Love in the Vineyard (Tavonesi #7)(2)

That and killing.

But killing was a tool he’d sworn to leave behind.





Chapter One



NATASHA’S HAND SHOOK WHEN SHE PLACED her stack of chips on the felt surface of the roulette table. Hope laced through the desperation gripping her chest as she pushed the chips onto the square marked seventeen. Numbers had never been her friend and lately luck hadn’t been going her way, but seventeen was her favorite number. When she’d turned seventeen, she’d pocketed one of the false IDs her foster mother had counterfeited and bolted for freedom, leaving the East Coast and its troubles behind.

Had it only been ten years since that rainy day when she’d boarded a bus with a single suitcase and set out for California? So much had happened since then. Some good, some bad. But the good was why she edged closer to the table and gripped her hope tighter.

“I love the thrill of this moment,” the well-dressed woman standing next to Natasha whispered in an almost reverent voice. “The delicious rush of anticipating where the hand of fate might fall.”

The diamonds on the woman’s hands and wrists told Natasha that the woman had far less at stake at the turn of the roulette wheel than she did.

Far less.

Voices of partying gamblers in the casino faded as Natasha whispered a silent prayer. But memories flooded in, breaking the flow of her carefully rehearsed mantra.

The last night she’d spent in this very casino she’d been a coat-check girl. It was the only job she’d found after she’d arrived in the Bay Area. The only job that didn’t require that she read or do math. No one knew that words slid off the page when she looked at them, that numbers danced and shifted and made her mind go blank. And no one had ever guessed back then that she hadn’t been of legal age to be working in a casino. Her dark makeup and weary expression had fooled everyone.

But one night, one of the regulars who’d been her biggest tipper had gotten under her careful guard. He’d treated her to dinner and drinks after she’d finished her shift. She’d ended up in his suite, naked, bruised and broken. She’d fled the suite and quit her job the next day, fearful that the man she’d mistaken for a Prince Charming—the man she’d willingly given her virginity to before he’d turned unspeakably violent—would come after her. Stalk her. His crazy talk and his fists had planted fear deep.

She’d never returned to the casino.

Until now.

Her palms sweated against the wooden rail of the roulette table. The only blessing of that horrific night was her son. Tyler and his future were the reason she’d returned, the reason she was wagering the last of her savings.

Petey, her trusted friend and the casino doorman, had tried to talk her out of her plan when she’d called earlier in the week to tell him she was coming to place a bet. He didn’t believe in gambling. And the truth was, neither did she. And that evening as she’d walked in the door, he’d told her a man had come in the previous night looking for a woman named Natasha but that Petey had convinced him that the only Natasha he knew hadn’t been around in years. His description of the man had stopped her heart, but she’d told Petey not to worry. Told him that coincidences happened all the time. The man couldn’t be Eddie. Not after ten years. Why would he come looking for her after all that time? Why would he even remember? But even as she tried to focus on her mission for the evening, she glanced over her shoulder, her body poised to run.

Hands clenched, she recited her carefully memorized phrases of hope, trying to banish the images of that terrible night and calm her racing pulse.

She’d make this one bet and never return.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Petey watching her. Petey was the only employee still at the casino who knew about Tyler. Petey she trusted. He was a storehouse of well-kept secrets, and he’d never give hers away. He came over to her and tried once again to talk her out of betting, but she’d made up her mind. And two decades of casino work had probably taught him better than to stand in the face of desperate hopes.

But it wasn’t just hope that drove her. She trusted the dreams.

She trusted the images that had recurred night after night, always the same. Images so real that she felt she could reach out and touch her mother as she spoke. For two weeks her mother had come to her, repeating the same message over and over in the soft voice Natasha still remembered.

Bet on number seventeen at the roulette table, and your destiny and hopes will be fulfilled.

She didn’t much care about her own destiny, but worry and hope and all her dreams for Tyler drove her. She didn’t want so very much, wasn’t greedy. All she wanted was to get Tyler out of the bad neighborhood they lived in and into a good school district, to give him the chance at success she’d never had. But to accomplish that she needed money. Money for higher rent, money for a move. Money that her paltry income at the plant nursery didn’t afford.

Her mother’s voice whispered in her mind, in her heart, and penetrated the fear and doubt coiling in her chest.

She would trust her dreams.

Surely the forces of good would shine on her just this once.

The croupier closed off the bets.

He spun the wheel in one direction and with a deft flick of his wrist sent the white ball rolling in the other. The colors blended as the wheel picked up speed and then separated as the wheel slowed.