Mona's last manicure had been three days ago in Paris, but it wasn't a very good job. Specks of burgundy polish flecked her cuticles. She hated that. She tuned out, then in to the conversation again when Stace started agitating for her and Mitch to come see his magnificent building in Brilling or wherever it was, as if they didn't see a bazillion million-dollar restaurants right here in the tristate area every day. Stace was such a small-town boy.
Mona sighed. She wished Mitch would just grow up and stop going psycho on her every few months. Every time he did his psycho thing, she felt so alone and unprotected that he had to pay big-time to make her feel safe and secure again. And then, of course, she never really did. "Which ruler has the Tao?" She or Mitch?
"By next week the snow should all be melted, and we can get you up on a horse," Stace was saying.
Horses. Snow in June? Nothing could be less appealing. Mona didn't care if Robert Redford or anybody else lived there, she wasn't going to Montana.
"Know your Terrain." Mona had strict rules about traveling in America. She would go to New Orleans, yes. Chicago, yes. Anywhere in California, yes. Tucson, yes. Kansas City, yes. Miami and Boca, definitely. But Montana, hill country, and mountains, no! She fluffed her burgundy curls, thinking for a moment about silver Indian jewelry and leather skirts with fringes as shown in Vogue and Elle recently in stories about "the new West." Still a definite no!
"We're planning to come out to the ranch in August," she lied, gazing out the internal picture window of the office she'd been sharing with Mitch for all of eight months. His moving her into his office was supposed to signal his readiness to leave Cassie and marry her. Had it happened? No, it had not. Did she have a right to be annoyed? Yes, she most certainly did. Age was terrifying her. Thirty-eight and unmarried was Not Acceptable.
"Know victory and defeat." But still the office was something. Her old office had been airless, tiny, and lacking a view of the cavernous insides of the temperature-controlled warehouse that was the second love of her life. Seeing all that primo vino gave her the same surge of pride she felt whenever she neared Manhattan and saw the skyline of her and Mitch's playground rise right out of boring old Queens.
The vino was housed in a building in Syosset that was as large as an airline hangar. When Mona had first encountered the aisles of wine racks in the much smaller warehouse that Mitch had owned back then, she'd been a young bookkeeper, not beautiful, but so determined to be somebody that she'd already left her car dealership first husband with goals of knowing people of greater taste than those who shopped for Saturns. When she'd seen all that wine, she was reminded of the stacks in her childhood library where books were lined up like hundreds of soldiers waiting for their chance to march off into readers' little hearts. Just like a certain book had marched permanently into hers, so had Mitch.
Now, twelve years later, she no longer did the books or read very many of them. Sales Importers, Inc., was a big company with a big inventory in several great big warehouses. She and Mitch dispensed taste and memories by the hundreds of thousands of cases, in small liquor stores and large ones, to Internet suppliers and restaurants. Some of it was cash business, strictly secret. The money was rolling in. They traveled extensively, studying vineyards and soils and production all over the world, tasting wine after wine. They chose their stock carefully, and didn't bother with wines that sold under ten dollars. Mitch liked to focus on clients who were used to good wine and drank several bottles of it every single night. Thousands of cases from Italy, Germany, France, Chile, Australia, South Africa, and dozens of wineries in the United States rested on metal racks that towered fifteen feet, twenty feet, thirty-five feet into the steel beams that held up the roof. Security guards watched their stock at night, and two forklifts were kept busy chugging around all day long on the cement floor, moving orders in and out. And this was only here.
The company was doing so well that they had nearly a hundred sales reps traveling around the country, servicing the thousands of accounts that were solidly on the books. Mona herself did a huge business, and Mitch was the Bordeaux futures expert, the gambler. And they had their lobby in Washington to keep things status quo. Mona was proud of all that she had accomplished, but all that mattered to her really was love. She was frequently tortured by doubts that Mitch would really keep his promise and marry her.
She made an irritated noise. Down on the floor was that IRS guy. This was another thing that had been carefully orchestrated. Ira had particularly advised them to be out of the country during all their audits. He'd told them it was crucial never to have a personal involvement with any governmental agent, especially not an IRS agent. Ira warned them that those small-minded people were terrorists, armed by the Feds and dangerous. You had to insulate yourself from them, and he was the insulator. Now she could see that he was absolutely right. This man was someone they didn't know, who was not supposed to be here until tomorrow, and his presence made her nervous as hell. He was walking around the precious racks as if it were a great big gold field just waiting for him to plunder. Somehow he looked familiar, a little like the rat Bruce, who'd dumped her in junior high.
Where Ira was, where Teddy was, where Mitch himself was, Mona had no idea. But here she was, all alone, holding the fort against a threat too terrifying even to imagine. It was the story of her life. A nuclear attack, a holocaust could not be worse persecution than this tax thing. Here was an enemy she did not know and could not prepare for. The whole thing was out of her hands. She tried not to let the fact that she was not the true and actual Mrs. Mitchell Sales, of Sales Importers, Inc., arouse what Mitch called "her paranoid side."
"We'll take the horses and go on a pack trip," Stace was saying.
"That sounds wonderful," Mona murmured, allowing herself a moment's amusement at Stace's thinking he was important enough to lure her out to the middle of the country-where she was not sure planes even landed-with the promise of a large dumb animal to sit on. She already had one of those right here.
"What about those auctions in Italy you were telling me about? We still doing that?" he demanded.
"Oh, yes, the auctions in Verona. We have it all planned." Mona said this in her sweetest voice, even though she and Mitch had already been and done their buying at the auctions in Verona. The auctions were at the end of March.
The IRS agent disappeared in the racks. A minute later he rounded a corner, and a forklift about to make a pickup at waist level almost pronged him in the groin. His wild scramble to get away caused her to giggle.
"What's funny? Is Mitch there? I want to say hey."
Mona tuned back into Stace for the last time. Well, he wasn't the only one who wanted to say hey to Mitch. The man was not picking up his e-mails, not picking up his cell phone. If she didn't know for a fact that Cassie was a dodo, she might think something was up.
"Well, honey, I wish I could put you on with Mitch, but you know I'm handling all the details of the Italy trip myself. You can certainly tell me all your special requests." She tapped her fingers on the desk. Time to hang up.
"I just want to say hey."
"Well, of course, you want to say hey. And Mitch wants to say hey, too, but you know, Mitch. Always on the run. How about I have him call you as soon as he comes in?"
Finally Stace was ready to hang up, and Mona's jet lag dizziness hit. She checked her watch. Mitch was really making her sweat. She hadn't planned to come in today. She'd planned to touch base with him and make up last night, then sleep late, and have a beauty afternoon with a salt rub, a massage, a manicure, and her hair colored in the afternoon. But he hadn't come in. She checked her e-mails again, then dialed his cell.