by Trish Morey
‘This is more like the kind of country I’m used to,’ Franco said alongside her, interrupting her thoughts. The land here dipped and rose, valley floors planted as market gardens, hillsides under orchard or vines, interspersed with pockets of bush. ‘Without the benefit of your gum trees.’
Holly’s ears pricked up. Beyond offering a name of the region, Franco had never willingly spoken of where he lived. Previously he’d clamped if the conversation edged anywhere near his life back in Italy or his family for that matter. It had irritated her at the time but she hadn’t been interested enough to persist. He’d been something to be tolerated for the duration, that was all. But that was before, when she’d thought of him more as an inconvenience than a man. Now the man seemed front and centre of her imagination. Now she wanted to know all she could about him.
‘It must be beautiful where you come from.’
‘You’ve never been to Italy?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve never been overseas.’
‘Never?’
She shook her head again. ‘There was never the money. And then, when things improved, there was never the time.’ She indicated he should turn right at the next intersection and then asked, ‘Is it the Piacenza region where your mother comes from as well?’
He slowed, waiting for an oncoming car to pass before he could make the turn. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Well, your mother is Italian and you’re living in Italy and I thought—well, I just wondered …’
‘She came from that region, yes.’
‘She’s not there now?’
‘Not as far as I can tell.’
‘You … don’t know where she is?’
‘Nobody knows where she is.’
Holly blinked. ‘But surely …?’
He cursed in Italian under his breath, a curse he’d heard his mother fling at his father when he was just a child, before he answered, his mood as wintry as the thick atmosphere and the heavy sky. ‘Nobody knows,’ he snapped. ‘Now, which way at this next intersection?’
She sank back into her seat. ‘Straight ahead, then right at the next town.’
She shut up then, thank God, giving him the breathing space to get his temperature under control. As if eight hours stuck alongside her in the car wasn’t enough, now she had to bring up his mother, scratching away at wounds that were best left alone.
Who knew where his mother was? Who knew if she was alive or dead? Not him. Sure, he might have wondered once, might have imagined or even hoped as a rebellious teenager that he’d find her hiding out amongst the hills and vineyards of Piacenza, but that was a long time ago and he’d long ceased wondering.
After all, why should he care after the woman had walked out on the family and left them all to rot?
Was it any wonder his siblings had gone wild? Rich, good-looking, untamed. Was it any wonder they could fill gossip magazines all by themselves?
He snorted. Not that he’d been much better.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Whoever had coined that phrase knew what they were talking about. But thank God he’d managed to keep his private life private. Thank God the paparazzi had long given up on him as the boring Chatsfield by the time Michele had turned up on his doorstep needing help.
He felt a familiar ache in his side, not helped by sitting so long in the car. He didn’t want to think about Michele. He didn’t want to think about that year. That loss.
The woman beside him shifted in her seat and he caught a whiff of her scent, something light and lemony and fresh. Like she was, he thought. Natural and unspoilt and so different to the type of women he was usually attracted to.
He hadn’t set out to be attracted to her, and yet …
He turned his head. She was staring straight ahead, her arms crossed, and if he didn’t know better he’d think she was sulking.
Maybe he’d been a bit hard on her, but after eight hours sitting so close it was no wonder he was feeling on edge.
He changed down a gear for a bend and let his fingers stray, his fingertips just grazing the fabric of her work pants. She jumped like he’d branded her and he smiled.
Josh had tried to warn him off and he’d listened. He hadn’t set out to seduce anyone, let alone prickly Ms Purman, and he didn’t resent getting the warning. But then he remembered that stolen kiss and he’d seen the way she’d watched him all this week. He’d seen the desire and the longing building in their blue depths while he’d been thinking about her in ways that weren’t entirely honourable himself. Did she realise those eyes were like windows to her thoughts?
And Josh had mentioned nothing about consenting adults.
Not that she was likely to consent to anything right now, and with good reason. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t talk much about my mother. I generally don’t talk about my family at all.’
‘I noticed,’ she said, her head swinging around. ‘Why is that?’
He shrugged, slowing the car as they came up behind a fruit-and-vegetable truck that was struggling along the windy road. ‘I don’t have a lot to do with them. Any of them.’
‘Why not? Because you don’t approve of their lifestyle?’
He had never approved, he’d always thought he was better than that—until Michele had appeared out of the blue—but that wasn’t the reason. ‘I left home when I was sixteen. I was angry and rebellious and decided I didn’t want to live in a media circus any more.’
She sighed and sat back in her seat. ‘If I had brothers and sisters I’d see them all the time. I’d love to be part of a big family.’
‘What? Even if it was a family like the Chatsfields?’
‘They’d still be my family. I can imagine Christmas with a house fit to bursting and everybody talking at once and lashings of food on the table. You’re so lucky.’
Was he? He’d never felt lucky. He’d felt … lost—like he’d never belonged. So he’d turned his back on being one of a crowd and fought hard to forge his own identity, fighting to get himself and keep himself out of the limelight.
