Undue Influence Read online

  Undue Influence

  Jenny Holiday

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Undue Influence

  Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Holiday

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the author.

  Edited by Sarah Lyons. Copyedited by Heather Martin. Cover design by Zack Taylor. Cover photo by olly19, Deposit Photos.

  First edition, September 2018

  ISBN: 978-1-7753768-1-1 (e-book)

  ISBN: 978-1-7753768-2-8 (paperback)

  She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

  —Jane Austen, Persuasion

  Chapter One

  “‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that—’”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  Playing dumb, Adam manufactured a confused look and aimed it at his sister. “Pardon me?” No matter that Betsy was pushing thirty, Adam still enjoyed bugging his big sister.

  She rolled her eyes and waved her hands vigorously in the air in an attempt to dry her freshly painted fingernails. “You know that’s not what I meant when I asked you to read to us.”

  Adam’s mother heaved a put-upon sigh. Wilhelmina Elliot, of Kellynch Vineyards in Bishop’s Glen, New York, was a woman who, unless there was a gun to her head, never read anything but Page Six. Or, in a pinch, the crime report in the Bishop’s Glen Bulletin.

  Unlike her daughter, though, the Elliot matriarch would never resort to vulgar language to register her disapproval. She merely murmured, “Language,” at Betsy, then pointed a shiny purple talon—her nails were wet, too—at a stack of newspapers and magazines on the floor next to the sofa.

  “You’d both like this book if you gave it a chance, I think,” Adam said even as he exchanged it for the Post. “There’s lots of conniving in it.”

  “Lots of what?” Betsy blew on her fingers.

  Adam tried not to roll his eyes as he shook Page Six Magazine out of the Post. Something caught in his chest to think that this might be the last time they did this. Was he going to…miss this?

  No. That was crazy. He was going to miss Kellynch something fierce—losing the vineyard was going to be like losing a limb—but this weird, nineteenth-century-esque ritual in which his relatives summoned him to read to them while their nails dried was a prime example of why he’d moved out of the house four years ago. He loved his mom and sister, and he believed they loved him, in their way. Getting to a place where that was true had not been easy. Theirs was a hard-won affection, and easier to maintain when he could love them from afar, from his cozy, solitary motorhome among the vines at the far end of the property.

  But still. Once more for posterity. He cleared his throat. “Paris Hilton’s dog died, and she’s planning a funeral with—”

  “This is old news.” Betsy waved her hands again but this time in a dismissive rather than a nail-drying gesture. The fact that he could tell the difference was probably pretty pathetic.

  “Well, I’m not sure print is the most efficient format for the timely delivery of gossip.” He got out his phone. “Is the Wi-Fi still on?” The electricity was, so maybe it would be. But, no. And he’d be damned if he used any of his data to read the gossip pages to his mom and sister. Like them, he was broke. Unlike them, he was not in denial about it. Tomorrow morning, he was moving his RV from the estate to his brother’s yard in town, and nothing about his modest existence would change—except of course for the fact that his heart, such as it was, would remain behind, tangled up in the vines at Kellynch.

  But he was resigned. He had plenty of experience walking around with a broken heart. Freddy had made sure of that.

  No, Rusty had made sure of that.

  No, that wasn’t fair. Adam had no one to blame but himself for the state of his heart.

  “What I really want to know is what’s going on in the Hamptons.” Betsy slumped theatrically against the back of the sofa but kept her arms in the air so as not to mar her manicure. She looked like a zombie taking a rest.

  “You’ll find out firsthand soon enough,” Adam said.

  “I can’t stand that we couldn’t leave today. Tonight’s the Art Hamptons opening party, you know, and Charlie has tickets.”

  He did know. She’d been talking of nothing else since it was decided that she and their mother would take a family friend up on an invitation to join him in the Hamptons for a few weeks. Adam feared that “take Charlie up on his invitation for a few weeks” was actually a euphemism for them having invited themselves for an indefinite stay, but honestly, he was too exhausted to care. For the most part, he’d made his peace with carrying out his duty to his family, but clearing out the house had been both physically demanding and heartbreaking, and he needed a breather from babysitting them.

  Charlie had been a professional friend of Dad’s through the New York Wine & Grape Foundation. He’d been in touch after Dad’s death and had helped set them up with the ultimately unsuccessful winemaker who’d taken over—not that Adam blamed either the winemaker or Charlie. You couldn’t do something with nothing, and at the rate his family spent money after Dad’s death, what they’d had to work with was basically “nothing.”

  He sort of felt like Charlie had done enough for their family, but Adam was so tired. His leg required a lot of rest at the best of times, given his dogged commitment to walking everywhere. And this was not the best of times. So he was just going to let Charlie have his mom and sister for a while.

  Betsy sighed. “If only we could have left today.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Adam said. “Mom has to be here for the auction tomorrow.” He might do everything around here, but on paper the vineyard belonged to Wilhelmina—for one more day, anyway.

