by Marina Adair
“Excuse us,” Jordan said, taking Frankie by the arm and pulling her away. Before Jordan could begin her lecture on what Frankie was positive would be inappropriate adult-child relations, her brother Adam came striding over.
“No dress-up today, kids,” he said.
The kids booed.
Ava and every mother chaperone in the firehouse—expect Regan DeLuca, who was bouncing a burrito wrapped Baby Sofie—stared, not even bothering to hide their interest. He got that a lot.
Adam had the Baudouin swagger and beefcake build and was the leader of an elite smoke-jumper team. Which meant he was an expert at parachuting out of planes to get behind fire lines and sweet talking his way behind panty lines. Even dressed in a pair of dark blue work pants and matching SHFD t-shirt and ball cap, he looked pretty impressive. And the women took notice. But even though he was three years older and five inches taller than her five-ten, she could still whoop him in darts.
“But if you make your way out front, one lucky Scout can run the siren,” he added and the kids cheered.
Arguing over who got to sit in the fire engine, the group followed Probie through the opened bay door toward the shiny red truck. It was as clean and charming as the rest of the station. Built in 1912, the only firehouse in the city limits was a historical brick-faced building with stone encasings framing the three massive arched doors. Situated at the end of Main Street, the St. Helena Garden Club took special care in tending to the rose-filled planter boxes and pansies filled wine barrels that lined the curb.
“Thanks for setting this up, Adam,” Regan said in a soothing singsong voice, most likely to keep the demon spawn from waking up.
“Yeah, and thanks for letting Ava and me join in,” Jordan said, offering up her best smile. “Now, if I could just ask one more favor.”
Adam gave her a weary once-over. “Last time you asked me for a favor, I ended up in nothing but a scarf and underwear.”
Jordan patted him on the arm. “And that calendar made my year as PTA President the largest grossing year ever. So thank you. Oh, and thanks in advance for this.” Without giving Adam a chance to see what was coming, Jordan reached up, wrapped one hand around his neck and planted a fat kiss on his lips.
“What the hell was that?” Adam asked, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
“Don’t worry, Smoky, I remember what your underwear looked like when they had the red Power Ranger plastered across the crotch,” Jordan said, not an ounce of interest in her eyes. “I was just making sure that you were so unappealing Ava wouldn’t be tempted to sneak out and see if your bell needs ringing.”
Adam frowned. “Ava is what, all of sixteen?”
Jordan looked over her shoulder at her daughter who, dressed in a strip of denim held together by a chain, glared back. Adam followed her gaze.
“Holy shit, when did she get so…” Adam trailed off, his hands making a Ba-dow! gesture.
“Do you know what I’d give to go back to the slobber and poop phase?” Jordan sent Baby Sofie a longing look, then stifled a yawn. Regan did the same and Frankie was pretty sure that both friends spent most of last night pacing outside their kids’ doors.
And here Frankie was complaining because Mittens had gnawed through the porch rail.
“Baudouin,” Captain Roman Brady hollered from the captain’s office. “Get in here.”
“Be right back.” Adam skulked off, but not before sending Jordan a hard glare. And Frankie knew that her friend’s kiss had a dual purpose: to gross out Ava and piss off Roman.
“And you wonder where Ava gets it,” Frankie said.
“The man has been sniffing around my skirt for months and won’t make a move. I was just giving him some inspiration.”
Adam stopped at the door to whisper something in Probie’s ear. Probie straightened, slack jawed, and took a ginormous step back. “Sixteen! I swear I thought she was a nanny or something.”
“Or something,” Adam said over his shoulder. He shut the captain’s door, cutting off the grumpy grumbles of his boss.
“Oh, look what I picked up this morning.” Jordan dug through her enormous purse and pulled out a card. It was black, glossy, professional, shaped like a wine label, and exactly what Frankie needed if she was going to sell her wine for top dollar.
“This is amazing.” She turned the promotional card for her winery over several times, swallowing back the weird urge to hug her friend with each flip.
