Autumn in the Vineyard (A St. Helena Vineyard Novel)

by Adair, Marina

  During the hearing, she’d even managed to convince herself that Charles had been at the back of the courthouse, hidden among the crush of people. But that silly, childish hope was extinguished now when she raised her hand and waved—and he took a huge step back, into his car and further out of her life. The disapproval rolling off of him as he drove away was like a physical blow.

  “Good to see you too,” Frankie called out and kicked at a pile of leaves in the gutter. This was why she’d bought Sorrento Ranch. Charles was so easy to disappoint and too stubborn to forgive. And she was tired of trying to live up to unattainable expectations.

  “Frankie?” Nate asked quietly.

  With shaky hands, she set her helmet on the seat of her bike and fished though her pocket, not wanting to turn around. She knew if she did, she’d see Nate standing behind her, wanting to make sure she was okay while his team of lawyers and supportive family waited for him inside. Nate with his Italian swagger and warm brown eyes that had a way of looking at her until she felt as though she weren’t all alone.

  He didn’t say a word but she could feel his concern radiating off him, drawing her in and she turned. Big mistake, because Frankie had never been a hugger, but for some reason she got one look at those arms—arms that made a woman feel safe—and wanted to walk right in and make herself at home. But like she said, she wasn’t a hugger.

  “If you’re here to make me an offer on the land, the answer is no.”

  His eyes went warmer, if that were even possible. “We’re prepared to offer you double what you paid.”

  “Wow. Did you expect me to jump up and down and say yes, when the entire town just discovered that the land is worth seven times what I paid?”

  He took a step forward. Toward her. “Look, I just want to help. You and I both know that Saul screwed us.”

  “You, golden boy. He screwed you,” she laughed. “I was straight up with Glow, did my homework, knew exactly what I was buying. And you heard the judge, I’ll be just fine.”

  “What if you lose the house?”

  “Then I sleep in the shed. Thanks for your concern.” Not.

  Frankie fumbled with unlatching the chin strap of her helmet, but her damn hands weren’t working. Okay, maybe she wasn’t going to be fine. Her personal life was nonexistent, her family life was a train wreck, and she really didn’t want to think about how alone she’d felt in that courthouse. Even though she knew her brothers were in San Francisco picking up Dax, that Charles was probably never going to talk to her again, and that Aunt Lucinda would have had her back if Frankie had told her, some stupid part of her heart had held out hope that her family would come rushing in to stand by her side. Like Nate’s had.

  But she had the land and a house—well, for at least the next thirty days. And she wasn’t going to screw this up. Now if she could just get Nate to stop looking at her like she was about to burst into tears at any minute she’d be fine.

  “Francesca,” Nate said, stepping closer and making her wish she was the kind of girl who could cry. Because then he’d give her a hug, and she really needed one. “I know how much a new tank costs. I also know that Charles never paid you a cent of what you were worth, because he knew you were trying to prove yourself. After buying the land and losing the water tank, you have to be low on funds. Take my offer.”

  When she was silent, hating that he knew her so well and wondering if maybe taking the money and moving somewhere else to start over was the best thing for her, he added, “I’m willing to raise it to two-point-five and offer you a job.”

  Oh my god. He’d done it. He knew she was upset about nobody showing up and he’d managed to humiliate her even more. This was why he’d come out here. Not to check on her or apologize. She knew better. “You are the most arrogant, idiotic jerk I have ever met. You actually think I’d take a job making wine for you?”

  “You’re right.” He flung his hands in the air and he started to pace. It was a pissed off pace reserved for Frankie alone. With everyone else he was calm, collected—nice. “I’m the jerk. I can see how you came to that accurate conclusion. I’m offering you more than double what you paid and a way to continue doing what you love without having to go groveling back to your asshole of a family.”

  “My family members aren’t assholes,” she defended.

  “Really?” he yelled—yelled. “Then please define ‘asshole’ for me, because I’m pretty sure it accurately describes a person who fires his granddaughter when she was just doing what’s right.”

