Excerpt of A Vine in the Blood by Leighton Gage

Chapter One

Less than an hour after Juraci Santos was unceremoniously
dumped into the back seat of her kidnappers' getaway car,
Luca Vaz crept through her front gate and poisoned her
bougainvilleas.

The way he figured it, he didn't have a choice. And it
wasn't his fault. It was the fault of that lying lowlife,
Mateo Lima.

"You're sure about the color of these bougainvilleas?"
Juraci had asked when he was planting them.

"I'm sure, Senhora," he'd assured her. "Blood red,
like you
told me."

"Guaranteed?"

"Guaranteed, Senhora."

"All right, Luca. But you'd better be right. Because, if
they flower in any other color. . . ."

She left the threat unspecified. But a threat it was—and
he
knew it.

Three weeks later, the roof fell in: Luca learned that
those new plants of hers were about to flower in a color
his wife,

Amanda, had described as the palest purple I've ever seen
on a bougainvillea. If Juraci Santos, a woman known to be
as vindictive as she was distrustful, discovered the
truth,
he'd be in big trouble.

Luca's advance notice of the situation stemmed from the
fact that he'd swiped one of the cuttings and planted it
to
the right of his front door. Unlike the bougainvilleas
along Juraci's wall, it had been standing in strong
sunshine for the last three weeks and Amanda, with her
sharp eyes, had spotted the first little bud. She'd taken
him by the arm, led him over to the plant and pointed.

"Isn't this bougainvillea supposed to be red?"

"It's not red?" he asked with a sense of foreboding.

He wouldn't have known if she hadn't told him. Luca
wasn't
just color blind; he suffered from the most severe and
rarest form of the malady: achromatopsia. He saw the world
in black, white and shades of gray.

Six people in the world, and only six, knew about his
condition.

Unfortunately, one of them was Amanda's no-good brother,
Mateo, who owned a flower and shrub business, and whom
Luca
blamed for his current troubles.

The truth of the matter was that Mateo Lima was a nasty
son
of a bitch, and there weren't many people in
Carapicuiba,or
the surrounding communities either, who were willing to
buy
flowers and shrubs from the likes of him. Nor were there
many people willing to hire a guy who was color blind to
care for their flowers.

So there they were, Luca and Mateo, stuck with each other.