why her grandparents had simply closed the door to Erik’s room. Even though Ernestina, the housekeeper, kept it aired out and dusted, the tragedy of his death seemed to hang in the atmosphere. There was a poignant sense of unfinished business, an unfinished life. Everything was frozen in time, as if he had just stepped out, never to return. She wondered if Cormac O’Neill noticed that, or if it was just her, imagining a connection with a man she’d never known.

Cormac set his large bag on a cedar chest at the end of the pine post bed. Erik’s boyhood room was still festooned with AC/DC posters, sports equipment, college pennants, old yearbooks, French and Spanish textbooks. Cormac went over to the built-in bookcase and ran his finger along the spines of the books there, some of them bleached by the light.

“Your dad liked books,” he commented.

“That’s what my grandparents said. When I was young, I made it my mission to read every single volume in this bookcase.”

“Why? To get inside his head?”

“As much as you can get into the head of a person you’ve never met. I made a valiant attempt. My favorites were
Kon Tiki
and
Treasure Island.
”

“Good choices. I loved those books.” He pulled out a copy of
White Fang
and opened to the inside cover. There was a bookplate on which Erik had written his name, the letters slanted in a careless or perhaps hurried scrawl. Cormac replaced the book and moved on to a row of travel books about Zanzibar, Mongolia, Tangier, Patagonia. “He was a fan of traveling. Or travel books.”

Isabel nodded. “He went to the University of Salerno in Italy, as part of the exchange program with UC Davis. That’s where he met my mom.”

“Are the French and Spanish books his, too?”

Isabel nodded. “According to Grandfather, Erik was a gifted student of languages. He grew up speaking Danish with his parents, Spanish with the workers and French because he loved it. And Italian, because he loved my mother.”

“Your mom’s Italian?”

“She, um, she died in childbirth. Giving birth to me.” Isabel’s own mother was yet another ghost in the house.

She caught Cormac’s flash of stark sympathy, which made her feel slightly apologetic, given what Tess had just told her—that Cormac O’Neill was a widower. “I know, this makes me Little Orphan Annie, but honestly, my grandparents were wonderful parents to me. If you lose someone before you know them, does it count as a loss?”

He hooked his thumbs into his back pockets and looked out the window. “Every death is a loss,” he said quietly.

“Of course. I’m just saying, it didn’t hit me the way it did Erik’s parents. Or Francesca’s. That was my mother’s name—Francesca.”

Cormac went over to a faded round dartboard and examined some papers stuck in place with a dart. “Looks as if Erik knew how to get in trouble, too. Aren’t these unpaid speeding tickets?”

“Yes. He drove a Mustang convertible.”

Cormac moved on to a display of ribbons. “What are all these for?” he asked.

“Okay, so he was a typical boy in every way—but he had this quirk,” she said. “He was a master baker. He won the Sonoma County Fair Blue Ribbon for the youth division from 1978 to 1982 in several categories.” She touched one of the fading ribbons. “Going through this stuff is like putting together a puzzle—but an imperfect one. I have all these artifacts—the things he left behind, photographs, stories from my grandparents and people who knew him. But
I
never got to know him, so that picture will never be accurate.” She opened a drawer of an old wooden desk. “My favorite artifact—his recipe collection.” Though she didn’t say so, this was when she felt closest to Erik—when she was following a recipe he’d put a little star by or annotated in his messy handwriting.

Cormac plucked a photograph from the drawer. “He’s a grown man in this picture.”

It was her favorite shot of Erik, one she used to take out and study when she was growing up. The photo showed him standing on Shell Beach, out on the Sonoma coast, with the cliffs sweeping up behind him and the ocean crashing around his bare feet. He was smiling broadly, maybe laughing, in the picture. He wore a red baseball cap turned backward, board shorts and no shirt. The camera had frozen him in a moment of freedom and joy.

“He’s younger in this picture than I am now.” She shook off a wave of regret, then shut the drawer with a decisive shove. “So, do you want a quick tour, or...?”

“Sure.” He turned and grabbed his cane.

