From Barcelona, with Love Read Online Free PDF

neglected courtyard once bloomed with carefully tended garden flowers, as well as heavy-scented jasmine and bougainvillea and hibiscus, because Barcelona is on the Mediterranean and enjoys that special climate, hot in summer but never too cold in winter, to need more than an overcoat when the north wind whips in. Now the garden is overgrown and wild.
    Today is different though. The old man is on the alert, his eyes watchful. For today the gates of the Ravel family townhouse are to be opened again. The Matriarch is expected. The last time those gates were opened were for her husband’s funeral, ten years ago.
    The Ravel name has been known for more than two centuries for the fine sherries they produce in the fertile, chalky land of the Jerez region, but are also known now for the vineyards and bodega in Penedès, south of Barcelona, where the Marqués de Ravel red wine is made, a wine that is rapidly climbing its way to become one of the most popular Spain produces; less weighty than a Shiraz, less tannic than a Chianti, softer than a Californian Cabernet. Its popularity also lies in its price point: not too high, not too low.
    The pricing was the decision taken by Doña Lorenza de Ravel, the widow and grand Matriarch of the Ravel family. What the Marquesa de Ravel says goes—and her family, with their inheritance in mind, does her bidding uncomplainingly. Or at least they do not complain in front of her. Not too loudly anyhow. Only one of her four stepchildren has ever disobeyed and that was Bibi and she was a rebel right from the day she was born, and, possibly, too, until the day she died.
    Today, the grand townhouse has been cleaned, dusted, aired. Doña Lorenza has summoned a family meeting. She intends to sort out the past. Finally.
    The white-haired old man pushes back the iron gates, removes his beret, bows his head respectfully as the black BMW X5 swings into the short driveway and parks in a sputter of gravel. The driver’s door opens and a pair of long legs emerges, feet encased in red python four-inch-heeled Jimmy Choo heels, followed by their owner. Very tall, curvy, rampaging black hair, fuchsia lipstick on her wide mouth, black eyes that take in everything in one wide comprehensive glance. No silver-haired grande dame this. Forty-one-year-old Lorenza de Ravel, the Matriarch, is hot.
    Lorenza was the third wife of Juan Pedro de Ravel. She’d married him eighteen years ago when she was only twenty-three and Juan Pedro was sixty-five. Widowed for ten years, she is the main inheritor of his fortune and his lands, his vineyards, his bodega, and his famous sherry business. The Ravel name is known worldwide, but it was Lorenza who turned some of those inherited vineyards into wine-producing, Lorenza who oversees the business; she who made the decision to go for the popular market instead of taking on the small and very competitive upper-crust wineries; she who decided the quality and the price point that have made it a success.
    Lorenza slams the car door shut and stands for a moment, taking in the old house where she had come as a young bride, far from blushing and virginal but with a handsome silver-haired husband who adored her and was rich enough to satisfy all her whims. She is beautiful now, but then she had been truly lovely, a softer, rounder, thrillingly sexy young woman who enjoyed nothing more than making love to her husband, or him making love to her, or them making love. Whichever way they did it she loved it. Right up until the day he died, not in her bed, thank God, though he was—also thank God—in her arms, and she had been able to say goodbye to him.
    He had died, right here, in this house, on a sunny autumn evening with the long library windows still open to catch the breeze and Magre, who was Juan Pedro’s beloved old black cat, curled on his knee. The cat was named Magre—“skinny”—as a joke because you never saw a cat as fat as this one. Juan