The Gemini Deception

Chapter Forty

Tuscany, Italy

Three weeks later, April 7

A month had passed since Harper’s return to her beloved home and country, yet the comfort she expected to find wasn’t there. She spent her days in the vineyards until late in the evening and would return home exhausted.

Monica would stop by on occasion to keep her company and distract her, but Harper would beg off early after staring silently into the flames of the outdoor fireplace. Her good friend and sex partner caught on very quickly that something was wrong. The first time she’d showed up to welcome her back, Harper had been pleased to see her but kept her distance. Monica had simply and silently understood. She’d asked if there was something she could do, and when Harper didn’t answer, she’d said she hoped this woman was worthy of her.

Monica, however, did start to worry and fuss over her when Harper refused to eat or have her traditional glass of wine at night. She’d show up with containers of ready-cooked meals and place them in front of Harper. To be polite, Harper would play with her food for a while, then beg off to bed.

Ever since her return, all she wanted to do was spend every moment working in the fields. It was the only time she could stop thinking about Ryden for longer than an hour. She had been tempted to call her every day that passed, but her voice would only make Harper hurt more, and it wouldn’t be fair to Ryden.

“Signorina Harper,” one of her hands called out from halfway across the vineyard.

Harper looked up and found him signaling her to walk over. She removed her gloves, brushed the soil from her pants, and went over to meet him.

“Someone here to see you,” he said in Italian when Harper neared.

“My appointment isn’t for another hour.” A new wine buyer was coming for a tour of her property and equipment. “Just show them the way,” Harper said indifferently. Normally, she couldn’t wait to escort potential buyers and friends through her vineyard, but she just wasn’t in the mood for conversation and business. “I’ll be over there.” She gestured to the new vines she had been working on before returning to them.

She’d intended to change her clothes for the clients, but right now she couldn’t care less. Her cargos were comfy and it was too hot to wear anything other than a tank top. She was stooped over, absorbed with the vine, when she felt someone staring at her. When she straightened and turned to look, she gazed straight into Ryden’s beautiful green eyes.

Ryden stood looking at her bemusedly, hands folded at her belt. She was wearing jeans and a red button-down shirt, and she looked amazing.

Resting her hands on her hips, Harper looked slowly from Ryden’s eyes to the very deep cleavage revealed by her shirt.

“I didn’t want to miss you anymore,” Ryden said. “So I looked up your vineyard and came to find you.”

Harper smiled. “You look great.”

“Don’t let the foundation fool you. I have circles blacker than tar under my eyes.”

Harper walked the few steps to her, not daring to take her eyes off Ryden, afraid that if she blinked Ryden would disappear like a dream. She gently placed a stray lock of hair behind Ryden’s ear. “Beautiful is what you are.”

“It’s how I feel when you look at me.”

“Breathless is how you leave me.” Harper caressed her ear.

“I’ve never felt like this before.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t explain it, but when I’m with you, everything is perfect. I come alive.”

Harper craved those lips. She leaned forward as Ryden closed her eyes, but a shout from her foreman interrupted them.

“Signorina Harper, your next appointment is here.”

Both of them looked in his direction. Harper felt like she was in a trance.

“I’d better leave.” Ryden was breathing heavily.

“Please, stay. I’m going to give a potential customer a tour of the vineyard, and I’d like you to join us.”

“I’d like that, too.”

“After they leave,” Harper said, “I’d like to take you to my home and cook for us.”

“I didn’t know you cook.”

“Then it’s about time we got to know each other.”

*

Once she’d toured the cozy Tuscany farmhouse, Ryden went to sit in the garden with a cold glass of iced tea while Harper jumped under the shower.

She couldn’t get enough of the magnificent panoramic view: the lush, eye-popping green of the vineyard, carved into terraces that cascaded down the side of the mountain to the rich, multi-hued blues of the sea below. The terra-cotta rooftops of a village etched into the cliffs along the distant water’s edge caught the sunlight, while above, a massive flock of seagulls rode the air currents in a spectacular and seemingly choreographed display of aerial acrobatics. Here and there, small plumes of smoke rose from the greenery, where hired hands burned off dead trimmings from the vines. If the planet had one perfect spot where beauty met serenity, this was it.

