Chapter 18
I think I’ll walk to Mr. Hartman’s,” Alana announced as she sailed into Peg’s office the next morning.
She’d wanted to postpone her meeting with Mr. Hartman, but Peg had reminded her that she’d already postponed seeing him twice. The staff was impatient to get the windmill running before harvest season and, according to them, growly old Mr. Hartman was the key to pushing the permit through.
Peg slanted her a look of doubt. “It’s more than two miles to his ranch house.”
Alana shrugged.
“And the trails are overgrown.”
“Then I’m taking the ranch Jeep.” Alana fished the keys out of the bowl just inside the office door. Her tricked-out Range Rover might make a bad first impression on Mr. Hartman.
“The permit meeting’s in ten days.” Peg crossed her arms and sat back in her chair.
At the staff meeting earlier that morning, Alana had questioned why having the windmill running was so important. They had electricity, all they needed. Jed Thomasson, the ranch engineer, had explained that the windmill and the green energy it would generate were part of a piece, part of the overall plan to create a sustainable operation on the land. From the staff’s reaction, she’d have thought that just asking the question was blasphemy. Peg’s rigid posture told Alana that she’d yet to be forgiven.
The road to the Hartman ranch was pitted with potholes. In her days wandering her grandmother’s ranch as a child, Alana had rarely dared to cross over onto the neighboring property. She and her cousins and brothers made up stories about the neighbor and his wife, and before long they started to believe their own tall tales. It was a wonder they hadn’t named him a fire-breathing dragon.
She wasn’t feeling at her best game. The previous day’s trauma with Matt and Sophie was still fresh. The look on Matt’s face had skewered her. It wasn’t as though he’d judged her, though he may have. What she saw in his expression was far worse than that. It was the simple fact that he acknowledged she was unsuitable in every way to be in his life. Well, except for one. And she hadn’t known until the miserable moment on the dock how much she wished it weren’t true. She shuddered as she remembered Sophie’s distress when Matt carried her down the dock. The firm set of Matt’s jaw and the hard glare in his eyes had started the business of breaking her heart, and Sophie’s sad gaze had finished the job.
The Jeep lurched as Alana turned onto a stone bridge crossing a stream. The bridge looked like it’d been there for a hundred years, maybe more. There wasn’t much that was old in California, not like in Paris, where buildings could range back nearly a thousand years. Post-Gold-Rush California was about as far back as structures went in Sonoma, not even two hundred years. From the look of the stone walls leading up to his ranch, Mr. Hartman’s place had been built during those raucous, pioneering days.
She pulled up in front of the house and hopped out of the Jeep. There was no one about, and it was eerily quiet.
The house had the appearance of an old adobe structure but had been modified with modern light fixtures and double-paned windows. The heavy wood doors at the front had hand-forged hinges and antique ironwork. A paper tacked to the door flapped in the breeze. She stepped closer. It was a scrawled note to her, and it was attached to the door with a knife. The knife struck her as overkill, but maybe the old man really was as crazy as people said. She ripped the note from under the blade and stared at the knife. She couldn’t believe she was considering pocketing it, just in case. Just in case of what? She wouldn’t know what to do with a knife if she was faced with a pack of howling hyenas.
She followed the instructions on the note and walked around to the back of the house. She hadn’t expected to find several acres of beautifully tended gardens. A fountain bubbled at the center of a cobbled patio, and covered walkways flanked the gardens bordering the two wings of the house. It was a place out of time. An exquisitely beautiful place from a more gracious time.
“You’re late,” said a voice from behind a hedge of manzanita.
She glanced at her watch.
“Four and a half minutes,” she said, irritated. In the country people gave each other a twenty-minute leeway. Evidently Mr. Hartman was even more crotchety than people had reported.
A head appeared above the hedge. Way above the hedge. Mr. Hartman must have been close to six and a half feet tall. And no one had bothered to mention that he was handsome, in a rugged sort of way.
“I’ll let it slide,” he said without cracking anything resembling a smile. He walked around the hedge and motioned to a table near the arched back entrance to the house. “I understand you prefer tea. Never touch the stuff myself.”
She stopped, and he must’ve caught the wariness in her face.
“Your grandmother told me you prefer tea.”
He was the man in the photos on Nana’s dresser. She’d wondered, but though Nana shared much of her wisdom and opinions, she was very buttoned up about her love life.
“Cat got your tongue?” His laugh sent creases around his eyes and a nice smile to his lips. “Or did those city-slicker kids over at the ranch tell you that I eat my guests?” He pulled out a chair for her. “Xavier Hartman. But you can call me Zav. Your grandmother preferred it. She thought Xavier was too pretentious for an old codger like me.”
“Alana,” she said, shaking his hand.
He looked her up and down, focusing on her face and hands. Taking her measure?
“You’re taller than the photos show. And stronger. I was afraid you’d be one of those scrawny Hollywood types.”
They both sat.
He poured her tea with steady hands. She smiled at the lovely bouquet of carefully arranged cut flowers sitting in the center of the table.
“That’s a lovely bouquet, Mr.—umm... Zav.”