Last week, after she’d discovered that Susan was going in a different, more DeLuca, direction, Frankie sucked it up and did something that normally gave her hives. She asked for help.
If she was going to sell her futures to an elite clientele, she needed to put on a polished front and give them a reason to feel comfortable saying yes to a risk. For a girl who considered competitive darts as an effective way of networking, Frankie sought out the two most polished people she knew to give her winery a professional makeover.
“I don’t know what to say,” Frankie admitted. Actually, she knew what she was supposed to say to her best friends who had gone out of their way to make Frankie’s dream that much more of a reality. But for some reason the words “Thank you” didn’t seem enough, and anything remotely close to “I love you” made her palms sweat. So she settled on, “You guys rock.”
“Well, the old logo promised a swift kick to the groin with every bottle,” Jordan said. “And I would love to take all the credit, but since Regan is the resident marketing goddess and standing right here, it’s probably best to admit that I had her do all the fancy stuff.”
“Not fancy,” Regan clarified, leaning in and pointing to the logo. She was so close that Frankie got a sniff of, well she didn’t know what, but it reminded her of Mr. Puffins when he was a kitten. “I polished it a bit, reworked your logo and made the t in Red Steel resemble the sword you wanted.”
“It’s in my family’s crest.” Frankie traced a finger over the logo. It was professional and classy, and still somehow her.
Charles had made it clear that Frankie couldn’t use the Baudouin name with connection to her wine. But he couldn’t stop her from using elements of her heritage.
“I changed the font, went with matted onyx for the background and glossy, deep red for the accent color. I think it looks elegant, sophisticated with the appropriate amount of bad-assery.”
There it was again. That powdery, fresh scent.
Frankie looked at Baby Sofie sleeping and leaned closer. “Do you Febreze her?” She inhaled deep through her nose. “The other kids smelled like a petting zoo and hot ketchup. And she smells like.” Sniff. Sniff. “New car.”
“It’s baby powder,” Regan said smiling. “Want to hold her?”
“Hell no.” Frankie stuffed her free hand in her pocket. “Just wondering if it works on alpacas. Or would it mess up his fur?”
“Why don’t you just get one of those pine-scented car fresheners and hang it around his neck,” Jordan offered. She took the card and turned it over. “I ordered a thousand but don’t worry. My supplier gave it to me at a huge discount and even threw in dual-sided for free, so I had them list your contact info, a little history about Sorrento Ranch, and some of the praise you’ve received over the years on the back.”
Frankie looked down the list of quotes, stunned at what industry people had said about her wine. “Where did you get these quotes?”
“I made a few calls.” Jordan shrugged as if it were no big deal. But to Frankie, it was huge. No one had ever done anything like this for her before. And suddenly she didn’t feel so alone.
“Speaking of calls, have you talked to Nate since the almost bed-sex?” Jordan asked.
“We were on the bed, but trust me it was nowhere near bed-sex.”
“If it wasn’t bed-sex, then how come when I showed up to the studio for my seven a.m. Buddha Baby Yoga class, you were half asleep on the stoop?”
“Because I missed my best friend.”
Jordan just looked at her.
>
“What?”
“Admit it, Nate gets to you. He always has and instead of talking about what happened, you got scared and hid.”
“I’m not scared and I don’t hide.” Which was why, after the DeLuca three had left, she had specifically told Nate she was sleeping when he knocked on her door. When she’d heard his loafers squeak down the hall and away from her room, she thought she was in the clear. Until her phone buzzed with a text. It was the same text she’d been re-reading all week. The reason why she had woken up on Get Bent’s stoop with yoga mat in hand:
SLEEPING HUH? I CAN SMELL YOUR SHORTS ON FIRE FROM DOWN THE HALL. I’LL GIVE YOU TONIGHT, BUT WE WILL TALK IN THE MORNING.
Closely followed by:
NIGHT, SWEET CHEEKS.
“Uh-huh. So why haven’t you called him yet?”
Frankie shrugged. “I figure he’s busy with their vineyard. Prepping it for the harvest.”
