Page 12 of The Rainbow Recipe
“I’m afraid that’s up to your grandmother,” he said with what sounded like genuine regret. “How about a cookie and milk before you go to bed?”
For a very brief moment, Pris almost liked the man.
That wore off fast. Once the twins had consumed their treat and Pris attempted to usher them upstairs, Dante caught her arm.
“If you’re not their nanny, then you can stay down here and explain what the hell you’re up to.”
Dante disliked sitting still.He was accustomed to staying busy from the moment he rose to the moment he hit the bed, which could be twenty-four or thirty-six hours later, depending on travel schedules. Alcohol and painkillers had slowed him down tonight, but he still wanted to pace while the she-devil debated running away.
To her credit, she chose to make up his bed instead. He probably shouldn’t call her a she-devil, but the irritating female had a way of looking at him as if she could see straight through his skull. Her eyes were almost amber in this light, like cat eyes, with great long lashes that concealed shadows beneath them. Beneath those witchy streaks of silver hair...Si, she worked at that image.
He grabbed one end of the bedding and helped arrange it, then collapsed on a tall kitchen stool. “I’m not the one refusing to communicate now.”
“You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be running around the world, too busy to help others.” She opened the refrigerator and began removing items.
He winced, remembering how they’d parted. But he really was busy, and she had plenty of family more than ready to go off on insane trajectories and wild rides. They hadn’t needed him—and he didn’t have time to be needed. “So you thought you’d just pop in and make yourself at home? How do you even know where I live?” He found one of the leftover breadsticks and chomped down on it.
Her eyebrows raised in perfect brown arches. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they formed a diabolical curl. She fished a ceramic bowl out of a cabinet and smashed eggs into it before she answered.
“You do remember my cousin Evie and her team of hacker geeks? Do you really think you popped into town, then disappeared again, without anyone checking you out? Jax might take you at your word, but friends don’t let friends get taken for a ride.” She whisked the eggs, then began flinging in other ingredients without measuring.
“Ives have their own genealogical genies to prove my identity. Jax didn’t need help. And I only came to give him a warning. It wasn’t as if I asked to borrow money. So don’t bullshit me. Why are you here?”
Damon Ives-Jackson, his newly discovered distant cousin, had explained some of his significant other’s witchy family history. Dante had heard weirder. His mother’s side of his family kept entire libraries of their eccentricities. The fact that this particular American branch of Malcolms had developed a reputation for fraud...Probably didn’t hold water. Still, Dante had seen them in action and remained wary of their anarchy that had almost got him arrested.
“Well, since Vincent Gladwell and his daughter entered town on the heels of your departure, resulting in the destruction of my reputation and business, I think I have every reason to check them out. It seemed overly coincidental that he’s a neighbor of yours.” She filled a second bowl with flour and began adding handfuls of this and that.
Dante processed this, but it made little sense. “Gladwell doesn’t own the land. Lucia Ugazio does. She’s his stepdaughter. Her cousin is running the farm these days. I’ve never spoken to Gladwell. I’m not certain he’s ever been here.”
He had ten tons of resentment he could dump on the subject of Lucia Ugazio, but that was none of her damned business.
“That’s not what he leads everyone to believe. According to the La Bella Gente website, Vincent developed a special variety of olive tree that flourished on this particular type of soil, generating top quality oil. Using old family recipes, they’ve been producing an extraordinary lotion that will make everyone who uses it rich and famous. Or something like that.” She threw handfuls of the flour mix into the eggs.
Dante snorted. “That’s a bunch of marketing rot. Those trees have been there since the beginning of time, along with the grape vines. Leo is slowly replacing the oldest of both with new varieties and testing the results, and the family did once sell creams and lotions in the local market, but wine and olive oil are more lucrative. What’s La Bella Gente?”
“Boutique selling olive-oil-based cosmetics. They’re also opening small Italian bistros where they sell gourmet olive oil, among other things. Their dried pasta cooks up like leather.” She pounded her fist into the dough, sending up clouds of flour.
Oddly, when she was beating up dough, she looked almost angelic, wrapped in bliss and peaceful. Her halo of silver-streaked brown frizz fell innocently on her forehead and bounced to her own strange music.
He’d look lower but she’d donned one of his mother’s massive aprons over her turtleneck. “Huh, first I’ve heard of it. Leo tells me the farm is barely breaking even. So, how are they destroying your business?”
“His daughter Katherine, the company’s glamorous figurehead, dropped dead while eating my crab-caviar crisps. Coroner says it was a heart attack, but Gladwell started nasty rumors about my cooking.” She flung the dough on a floured pastry board and began beating it up some more. “My crisps weren’t any more poisonous than the limoncello she was drinking. He’s muddying the waters for his own purposes, an old con trick. I want to know why.”
Dante finished the bread stick but still couldn’t process this. If memory served, Katherine Gladwell was Lucia’s half-sister, the one she’d run off to help half a dozen years ago. This was the first he’d heard of La Bella Gente. “Katherine and Vincent aren’t Italian. Lucia inherited the land and the olive oil operations from her Italian father. She left her cousin Leo to run them while she fled to London for the glamorous easy life with her English mother. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Youare the last person Katherine Gladwell thought of before she died.” She grabbed a rolling pin and smashed it into the pile of dough.
Dante paused in reaching for the last breadstick. “And you know this how?”
“I was there, remember? Serving her poisoned caviar to go with her limoncello. Really nasty combination. She was supposed to be drinking champagne and celebrating the boutique’s grand opening.”
He was knackered and in pain, and he still saw through this obvious ploy. “You said I was her last thought. How? Was she cursing me? As far as I’m aware, I never met Katherine Gladwell.”
The she-devil plopped the round of dough into the bowl, covered it, and glared at him. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Just accept that unless there was another Dante in her life, she practically died with your name on her lips.”
“Since I don’t know the woman, it had to be another Dante. I’m not the only one in existence.” Except Lucia had gone to stay with her mother, who had married a Gladwell. “You’re saying this Katherine Gladwell wasmurdered?”
“The autopsy isn’t complete and the sheriff isn’t talking, but how often does a healthy thirty-year-old woman die of a heart attack?”
