“I’m American,” he said. “This is my country. Not the home of my ancestors, but this country I live in now.”
“I’m Dutch, and a few other nationalities. None of the rest of them matter.” She dismissed her current home, the place she’d been born, with a disdainful expression. “I’m Russian. I trace my ancestry directly back to Ivan the Terrible. For giving him a child, the czar gave my many-times-great-grandmother a noble husband, an estate, an exalted title—and the pink diamond necklace.”
“And eighty-one years ago, when your ancestor tried to hock the necklace, Massimo stole the diamonds, and your family has been searching for them ever since. Yeah. I got it.”
Her eyes glowed green, the color of money. “The pink diamonds are my heritage, and yours.”
Noah laughed, a twisted, bitter sound. “A heritage in which I will have no share.”
“You could—if you came with us. Stayed with us.” Every word was an enticement.
“What would I get from that? A chance to wear the pink diamond necklace to the Propov Sunday-night dance? I mean really, Mother.”
“You’re my son. I could train you to take my place—”
Noah threw back his head and laughed out loud. “How many of my cousins would I have to kill before they accepted me?”
“Some loss of life is inevitable in a change of leadership.”
Her words were so simply, flatly stated, he knew she had killed to take the lead. Killed one of the relatives she claimed to support. He answered just as simply. “No. I have no desire to constantly live a life on the razor’s edge of catastrophe. I’m happier running my vacuum cleaner.”
Contempt twisted her mouth. What an incredible disappointment he must be to her… her son whom she had so easily conned into doing her bidding.
“What are you going to do with the diamonds when you retrieve them?” he asked.
Her face grew taut with hunger, and she gazed over his shoulder into the clear air. “I’m going to have them reset in rose gold in a re-creation of the original setting. I’ll keep it in my house under the tightest security. Those diamonds will represent the pride of the Propov family restored.”
Noah snorted. “You’re kidding yourself. Hendrik will sell the diamonds as soon as you’re dead. And you’ll be dead as soon as you recover the diamonds.”
She leaned back in her chair and watched him with a lethal gaze. “You don’t understand the ties of blood.”
He thought of Nonna, of his brothers, even of his father. He remembered the threats she had made against their lives. Looking into her eyes, he said, “You’re using the Di Luca family to blackmail me. Can you really claim I don’t understand the ties of blood?”
Her gaze fell beneath his, and he counted that a victory.
Then she looked up again, those green eyes cool and measuring. “So you remember what I told you. That if you ever tell your family about us, who we are and what we do, we will have to kill them.” She kept her voice low and lethal.
“I’m not likely to forget.” Nor was he likely to discount her claim.
He had seen her kill before.
“Good.” She brightened. “I have a gift for you.”
“Do you?” A chill ran up his spine; he had experience with her gifts.
Leaning over, she dug through her capacious Italian leather purse and brought forth something that looked like an expensive leather dog collar. Two strips of black leather had been stitched together. A silver clasp would join the two ends. At every inch, a silver stud protruded, and at the end of each stud, a rhinestone sparkled.
Noah was aghast. “This looks like something the Goth youth in Germany wear.”
“That’s right,” she said encouragingly. “It’s a necklace.”
“You’re giving me a necklace.” It was a statement, not a question. “A hideous necklace.”
Liesbeth appeared honestly surprised. “I thought it was quite handsome, and as you said, many European men wear such jewelry.”
“Too bad I don’t live in Europe,” he said flatly.
She cocked her head as if trying to ascertain whether he was joking. “Hm. Well. Anyway, Brigetta made it for you with Grieta’s help. There’s a camera hidden in this stud.” She pointed to the stud that would sit at the front. “The lens is one of the jewels.”
“So I wear it around my neck and you see what I see. You see where I search for the bottle.”
“Exactly.”
He didn’t really want to know, but the question had to be asked, and as he did, fear tasted like dry sweat socks in his mouth. “Brigetta is your munitions specialist. Why do you need her to help make a necklace with a camera?”
“Ah!” Liesbeth leaned back and waved an apologetic hand. “I told the children you would realize the trap. You’re very astute.”
“I am now. You trained me, after all.”
“You were very good. If you had stayed with us—”
“That wasn’t an option. You wanted me here.”
“If you had proposed such a course, I would have agreed with vigor.”
He leaned toward her and lowered his voice to a furious whisper. “Why would I propose to stay with the people who hated me so much, they spent three months setting a snare that would ruin my life?”
She leaned toward him, and she, too, kept her voice quiet. But she sounded totally reasonable. “We do not hate you. How can you think that? Every plan can be altered when another, more profitable plan is presented.”
“So what is the plan for this, Mother?” He gestured toward the dog collar sitting flat on the table.
She sat back, clearly disappointed, wanting to resurrect the old memories. But she was a patient woman; after all, she’d been waiting since the day he was born to retrieve her diamonds. “Hendrik is getting impatient with the time we’ve invested keeping track of you as you search for the bottle, and all with no payback, no reward in sight.”
“Poor Hendrik.”
