Can't Hurry Love

by Christie Ridgway

  She didn’t move a muscle in either direction. “What do you want?”

  He shook his head, ignoring her question. “You’re early. Who told you we’d be here?”

  “Grace—” she began, and at the word she knew his identity. Not a stranger. Grace’s ex-husband. He’d approached her at Vincenzo’s when she was there with Liam. And then again, on the Edenville street. He’d been wearing a ball cap that day and talked to her about his voodoo aunt and his superstitions. This guy had been watching her.

  “Ah, Grace.” He gestured her inside with his free hand. The hand with the gun continued aiming downward, at Liam. “As soon as I take care of you, the two of us will be back together.”

  Giuliana came farther into the room, her steps slow.

  “Sit down, sugar. I need to deal with your husband before I get to you.”

  Get to me how? Deal with him how? her brain screamed. But she tried appearing calm as she slid onto the last bench at the rear of the room. Twisting in her seat, she could see both him and Liam. “What’s, uh, what’s your name?”

  “Daniel.” He leaned down and fished under Liam’s inert body. When he straightened, he had a cell phone in his hand. “He whipped this out pretty fast. I don’t think he managed to call, though.” His thumb moved and she guessed he was checking the log.

  “What, uh, do you want, Daniel? I don’t have my purse with me, or even my keys to the winery offices, but I could get them. We have a little bit of cash there.”

  He glanced at her, his expression scornful.

  “Or wine! We have wine!” She gestured to the bottles on the table beside Liam. On the opposite wall was another table with even more blanc de blancs. “That’s a sparkling white, but we make a chardonnay and a very nice cab, too.”

  “I don’t want your money or your liquor, sugar.” He pocketed Liam’s cell phone. Then he strode toward her.

  She slid down the bench. “What do you want?”

  He held out his palm. “Your phone.”

  Stalling seemed like a good idea. “Why would you want that?”

  Annoyance crossed his face. “Sugar—”

  “I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know why you’d want anything to do with me and Liam.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. The body on the floor was so still.

  How bad was Liam hurt? “Let me go to him,” she pleaded. “I know first aid.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Daniel said. “I just coldcocked him with my gun. The fire will do the rest.”

  Her blood didn’t run cold. It just stopped running altogether. And her mind went very, very quiet. “Fire?”

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody with that arson at the apartment. I just wanted Grace out of there. I thought if she didn’t have a place to stay, that she’d come back to me.”

  Giuliana swallowed. “It was you who started that.”

  “Mmm.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think she’d really go through with it . . . leaving me. Sure, I knocked her around a few times, but that’s the only way to get through to her. Her dad told me that.”

  Giuliana’s fingers curled into fists. She wasn’t stupid enough to take a swing at him herself, but she wanted to knock him around, she did. After she’d been mugged, she had revenge fantasies for months. They were all coming back to her.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Liam twitch. Her belly tightened. Don’t call attention to yourself, she thought, sending him the silent message. Don’t give him another excuse to hurt you.

  “I remember our conversation on Market Night,” she said, babbling whatever came into her head so Daniel would keep focused on her. “I remember you have an aunt who practices voodoo.”

  “Yeah.” He frowned at her. “Now hand me your phone.”

  She slowly stood. “I don’t have one on me,” she said. Damn. It was a fact. She must have left it at the farmhouse. Wearing only her jeans and a Tanti Baci T-shirt, it was easy to prove the truth of her statement. “See?” She patted her front pockets, then twisted to show there was no telltale bulge in the back ones, either. Remembering something Grace had once said to her, she tried looking apologetic. “I’m forgetful. My papa said all three of us girls put together were hardly as useful as half a son would be.”

  Daniel’s mouth quirked. “Grace was like that. Always forgettin’ stuff. I like raspberry jam on Saturdays, not strawberry. I decided I like my shirts washed inside out, but could she remember that?”

  Petty bully, she thought to herself. Who knew you could be scared spitless and incensed at the same time? She bet if Grace remembered raspberry was his Saturday favorite then the next weekend he’d change it back to strawberry. Instead of showing her disgust, she sighed. “I have a memory like a sieve.”