  Frankie wasn’t sure how to answer that. She also wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold his gaze, so she looked down at her helmet and fiddled with the strap. She’d been so sure that her day couldn’t get any worse. Man, had she been wrong. Here she was facing down the one person who could make her feel vulnerable and safe at the same time, and once again they were on opposite sides of the war.

  Nate’s hand rested on top of hers, stilling her fingers. He took the helmet and placed it on her motorcycle. “I’m sorry about Charles. I know how much the winery and his relationship meant to you. And I’m sorry that all of this happened because I bullied you into sitting on the tribunal. I knew he’d be pissed if you helped us, but I had no idea he would retaliate like he did.” He stopped, his chocolate colored eyes melting with understanding—she studied her boots. “But you knew, didn’t you?”

  Yeah, she knew.

  Nate curled a finger under her chin and tilted her head up to meet his gaze. So she closed her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  When it became obvious he wasn’t going to leave until she answered him, she opened her eyes and—whoa, big mistake. Nate was looking down at her like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to hug her or kiss her. And her heart was praying for the first and her lady parts were partying like it was the second.

  She remembered what his lips felt like on hers, warm and strong and, in that moment, right. So incredibly and cosmically right. The man could kiss. But then her grandpa had gone ballistic and Nate blurted out his apology—for kissing her. Not for screwing up her life or being a permanent pain in her butt, but for the kiss. As though it would take him a lifetime to get over the hardship.

  And he’d never even called. Not the next day or even the next week. A guy shouldn’t kiss a girl like that and then never call.

  Then again, what did she expect? Nate’s disappearing act went all the way back to high school when he kissed her and then the next day asked Sasha “I’m perky and petite and everything you’ll never be” Dupree to prom.

  “First off, I didn’t sit on the tribunal to help you. I did it for the town and because, whether my grandpa believes it or not, I earned my right to be there.” Which was only partly true. The other part, the seventeen-year-old girl who still had a crush on Nate, did it for him and his family. “And secondly, trusting you hasn’t worked out so well for me in the past.”

  The minute she said the words, she wanted to take them back. She didn’t want to talk about the past. Dealing with the present was hard enough.

  “Forget it.” She turned to leave but Nate’s strong hand caught her wrist.

  “No, you’re right. I should’ve listened to you about the land and the tribunal, and I should never have kissed you.”

  It was impossible to speak. It was as though he’d socked her in the gut.

  “There,” he added on a long exhale. “Shit, I am totally screwing this up again. What I meant to say was that I’m sorry that I kissed you there where anyone could have walked in.”

  She wanted to say that it didn’t matter anymore, that she didn’t care, but for some silly reason she did. “But you did. Why?”

  Nate cleared his throat, but his voice came out ragged. “Hell, Frankie I don’t know. You were all pissy about the winner who everyone else felt deserved to win. Then you started yelling that it was unimaginative and predictable, with the poor guy standing twenty feet away, so I took you aside and kissing seemed like the only way to calm you down.�
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  “To calm me down?” she said, suddenly feeling anything but calm.

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “And, trust me, I had every noble intention of leaving it as just a kiss, then you stuck your hand down my pants and I was a goner.”

  Frankie felt her face flush with embarrassment. She remembered how something had just snapped. Maybe it was the stress of disobeying her grandpa, or the disappointment over knowing that if she hadn’t sat on the tasting tribunal, she could have entered her wine and won, or maybe it was just that she’d had a dry spell that had spanned two harvests. Whatever the reason, one touch of his lips and she’d been so aggressive, she’d practically knocked him over.

  “You could have at least told me that my grandpa was in the room.”

  “I didn’t see him,” Nate defended.

  “He was looking right at you!”

  “Again,” Nate said, pointing to his southern region. “Hands down my pants. Any guy getting a hand job would have had a hard time focusing.”

  “Half a hand job,” she smiled. “I never finished.”

  “Believe me, I remember.” So did Frankie. She remembered vividly how good he smelled, tasted, felt pressed against her body. “Anyway, what I am trying to say is that I’m sorry you lost your job over it.”