But now he wondered about his family. He knew what the magazines said about them, but how were they really? Antonio, Lucilla and Nicolo—he didn’t even know if they had partners or were married. And what of his younger siblings, the twins, Orsino and Lucca, and Cara, who had been only seven when he had left?
Only one year older than Nikki when she had died.
He swallowed. Did Cara even remember him? Remember the games of cricket they’d played before he’d left? Remember the warnings he’d tried to give her about the big bad world around them?
And then Holly said something that sounded like koala but she was so casual he thought he must have misheard until she pointed and he was glad the truck in front was going too slowly because he saw it curled high up in a tree.
She spotted another a little farther along, this time with a baby clutched to its mother’s chest.
Nikki would have been beside herself. She’d loved animals, large and small, and he and Michele had taken her to the zoo as many times as her failing body would allow. When she’d seen her first real live koala, she’d grinned so hard her little face had nearly split in two.
He found a place to pull off and they walked back for a closer look. The mother koala chewed on a gum leaf and blinked at them unconcerned while the joey slept oblivious on her chest. He took a photo for Nikki, even though his daughter would never see it, but the other children in Nikki’s Ward would no doubt enjoy it.
‘A souvenir of your trip?’ she asked.
‘Something for a friend,’ he said, and left it at that.
They walked back to the car and he listened as Holly told him about the koalas, her delight in the furry creatures palpable, and it shook off his melancholy. He liked the way she looked when she was happy. He liked what it did to light up her turquoise eyes and put colour in those sensual lips.
He wondered what it would be like to be the one to make her eyes light up like that and put a flush in those p
ink cheeks. And he wondered whether he might soon get to find out.
‘A couple more kilometres down this road,’ she said back in the car and after they’d made the final turn. ‘You’ll see our sign out front.’
They drove along a winding valley lined by towering eucalyptus trees with creamy smooth trunks, stately and majestic.
‘Candlebark gums,’ she told him when he mentioned them in passing. ‘Eucalyptus rubida.’
He recognised it. ‘The name of your sparkling wine.’
‘Ten out of ten,’ she said with a smile, sounding impressed. ‘We wanted a name that reflected this area. And the vines sit shoulder to shoulder with the candlebarks—it just seemed a natural fit.’
He turned up the long driveway, towards a house set up high on one side beyond which vines marched up the hillside.
‘The manager’s away on holiday with his family right now so you can park anywhere.’
‘We’ve got the whole place to ourselves?’
It was a test. He’d intended it to be one. It would either mean nothing to her, or something.
She blinked, a delicious blush colouring her cheeks, the tip of her pink tongue hovering tremulously at her top lip.
Bullseye.
She cleared her throat. Avoided his eyes. ‘It actually means we should be able to get this wine disgorged and dosaged without interruption and be back on the road in no time.’
It was a reasonable answer, she thought, under the circumstances. It was the right answer if you were thinking about the job at hand and not about the humming in your veins and vague possibilities that he might not even have intended.
And if he had meant anything else, she’d soon know it.
‘After the delays on the highway, you think we’ll get everything done and make it back today?’
His eyes had a glint to them, his lips a faint curve, and his words put her in mind of another answer and reminded her of the key to the guesthouse weighing heavily on her conscience.
Because between the heavy sky and sodden earth, between the barren vines and the towering gums, something had changed between them. There was an added note to his voice, mischievous. Challenging. Maybe even daring.
Making him seem more playful than ever.
Infinitely more interesting.
And infinitely more dangerous.
Did she dare test it?
She’d never been so tempted.
But what kind of fool would she look if she gave in to temptation. What was in it for her? Making love to this man—a Chatsfield of all people—after all she’d said about the family? Wasn’t that some kind of surrender after he’d blown into their lives, practically demanding the keys to the estate, and she’d done everything she possibly could to fight him off?
How would it look if she slept with the man now?
And yet still she felt the pull and the lure of him, with every fibre of her being.
‘Let’s see how far we get,’ she said, not even wanting to think how that could be construed as she jumped from the car.
The air was cold and sharp, her breath turning to mist. They only needed ten dozen bottles and a couple extra for the cellar door supply. It shouldn’t take long with Franco to help her.
And they could be back on the road again tonight, or they wouldn’t …
She took the path around the house and headed straight to the stone building behind, and if the outside of it reminded him of an old French barn, the inside was some kind of sparkling wine lover’s paradise. She snapped on lights and the bottle neck freezer and went to fiddle with a fireplace and get some heat into the place while he was content to turn in a circle and breathe it all in.
Slate floor, exposed timber beams and riddling racks lining the stone walls, the racks set on a gentle slope with bottles standing upside down inside them on an angle. Hundreds and hundreds of bottles. Instinctively his hand reached out for one bottle, giving it the slightest of shakes and a quarter turn.
Apparently she noticed. ‘You can give me a hand with the riddling while we’re waiting for the freezer to get cold enough for the disgorging,’ she said as the fire in the stove caught, sending an orange glow into the room and illuminating artworks hanging above the racks.