She heard noise from inside the farmhouse, so she slipped into the kitchen through a side screen door that adjoined the garden. Harper stood hunched over a chopping board, her back turned. She made no sign she’d heard Ryden come in, so Ryden used the opportunity to study her from the doorway.

Not only did Harper look comfortable cooking, she appeared well versed in the fundamentals of Italian cuisine. She’d told Ryden that Italians believed the magic lay in the simplicity and freshness of the ingredients, so tonight’s angel-hair pasta would be accompanied by a sauce made from sun-ripened tomatoes, scallions, basil, olive oil, and regional cheeses.

Captivated, she watched the easy, sensual way Harper moved, fluid grace in every motion, with no wasted step or gesture as she chopped ingredients and tossed them into a wide saucepan. Ryden couldn’t take her eyes off Harper’s ass, perfectly defined by the light linen trousers she’d changed into, and realized for the first time why men spent so much of their life checking out women and thinking about sex.

“Enjoying the view or the smells?” Harper asked, her back still turned.

“Both,” Ryden replied with confidence, actually glad she’d been caught appreciating Harper.

“I’m glad.” Harper looked at her with those penetrating blue eyes.

“Can I do something?” Ryden asked, relieved she could form a sentence in the face of such enticing temptation.

“You’re going to have to be more specific before I answer that.” Harper stared at her mouth.

How could this woman turn her on with just one look or sentence? “Can I help you in the kitchen?” Ryden asked.

“Are you being deliberately vague?”

Her cheeks burned with the insinuation. “I’d like to help you prepare dinner.”

Harper smiled. “You’re fun to tease. Here…” She placed a knife on the counter. “Why don’t you work on the salad?”

Ryden stood next to her, slicing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and red onion, while Harper cooked.

“Almost ready.” Harper dipped her finger in the sauce and was about to taste it when Ryden stopped her hand.

“Let me,” Ryden said.

Harper let Ryden guide her finger to Ryden’s mouth.

She slowly licked off the sauce, playing her tongue provocatively around Harper’s finger, never taking her eyes off Harper’s. “Delicious,” she whispered.

Harper swallowed.

“You’re fun to tease.” Touché, Ryden thought, with a satisfied smile.

“I love to be teased,” Harper replied, “in the kitchen and every other room.”

Ryden had to put some space between them before she embarrassed herself. She took a step back. “I’ll set the table.”

They ate at the rough-hewn table by the outdoor fireplace, sitting side by side on a bench that faced the spectacular view. As they talked about Italy and drank Harper’s divine red wine, Ryden found herself torn between staring at the view—spectacular in the setting sun—and Harper’s equally compelling profile, her bronzed skin shining in the amber light, eyes sparkling in pride at her vineyard, and her inviting, lush lips.

After they finished their food and cleared the table, they poured a second glass and returned to sit in comfortable canvas chairs by the fireplace.

“You never told me why that special-edition wine I drank was so important,” Ryden said.

“Pepo—the founder of the vineyard—gave it to me before he died. It was a fifty-five-year-old wine, the first to be produced.”

Ryden gasped. “Oh my G…I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

“Clearly.” Harper smiled.

“No wonder you got so upset. I thought it was because it was expensive.”

“It was priceless because it was given to me by the only father I ever knew. He was my family.”

Ryden sat there shaking her head. How could she have been so stupid and insensitive?

“Hey, what’s done is done.” Harper touched her hand. “It was about time someone drank it.”

“Maybe, but not me. I can hardly tell the difference between wine and Sprite.”

Harper laughed. “That’s not true.”

“But you know what I mean.” Ryden couldn’t even look at her.

“If it makes you feel any better, I kept the bottle.”

“Should it? Because it doesn’t.”

Harper sat back in the chair. “I guess it was always about the bottle, since I never intended to drink the wine. The bottle is what I looked at whenever I missed home and the grapes. So, now it’s empty.” Harper shrugged. “Only means it’s lighter to carry around.”

