Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Faith watches me with intense green eyes. “Well?” she prods.
“Damn good,” I say. “And I’ve eaten my share of pasta in Rome.”
She sighs. “Oh, how I’d love to go to Italy. My parents went a good half-dozen times for ‘wine research,’ as they called it. My father loved those trips. My mother was all his then. I can’t imagine wanting someone so badly that you’d allow yourself to be treated that way. I never understood.”
Which, judging from what I know of her, is why Macom got kicked to the curb after only a year. “There’s a fine line between love and hate,” I assure her. “Lovers become enemies. I see it all the time with my work.”
“But you do corporate law, right?”
“Personal relationships are common disruptors to business. The worst kind because they get emotional and dirty.” I stay focused on her past. “Who stayed with you when your parents were traveling?”
“A friend of my parents who passed away a few years ago. And Kasey, the manager at the winery, has been there for twenty years.”
I study her a moment. “Why, if he’s good at his job, can’t you paint, Faith?”
Her answer comes without hesitation. “Kasey and my father were a team. A few years back, we were just getting by, but they’d built our retail sales to a huge dollar figure the year before my father died. That’s why I was able to buy this house with my inheritance.”
“And your mother inherited well, I assume?”
“He had life insurance and money from the winery, which is why I need into her bank accounts.”
Which Beck tells me are empty, I think.
“When my father passed,” she continues, “my mother insisted she was taking over that role my father held, but it was, as expected, a disaster. My mother angered customers and made rash decisions.”
“You lost business,” I surmise.
“A ton of business.” She stabs a meatball. “That’s when I took over and tried to earn the deals back. But it got worse before it got better. We lost one section of our vineyard to a bad freeze because she declined normal procedures as too costly. Kasey was at his wit’s end, and I convinced him to stay. That freeze,” she says, stabbing another meatball, “makes the forty thousand a month a real accomplishment.”
“Don’t artistic types hate the business end of things?”
“I know this place,” she says. “I bring knowledge and the name to the brand.” She waves that off. “Enough about that. Did you always want to be an attorney?”
“Yes. My father was an attorney, and I wanted to be better than him. And I wanted him to know I was better than him.”
“Are you?”
“Yes,” I say, offering nothing more, and nothing more is how I always liked that man.
“How did he die?”
“Heart attack.”
“My mother, too, and I’d say that’s an interesting coincidence, but it’s a common way to die.”
“It is common,” I say, and I silently add, And the perfect cover up for a murder. Or two.
She sets her fork down. “Right. Common. And this is a bad subject. I think I’m done eating.”
“You’ve hardly touched your food, Faith.”
“I just…like I said. It’s a bad subject.” She starts to get up, and I catch her hand.
“Sit with me.” She hesitates but nods, settling back into her seat. I glance at her plate, then at her, letting her see the heat in the depths of my eyes. “I’m going to make you wish you ate that.”
She studies me right back for several beats and then picks up her fork. “I’ll eat, and I’ll do so because my growling stomach will distract me when I paint, and then I’m going to paint while you get ready for your call.”
“Not about to let it be about me, now are you?” I challenge, but I don’t give her time to fire back. “Are you going to finish painting me?”
“Maybe,” she says, her eyes filling with mischief. “We’ll see if you inspire me again.”
I remember the way she’d thrown that painting on the ground, the way she’d shouted at me. “If inspiring you means making you think you can’t trust me, I’d rather not.”
“There are other ways to inspire me,” she says, taking a bite of her food.
“How should I inspire you, Faith?”
“I’ll consider letting you know when it happens.”
“All right, then. When did you first get inspired to paint?”
“I always wanted to paint. From Crayola to paintbrush at age five. And Sonoma is filled with art to feed my love.”
Now she says love, but she’s used the word “like” when talking about wine. “And you went off to college with a plan to turn it into a career.”
“I did.”
“And your parents had to be proud.”
“They were supportive enough, but as an aspiring artist, I’m just like half of L.A., trying to make it to the big or small screen. No one takes them seriously until they do it.”