Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Beckett
Daisy Larsson sleeps like the dead.
At some point during our ninety-minute drive, she reclined the seat back as far as it would go and promptly fell into a deep sleep.
She was probably up all night partying.
“Daisy,” I say sharply. “Wake up.” I nudge her shoulder. “You’re getting drool all over my leather seats.”
A soft sigh escapes her lips as she rolls onto her side facing me, and the hem of her T-shirt rides up, exposing her taut stomach and sun-kissed skin. The T-shirt is a few sizes too small with an illustration of a cat above red and black Kanji symbols. It looks as if she bought it from the kids’ department. Meanwhile, her baggy jeans are three sizes too big and ride low on her hip bones.
She looks young and innocent, almost childlike when she sleeps, with long sooty lashes resting in the purple-tinged hollows beneath her eyes.
She has a decidedly feline look—tousled blonde hair, slanted cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes framed by thick arched brows.
My gaze drops to her mouth. It’s slightly parted, her lips so lush and pouty I want to put my fist through a fucking wall.
This whole thing feels like a sick joke. Even from the grave, my father has found a way to fuck with me.
I wish like hell I could have just walked away from this whole mess, but for several reasons, I refuse to do so.
I can’t allow Daisy to walk away with everything. She doesn’t even deserve to set foot on this land, much less inherit it.
There is no fucking way that my father will be getting a mausoleum and a rose garden to commemorate his pathetic life.
This isn’t chump change. My father’s estate is worth tens of millions, and I plan on using every cent of it to fund my next technology startup.
I get out of the car, slam the door shut with so much force the whole car shakes, and stand in the circular driveway, staring at the house. It looks like a Tuscan villa with ivy climbing up the crumbling stone walls and a terracotta roof with cracked tiles. The green paint on the shutters is faded and peeling, and the weeds have overtaken the lawn.
What was once a beautiful home, now reeks of neglect.
I carry the bags inside and climb the stairs. Hanging a left at the top, I set Daisy’s bag in the smallest bedroom with the most water damage and resist the urge to check her bag for drugs—or lingerie .
My father’s terms were so specific that I can’t even toss her bag on the street and let her find her own damn place to stay. Further proof that he takes joy in fucking with me.
After unpacking my clothes and putting them away in a much larger bedroom at the opposite end of the hall, I set up my office on the oak table in the study.
Books fill the floor-to-ceiling shelves and faded Aubusson rugs skim the oak floorboards, but everything else I remember from my youth is gone.
My father was an avid collector—art, fine wine, thoroughbreds, cigars, watches…and his tragic flaw, beautiful women.
After he died, I spent a few days going through his things and in the end, there was nothing of any real value left in this house.
Whatever Astrid hadn’t taken, he must have sold to cover his debts.
The greatest asset is the land—a two-hundred-acre estate vineyard that consistently produces award-winning wines in the heart of California wine country.
I have three months to get this place ready to sell and to find a way to cut Daisy Larsson out of the inheritance before the deed falls into her greedy little hands.
I’ve just finished a Zoom meeting with the investors when Daisy wanders past the window, gathering her hair into a messy bun and securing it with…a pencil?
She’s still wearing the baggy jeans with the kid-sized T-shirt and without the hoodie covering it, the small of her back is exposed. I have no idea why any of this is sexy—she dresses like a homeless person—but Daisy is the type of girl who could make a burlap sack look provocative.
Barring her fashion sense, she is exactly the kind of woman my father would have gone for in his prime, and the type of woman I avoid like the plague.
Too messy. Too complicated. Too much of everything.
She saunters across the patio and walks up one of the rows of the vineyard, trailing her hand over the vines, and my mind reverts to her comment about stealing her lingerie. What kind does she wear? Silk? Lace? Feminine? Racy?
Fuck. I scrub my hand down my face and groan. Any man with half a brain would turn away from the window, but I continue watching like some kind of creepy voyeur.
She’s talking to Pete, the vineyard manager who is smiling like a doting father, completely captivated by whatever she’s saying. I can only hope he’s smart enough to steer clear of her tender trap.
I have no actual proof that she’s anything like her mother but how could I assume otherwise? She’s here, isn’t she? And she obviously manipulated my father into giving her half of everything.
No matter how you spin it, one thing is certain—Daisy Larsson is trouble.
My phone rings and I swipe the screen. “How’s it going?” Grayson asks.
“How do you think it’s going? I’m stuck on this vineyard with Jezebel’s daughter.”
“You make it sound like you’re serving a prison sentence.”
“Close enough,” I mutter.
“Your father was a bastard, I’ll give you that, but no red flags came up in her background check,” he points out.
