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the Los Angeles
area and we’d rekindled an old college relationship.”
    “I see.” He paused. “We’d courted for some
time in the past?”
    Courted ? “Yes, I guess we did.”
    He was quiet for the next few miles. “Were
you and your child’s father together for a long time?”
    “I met Alexander shortly after Miguel had
died. With Sarah gone, too, I was lonely and sad and when I was
with him, I could forget that.” She glanced over and he was
studying her with interest, and perhaps a little sympathy. It was
the latter that she couldn’t stand. It was the kind of look she’d
gotten too often after her parents had died. She hadn’t deserved
the sympathy then, she didn’t deserve it now. Alexander had fooled
her and she’d been careless. “It wasn’t love. We both knew that,”
she lied.
    The tip of his nose got pink and she wondered
if she’d shocked him. Good. Shock was way better than sympathy. But
if that shocked him, her family and its very strange dynamics would
push him over the edge. She gripped the wheel with a growing sense
of dread. This was never going to work.
    It was just that he’d been so darn convincing
on the beach. He’d looked at her with those intense green eyes and
she’d started to think that maybe he was the answer to her prayers.
What had possessed her to do something so crazy?
    She drove north for another ten minutes
before flipping on her turn signal. She slowed the car down, made a
right hand turn, leaving the main road. “We’re almost there,” she
said, “another fifteen minutes at the most. Grandmother’s house is
up in those hills.”
    He nodded, his attention on the grapevines,
supported by their trellis system, that flanked both sides of the
paved road. The man just did not talk much. “You know,” she rambled
on, “over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we
go.”
    He didn’t even blink.
    “Except there’s no river and no woods. Just
grapes,” she added, like an idiot. She put her foot on the brake
and stopped the car. “George, let’s just admit it. This is never
going to work.”
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    “We’re not even there yet and you’re giving
up?” he asked. Before she could answer, he let go of the door
handle and turned his head to glance out the window. “Pretty
country,” he said.
    It was beautiful country, so lush in the
springtime. Summer would bring the heat, which would be almost
unbearable, but so necessary if the grapes were to ripen and
sweeten. Fall would bring the rains. There’d be a push to bring the
grapes to harvest before that happened.
    “The closest bus station is less than a half
hour from here,” she said, trying to get him back on topic. “I’ll
drop you off and you can. . .uh. . .pick up your life where it was
before I so rudely interrupted it.”
    “So grapes are the only crop?” he asked, his
head still turned toward the window.
    There was no time for a horticulture lesson.
“Mostly. There are a few olive trees, for the heck of it. I mean,
after all, this is wine country.”
    “I don’t see any grapes on those vines,” he
said, sounding concerned.
    “It’s too early yet. What will be grapes are
now just buds.”
    “What’s that?” he asked, pointing in the
air.
    “A wind machine. Sort of a really big fan.
Frost is a vineyard manager’s worst nightmare. These machines can
mix the warmer air, which lingers somewhere about twenty feet above
ground, with the colder air at the surface. Many times that’s all
that’s needed to ward off significant damage to a grape crop.”
    He finally turned to look at her. “I don’t
know much about growing grapes.”
    He should stop worrying. He wasn’t staying
that long. “There are plenty of people here who do,” she said,
dismissing his concern.
    “Like your aunt and uncle?” he asked.
    “Uh. . .no. Tilly and Louis mostly work on
the business end and leave the grape-growing to others.”
    “You don’t sound all that fond of