  “Yeah, me too.” She’d lost so much more than just a job that night. Her grandfather walking away like he had, even after she explained she was just trying to help the town, had reaffirmed her greatest fears: For whatever reason, Frankie wasn’t the kind of person who inspired unconditional love. “Although I think the final straw was my lecturing him on buying that land in Santa Ynez Valley.”

  Nate ran a hand through his hair. “If I had been thinking straight yesterday, I would have told the sheriff it was a misunderstanding.”

  Frankie raised a brow, challenging.

  “Okay, maybe not. I was pretty ticked when you said it was your land. But I’m sorry I didn’t listen.”

  “Thanks,” she said, shoving on her helmet and adjusting the strap. “For the apology and that touching walk down memory lane, but I’m still not selling.”

  “Yeah, didn’t think you would,” he shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for making an offer, though.”

  Frankie climbed on the bike. She felt him watching her.

  “Did you ever explain things to Charles? How what you did saved the event?”

  She almost missed the question over the rumbling of her engine as she started her bike.

  “Yeah,” Frankie said, staring at the road and making sure not to betray herself. “He wasn’t interested.” Frankie flipped down the visor of her helmet and took off.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mittens was driving her insane.

  Okay, to be fair, it wasn’t the alpaca’s fault that he’d eaten the mesh on the screen door and the top two boards off the first step of the porch. Frankie should have come straight home after the hearing and fed him. Instead, fired up and frustrated by the day’s events, she burned up the pavement until she burned out the need to scream—or cry. The result: She was exhausted, Mittens had a stomachache, and now, instead of checking her vines to make sure none of the heavier clusters had broken from their ties, she was cutting down the boards to size.

  “Wark.”

  “Is that all you have to say for yourself?” Frankie asked, firing up the skill saw and making the last cut.

  “Wark. Wark. Wark.”

  Mittens, cured from his bellyache after eating every last flower in the flowerbed, pranced around proudly.

  “Let’s see if you’re still strutting when I have to sell your manly coat to make next year’s sweater sets so I can afford to buy new plants,” Frankie muttered, wiping the sweat off her brow and picking up her nail gun. “You do this to even one of my vines and I’ll be eating alpaca jerky for the next year. Got it?”

  Mittens walked over to Frankie and headbutted her shoulder. Moving to her neck, he began to nuzzle and emanate a low, happy hum. She shoved him back and looked up as the alpaca batted his big, thick lashes her way.

  “Flirting doesn’t work with me, dude. Hard to charm your way into to my panties of steel.”

  “Well, then you should consider some lace,” a weathered voice came from behind. “Lace likes to be charmed. Perhaps silk.”

  “We should take her to The Boulder Holder, Lucinda,” added a voice that sounded like the queen of England, only with an Italian accent. “They’re having a Harvest sale on all their autumn colored unmentionables.”

  Frankie shot the last nail in the board and turned around. Standing at the bottom of the walkway, in overalls and holding shovels, was Aunt Lucinda, her two sidekicks, ChiChi Ryo and Pricilla Moreau, and her cat. Okay, so ChiChi was dressed in a tan pantsuit and wearing gem encrusted gardening gloves, Aunt Luce was holding a pickax, and Mr. Puffins was wearing a sunbonnet, but they were all ready to do some serious manual labor.

  “Maybe my panties don’t want to be charmed,” Frankie said, dusting off her hands and hating that that uptight DeLuca flashed in her mind and she couldn’t help but wonder if he was more of a silk or lace kind of man.

  Mittens followed closely behind her, sniffing Mr. Puffins before taking an experimental nibble of the silk flower on the cat’s hat. Mr. Puffins narrowed his eyes but allowed the welcome.

  “Then you haven’t met the right charmer, dear,” Pricilla, world renowned baker and Napa County’s coupon poker champion—senior and otherwise—said with a grin that made Frankie want to cover her eyes.

  “Yeah, I remember what happened last time you said that.” Frankie had spent the night sucking face with a biker named Wreck, before her three wide-eyed grannies had gotten them all permanently banned from Anaconda, a strip joint in Reno.

  “Aren’t you going to invite us in?” Aunt Luce asked.