  Still searching for another delay tactic, she darted her gaze around the room. It snagged on the framed photograph on the fireplace mantel with some other vintage Tanti Baci memorabilia. The items used to sit in the display case damaged during the vandalism. Hah. She could guess the culprit of that crime now.

  Her eyes focused on the picture of Anne and Alonzo, arm in arm between flourishing vines. “Uh, what was it you said about evil spirits, that day we met up?”

  “You don’t want to wake ’em.” His brows came together and he cocked his head. “What made you mention that?”

  “It’s just that we’re here in the wedding cottage.” Behind Daniel’s back, Liam’s legs moved again. Then she saw him wince and his eyes half opened. She raised her voice, hoping to help orient him. “We’re here in the cottage of the couple who founded the winery, Daniel. My great-great-grandparents. They’re supposed to haunt the place.”

  The man twitched. “Nah.”

  “Oh, yeah. When you were married, didn’t Grace ever tell you that? It’s common knowledge in Edenville.”

  “She’s a quiet thing,” he said. “When I get rid of this place, then she’s going to see that she needs to come back to me. Without a job, she’ll have to.”

  Panic tightened her throat. Get rid of this place? “Tanti Baci has been in my family for a hundred years.”

  “Yeah? Grace was my wife for three. She’d still be my wife if you hadn’t given her a job.”

  “I’ll fire her. Right now. Give me Liam’s cell phone, and I’ll call her this instant and tell her not to come to work tomorrow.” She’d call 911 first. Or after. She just needed to get her hands on that phone!

  Daniel sighed. “My wife is stubborn when she gets a mind to be. You could fire her and she’d still be back here tomorrow. I think it’s best if I stick to the plan. Burn the place down, with your meddling self and your husband inside the cottage. I’ll get the offices next. That farmhouse while I’m at it.”

  “Oh, Anne and Alonzo will be very unhappy if any of that happens.” Giuliana didn’t have to fake her shudder.

  “How quickly does a vineyard burn?” Daniel asked, as if it was a perfectly natural question.

  Perfectly natural to discuss the destruction of her heritage. Her family. Not only was he talking about harming her and Liam, but Allie, Penn, Stevie, and Jack were at the farmhouse. And Myauntiescool Andspoilsme.

  Her blood was running cold now, but a fiery resolve was kindling in her belly. “Anne and Alonzo would really hate for something to happen to the vines,” she asserted. “People have seen them, you know. Their ghosts. We had a man make off with some of our root stock once. Not half a mile away, he ran into a ditch and was thrown through his windshield. As he lay dying, bleeding from a wound that sliced his scalp from his skull, he whispered to the emergency workers he saw Alonzo Baci standing in the middle of the road, a pitchfork in his hand.”

  There was a sheen of sweat on Daniel’s upper lip and a little tic was fluttering the corner of his right eye. Over his shoulder, she saw that Liam was on the move, crawling toward their captor, the wine bottle that had been beside him in his hand. Her heart started beating in double time, but she didn’t let her focus stray.

  “Then
there was what we call the Dick and Balls incident.”

  Daniel swallowed. “What was that?”

  “Some young buck was riding his motorcycle through the rows, trying to impress my baby sister. He lost control and plowed through several vines. The motorcycle went down and he slid along the dirt, only stopping once his—well—private parts were speared by a stake his wild riding had dislodged. He begged the two people that appeared beside him for help, but they just laughed at his predicament. Later he identified them as my great-great-grandparents.

  “We call him . . .” Noting the creeped-out look on their captor’s face, she paused for effect.

  Daniel licked his lips. “You call him—”

  Pop!

  The sound cracked like a gun shot. Daniel jumped, whirled, his arm lifting.

  From the opposite direction: Pop! Pop!