“You’re too kind. I’ll have to accept your reasoning since I can’t replace it.”

“I mean it,” Harper said.

“Why did you choose Angelo as a name for your wine?”

“Pepo was obsessed with his dog,” Harper replied, her voice tinged with a bittersweet sadness at the memory. “This house and vineyard have never been without an Angelo, even after he died and I took over.”

Ryden looked around.

“He died a month and a half ago,” Harper explained quietly. “I buried him up there.”

Ryden ached to ease the pain in Harper’s voice. “You must miss him.”

“Like crazy.”

“Will you get another?”

“Of course. I can’t imagine life without a dog.”

“But not yet.”

“I’ve been waiting for the right moment.”

“A particular litter?”

Harper shook her head. “I don’t believe in buying expensive certified breeds when the shelter here is full of strays that desperately need a home.”

“I totally agree, especially after having worked for a shelter for the past month. You won’t believe how many people dump their dog because it’s no longer a fuzzy, cute puppy the kids want to play with.”

“It’s ridiculously sad. I don’t see how anyone can decide to get rid of a living creature because it’s no longer convenient. You wouldn’t do that to your child.”

“So the right moment depends on, what?” Ryden asked.

“I just know. The same way I know which dog to pick. It’s a personal moment for me and something I do alone, so that I know the animal is mine and I’m his, no one else in between. It’s silly, I know, but—”

“But you want to know you’ve been chosen. You, exclusively, and without a doubt or hesitation.”

Harper smiled. “Yeah.”

“I’ve been tempted to take at least ten dogs home in the past month.”

“Nothing yet?”

“I keep putting it off. But who knows? Maybe when I get back.”

Harper’s smile disappeared. “When do you go back?”

“The day after tomorrow. I wanted to take a week off, but…I’m new, so I had to beg for the three days. I told them I had a family emergency back home. I never said I was going to Italy.”

“Good thinking.” Harper got up to tend to the fire.

“One of the few perks of being able to reinvent yourself is that you get to be someone with a loving, fully functional family who needs you to rush home.”

“I guess,” Harper said flippantly.

“Don’t you miss it? Having a family?”

“Not really.” Harper sat back down. “Not in the traditional sense, anyway. What I miss is someone I can call family. I’ve never wasted my time with what ifs because I can’t miss a mom or dad when I’ve never had to lose them. But what I can miss is a sense of belonging, a mutual feeling of being needed and wanted.” Harper took a sip of wine. “Now, that I miss.”

“She hurt you a lot.”

“I’m no expert, but there’s no bigger hurt than that of betrayal,” Harper said. “To find out you loved what was never there, loved someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t give herself…because who she wanted, what she needed, wasn’t what you had to offer.”

Ryden wanted the mountains to echo the desperate screams of her heart. She’d never intended to deceive Harper; duplicity was not who she was or could ever be, and she desperately wanted this woman to believe and forgive her. But her decisions, and her new life, allowed for nothing more than a glimpse of what could have been.

She had made the trip because she had to see Harper, and tell her she was sorry, and prove what she felt had nothing to do with Moore or money. But fate had sealed the deal for her. This wonderful, hurt woman could never trust her, and the worst part was, she couldn’t blame her. The bottom line was, she had lied about who she was, what she did, and even what she looked like, and nothing she could say or do in the very limited time they had together would make Harper believe her intentions were honest and her feelings true.

Ryden didn’t know what to do. The fact that Harper, a woman completely out of her league, found her attractive was flattering and exciting, but what Ryden felt went above and beyond a mere weekend to remember. Would she spend the rest of her life regretting what could have been or regretting the memory of a beautiful mistake?

“I lied…to you.” Ryden shifted in her chair. “I hurt you and…I almost got you killed.” She stopped and both stared at the flames.

She took a deep breath. “I can say I’m sorry, say I never meant for any of it, but the simple fact is I…I can’t erase what I did, the same way you can’t erase your regrets for having trusted me.”

Harper sat listening, saying nothing, either because she didn’t want to interrupt or because she didn’t have anything to add to the indisputable truth.