“Those turned up next to my gate two days ago. Strangest thing. First I can’t find my best hoe, misplaced not one but two trowels and then these flowers turn up. I thought Juan and Mario, my gardeners, were taking tools home, and then I thought you might’ve been trying to sweeten me up.” He chuckled, and the lines on his face softened. “Now I’m not sure what to think.”
If she’d known he had a weakness for flowers, she would’ve brought a bushel full. She straightened her spine and folded her hands in her lap, squeezing them together. “Mr. Hartman, I came to talk to you about the windmill.”
“In time, dear, in time.” He handed her a delicate teacup painted with roses and ivy vines. “We have other business to attend to, you and I.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from under the teapot. “Jo left me damned explicit instructions.”
She’d never heard anyone call her Nana by a nickname. She was señora to the staff and of course Josephine to her closest friends, but never Jo. Alana eyed the stack of papers. She didn’t doubt that Nana’s instructions were detailed; she’d always been a stickler for minutiae. What surprised her was that Mr. Hartman had information that Nana obviously hadn’t wanted to leave directly with her.
“Don’t go getting ideas,” he said, as if reading her mind. “We had a glass of wine once a week, Jo and I, nothing more.” He looked at her as if to make sure she believed him. “Friends. We were friends.”
He tapped the fingers of one hand on top of the papers.
“When my wife died ten years ago, I thought I’d follow right away. But life doesn’t work the way we think we want it to.”
He wrapped his hands around the teapot, as if to warm them. They were bronzed from the sun and seemed out of place against the delicate teapot.
“But I’ll tell you one thing—life is meant to be shared. When you build something and the person you’ve built it with goes, it leaves a helluva hole that no one can warn you about.”
He poured more tea into her cup. He seemed to know she didn’t take sugar or milk. He seemed to know a lot.
“Jo saved me from dropping into that dark hole. But I never knew how deep it would cut me when she passed.”
“I loved her.” Alana said, trying to swallow the lump rising in her throat.
“You wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t know that.”
Grief rose like a wave crashing over her, the sadness gripping in her chest and hooking under her ribs. She buried her face in her hands and tried to breathe. This was a diplomatic mission. She had goals. She was not going to lose it. Tears pooled, and she fought to keep them back, the muscles in her jaw tightening as she struggled to stem the flood. At Zav’s discreet cough, her strength failed.
She wiped at the tears rolling down her cheeks with the back of her hand, clenching her jaw and trying not to sob.
Zav touched her hand and she jerked it back, startled.
“These things come in handy,” he said. The white handkerchief he offered was freshly pressed and folded in a neat square.
Alana blew her nose and shook her head. If she tried to speak, the sobs would cascade into a torrent.
She dabbed the last bit of moisture from her face with the now soaked handkerchief and squared her shoulders. “I’ll wash this and bring it back to you,” she said, embarrassed.
He reached across the table and took it from her. “No need. Laundry is the least of my worries.” He tucked it into the pocket of his jeans. “I learned a thing or two about grief, young lady. You don’t get to be as old as I am and not experience it. Grief demands to be witnessed. You can’t move through it alone.”
It occurred to her that Nana had come up with a plan to draw her and Zav Hartman together, to give them both a way of coming to terms with her death. Then it occurred to her that Nana’s maneuver of leaving her the ranch might’ve been a setup. She’d heard of a hand reaching from beyond the grave, but thought it a theme of B-grade horror flicks. Nana’s wasn’t a touch she feared, but she wasn’t sure she liked being scripted.
Zav leafed through the papers and pulled one out. He read down the page and shook his head.
“These things can wait.” He tucked the paper back under the teapot and tilted his face to the sky. “Begging your pardon, Jo, but your granddaughter has a schedule of her own.” He knitted his brows and looked back at her. “Why’d you wait so long to come over here? Your permit meeting’s coming right up.”
Alana didn’t answer. She didn’t want to lie, but she also didn’t want to tell him the truth, to admit that the first time she’d blown off meeting with him in order to party with Marcel in Paris. The second time was because she wasn’t in any frame of mind to deal with a man of his sour reputation.
Zav crossed his arms.
Nana’s script was flawed. The threads of Alana’s life, the life she’d loved, were unraveling with every day she spent at the ranch. Defiance streaked through her, trumping grief and guilt.
“I had things to attend to,” she said, pressing her spine against the cold metal of the chair. That much was true, but she heard the hollow ring of her voice.
Zav harrumphed and held her gaze.
She stared back. When Zav didn’t look away, she wondered if she’d automatically lose the staring contest if she blinked.
“You have your own ways, I can see that right enough,” Zav said. “But you’ve got some of Jo’s sass, don’t you?”
He looked away and picked up his cup. Alana released a deep breath and licked her lips, an action that Zav caught with a peek from under bushy brows.
“I don’t think Nana and I are much alike.”
Zav laughed. “That independent kick, wanting to do it in your own time your own way? That doesn’t sound like Jo to you?”
Actually, that was Nana. And her. Alana laughed when Zav again peeked at her, this time nodding.
“Yep, just like Jo.”
He pulled a tube of paper from a basket beside him and unrolled it.
“Let’s see what we can do about that damned windmill of yours.” He picked up a rock from below the table and secured one edge of the drawing. “Jo was crazy about the damned thing. You’d think she’d invented it herself.”