Between yoga, lunch with Luce, checking on her saplings, and doing a few practice runs for the Pick Till You Punt with Jordan, Frankie had managed to keep herself busy until well into Saturday evening, where she had no option but to go home and face the sexy Italian in the room.
Only, when she’d arrived at the ranch, she found it shy one DeLuca. In his place was a note, perfectly folded and addressed to her, sitting on the kitchen counter. It explained that he had to take a last minute trip south to check on their Santa Barbara property and that he would be back Friday at the latest.
A dry Indian Summer combined with a couple of stupid campers in Los Padres National Forest had ignited a wildfire. The strong winds had quickly spread the flames north through the Santa Ynez Mountains, a range that butted up to Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez Valley, threatening some of the top vineyards outside Napa Valley. Including Charles’s latest four-hundred acre noose.
When Luce told Frankie that Charles had already sent a few extra hands down to help prepare for the worst, if the worst came, her heart pinched. Their business would be sunk if anything happened to that land, and yet she wasn’t allowed to help protect it—a job that a few months would have fallen under her purview.
So she wasn’t surprised that Nate had taken the first flight out as well. The DeLuca’s owned several premium vineyards in the Santa Barbara area, and if there was trouble, she knew he’d want to be in the thick of it.
What had surprise her though was that on the back of his note he’d written a SWEET CHEEKS CHECK LIST.
First item under the household category was to pick up carrots for Mittens but to make sure that they were, secondly, attached to the tops since, thirdly, Mittens only liked the green portion of the vegetable, and he needed to be, fourth, fed twice daily. As though Frankie didn’t already know all of this.
The second column of the list addressed the business side of their partnership, clearly outlining that Tanner would be by Wednesday to measure for the new tank, which would be delivered sometime next week, marking the six remaining weeks she had to find one hundred and fifty thousand dollars or she would have to sell her grapes—most likely to the sexy Italian who at the end of his very detailed and incredibly annoying list told her to keep Friday clear for dinner and a long talk, which Frankie knew would lead to bed-sex.
The exact reason why she’d bailed Saturday morning in the first place. Because although she could lie to Jordan, she was never one to lie to herself. What happened between them four days ago might not have taken place while lying on the bed, but the way her heart melted when he’d touched her, the way it still stuttered when she thought of how he’d looked at her, Frankie knew that with Nate something was different. The kind of different that told her they could have been anywhere and it still would have been bed-sex worthy.
A dangerous place to be when there was no future for them outside of the bed.
A loud shrill of the sirens blared and the kids’ screams of delight echoed throughout the empty engine bays.
“Yes, sir.” Adam stalked out of the captain’s office, frustration underlining his respectful tone.
He took off his hat and made his way across the bay. He let out a big breath and Frankie stilled. Something was wrong. She could see it in the way his face furrowed. Adam never furrowed; he was the easy going one of the family.
“Is everything all right?” Frankie met him halfway. “Is it grandpa?”
“No, nothing like that.” Adam ran a hand though his spiky hat hair. “The Cachuma Fork fire jumped the fire lines and is headed toward the Santa Ynez Valley. Captain’s sending me down as part of a task force situated at the base of the hills to cut a new line and wait for the fire to come to us, so we can knock it out before it reaches the vineyards.”
“How bad is it?”
“I leave in an hour.”
That bad. “If anything happens to the south county vineyard—” she started.
“I know.” Adam shook his head. “Right now I’m more worried that I won’t make it back in time to for the Pick Till You Punt.”
“Oh.” Frankie’s heart sank because with Dax back overseas and Jonah working the event in an official capacity, she was out a team. But she brushed it off quickly. “Don’t be. We’re good.”
“You’re short one person, which is why I was going to talk to Jonah and ask to fill in for me,” Adam said.
“No, don’t do that. I’ll work it out. You just focus on staying safe.” She gave him a Baudouin family hug—which consisted of a swift punch to the shoulder. When Adam didn’t punch back, or look even remotely convinced, she added, “Jonah’s working that day anyway.”