  “I thought you were here to work.” Frankie looked at her freshly cut boards, the setting sun, and back to the grannies. It was too late to start on anything now. They all knew it, which was why they smiled expectantly up at her. Even Mittens seemed to be grinning. “You aren’t going to go away until you come in and see the place, huh?”

  “Nope,” they said in unison.

  Frankie crossed her arms and took in a deep breath. She loved her aunt and surrogate grannies, she really did. But she knew why they were here. And she did not want to talk about the judge’s ruling, Charles’s stubborn pride, or how she was sharing land with a freaking DeLuca.

  “Not one word about idiotic men,” Frankie muttered and Mittens bared his teeth.

  “I just brought over dinner.” Pricilla held up a to-go bag from Sweet and Savory Bistro, the new local’s hot spot eatery that Pricilla and her granddaughter opened last month. “Lexi’s special pork loin.”

  It wasn’t an answer, she noticed. And she knew better than to believe the innocent blinking behind those bifocals. Frankie also knew better than anyone in town how much trouble these three could cause. She spent more time with them than people her own age. But Lexi’s pork loin smelled amazing and Frankie was starved. She’d split her last Pop Tart with Mittens before she’d left for court.

  Frankie gave them all a stern look for several long seconds before turning and walking into the house. “Watch your step.”

  She walked through the front room, silently cringing as three sets of orthopedic shoes squeaked on the wooden floor behind her. She knew what they saw. Nothing about the house was impressive. The building itself was sound, but the furniture was outdated, the wallpaper covered in grapes, and everything was coated in a fine layer of dust.

  Saul and Glow hadn’t lived in the house in years. When their kids went away to college they had moved closer to town. So, in addition to prepping for the upcoming harvest and planting her soon-to-be vineyard, Frankie had a decade of grime to deal with.

  They walked into a large farm style kitchen, with more grapes, and Frankie grabbed a bottle of her Cab off the table and four wine glasses. Pricilla pulled a sanitizing wipe from somewhe
re inside her crocheted purse and went about wiping the table down.

  ChiChi opened and closed every last cupboard and shook her head. “Child, how long have you been living here?”

  “Since Monday,” Frankie admitted.

  “How have you managed to eat when you don’t have a single plate, cup, or fork in the entire house?”

  Frankie looked at Luce who was stroking Mr. Puffins and rolled her eyes at ChiChi’s outrage over Frankie’s lack of homemaking skills. Luce was the one person who completely understood Frankie. They were two peas in an extremely screwed up pod.

  “I have cups.” Frankie held up her wine glasses and smiled.

  “You’ve got a set of shot glasses too. The ones I brought you as a housewarming present,” Luce added with a grin.

  “Yeah, but no water to wash them. I guess Saul had the same tank working both the house and the vineyard.”

  “I already called Walt,” Luce said. “He’ll be over first thing Monday to check out the water tank and see if he can get the water running, at least to the property.”

  “Shot glasses. No indoor plumbing,” ChiChi chided as though she didn’t, on occasion, sip homemade Angelica, aka fancy people’s moonshine, from teacups. “You two are as bad as my grandson, Trey. Boy doesn’t even have a place of his own and he’s coming on thirty.”

  “Lexi sent paper plates and plasticware,” Pricilla said. “So stop harassing the poor girl and help me serve before it gets cold. And Trey would get himself a place if you all didn’t pamper him.”

  ChiChi harrumphed but took her seat. In minutes, supper was being spooned up, plates were being passed, and a comforting hum of chatter filled the room. Frankie looked around the table at three incredible women whose friendship had outlasted wars, marriages, funerals, and feuds and found herself smiling. What would she give to belong to something as special as what they’d created?

  Oh, she had friends. There were Jordan Schultz and Regan Martin—well, Regan DeLuca now—but for whatever reason, Frankie had never been able to fully open up. Not the way these women did. There was nothing hidden between them. Even when ChiChi had married Geno DeLuca, breaking Charles’s heart and starting a feud that would forever change the shape of St. Helena, never once had their friendship waivered.