Read Christmas in Wine Country for Free Online

lose your job and your boyfriend within days of each other? Probably not that often. Especially not with the humiliating twist of your boyfriend breaking up with you by telling you he’s moving in with the other woman he’s been seeing of whom you were completely unaware. Upside: his assurance that she shouldn’t be so upset because it wasn’t like he’d been her boyfriend, anyway. They’d just been fooling around. For the past two years.
    Given all the excitement, it was understandable that Lila hadn’t exactly had the presence of mind to cancel the reservations at the inn in a timely fashion. By the day Lila had called she’d been informed that she’d missed the window of their one-week cancellation policy. Beat-down and humiliated by recent events, she’d simply accepted this as the new course of her pathetic life and hung up the phone.
    The feeling of abject defeat—it reminded of the week she’d spent as a teenager babysitting for a family vacationing on the Cape. The parents had been child psychologists who wanted to raise children of limitless potential. This translated into a strict policy of caregivers never saying no. Consequently, the children, too poorly behaved to do things like eat indoors, had required not just constant supervision but constant intervention from at best disruptive and at worst life-threatening behavior. By the end of the week, fourteen-year-old Lila had found herself exhausted and wading around a lake pushing not only the two little boys around in an inflatable boat but the fat father, belly out in the late July sunshine. So beat down had she been that when a seagull had pooped its trademark trail of greenish-white slime down her white t-shirt, all she’d done was remove it without a word, resigned to wearing just her swimsuit. Balling the soiled shirt up and stuffing it into her backpack, it was almost as if she’d been expecting it.
    That was about how she felt right now, driving down the dark and winding road. In fact, bird poop might be a welcome distraction from her current slew of worries.
    “Treat yourself,” her Gram had insisted, encouraging her to still go on the vacation. “You need a break. Curl up with a good book. Take a walk through that pretty little town. Visit Annie. It’s been far too long since you two have seen each other.”
    Lila almost hadn’t done it. Until abruptly tearing herself out of a deep funk in her apartment to throw a toothbrush, hairbrush and sweater into a bag, jam an old Red Sox cap down over her unwashed hair and hit the road at 9pm. And so here she was, shipwrecked and in shock, driving alone in the rain down a winding coastal road in the pitch dark. She felt close to a news headline: Lonely Spinster Crashes Car in Desperate Plea for Attention. Readers would probably skip to the next story: Fancy Feline Fashion Show!
    A sign announced Redwood Cove: 15 miles. She was getting close to the romantic seaside bed-and-breakfast where she’d booked a room. For her and Phillip. She felt tears welling up in her eyes.
    Not now, she told herself, now she needed to focus on the road. Turning on the radio, she hoped for a distraction. Of course every station was playing sad-sap songs about lost love. Or worse, being in love. Angrily punching the radio’s scan button she dismissed all of it as pathetic. Until she hit a station playing Air Supply and decided she might as well give in. “I’m all out of love! I’m so lost without you!” she belted along, feeling the true meaning of the song as never before.
    Squinting at a sign up ahead she wondered if it could be the inn already. Drawing closer she read: Endicott Vineyards. She could picture herself up on stage, one stiletto broken, lurching around and yelling. Meeting Jake Endicott’s dark, disapproving gaze for a moment before shrugging it off and turning her performance up a notch just cuz.
    Passing the scene of the crime, Lila winced and realized she was doing it again. Belting out 80s music.