The Riesling Retribution by Ellen Crosby Page B

prickled on the back of my neck.
    “Aha! Knew I was right. You do, don’t you?”
    I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book. “It’s not my personal piggy bank, Eli. It’s a business account and that money is there to pay bills.”
    He spread his hands apart, palms up. “I’m tapped out, babe. Are you going to help me or are you going to throw your brother to the wolves?”
    It was a low blow, and he knew it. I wasn’t responsible for his problems. He was.
    “Giving you more money without doing something about the way Brandi spends it isn’t going to help anyone. You can’t pay me back the eight grand any more than you can pay your creditors back. Take the four hundred as a gift, okay? You don’t need to repay that.”
    He looked like I’d slapped him. “I don’t need your charity. Forget it. I’ll go elsewhere.”
    “Eli, wait!”
    But he was already moving toward the gate, raising his hand in a backward salute, dismissing me.
    “I gotta go. I’m late for something.”
    He slammed the gate, as I expected he would. I sank down by my mother’s gravestone.
    “Now what?” I asked her. “How did he do that? Why am I the one feeling bad?”
    Giving my brother money would be like giving alcohol to a drunk. He didn’t have his spending under control—and his wife was dragging him down to the depths I remembered from when Leland was alive. When we lurched from feast to famine, either flush with cash or nearly flat broke. Eli’s story was just a downward spiral.
    I paused at Leland’s marker as I left the cemetery. Years ago my mother hid a fabulous diamond necklace given to one of her relatives by Marie Antoinette because she knew if my father got his hands on it he’d sell it, just like he’d sold all her other jewelry to fund his business ventures. I’d found the necklace two years ago, hidden in a barrel in the wine cellar. Eli got a third of the money from its sale and had blown his share. I used mine to pay for our expansion and putting in new vines.
    Right after Leland died, a French live-in boyfriend had sweet-talked my bank in the south of France into letting him withdraw all my funds, claiming I needed the money because I was moving back to the States. As soon as I got home, I planned to call Blue Ridge Federal and check on my account.
    Not that I thought Eli could pull off the same scam, but I knew he was desperate enough to try anything. Including cleaning me out.

CHAPTER 6
    I called Seth Hannah, the president of Blue Ridge Federal and an old family friend, the moment I walked through the front door. Like Leland, Seth was one of the Romeos and he used to play poker and hunt with my father. I’d long suspected Seth had a crush on my mother, as did so many men who were captivated by her beauty and indefinable French sense of style and allure.
    “What can I do for you, darlin’?” he asked.
    “Just checking my balance. I wasn’t sure if something cleared or not.” Or got cleared out.
    I heard some clicks of a computer keyboard and he quoted a figure that matched the one I had.
    “Happy to oblige, but you can do all this online, you know.”
    “I know, but I wanted to ask you about something and I can’t get that from a computer.” I wondered if he heard the relief in my voice that we still had funds to talk about.
    “What’s on your mind?”
    “I just want to make sure that no one besides me has access to that account,” I said.
    “Well, that’s how it’s set up, Lucie. Why’re you asking about this?”
    I hesitated and Seth waited.
    After a moment he said, “This wouldn’t be about your brother, would it?”
    “Please don’t say anything to anyone, Seth. He came to me for a loan just now and I turned him down. He knows I’ve got a lot of cash in that account.”
    There was a long pause. “It’s no secret your brother’s in a pretty deep financial hole, honey. You thinking he might try to cash a check of yours or something?”
    “When we were growing up and Eli