Her sister gasped. “You wouldn’t.”
“Did we not share the same childhood?”
“Yes, but—”
“Lil. I understand you are sickeningly happy with your machismo husband and your gorgeous little boy, soon to be brother of a gorgeous little girl, I’m sure. But leave me out of the baby discussions.”
Lilly sighed. “Fine.”
Alex looked up to see the sound technicians she’d hired pulling into the parking lot. “If you don’t hear from me in a while it’s because I am either snowed under or I’ve actually gone ahead and committed murder on your brother-in-law. How are you feeling, by the way? Following doctor’s orders?”
“Riccardo will barely let me move without commenting. I might kill him before this is all over.”
Lilly had suffered from preeclampsia with her first pregnancy and they’d all walked on needles throughout most of it. For once, Alex didn’t blame her controlling husband for being that way. “This may be the only time I ever tell you this, but listen to your husband. He’s right.” She stood up and grabbed her clipboard. “I gotta go. Give said husband a sock in the head for me.”
* * *
Gabe stared at the guest list and decided he must be delusional at this point, because he had not put that name on this list.
He hit the intercom button. “Danielle,” he growled. “You sent me the wrong list.”
“Let me check.” She walked into his office a minute later. “Nope, that’s the final one.”
“It can’t be,” Gabe replied as patiently as he could manage. “Darya Theriault is on it.”
His PA whitened. “It’s the master list. Alex had a last look at it.”
His fingers curled around the paper. “She changed it and didn’t get my final approval?”
“She said you’d seen it twice.”
White-hot anger sliced through him. “Get her on the phone, now.”
“Frank Thomas is here.” Danielle gave him an uncertain look. “Do you want me to make him wait?”
The desire to put his hands around Alex’s beautiful neck and strangle her almost made him nod, but finding out what Jordan Lane was up to was more important than bloody murder. “Give me two minutes, then send him in.”
She nodded and left.
Alex had put his ex on the guest list. His ambitious lawyer ex who’d left him for a senior partner with a note that had said, “I don’t love him like I love you but it’s a smart move and I’m marrying him.”
Just like that. Propped up beside his coffee mug when he’d walked in the door from a trip to New York.
Worse than that, this RSVP list said Darya was attending. With her husband.
It was the last straw. He slammed the list down on his desk. He’d managed to overlook Alex and her team’s blatant misuse of his time. The decisions she was making she thought he wasn’t noticing. But this. This was too much. Troppo.
As was the creation she’d sashayed into the kitchen wearing last night that had screamed take me. Merda. There was only so much a man could take. He’d dealt with the insubordination; he’d even managed to handle the smart mouth. But he could not get his mind off of how good she’d felt under his hands that night at the hotel—sleek, smooth and undoubtedly worth every last husky sigh. Or the way that negligee had put her perfect body on display, hugging the lush curves of her breasts and hips. His body tightened under his fitted suit trousers. They were the type of curves that made a man want to put his hands all over her—in no particular order.
Dannazione. He jammed his hand against the desk and ruthlessly pushed the image away. It had taken him ten pages of sales figures to wipe it from his head last night, but apparently it was of the recurring variety. Not a positive thing, when she was the employee he intended to tear a strip off of as soon as he could get his hands on her.
He stood to greet Frank. This afternoon he was getting rid of that particular problem. One way or another.
Frank Thomas, a fifty-two-year-old cop–turned–private investigator, gave Gabe’s hand a hearty shake and made himself at home on the leather sofa. Gabe followed and stood opposite him, too restless to sit down.
“The rumors are true,” Thomas announced. “Jordan Lane is developing a Devil’s Peak look-alike.”
His heart dropped. “How do you know?”
“A source in the restaurant industry. He’s been chatting it up, apparently.”
“How close is it?”
The investigator shook his head. “Talking’s all he’s doing. But I hear close.”
Gabe shoved his hands in his pockets and paced to the window. “It doesn’t fit with his current strategy. I don’t get it.”
“I think that’s the point. It isn’t about strategy. He’s after you.”
A sense of foreboding settled over him, an uneasy feeling pulling deep down in his gut. The Devil’s Peak wasn’t your run-of-the-mill, ordinary blend. A great deal of proprietary processes and ingredients had gone into it that hadn’t been done in a Californian wine before.
He looked at Thomas. “He’s got someone on the inside.”
“My thoughts exactly.” The wily investigator cocked a brow at him. “Any idea who it could be?”
No. He thought about Pedro, his head winemaker, whom he’d brought with him from the Tuscan De Campo vineyard after the older man’s wife had died. The men and women he’d handpicked to work alongside Pedro. “No—I trust them all implicitly.”
Thomas pursed his lips. “Someone in the office? Suppliers, distributors, customers?”
Gabe shook his head. “They wouldn’t have the knowledge. You can’t copy the structure, the composition of a wine without knowing what you’re doing.”
“Then you’ve got to go through your people again. Take a closer look. See if you’ve missed something.”
He nodded. The uneasy feeling in his gut tightened. He was close, so close to achieving what he’d set out to do eight years ago—to put De Campo in the upper echelon of Californian winemakers. So close he could almost taste it. He would not, could not allow a disloyal team member to destroy his dream. There was another wine, a far more important wine, in the works, too. The wine only he and Pedro knew about.
He had to find the bad apple before whoever it was found out about that wine as well. The game changer. If it wasn’t too late.
“Give me an hour and I’ll get a list to you,” he said to Thomas. “We’ve done background checks on everyone, but dig deeper. See what you can find. Meanwhile, I’ll go through them all with Pedro. See if anyone sticks out.”
Thomas nodded. “If there’s something there I’ll find it.”
* * *
Gabe got back to the vineyard at two and went directly into another meeting. Alex waited until she saw one of the men leave at three-fifteen, tucked the folder with the approvals she needed under her arm and marched into the house, determination fueling her every step. Down the gleaming hallway to Gabe’s office she went, a closed door greeting her. She knocked and reached for the handle. Elena held up a hand. “I wouldn’t—”
“Bother him,” Alex finished. “I know.” She turned the handle and swung the door open, her legs planted wide in a fighting stance. “This time your guard dogs aren’t going to work. I need y—”
Two men were seated near the window, staring at her. She did a double take. Oh. Only one had left.
“Whoops,” she muttered. “I thought you were done.”
The room was silent. Gabe said nothing, his gaze resting on her with a stillness that drew her attention to the furious gleam in those spectacular green eyes. “We’re almost done,” he said in a deadly quiet voice. “Would you wait for us in the living room?”
She backed out, thinking she really might have done it this time, but past caring because he was impossible and she had to get her job done. Closing the door, she retreated to the kitchen instead, a tiny rebellious part of her refusing to let him order her around.
“Lemonade,” she murmured in response to Elena’s curious look.
“You’re in trouble?”
“I would say so.” She retrieved the carton from the fridge and sloshed some into a glass. “Got any advice?”
“Normally I would say appeal to his reasonable side. But these days?” Elena shrugged. “Keep your head down.”
Which was obviously not what Alex did when Gabe found her there ten minutes later, chatting with his housekeeper. “You,” he snarled. “In my office.”
She followed him, wincing as he slammed the door behind her.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing walking into the middle of my meeting?”
“I didn’t know it was still going on,” she said calmly. “I’m sorry.”
“I told you I’d come get you.”
She set the lemonade down on his desk. “You keep disappearing, Gabe. We are behind. Significantly behind. Emily needed an approval on the catering yesterday, I need an approval on this interview list now or we aren’t going to have any one-on-one media interviews at the event.”
“To hell with the media,” he roared, making her take a step backward. “They can wait.”