Betrayal Read Free Page A

security guards who patrolled the perimeter of the Di Luca property.
    Her granddaughters-in-law, Brooke and Chloë, had left to pick up a flat of strawberries for shortcake.
    So Sarah was alone in the kitchen, and these days that was a rare thing.
    Wiping her hands on her apron, Sarah listened as, with well-controlled violence, the boys—she never thought of them as her grandsons—tore apart her front steps. But she heard no voices, no banter, and they worked with an unceasing urgency, as if the stairs that had stood with the house for a hundred and twenty years needed to be demolished now .
    The boys said the steps were too steep for her. Which wasn’t true. She’d lived sixty years in this house, since she’d come here as Anthony Di Luca’s bride, and she’d never once fallen down those stairs.
    But ever since she’d been attacked here in her home, the boys had been anxious, solicitous, and bossy . That didn’t surprise her; in her life she’d learned a lot of things about men, and number one was, when they were scared for someone they loved, they didn’t say they were scared. They didn’t express affection. They didn’t give solicitous cards or boxes of candy.
    Darn it.
    Instead, they fixed things. Things like the stairs. Her security system. They had even provided her with a nurse and a bodyguard. Putting things to rights made men feel better. Made them feel in control.
    Which was great for them, but she could stand only so much of their fixing before she wanted to knock their stubborn heads together. Because they hadn’t solved anything. Instead… now they were angry at each other. Furious.
    She hated that.
    It wasn’t as if they had never fought before. They’d grown up together (mostly) in her house (mostly) and had always made Sarah’s life interesting. But when they were boys, their fights had resulted in scrapes and bruisesand the occasional black eye. This time… this time they nursed a corrosive fury that, if not resolved, could dissolve the sense of family and affection they felt for one another.
    Taking three bottles of water from the refrigerator, she walked down the hall, past the second bedroom and the bathroom and the dining room, past her bedroom and the front room. She bumped her hip against the screen door. It swung open, and she walked out onto the high front porch.
    The house was old, built at the turn of the twentieth century by Ippolito Di Luca for his bride. At the time, the farmhouse had been the height of style and comfort, with two bedrooms, a spacious kitchen, and even an indoor toilet. By modern standards, it was tiny and worn, but every time Sarah stepped out onto her porch, she knew she had the best view in the world.
    Her home sat perched high on the south end of long, narrow Bella Valley, and from here the vista spread out in a glorious, constantly changing array of browns and greens and golds. With a glance, she could see the lush bottomlands and the silver trickle of the Bella River that had, through thousands of years, carved the basin.
    Outside of the town of Bella Terra, swaths of orchards rustled with leaves that protected the burgeoning fruit from California’s sun, and long stripes of grapevines rose from the valley and crested the neighboring hills. Beyond that, the mountains cradled the valley in rocky arms, protecting it from the harshest ocean storms and the blustery winds that swept down the Sierras.
    Throughout Sarah’s eighty years, she’d watched as Bella Terra grew from a tiny country town to a bustling urban area; right now, she could almost hear summer’sinflux of tourists buzzing like bees as they set out from the hive to tour the vineyards and sip their finest wines.
    Much of the land she could see was Di Luca land. The family was a kind of nobility here, first among the Italian families to realize the potential of the soil and take it as their own. Sarah supposed it wasn’t a gracious thing to exult in the Di Luca possessions. But she did. She