“What happened to your leg?” she asked.

“I wish I could say I trashed my knee while doing something awesome, but it happened at JFK airport when I was running for a flight.” He shrugged. “It’ll be okay.”

In the middle of the second floor were the two biggest suites, one facing north, the other south. “We just finished remodeling them,” Isabel said. “Careful, I think the paint might still be wet on the doorframes.”

He scanned the new furnishings, the bright walls and window seats. “It’s great, Isabel.”

“Thank you. This has been a labor of love, for sure.”

“What’s up those stairs?”

“Third floor. My room, a few more guest rooms....”

Leaning on the hand rail, he went up the stairs. Isabel told herself to get used to this. Grandfather had invited the guy to explore their lives, and she supposed that meant he would be poking around every room of the house.

She showed him the guest rooms on the third floor, including the suite where Erik and Francesca had lived after they married. Though currently unfinished, this was going to become the honeymoon suite, romantic and private, appointed with luxurious fabrics and a special dressing room for the bride.

“And this,” she said, opening a door to a small sunroom, “was my grandmother’s domain. It hasn’t been refurbished yet, either. I’m not sure what to do with it.” Although Bubbie had been gone for ten years, her presence could still be felt in the closed-off room. Her sewing machine stood in the corner, still threaded, the needle raised as if awaiting orders. Under the long bank of windows was a faded daybed where Bubbie had lived the final days of her illness. She had spent time doing the things that mattered to her—simple things—visiting with family and friends, writing letters, gazing out at the beautiful view, enjoying a cup of tea with a buttery cookie, reassuring Isabel and Magnus of her love.

But Bubbie had never divulged the biggest secret of her life.

Regarding the sunroom, Isabel felt a surge of inspiration. “I’d love to turn this space into something Bubbie would appreciate,” she said.

“Need any suggestions?”

Not from you,
she thought. “I’d love it to be a place of dreams, somewhere to sit and think.”

“Thinking gives me a headache.”

She gestured at the row of windows. “You’d probably like a universal gym and giant speakers blaring heavy metal music.”

“Hey, thanks for reducing me to a cliché. Actually, I was going to suggest yoga mats and gong music.”

The suggestion surprised Isabel. She could instantly picture a yoga retreat here. Maybe having Cormac O’Neill poking around and commenting on everything might turn out to be the start of something good.

Yet the thought of a stranger covered in beestings, staying in the house, swearing like a reject from a busy restaurant kitchen, was unsettling.

“Shit, oh, man.” As if he’d read her thoughts, he staggered and grabbed the doorknob.

“What’s the matter?” She clutched at his arm. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sorry, I’ll be okay. Post Adrenalin letdown,” he said. “Feels like vertigo.”

“What can I do?”

“Maybe a rest and a shower.”

She escorted him back to Erik’s room. “All right,” she said, feeling flustered again, “you should find everything you need here.”

He paused, studying her. “I already have.”

* * *

Cormac O’Neill had been to a lot of places in his life, too many to count. But as he stood at the window of his room at Bella Vista, he couldn’t recall a place that rivaled the beauty of the Sonoma hacienda. Looking out at the orchards and fields, he felt a million miles away from the war-torn places of the world, the airports and grimy cities, the long barren stretches of scorched earth in the foreign lands he’d visited. During his career, he had lived in mud huts and tents, in hovels and out in the open, being eaten alive by bugs or shivering in an unheated room. He could do worse than a luxurious villa in Archangel, that was for sure.

Staggering off an overseas flight at SFO this morning, he’d borrowed a buddy’s Jeep, gulped a double shot of espresso and had driven straight from San Francisco to Archangel, hoping to relax and sleep off the jet lag. Instead, he’d encountered the skittish and suspicious Isabel, who had kneed him in the groin. Next came the swarm of bees and the trip to the urgent care place. He wondered what the next disaster would be.

When Tess had told him about the book project, she hadn’t mentioned hostile women and swarms of bees. In fact, she’d characterized it as a working vacation of sorts, a way for him to recover from his bum knee by soaking up the charms of Sonoma County.