Background checks only give you limited information so all we learned is that she doesn’t have a bad credit history or a criminal record. That we know of .
“Only because we found virtually nothing on her. Which is a sure sign she has something to hide. She probably goes by some alias we haven’t uncovered yet.”
“ Or there’s nothing suspicious and you’re just assuming she must be covering something up.”
I’m not sure why he’s defending Daisy.
Grayson and I have been friends since our freshman year at Stanford and cofounded a fintech startup together. I know enough about his family dynamics to know damn well that if the shoe were on the other foot, he’d be just as suspicious as I am.
“What twenty-something in the Western world doesn’t use social media?” I counter.
“I admit it’s rare but it’s not a crime,” he says, still playing good cop to my bad cop. “Maybe she’s busy living her best life. She’s a pretty big deal in the art world.”
I’m not sure where he came up with that but he’s giving her far too much credit. “She takes Polaroids of teenagers,” I scoff. “That hardly makes her Annie Leibovitz.”
He laughs.
The truth is that I don’t know what her portfolio entails because only a few of her photos can be found online.
“I don’t want people screenshotting my photos. My work is meant to be viewed in books and exhibitions and in print,” she said when she was interviewed in some artsy magazine where she talked about her work and how she preferred 35mm cameras over digital. “And I don’t want pervy men saving them.”
To be fair I can’t fault her for that. I work in technology, and I even have issues with how information on the internet is abused. But that’s as far as I’ll go in agreeing with her on anything.
“On another note, we’re nearly at the finish line,” Grayson says. “I can’t fucking wait until we close on this deal so we can move on. The past year hasn’t been a lot of fun.”
We’ve spent the past year preparing our startup for a sale while also juggling the demands of our investors and running the company, so yeah, it hasn’t been a lot of fun.
But it will all be worth it in a few short weeks when we close on the sale with Royce Capital and we both walk away with $200 million. Not bad for two guys who built a startup from the ground up.
“Just so you know, I’m inviting myself up for the holiday weekend. Do you have a spare room in your crumbling mansion, or should I book a place?”
“You can stay here.”
“In that case, I’m sending you a housewarming gift.”
“I don’t want any of your gifts.” Grayson’s gifts are usually over-the-top, highly impractical, and nothing I would ever want.
“You’re going to want this,” he assures me.
When we hang up, I go back to watching Daisy as she brings a cluster of grapes to her nose. Her eyes drift shut like sniffing grapes is as close to heaven as she’s ever come.
Those grapes are grenache and when they flower, the scent is heady and perfume-like, but I wouldn’t have expected her to notice or care.
This is the same girl who told me via text that she lives on champagne and cigarettes, and her favorite hobby is clubbing with “her squad.”
She also dropped brand names like she was a Kardashian and claimed that The Real Housewives was her favorite show to binge-watch. Which naturally led me to assume that she would be Astrid 2.0.
But now that I’ve met her, it doesn’t add up. Her clothes look like they’re from Goodwill and she was carrying a JanSport, not a designer bag.
But I’m not ruling out the possibility that this is all part of her cunning plan.
Based on the evidence, I find it impossible to believe that she didn’t manipulate my father. He rewrote his will and added her as a co-beneficiary only six months before he died.
Coincidentally, that was right after he showed up at my office with a bottle of Cabernet, put his feet on my desk and lit a Cuban cigar like he was in a Vegas nightclub. If he’d summoned strippers to perform for him, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
I hadn’t spoken to the bastard in fifteen years and had zero interest in a father/son bonding session, so I gave him two options—either be escorted off the premises or walk away on his own two feet.
On his way out the door he said, “I want you to run the vineyard.”
“I already have a successful business to run.”
“Technology? This won’t make you happy. There’s nothing tangible here. You need to come back to the place where the dirt, the rocks, the fog, and the wind speak. You need to inhale the intoxicating scent of the grenache grapes on the vine and taste the sweetness on your tongue.”
My father thought he was Hemingway. “Don’t fucking tell me what I need. Where were you when my mother needed you?”
As a kid, I used to idolize my father. I wanted nothing more than to follow in his footsteps and become a vintner. But because of him, all my happy memories on this vineyard have been tainted.
I doubt that Astrid Larsson was the first woman he cheated on my mother with, but it was the only time I ever caught him in the act.
I was thirteen when I walked in on them. My father’s back was turned, and Astrid had her back against the wall, smiling as she held her finger to her lips.
Shh. Don’t tell. This will be our little secret .
Instead of being a decent husband and human being, that son of a bitch was fucking another woman in the wine cellar. A woman my mother had moved into the gatehouse after Astrid fed her some bullshit hard luck story.
Astrid was a liar. A con. And a thief.
I have no reason to believe that Daisy is any different.