A Fine Year for Love. Catherine Lanigan
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growing. “I don’t believe this.”
She hopped onto her ATV and switched on the ignition.
When she was still fifty or so yards from the top of the next rise, she cut the motor and let the vehicle roll silently across the valley. The ATV came to a stop and Liz dismounted it. She grabbed her shotgun from the boot and moved forward stealthily.
The movement Liz had seen from a distance was not, as she’d initially assumed, that of a deer or coyote. It was that of a man. He was too tall to be Aurelio, their hired hand.
There was the odd chance that it was Giovanni Fiorinni, an agronomist who split his time between Crenshaw Vineyards and several other wineries up in Michigan—but Giovanni had visited five or six days before. She didn’t expect him back for weeks. Perhaps the man was a weekend tourist who had wandered over here by accident.
Liz quickly dismissed that idea. This area was fenced, gated and locked.
She had brought the chardonnay vines from France herself. It was in this precious section of the vineyard that she had placed her dreams of producing champagne—real champagne. The first in the Midwest.
No, there would be no cause for anyone other than her and her grandfather to be on this part of the property.
This man was trespassing.
He was well over six feet tall. His nearly black hair had been precision cut and styled, which told her he probably didn’t employ a local barber at six bucks a pop. He wore clean and fitted jeans, expensive-looking black leather cowboy boots and a blue-and-white-striped Oxford shirt.
Was this guy a farmer?
The man dropped into a crouch. It was clear he hadn’t heard her approach. Liz couldn’t tell what he was doing, but he seemed intent on his work as he scooped up a handful of earth. Still moving forward, Liz noticed he was wearing plastic gloves. Next to his foot was a box filled with some sort of equipment.
This man had a purpose.
He had his back to her as he held a wide-mouthed glass tube of dirt—her dirt—up to the sun.
Liz lifted her gun, aimed it at him and stood her distance in case he made any quick moves.
“Put it down and turn around,” she ordered harshly.
The man raised his arms and slowly turned to face her.
Liz gasped. “Gabe Barzonni! What are you doing here? You’re trespassing.”
Gabe guiltily looked at the soil in the test tube, then flashed Liz a charming smile.
She frowned and continued to glare at him down the barrel of her shotgun.
Gabe chuckled. “Hi, Liz.”
She remained silent as she slowly lowered her gun. “Spill. What are you doing?”
“Actually, I came here to check out your tasting room. Very nice. I like the maple wood floors, by the way. Then your sommelier there—”
“Louisa,” Liz interjected.
“She’s very helpful. Said she’s from the Champagne region...” Gabe smiled winningly.
“I know where she’s from,” Liz growled. “And you’re beating around the bush. Why are you stealing my soil?”
“I wasn’t stealing, exactly.” He started to smile again, but catching Liz’s suspicious glare, he obviously thought better of it. “I was very impressed with the wines I tasted. Very impressed. I followed some other tourists out to the vineyard. Louisa told us we were free to walk around.”
“Sure you are. Among the cabernet grapes. Not over here.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Liz, can you please put the shotgun away? It makes me nervous.”
“Good,” she said, though she put the butt end on the ground and held the gun, by the barrel, at her side. “I like you being nervous. Maybe you’ll start telling me the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth.”
“Fine. Then dump the dirt.”
Gabe lowered his hands slowly and looked at the tube as if it held gold dust. “I wanted to test it is all. It’s a hobby of mine.”
“Yeah? Since when?”
“Liz, you know me. We went to high school together.”
She shook her head. “Hardly. I’m four years younger than you. I was a kid when your name was being plastered across the sports section of the newspaper for a touchdown or something.”
He glared at her. “A lot of touchdowns. We went to state.”
“You and I were never part of the same crowd. Okay?” She pointed at the vial. “Dump the dirt.”
“Fine,” Gabe replied. He reluctantly deposited the dirt on the ground.
“Now leave,” she ordered.
“Don’t be like that, Liz. Maybe we could go back to the tasting room and you could tell me more about these chardonnay grapes...”
“You don’t hear so well, Gabe. I want you to leave.”
Gabe threw his hands up in the air. “I’m leaving,” he said angrily. He shoved his test tube into the metal box he’d brought with him.
“I’m thrilled,” Liz said.
She watched as Gabe hoisted himself over the whitewashed wooden fence as if he’d been training for a gymnastics team. He walked past the tasting room and over to the gravel parking lot, got into a black Porsche convertible and drove away.
Liz knew the Barzonni family, though not all that well. She was most familiar with Gabe’s brother Nate, a cardiac surgeon, because he was engaged to one of her closest friends, Maddie Strong. Gabriel Barzonni was the eldest of the four Barzonni boys. As far as Liz could remember, none of the Barzonnis had ever come to visit her or her grandfather.
She couldn’t even remember the Barzonnis coming to her parents’ funeral. But then, she’d only been six years old, and she hadn’t really known the family at all. As far as Liz was concerned, she didn’t have a history with Gabe.
His trespassing was more than a little bit suspicious.
Clearly he wanted something. But what? The Barzonnis were hugely successful and owned a great deal of farmland. What could Gabe possibly want that Liz had?
The more she thought about him, the more her stomach churned and her nerves fired with alarm. She felt as if she’d just come upon an intruder during a home invasion. Yet this was a person she knew. Sort of.
She bent down and grabbed the handful of soil that had fallen out of Gabe’s test tube. His actions made no sense at all. He didn’t come from a family of thieves, and if he wanted to run some kind of local soil experiment, why hadn’t he just asked her permission to take samples? She would have been happy to help him out.
On the face of it, Liz had no real evidence against Gabe. She’d always had a highly suspicious nature, and her girlfriends often accused her of being paranoid. Maybe she’d developed the trait after the car accident that had killed her parents. Years of worrying about her aging grandfather and pushing herself to secure the future of the vineyard certainly hadn’t made her a more trusting person.
Liz pursed her lips. Intuition told her Gabe was up to something.
She rubbed her arms, trying to push down the hairs that had pricked up as they always did when danger loomed nearby.
“Something tells me I should keep you in my sights, Gabriel.”
LIZ RODE THE ATV to the utility barn and