“So to appease him, we made a plan to hurry this along. In addition to the camera, this little stud”—she tapped it—“contains a timer. It’s set for two weeks from the time the clasp is locked. The collar, by the way, is impossible to remove without the key.”
“I suspected that.”
“The timer is connected to an explosive powerful enough to blow your throat open.” She beamed as if expecting praise.
“I see. Very clever.” He closely examined the studs that held the camera and the explosive. “So if I don’t find the bottle before fourteen days are up, I lose my life in a bloody and disgusting manner.”
“It will be a discreet explosion. At such a sensitive part of the body, it doesn’t take much to cause death. But I don’t think we need to dwell on that. This will add incentive to your search, and I’m sure that will result in success. Now, if you’ll put on the—”
“Give me your tapestry needle.”
“What?”
“You still do tapestry work, don’t you? Give me your needle.”
She stared at him; this was obviously not the reaction she had anticipated. With a shrug, she dug through her purse, pulled out a task bag, and found a three-inch-long stainless-steel needle and handed it over.
He examined it carefully. “In the past, your tapestry needles were always blunt to go through the canvas that you worked.” He lightly touched the gleaming point. “This is quite sharp.”
She shrugged. “I am older now, increasingly likely to be viewed as a victim, and so I’m more wary than I used to be.”
“You hold your weapons in secret. Very clever, although I pity the man who imagines he can take you down.” With a flick of his wrist, he popped the jewel out of one of the studs.
She caught his hand. “What did you do that for?”
“I disabled the camera.” He examined each stud, found one without a rhinestone, rammed the needle into the small hole.
Liesbeth placed her hand on her own throat and looked into his eyes. “That bomb is real, you know. If
you had calculated incorrectly and shoved that needle into the wrong place, you could have blown off your hand.”
“Then Grieta would have had to build me another one for my neck, hm?”
He broke off the needle and handed it back to her. “That takes care of the microphone.” Picking up the dog collar, he showed it to his mother, front and back, like a stage magician displaying his wares before his next trick. Putting it around his throat, Noah clicked the lock.
Even here, with voices buzzing around them, with the sound of the traffic on the street, the snap was loud, solid, final.
He looked at his watch. “Thursday, three thirty-seven p.m.”
She looked at her watch, too, then back up at him. “You don’t seem to comprehend. By putting the necklace on and clicking the lock, you started the timer.”
“I never doubted it for a minute. If I haven’t found the bottle in two weeks, you can kill me, Mother dear, but in the meantime, damned if I’m going to be a walking video camera for you.” Leaning forward, Noah caught Liesbeth’s wrist. “Did you really think I was going to allow my goon cousins to force me to don this?” He indicated the bench across the street where Hendrik, Klaas, and Rutger loitered, waiting for the signal to carry him off and force him into the collar like a rabid dog.
“I… thought… Yes, I suppose I thought your cousins would have to coerce you.”
“Every day, I am searching the cellars below the resort, looking through every cubbyhole, behind every rafter, in every secret room.” His blood churned in fury. “You imagine I don’t care, that even if I look, it is to find the bottle for me. You are so stupid.”
She tossed her head and tried to free herself.
He tightened his grip. “All I want is for you to take the bottle and go. I want my home back, some peace of mind returned to me and my family.”
She curled her hand into a fist. “You don’t have to search by yourself. Let your cousins help.”
“I’m not letting them anywhere near my resort guests.”
“Your cousins would behave if I told them to.”
“You’re overestimating your influence. They’re beasts unfit for civilization. They break people’s fingers as if they were crushing potato chips.” He thrust his face into hers. “No, Mother, and if I find them poking around my resort, I’ll kill them, bury them in the tunnels, and no one will never find them. No one.”
“But do you understand what will happen if you don’t find the bottle…?”
“What? I’ll die? Since the day I realized that my mother”—he shook her wrist hard—“my mother traced her family’s diamonds to Bella Terra and the Di Luca family, and cold-bloodedly conceived me with the intention of someday using me to retrieve those diamonds… I have been resigned to dying a violent death. Be proud. That’s the heritage you have given me.” He let her go and stood. “But never fear. I will work to find that bottle of wine. I will not die and leave Bella Terra with a future filled with ferocity and murder.”
Chapter 20
At five o’clock on Thursday afternoon, on her first full day in Bella Terra, Penelope got out of her car in the parking lot of the Sweet Dreams Hotel to find the sun had baked heat into the asphalt. It burned through the bottom of her sneakers and made her wonder why she’d come to Bella Terra in the first place. She could be in Portland, where it was cool and rainy… and where there was no one for her, only a simple gravestone in a shady cemetery, and an old lady whose mind was slowly slipping into the next world. Or she could be in Cincinnati, where… where Keith’s parents hated her for marrying Keith, and Keith had died.
She needed to find a place where no memories haunted her, where she could see a future unmarred by sadness and death.
She stood there, squeezing the car door handle, letting the sun incinerate the day’s jumble of emotions into a pile of ash.
But like a phoenix, Noah Di Luca rose from the ashes.
How was it possible that she had met him before she’d even been in Bella Terra for twenty-four hours? How was it possible that she allowed him to hold her hand? Smile at her? Act as if his brutal rejection of her and her earnest young love had never happened?
