No wonder Ziggy didn’t remotely resemble her father.

“Papà Santini doesn’t like talking about my parents.”

“Why not?”

“Santini dated my mother before Sigfrid married her.”

Oh. But his comment, and the silence after it, felt like more than just an old jealousy. And the conversation had been about her grandfather, not her father. Then again, RJ was tired, and it was possible her instincts weren’t firing right. “Your father was named Sigfrid too?”

“After Fred. Family name, remember?”

“Right.”

“It’s a taboo subject for Papà. Apparently, he wanted to marry Carlita, my mother, but Sigfrid had been abroad, in America, and when he returned, he swept Carlita off her feet. Married her out from under Santini. She was twenty-four. Sigfrid was thirty.” She turned back to the window. “It took them seventeen years before they had me.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. A couple miscarriages at the beginning, and then nothing for years. My mother had me at forty-one. Meanwhile, Santini had married Momma Tessa, and by that time, I had cousins who were ten and twelve years older than me. Felix, who lives in Rome, and Bella, in New York, who is a doctor.”

“No one lives at the winery?”

Ziggy headed toward the door. “It’s a hard business. And it has to be in the blood, I think.”

“You don’t want it?”

“I have a different life.” Ziggy reached for the door. Paused. “For now.” Then she turned back to RJ. “By the way, I was able to charge my phone and download my voice mails. Roy left a message. He and York are on the way.” She smiled. “I told you everything would be okay.” She smiled and closed the door.

But RJ stood at the window, the book clasped to her.

She’d heard that before.

“Gotta love Italy.”

York barely heard Roy, who sat beside him in a very cramped Fiat 500, his window down, the wind in his hair as it swept off the Mediterranean Sea to the west.

“Yeah,” York said softly.

Really, he was just being paranoid.

No one was following him. No one had sat in the threadbare lobby of his hotel room last night, waiting until morning when he and Roy left for Rome. No one had followed them to the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, sat across from him in the terminal during the two-hour flight delay, then boarded the plane and sat three rows behind him.

And no one was on their tail three cars back on their drive up the coast of Italy on a slick black Ducati Streetfighter V4 motorcycle.

A real beauty if you asked him.