“I wish I could say that if I could turn back time, I’d make different choices, but…I’d be lying. I took this job to save my life and I lied to you to protect yours.”

“I know.”

Ryden nodded. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I deceived you, does it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” Her heart sank in disappointment.

“But what bothers me most…” Harper sat forward, “is that you were so quick to give up who you were: your life, face, identity, to become someone else.”

“It didn’t seem like a sacrifice, then.”

“How could you so easily reject who you are? Who you’d become?” Harper sounded aggravated.

“Because I couldn’t appreciate what I had. I couldn’t see what life had given, just the things it had taken from me.”

“I can understand not being happy with how life sent you off, what it deprived you of. But, on the other hand, look at what it gave you. It made you a fighter, a woman capable of fending for herself and finding ways out when there were no doors.”

Ryden nodded. “That it did.”

“It made you the most beautiful kind of woman, the kind that’s too busy surviving to realize just how attractive she is,” Harper said. “Trust me, no amount of makeup or surgery can create beauty that isn’t there.”

“Thank you,” Ryden said halfheartedly. “I’m glad you think of me in those terms.”

“But?” Harper obviously caught the unenthusiastic undertone.

“The fact remains that you don’t trust me, and I’m in a witness-protection program that prohibits me from seeing you.” Ryden exhaled loudly. “An added stigma, another permanent reminder of everything I’ve done.” She got up. “My only regret about this ludicrous period is that I met you during it. I wish you’d come along before I sold myself. I wish you could have met the real Ryden, the one incapable of lies and worth trusting.”

When Harper didn’t react, she walked the few steps to the house. “I’m going to take a shower and retire for the night. Thank you for the lovely day and evening.” She opened the door and turned to look at Harper, who was lost in thought, staring at the dying flames.

“It’s funny,” Ryden said, “how life can give us insight into our alternate future, as if to rub in our faces how much we screwed up at the crossroads.” Forlorn, she entered the house and shut the door to what could have been.

*

Harper moved mechanically as she extinguished the fire and gathered up the dessert plates and wineglasses. She couldn’t stand to see Ryden hurt, and she didn’t know how to deal with the finality of the situation. Whether Ryden was trustworthy or not was not for her to judge, since Harper barely knew her, but what she did know was that this woman had thrown herself forward to take a bullet.

Ryden possessed a certain virtuousness and naïveté for a woman of her age that Harper had never witnessed. Life might have been hard for Ryden, but contrary to the way that most who traveled a rocky path reacted, she hadn’t become hard, and her purity was a genetic disposition, not an acquisition.

Harper could feel how much Ryden regretted having to lie to her, as well as the consequences of those lies, and she believed Ryden when she said she’d wanted to protect her. It would have been so easy for Ryden to confess what she’d gotten herself in to and ask for Harper’s help to get her out of a dangerous game, but Ryden had put Harper’s safety above her own.

The problem was, Harper didn’t want to believe she was ready or willing to trust another woman after Carmen, and another straight one at that. She’d given her heart before, and it had taken her years to come to terms with her own blindness and self-delusions.

She was incredibly attracted to Ryden; she’d struggled with that desire from the moment she’d first seen her. But she was too old and too burned to let attraction dictate her more profound need for an unconditional bond.

Stolen moments with a woman she was forbidden to contact was not Harper’s idea of a foundation to build on.

She heard Ryden moving around upstairs. Probably just getting out of the shower, since the guest bath was just above her head. Frustrated, she kicked the door to the dishwasher shut. Why the hell did this woman have to walk into her life? And why couldn’t Harper walk away from this condemned situation?

Was life testing her? Was she at a crossroads of her own, where her alternate future was being constructed as she stood in the kitchen picturing Ryden exiting her life for good?

Harper locked the door and switched off the lights. Years from now, would a potential glimpse into an alternate life fill her with remorse or relief?

Distraught, Harper walked quietly up the stairs and stopped at Ryden’s room, where she rested her hand on the closed door and silently bid her farewell, chastising herself for the decision she knew she would regret.