‘This is something,’ he said, honestly impressed. ‘I knew you had a vineyard up here, but this?’
‘You like it? I don’t get to spend a whole lot of time here, but this baby is my pride and joy. Gus wasn’t keen being so far from our Coonawarra operation, but a decent sparkling was the one thing we didn’t have in our arsenal.’
‘What does he think now?’
She lifted an eyebrow. ‘Seriously?’
He smiled back. She was right, stupid question. The longer he was here, the more he was impressed with what this woman had achieved with her vines and her wines. He could scarcely believe he’d ever thought of her as drab. Maybe because that was before he’d stumbled upon the colour in her turquoise eyes and her pink lips. Maybe because, when she smiled, she looked anything but drab.
He forced his attention back to the bottles lining the wall. ‘When was this lot bottled?’
He watched her lightly run her hand over a row of bottles as she walked along, almost as if she was caressing them. The wine whisperer at work. But that wasn’t the only thing he noticed. Because there was a sway in those hips as she moved. Subtle but there. And he knew that somewhere under those khaki clothes hid the body of a woman, curvy and lush.
She was mad if she thought they were going anywhere tonight.
‘If you’re talking this year’s vintage, not that long ago. After we picked, the juice spent five months in new French oak barrels before being bottled. So they’re still young and we’ll just leave them on lees. The longer on lees, the more biscuity the wine, so there’s no rush.’ And then she stopped and smiled. ‘But you know all that already.’
He did, but he liked listening to her nonetheless. He’d met plenty of winemakers in his time, some of them pompous old toads who liked to think themselves geniuses. But Holly made what she did sound simple, as if anyone could do it. He knew differently. There was a science to winemaking, of course, but there was also an art. A magic.
Holly had that magic, in spades.
And he itched to hold that magic in his hands and feel it when she came apart. Was there a chance it might happen tonight?
With a wrench he forced his mind back to the wine.
‘You do all your disgorging here?’ It seemed hard to believe they could run such a successful operation from two such modest sites.
‘Mostly. It works fine. Unless someone makes a big order, we usually only dosage a few dozen at a time. We’ll fill this order from last year’s vintage and I reckon it’ll go down a treat at that wedding.’
‘How do you propose filling the Chatsfield order the way you now work?’
The lights in her eyes flared. ‘You mean, how do I propose filling the order if I sign the contract?’
Once upon a time, not so long ago, that argument would have been a whole lot more convincing.
‘Do you really think there’s any doubt now?’
She turned away, her hand sweeping over bottle bases like they were her children. ‘We’ll disgorge and dosage in bigger lots, that’s all. Freight over several dozen at a time. But still, the plan will be to keep the wine on lees as long as possible. I’m not into factory-scale production. That’s not the way we operate, and I’m guessing it’s not the reason why Chatsfield Hotels picked us as their chosen supplier.’
She turned around a beat later, her eyes showing that she’d met his challenge head-on and faced it down. Her turquoise eyes gleamed in the light of the fire. ‘And now we’d better get this show on the road.’
Holly took one side of the room, Franco the other. They worked quickly without rushing, turning bottles a quarter turn to shift the lees in the neck of the bottle so it didn’t get stuck in the microscopic ridges in the glass, and with the pot-bellied stove crackling away and pumpin
g out heat, soon it didn’t feel cold in the room at all.
They made a pretty good team, she thought, aware of the fluid movements of the man on the other side of the room moving to the rhythmic sounds of glass bumping against wood.
He’d stripped off his jacket and his shirt hugged his broad shoulders as he reached up to the highest bottles, the fabric pulling tight down his back to the belted moleskins he looked so good in.
If he made a move on her tonight, would she take it?
Should she?
He glanced over his shoulder and caught her spying on him. He smiled. ‘Checking up on me?’
She smiled back. ‘Yes.’
He laughed and turned back around, and she smiled at the bottles on the wall and had to remember to breathe.
What was she thinking?
He was a Chatsfield.
And yes, he was that, but he was also as good-looking as sin and he’d be gone in a few short weeks and it wasn’t like she really had to like him.
And when it all came down to it, she didn’t really dislike him. Not any more. Otherwise she couldn’t even begin to consider the germ of the idea that had been spinning in her mind all day. Sure, she hated the way he’d turned up, expecting them all to fall at his feet and hand over all that he’d expected, but he was more than that. He’d proven it in the couple of weeks since with a work ethic she never would have believed possible.
As for what was in it for her, well, if he was interested, it might even help her out with something that had been worrying her for a while.
He seemed interested …
And then they ran out of bottles and she checked the temperature in the freezer and declared it cold enough to freeze the neck of the bottles and they started the real work, placing bottles neck-down into the freezing liquid.
She’d planned the workspace to suit herself. There was no automated production line like you’d find in a factory set up for big volume processing. This was a boutique enterprise and the boutique label meant that the disgorging, dosaging, corking and caging functions were all wedged between the freezer and a bar topped by a single massive slab of timber.
Working by herself had never presented any problems.