“But I’m not.” Regan smiled.
“You can’t,” Frankie said, staring horrified at the wiggle that came from beneath the pink blanket. It was just a little quake, but enough to have her taking a small step back.
“Why not?” Regan argued. “I’m VP of marketing for Ryo Wines, sister-in-law to one of the owners, granddaughter-in-law to the other, and sleeping with the man who has fooled himself into believing he runs it. Plus, it could be a girl power team.”
“Fine, but if I can’t bring Mittens, you can’t bring…” Frankie pointed to the—definitely moving—pile of cotton. Blue eyes latched onto Frankie and Baby Sofie took one look and let out a screech louder than the siren.
* * *
“We’re going to lose.” Tanner said, dropping an empty crate on Marc’s foot. Both men were staring over the rows and rows of grape-covered trellises toward Main Street.
Squinting past a giant Pick Till You Punt banner, Nate stepped around Gabe and walked to the end of their row to see what everyone was gawking at. One look at the woman dismounting her motorcycle and stalking through the community park and he had to agree.
No truer words had ever been spoken.
Because headed their way were four beautiful women and a half pint, “Crushing the Competition” hats pulled low, ponytails swinging and attitude flying. They all wore matching bright pink t-shirts with “Crush This” written across the chest, black hip huggers and combat boots that, aside from having the steal reinforced toes, looked incredibly hot. And judging on the silent men beside him, he wasn’t the only one appreciating the view.
But Nate was only interested in the five-foot ten, blue-eyed view who was leading the pack, ax in hand, which had no purpose in the contest other than to intimidate. Point to Frankie, it was working. She was composed, ready for battle, and so damn beautiful he knew he should just turn around and walk away.
The Pick Till You Punt was about to begin any minute, and he needed to focus. Not that he doubted Team DeLuca would win—they always won, but the one thing that Trey had been right about was that there was a lot riding on how the next few weeks played out. The smart thing to do would be to keep his mind on the goal and eyes off the way that t-shirt clung to Frankie like it had been painted on.
Which was why Nate found himself leaning against one of the stakes, waiting for her to approach. He was done with always doing the smart thing. Around Frankie all of the st
atic about wine, his family, the direction of the company, the effect Sorrento Ranch had on the big picture faded and Nate found himself living in the moment. Found that the heaviness around his chest, which had started after his parents’ died and made it impossible to breathe most times, disappeared and he could just relax without the expectation of what the next breath would require of him. Something he’d never allowed himself the luxury of doing.
“Have I ever told you how much I love pink?” Nate asked when Frankie was less than a foot away.
“Lexi picked it out. She sewed the words on it too.” Frankie tugged her shirt taut to show him, unintentionally pulling the neckline down for his viewing pleasure.
Nate took a long, thorough look at everything Frankie had on display. He didn’t feel the need to rush, which was a good thing considering he’d missed the hell out of her over the past week and because she was taking her sweet-ass time doing the same.
Her blue eyes zeroed in on his mouth, sending a shot of hot lust straight to his groin. He had it bad for the town’s bad girl.
Face flushed, eyes dilated, Frankie wet her lips. If that wasn’t hard evidence that she was as busy picturing him naked as he was her, the pretty peaks poking out, just above the top curve of the U and second H, did the trick.
“How was the trip? Is your property okay?” Okay, so she didn’t want to talk about what happened between them last week, or what was happening between them right now.
“Yeah, the firefighters got it under control before the flames got too far north, so we were lucky. How’s your grandpa’s land?”
She shrugged and the fabric of her tee rode up and exposed a sliver of smooth skin. “Haven’t heard anything yet. But if something happens, one of my brothers will call.”
So Charles was still freezing her out of the family. Nate wanted to pull her into his arms and give her a hug. All Frankie ever wanted was to make her family proud, and her grandpa used that big heart of hers against her, used it as a way to control her, to get her to come back on his terms. The faint bruising under her eyes told him that Charles’s plan was working—to a point.