Read Revenge at Bella Terra for Free Online

She really did. He was a great guy. But her mother had warned her: When it came to women, he was a Neanderthal. He thought a woman should be married and producing children, particularly if that woman was his daughter and the children she would bear would be his grandchildren.
    He was proud of her. He adored her. But they wanted different goals.
    He wanted grandchildren to make up for all the years he’d missed of her life.
    She intended to live the life she had worked so hard to make for herself. She did not want a husband he had bribed, begged, or blackmailed to marry her.
    She read the directions about how to place the jack, read them three times, knelt in the gravel, and maneuvered it into place. Taking a breath, she started to raise the car.
    The way things were going, she’d be lucky if the damned car didn’t slide on this gravel, fall off the damned jack, and crush her damned hands and at least one damned foot.
    Hey! But at least if her fingers were broken, she wouldn’t have to finish the damned book!
    That’s the way, Robinson. Look on the bright side.
    When her father had given her a plane ticket from Austin to Santa Rosa, she debated telling him no, she wouldn’t go. But she had experience with his match-making schemes. He never gave up, and if she didn’t go to California, somehow Eli Di Luca would find his way to her.
    Besides, right now, as Texas simmered under a blistering spring heat, California sounded pretty good. So she’d decided to go . . . but on her own terms.
    She’d packed her car and started across country, determined to have an adventure. She’d driven across west Texas, the most godforsaken, desolate stretch of land in the world. She had traversed the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, gawked at the magnificence of the Grand Canyon, driven through Los Angeles, where the freeway never ended, and onward to the coastline, where she had walked in the sand, played in the ocean, and locked her keys in the car.
    That had been embarrassing.
    After calling a locksmith and retrieving her keys, she’d stopped in Hollywood at a spa and, um, done something impulsive.
    She touched her hair gingerly.
    Very impulsive and possibly ill considered.
    She’d driven into the Sierra Nevada mountains, through the mighty sequoias and into Yosemite National Park, where she had cried at the epic majesty of that glacial valley. She’d veered into the Central Valley, and found spots as hot and flat and bare as Texas. No tarantulas, though. No sagebrush, either. Just miles and miles of farmland as far as the eye could see. But when she drove into the wine country, the scenery changed. The valleys were narrow and long, the highway crowded. Grapes grew everywhere, beside the road, up on the hillsides. And every five hundred yards was another sign for another winery.
    When her GPS instructed her to turn off and take the pass over the mountains and into Bella Valley . . . she’d almost died of terror.
    She was from Texas, from the hill country. Not from the let’s-drive-on-a-narrow-winding-vertical-road-and-scare-the-pants-off-her country.
    That road had scared the pants off her. Going up. Going down. And then . . . she’d come around a sharp corner and there it was, Bella Valley, spread before her like some flashback to early California, when people were scarce and the land drowsed under a loving sun. Wide oaks dotted the golden hills. Orchards and vineyards rode the rise and fall of every fold in the earth. In the distance a town, Bella Terra, nestled beside a silver river that wound in wide loops through the bottom-lands.
    She didn’t care about Eli Di Luca, but right then and there, she fell in love with his home.
    She had almost called her father to tell him. But there was no point in encouraging him any further.
    Anyway, she didn’t dare call him right now. He had not been happy about his baby girl driving two thousand miles by herself. He had predicted dire happenings. Like this flat tire.
    She stepped back