  “Adam, you need your hair cut.” His mother was pretending she hadn’t heard anything. Just like she was pretending their home wasn’t going into foreclosure. Pretending she and Betsy hadn’t run the family business in to the ground. “Your features are too delicate for long hair.”

  “It’s not long.” It wasn’t the short-sided, fascist cut she preferred on him, and yes, maybe he was a bit overdue for a trim, but no reasonable person would call it long. But then, when had his mother ever been reasonable?

  “The limp is enough, dear. You don’t need another unusual feature to draw people’s attention.”

  Isn’t drawing people’s attention one of your favorite pastimes?

  He kept his mouth shut, though. There was no point. He’d long since learned that he could either have a family or not have one, and if he wanted one, it came at a cost.

  “Not to mention the gay thing,” his sister added.

  Yes. The gay thing. Adam sighed. A shaggy-haired, gay guy with a limp: what a scandal. Thankfully, the gay thing really wasn’t a thing anymore. To his mother’s credit, after an initial freak-out, she’d gotten over his coming-out at age seventeen pretty quickly. It generally didn’t appear on her laundry list of his shortcomings—or at least very high on that list.

  “Today’s Bulletin is here, isn’t it?” his mother asked, apparently having lost interest in criticizing his appearance. “You didn’t have them stop the subscription until tomorrow, right?”

  “Yep.” Adam opened the local paper to the crime blotter. “Drunk and disorderly, Stone Road.”

  “That’s Glen Lake Estates.” Betsy, naming another of the
local vineyards, perked up.

  “Officers were called to investigate a disturbance created by two men who became incensed when told a tour package they purchased did not come with unlimited refills.” Adam chuckled. “One of the individuals, upon talking to an officer, elected to upgrade to the unlimited option. The other grew increasingly belligerent and was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.”

  His mother sniffed. “I’m not sure what they expect with those…” She wrinkled her nose. “Tours.” Bringing people in on buses like that. Honestly. I wouldn’t want a sip, much less an unlimited amount of any of Glen Lake’s so-called Riesling.”

  Adam refrained from pointing out that Glen Lake, unlike Kellynch, was thriving. Those busloads of tourists his mother found so beneath her kept the place afloat. The time for those arguments was done, though. You couldn’t undo foreclosure. She’d never listened anyway, when Adam had tried to explain that from a simple accounting perspective, expenses could not exceed income indefinitely. Even he, who had never been a scholar or known much about the winemaking side of things, could understand that much.

  He went back to the newspaper. “Domestic disturbance. Forty-eight-hundred block of Rook Street in Uppercross.” Betsy narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. She was trying to figure out who it might be. “A twenty-five-year-old male summoned police to report that his estranged girlfriend threw a Bible at him.”

  “Oh! That’s Henry McGuire!” Betsy exclaimed.

  “It certainly is.” Wilhelmina sniffed some more. There was nothing his mother enjoyed more than subtly displaying her disapproval and therefore her superiority. “Charlotte Haywick threw a Bible at Henry McGuire? She’s in seminary—can you imagine? Acting like that when you’re supposed to be…godly?”

  “It’s not really seminary,” Betsy said. “It’s some kind of weird hippie thing.”

  “I think it’s just Unitarianism,” Adam said. It wasn’t like Charlotte was in the Hollywood cult Betsy had flirted with enough a few years ago that Adam had basically had to kidnap and deprogram her. But he took her point. Charlotte Haywick and Henry McGuire had a longstanding on-again, off-again relationship—they had since high school. Everyone always assumed they would end up together, but there certainly had been a lot of drama along the way. It kept the entire town riveted.

  The old mantel clock chimed nine o’clock. Adam put down the newspaper. “Sorry, but I need to get this room done.”

  The library was the last room left to pack up. His mom and sister, given their indifference to books, had left it to the end—or, rather, left it to Adam, as they did pretty much every unpleasant task. It was also the only room in the house that had any furniture left in it, hence their having commandeered it for foreclosure-eve manicures. Because God forbid they be forced to vacate the home and vineyard that had been in their family for three generations without their nails done. They already thought it a terrible sacrifice that they’d had to give up their weekly mani-pedi salon appointments. It’s not extravagance, his sister had protested. It’s just the bare minimum of what’s considered socially acceptable.

  A flare of anger ignited in Adam’s chest. He was pissed at his mother for letting their family’s legacy crash and burn. She took no responsibility for anything, and she never would—and she had taught her daughter the same. His younger brother, Mark, wasn’t much better, but at least he had his own house, so he wasn’t so much Adam’s problem.

  When Adam’s father was alive, he’d managed to keep the family’s profligacy in check, but as hard as Adam had tried, he hadn’t been able to replicate the feat and had been forced to watch Kellynch slowly bleed out over the last several years.

  But it was useless to be angry with them. Wilhelmina and Betsy were professional martyrs. He could either accept that and have a family, or fight against it and be cast out.

  And Adam was nothing if not practical.

  And while he had done his best to try to keep things going at Kellynch after his dad died, all his interventions had accomplished was to prolong the inevitable. Now he just wanted to be done. And this was the last task: sorting through the books.