  When he spun the other way, Giuliana shoved at him with all her might. He stumbled into Liam, crouched at his feet, who took advantage of the other man’s imbalance and yanked him down, his hands going for the wrist of the arm with the gun. Giuliana leapt onto the villain’s chest, then gripped his hair in her hand and lifted his head, only to slam it into the ground.

  Adrenaline pouring through her like rocket fuel, she slammed it again. Then again. Nobody threatened her land or her family. Nobody hurt her man. She slammed it again.

  “Jules.” She heard her name from a thousand miles away. “Jules, he’s out.”

  Her fingers still cramped in Daniel’s hair, she looked over. Liam had the gun and he was rising to a stand. “I’ll get the rope.”

  She was breathing hard and her hand was locked in a claw she couldn’t straighten. When Liam returned with the coil, he gently pulled her free. As he began unraveling the rope, she crawled toward the fallen cell phone. She wasn’t convinced her knees would bear her weight.

  “Clever you,” she said, her voice a croak as she bypassed the puddle of wine spilling from the abandoned bottle. “Popping the cork. It sounded like a gunshot and startled him.”

  Liam grunted as he rolled Daniel over so he could tie his hands behind his back.

  “But you just had the one bottle,” she said, frowning. “How’d you make those other two blow?”

  Liam slid her an enigmatic look. “I didn’t.”

  Less than twelve hours after the police carted off Daniel Mowdray, Liam let himself back into the wedding cottage. His belly jumped as his gaze found a figure silhouetted by the window.

  His pulse didn’t stop its chatter when he saw that it was Giuliana. “You should be back at the farmhouse,” he said. He’d made sure she was safely there, surrounded by her sisters and their husbands, before he’d headed for his own home in the early-morning hours. “You’ve got to be exhausted.”

  She drifted toward him, looking anything but tired in a pair of faded sweatpants and her “You Had Me at Merlot” T-shirt. Her expression was relaxed and there was a pretty flush on her cheeks and a sparkle in her tip-tilted eyes.

  “I feel pretty great,” she said.

  “You look pretty great,” he murmured. Beautiful. “But what are you doing?”

  “Reclaiming the cottage. I’m not letting that sleaze contaminate one of Tanti Baci’s treasures.”

  He nodded, proud of her. Not just for that, but because he’d found out last night that she was giving second chances a shot and had decided against selling the land. It made the success of the Vow-Over Weekend just that much more important. “I talked to the police. I think we can keep the incident quiet, at least until Sunday when the celebration is over.”

  “Last night you told them the Vow-Over Weekend was why you were here. Someone called who said he was from the tent rental company?”

  “Yeah, and there was a problem I needed to address immediately. When I got here, I saw the light on in the cottage.”

  “He hit you over the head when you came inside?” she asked.

  “Apparently his plan was to get me to lure you here with a call when I came to. Then he’d tie you up, too, and start a fire.” Thinking about it, Liam wished he’d been rougher when wrestling the gun away. And that he’d gotten in a few head drops himself, after he’d put a stop to Giuliana. “Crazy son of a bitch.”

  “Superstitious, crazy son of a bitch.”

  “Smart woman, to keep his attention like that—the Dick and Balls incident?”

  A small smile curved her lips. “It bought us some time.”

  Neither one of them mentioned those mysterious and well-timed popping corks.

  She cocked her head, studying him. “But what brought you here?”

  Stalling, he slid his hands into his pockets and worried the item he’d tucked into the right one. “Uh . . .” A good excuse didn’t immediately occur to him.

  Giuliana ran her hand along the back of one of the benches, then slid onto the seat, in the exact place she’d been the night before when he’d come around. Finding her there, at the mercy of the man who’d just knocked him out, had taken him from quasi-conscious to fully awake in a split second.

  “How’s your head?” she asked, as if she could read his mind.

  He struggled to keep his composure, still plagued by that memory of her confronting the man with the gun. “This past week has been a revelation, in more ways than one. Turns out my head’s damn hard.”

  She smiled. “No surprise to me.”

  “We’re both stubborn.” He hesitated. “I guess that’s why neither one of us filed for divorce.”

  “You’d guess wrong.”

