CHAPTER ONE
‘I’VEHADApersonal invitation.’
Evelyn Scott pushed the handwritten note across the kitchen table to Izzy. The salad the elderly woman had prepared earlier, using produce from the vegetable patch at the end of her garden, had been eaten, the home-made lemonade drunk and outside a burning orange sky signalled the arrival of dusk.
Here in Napa Valley, the horizons seemed limitless and the vast expanse of sky was a canvas upon which every shade of colour begged to be painted, depending on the time of the day and the vagaries of the weather. Izzy could have lain on her back in a field for hours, just appreciating its spectacular, ever-changing beauty.
‘A personal invitation?’ She reached forward to take the note and realised that, while they had been lazily conversing for the past hour and a half, while the older woman had listened and responded to everything Izzy had had to report, she had been busily hiding the fact that she was worried sick. And Izzy knew the source of that worry.
She read the note.
It was written on a piece of heavy, cream parchment paper, the sort of paper she associated with aggressive bankers calling in loans or hard-nosed lawyers threatening jail.
The writing confirmed that first impression. Long, determined strokes issued an invitation to tea, during which the sale of the cottage could be discussed ‘face to face’. The invitation looked more like a summons.
‘It’s the first time I’ve been approached by the man himself.’ Evelyn rose to her feet and began clearing the plates and glasses, waving aside Izzy’s offer to help. ‘You don’t need to concern yourself with an old woman’s problems. That’s not why you came here in the first place.’
‘Evelyn, your problem is my problem.’
It still felt weird after nearly a month to call the older woman ‘Evelyn’instead of Nanny Scott, which was always how her mother had referred to her. To this day, Izzy had vivid memories of sitting in her mother’s bedroom, watching as Beverley Stowe brushed her hair and dabbed on lipstick, smacking her lips together to distribute the colour evenly, inspecting her face from every angle as she chatted away. Izzy had listened avidly. She’d thought her mother to be the most beautiful woman in the world and she had drunk in every single thing that had passed her lips with the fervent adoration only a child was capable of.
There had been a thousand tales about Nanny Scott. Izzy had met Evelyn Scott for the first time on her one and only trip to California when she’d been nine, a year before her mum and dad had died in a plane crash. That holiday was etched in her mind because holidays with her parents had been few and far between. She could still relive the high-wire excitement of being with her parents for that heady, hot, lazy month in summer as though it had happened yesterday and not thirteen long years ago.
So now, sitting here, seeing the worry on Evelyn’s face, Izzy felt anger surge inside her at the preposterous and intimidating antics of the billionaire who wanted to buy the cottage out from under the seventy-nine-year-old woman’s feet, and to heck with what happened to her after that. He had sent his minions, but the message had not been delivered to his satisfaction, so here he was, knife at the ready to cut an old woman loose for the sake of money.
‘No,’ Evelyn said firmly. She placed a plate of home-made pumpkin pie in front of Izzy and sat back. ‘You have enough on your plate without all of this nonsense. No one can force me to do anything.’
‘My plate is looking very clean and empty at the moment,’ Izzy returned.
‘So you finally took my advice and picked that phone up and spoke to your brother?’ Evelyn’s brown eyes sparked with lively interest, her own problems temporarily set aside. ‘I knew there was something you wanted to tell me. An old woman can sense these things.’
Izzy reflected thatthiswas exactly why she had no intention of returning to Hawaii until she had sorted out the situation here. No, she wasn’t obliged to, but where did decency and a sense of fair play go if you only did what was right because you were obliged to?
Izzy had fled Hawaii after her heart had been broken. And she had fled to the place where her mother had grown up, feeling an overpowering need somehow tobe closeto her mum in the wake of her disastrous affair with Jefferson.
The yearning just tofeelthat the spirit of her mother was close by had been silly, childish and irrational, but it had also been overwhelming enough for her to heed its insistence.
She’d rooted out the tin that was stuffed with old photos, postcards and pretty much everything she had gathered over the years before her parents had died. She had pored over faded photos of the sprawling ranch where her mother had spent her childhood before she had left home at eighteen and begun a second life in England. She had squinted at pictures of Nanny Scott, the grandparents she had only met once and all the pretty young people who had crowded her mother’s teenage years. And then, heart swollen with sadness, whimsy and nostalgia, she had dumped all her responsibilities at the hotel where she had been working and quite simplyfled.
Of course, she’d felt guilty at leaving her brother in the lurch, but she had made sure that everything was up to date, and she’d known that Nat would be able to take over temporarily. She’d also known that Max would descend and everything would be sorted because that was what he did. He wielded a rod of iron, gave commands, issued orders andthings got done.
She’d felt far too bruised for any residual guilt about running away to anchor her in a place she no longer wanted to be, doing a job she hadn’t the heart to do, however privileged she might be to have had it in the first place.
It was as if her wounded heart had made her face all those long years of living in a wilderness, learning how to manage a life without the love and input of parents, watching and envying her friends and the relationships they had with their parents.
So often her youthful heart had twisted when friends had moaned, because at least they’d had a mum and dad to moan about. Max and James had both done their best for her but there’d been only so much her brothers were capable of doing. She had stared deep into the void left by her parents’ death and, in the wake of Jefferson and her bitter disillusionment, had been driven to confront it, to search for that missingsomething, which foolishly she had thought she might find if she went back to where her mother had lived.
She’d known that the big house, as her mother had called it, had long been sold, along with the vineyards. She hadn’t gone there expecting to walk into her mother’s childhood home. But justbeingin the area was soothing and she had been over the moon to find that Evelyn was still there when she had visited the cottage.
She’d half-expected her brother to ferret her out. He had sufficient clout to get someone to locate her within seconds, but he hadn’t, and it had given her a chance to really connect with Evelyn. And, over a couple of weeks, she’d heard about the problems she was having, trying to hang onto the cottage in the face of ever-insistent demands that she sell to the guy who had bought the big house, and the even bigger house that adjoined it, so that two medium-sized vineyards could be turned into one enormous one. Another greedy developer with no scruples.
Evelyn had also been there to hear abouthertroubles and she had no intention of abandoning the older woman now, in her hour of need.
Not if she could help it.
‘Well?’ Evelyn pressed. ‘I’m tired of thinking about my dreadful woes. Tell me some good news. And I know you’ve got good news! I may be old but my eyes are in perfect working condition. What did that brother of yours have to say? Gosh, my dear, I wish I had had the opportunity to meet all of you so that I could put faces to the names. I wish I knew what James and Max looked like in the flesh, and not just in those pictures you showed me on your phone.’
Izzy surfaced from her thoughts. Obligingly, she told Evelyn about her phone call, which she had been hugging to herself for the past few hours. Yes, she had spoken to Max, after a lot of procrastination. He hadn’t hunted her down he had listened to Mia, thank God, and had chosen to hang back but, even so, he would only have done so reluctantly.