  “Are your nails dry?” he asked his mom and sister. “Why don’t you head out to your hotel, and I’ll finish up here?”

  “I thought it would be best if you did this room,” his mother said. He didn’t bother pointing out that he’d done every room.

  “Will you see us off in the morning?” his sister asked.

  “I can’t. I have to work.” Some of us earn our living.

  “Oh, Rusty will give you the morning off,” his mother said.

  Adam didn’t want the morning off, was the thing. “He can’t. We have a transmission that’s giving us major problems, and the mayor needs a flat replaced before ten o’clock because he has to drive to Seneca Falls for a meeting.”

  “Well.” His mother stood and brushed her hands together as she looked around the half-packed room. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “Really, it’s for the best,” his sister said. “I never liked—”

  “Text me when you arrive safely.” Adam pitched his voice to drown her out because, God help him, he only had so much patience. If his sister started up with one of her sour-grapes—no pun intended—rants about how boring and sleepy Kellynch and Bishop’s Glen were, he could no longer be responsible for his actions.

  Adam loved this town. His grandmother had been one of its most prominent residents back in the day, and he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Yes, it was kind of dull and was slightly down-at-heels aside from the slice of it right along the lake where the wealthy residents and summer people lived, but it also had vines and forests and the big blue lake. It was home. And given that he no longer had Kellynch, at least he still had Bishop’s Glen.

  Finally, following a flurry of air kisses and hands-off hugs—got to protect those nails—he was alone.

  He opened a bottle of pinot noir, one of the last ones from the harvest five years ago, the last year his father had overseen things. He shouldn’t have let it age this long, but he’d been saving the last few bottles for a special occasion, and saying goodbye to Kellynch was certainly “special.”

  There were no wineglasses left. His dad had kept a tray of fine crystal ones in the library, which had been his retreat, but they’d been sold off months ago. So he drank straight from the bottle, deeply, letting the herby, berry-inflected vintage slide down his throat. Drinking from the bottle suited him anyway. If there hadn’t been a vineyard in the family, Adam would have been a beer drinker, and probably a mass-produced macro-brew drinker at that. He’d never been as refined as his mother wanted. Or as ambitious as his best friend Rusty wanted. He was a guy who fixed cars by day and puttered around the vineyard by night, doing what he could to keep things in repair. Trying in vain to make his mother see that they needed to do things differently or they’d lose everything.

  The wine was good. Pinot was a finicky grape for this cool-climate region, but the weather had cooperated that year, and his dad really had had the touch. His grandma had been competent as a winemaker, one of the region’s pioneers in experimenting with cold-weather varietals, but his dad had been great. He’d been trying to make Kellynch into a real player in the region, and he’d been starting to see some success—some local awards and a few new, big wholesale clients. They’d even started talking about spiffing the place up so they could open themselves up to the public for tours and tastings.

  But then he up and died.

  If only he had allowed Adam to help him, like Adam’s grandma had, Adam might have known enough to save things once his dad was gone. Grandma had been content to let ten-year-old Adam trail around behind her as she did the leaf thinning, making way for the sunshine to hit the clumps of fruit, but he’d been too young to really absorb anything. His dad, by contrast, had been focused on Betsy taking over as winemaker. Adam was never sure if it was because she was the oldest or because she was the
not-gay one. The one without the limp. Either way, he certainly had picked wrong. Betsy had never been interested in the actual work that went on at Kellynch, merely in the spoils of that work.

  By contrast, whenever Adam volunteered his services, he’d been rebuffed. The winter pruning was too delicate a job, his dad would insist. He didn’t know how he knew what temperature to ferment the Riesling at, he just knew. It wasn’t teachable. You had to have a knack.

  Eventually, Adam had gotten the message and stopped offering.

  He allowed himself a few more swigs of wine before replacing the cork. He wanted to keep drinking, to just leave his head tilted back and chug, but there was work to be done. He gathered old newspapers and magazines and made a pile for recycling. Then he turned his attention to the books. A fair number of them, like the Austen he’d jokingly tried to read earlier, were his. He’d never bothered moving them to the RV, figuring there was plenty of room in the house, but now he would. The winemaking tomes that had been his grandmother’s, and then his father’s, he was less sure about. It felt like a sin to throw them away. The industry in the region was young, at least on a global scale. His grandmother had been the first winemaker at Kellynch, and he remembered her bringing these books back from trips to France, pouring over them in this very room.

  Yet what good would it do to hold on to them? As of tomorrow, Kellynch Estates Winery would no longer belong to the Elliots. It remained to be seen whether the new owners would even bother trying to restore it to viability as a vineyard.

  He sighed and flipped open the front cover of the book he’d been torturing his sister with. Rusty had given it to him eight years ago, just after he’d talked Adam into making the biggest mistake of his life.

  He had inscribed the inside.

  Austen had it wrong. There’s no such thing as too much pride—or too much prejudice. xoxo, Lady RM.