He was an ass.
Worse, she was an idiot.
She didn’t want to see him. She thought she’d made herself clear without rancor; no point in having him think she still had a thing for him… an awareness… a craving for his touch.
Nope. None of that.
But every woman would have recognized the danger of hanging around Bella Terra, with its memories and its obligations. And any woman worth her salt would have run like a rabbit.
Instead, Penelope had committed herself to visiting Mrs. Di Luca.
Not like she didn’t want to see the old lady, but… With a groan, she thumped her forehead against the door. Then rubbed the place where she’d hit. That hurt.
Mrs. Di Luca. Her house, packed full of memories of that summer.
Why couldn’t Penelope do the smart thing and leave? What stupid remnant of old-fashioned courtesy and caring made her stay to express her creaking affection for Mrs. Di Luca… who had made her so welcome that summer nine years ago?
Why couldn’t Penelope turn her back and run away?
Cowardly? Sure. But in the end, all that mattered was saving herself. Hadn’t she learned that lesson yet?
“Hey! You! Number fourteen. Come here.”
Penelope glanced up to see a woman, five feet tall and two hundred pounds, sweeping the walk in front of the office and eyeing her with stern attention.
“Oh, no,” Penelope muttered.
She was looking at Arianna Marino, in a dark blue dress with a white collar and a black belt and shabby black leather ballet flats. She exuded all the authority of a bulldozer. That was to say… a lot of authority. She wielded the broom like a lance, and when she beckoned to Penelope, Penelope went, marching up toward the office as if on official business. She fingered her room key, though, hoping to insinuate that she needed to leave soon on some important matter.
If Arianna Marino was impressed by Penelope’s air of efficiency, she hid it well. Instead, she held open the door to the motel office, commanding Penelope to enter. “Number fourteen. Penelope Alonso.”
Crap. Had she recognized Penelope? Or did everyone in this town know everything?
“I’m Penelope Caldwell now.” Penelope walked into the chilly office, where it smelled musty and damp.
“You’re widowed,” Mrs. Marino said. “Your husband was killed in a car wreck.”
“True.” The phone call had been wrenching, a life-changing moment of horror and grief all too soon supplanted by other horrors, greater griefs. “How do you know?”
Mrs. Marino gave the expected answer. “The Internet.”
“Why do you care?”
Mrs. Marino went to the tiny, old, chipped refrigerator that hummed in the corner behind the counter. “I liked your mother.”
That was an answer of a sort. “So did I.”
“Glad to hear it. I had hoped to see her again one day.” Mrs. Marino sighed with a gust that made a mockery of that feeble window air conditioner.
“She would have liked that.” Penelope knew that was true; her mother admired Arianna Marino, said she was a power to be reckoned with.
Mrs. Marino pulled out two beers, popped the tops, and presented one to Penelope. “Sit,” she said, and pointed at the black metal-and-vinyl straight-backed dining chair behind the counter.
Interestingly enough, the presentation of the beer and the directive to sit made Penelope realize how far she’d come in Mrs. Marino’s estimation. When she was here with her mom, Mrs. Marino had barely noted her existence, and never had she been allowed behind the counter.
She walked around, and she sat.
“When she came here, when you were a kid,” Mrs. Marino said, “your mother wasn’t well.”
Penelope, who didn’t much care for beer, rubbed the icy bottle on her forehead. “I didn’t know that then
. I wish I had. I would have done things differently.” But she’d been so selfish, so self-involved, she hadn’t seen what was right before her face. That her mother had suffered from breast cancer. That she was still recovering from chemo and radiation.
“She didn’t want you to know.” Mrs. Marino patted Penelope’s shoulder with a heavy hand. “She wanted you to be young and carefree.”
With a bitter smile, Penelope remembered Noah. “Oh, I was that.”
“She was a worker, your mother was, cleaning rooms for me, tending bar when she had to.” Mrs. Marino seated herself in the chair at the check-in desk. It creaked beneath her weight, but didn’t dare collapse. “The customers liked her. She was smart, didn’t put up with any shit, yet she was friendly and she listened when they talked. A lot of them were illegals, from Mexico and beyond, here without their families, and they liked showing her pictures of their kids. Not that they didn’t like it when we had a bimbo in the bar. But they liked your mother for different reasons.”
“She was a great mother.” Except for that one big matter that had made Penelope stand before her mother’s gravestone and sob out accusations.
That had not been one of her stellar moments.
She tipped up the bottle and took a long, cold drink. “What a hell of a day,” she muttered.
“That’s what happens when you come back poking your nose in stuff that’s none of your business.”
Penelope lowered the bottle with a bang onto the counter. “What do you mean? What do you know?”
“I know you met Brooke Di Luca in the Rhodes Café today and went off with her to her new house.” Mrs. Marino’s chair swung back and forth, back and forth, creaking and begging for lubricant. “Gossip says you’re her new interior decorator.”
“Interior designer,” Penelope corrected automatically. “Did you have someone spying on me?”
“That’s not necessary. I have connections.” The twist of Mrs. Marino’s mouth looked like wisdom. “People tell me things.”