  “Yeah.” He blew out a breath. “That wasn’t it.”

  And then all his cool fled. One second he was standing by the door, and the next he was at her feet, his head in her lap, his arms around her waist. “Jules,” he said. “Jules, I love you.”

  To hell with Calvin Bennett and whatever legacy he’d left behind. Liam would love this woman generously or die trying—he wasn’t giving her up this time without a fight. “I love you so much.”

  She curled over him, her hands in his hair. “I’ve never been so happy to hear anything in my whole life.”

  He looked up, into her beautiful face, his heart feeling too big for his chest. “You’re crying.” His thumbs brushed at her tears.

  And just like the day before, she smiled through them. “And so are you.”

  He thought he owed them to her. “God, Jules. I didn’t have the words to tell you how sorry I was about our baby.”

  “I understand that now.” She stroked his hair back from his forehead. “I shouldn’t have run away. I should have run to you and then maybe we could have figured out the words together.”

  “I don’t know. I was pretty messed up.”

  “Then let’s talk about the present. Now, I think we can make this work. Stevie told me something about Jack. She said he makes her feel safe and that’s what you do for me, too. Take last night—I knew that together we’d be all right.”

  “I hope to God that’s the last time we’re put to the test.”

  “Oh, I suppose we’ll be tested again, don’t you? We probably know better than most people that it takes more than . . .”

  “Love,” he said, adamant. “Passion.”

  She nodded. “That it takes more than love and passion to make a relationship work.”

  “I need to realize I can’t—and shouldn’t—smother my feelings.”

  “I need to be willing to risk loss.” She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Are we up to it?”

  “Damn straight.” His hands cupping her face, he brought her mouth to his for a sweet, sealing kiss.

  When she broke away, they were both already breathing hard. “I’m still not clear on why you came to the cottage this morning.”

  His gaze slid away from hers. “Do you have to know?”

  “Now that you asked that?” In her gaze, he glimpsed the often pesky girl of his childhood. “Of course.”

  He put his hand in his right pocket. “You’ll laugh.”

  �
��Only better and better.” And she did laugh when he shot her a disgruntled look. “Okay, I won’t.” Despite her primmed mouth, her eyes danced.

  “The cottage seemed like a good place to think.” Though he’d made up his mind the day before, when he’d spotted her in the vines. When he’d seen her with a baby in her arms and realized that he couldn’t protect her or himself from hurt and loss. It had been absolutely clear at that moment that he wanted to face life and death with Giuliana, not without her. “An experience like we had last night . . . it can clarify things.”

  The person who knew him best in the world shoved at his shoulder. “You are so full of it. That’s not why you came.”

  It felt good to laugh himself. “Fine. I’m a sentimental fool. I was looking for their blessing. And for a little good luck. I’m here to get Anne and Alonzo’s ghostly okay on this.” Withdrawing his hand from his pocket, he presented her with the glass bead bracelet that he’d found beneath the pillows of his bed. “We’ll get a ring, too, but . . .”

  Her expression went serious, and her eyes filled, again, with tears. He thought it was a good sign. “Liam Bennett, you are a sentimental fool,” she whispered.

  “I already said that.” He was still kneeling at her feet, so he had to duck his head to catch her gaze with his. “Giuliana, will you marry me?”

  “Yes, I’ll marry you.” She launched herself forward, and he caught her in his arms. “I already said that, too.”

  His heart beat hard against hers. “It bears repeating.”

  It wasn’t their only do-over. They spoke their vows again, in front of family and friends at the fiftieth celebration of the wedding wine. Liam watched his wife walk down the aisle in Anne and Alonzo’s cottage, feeling just like Penn. He barely suppressed beating his chest as she drew nearer.

  She carried pink and purple orchids and had a few tucked in the upsweep of her hair. Her dress hugged her small waist and then belled in unadorned layers of some frothy fabric. Ed and Jed from the hardware store claimed she looked just like Audrey Hepburn. Stevie had whispered that a nearby bridal shop and the local alterations expert had colluded to get it ready in record time.