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and looked.
    Okay. The tire was off the ground.
    Should she have loosened the lug nuts first?
    Crap. Yes. She should have.
    She lowered the jack again, and when the weight of the car held the tire in place, she pulled the handle off the jack—good thing the instructions told her it acted as the tire iron, too—and wrestled with the lug nuts.
    How was she supposed to loosen them when some guy with an air compressor had tightened them?
    She bounced on the tire iron.
    If her father knew about this flat tire, he’d call Eli Di Luca, who’d come to the rescue.
    She wouldn’t mind if a Texan called her “little lady” and patronized her while he fixed her tire. Having one of Papa’s suitors rescue her would be seriously annoying.
    No matter how much of a pain in the ass she found her father and his plans, she was still glad he was in her life. But between his machinations and her becoming a successful author, she had grown skittish about dating . She never knew whether the guy was going to talk about how he wanted to settle down and raise a large family or whether he was going to earnestly tell her he had a great plot for a book, and suggest she write it for him and they’d split the profits. And inform her that if they skipped the New York publishing house and published it themselves online, they’d make millions and billions of dollars and get to keep it all themselves.
    In the end, she didn’t know which was worse: the guy who lunged at her with the intent of impregnating a rich man’s daughter, or the guy who bored her silly explaining every detail of his story.
    Hm . Her father should look for a guy who had a plot idea and also wanted to marry money. She would go out with him; he’d talk about his book until she was in a coma; then he could have his way with her at his leisure.
    She grinned and carefully stacked the lug nuts in a pile, then went to work with the jack again.
    And no matter how much people who thought they could write when they had never tried annoyed her, she loved talking with other authors, published and unpublished, the ones who put their butts in their chairs day after day and wrote . If not for their knowledge and assistance, she would not have realized she was suffering from the well-documented second-book syndrome. According to authors who wrote lots of books, there was only one cure—to finish the book and start another. And another.
    So she would. Because she was tougher than she looked.
    She had gotten the car off the ground again, hadn’t she?
    She tugged the flat off, carried it to the trunk, put it in.
    She put the spare on. Tightened the lug nuts. Lowered the jack.
    She had changed the tire! She had changed the tire!
    Lifting her arms over her head, she did the victory dance.
    She was a goddess! A goddess!
    . . . Of course, that was when a winery tour bus full of people drove past, staring as if she were crazed.
    She lowered her arms.
    Damned deadline.

Chapter 6
    “ S omeone’s coming up your drive.” Royson Ryan straightened up and looked toward the dust cloud on top of the ridge.
    “Son of a bitch.” Eli glanced at the horizon. “Now? I’m busy.”
    Roy and Eli were at the bottom of Gunfighter Ridge, at the end of a row of grapevines, repairing the drip irrigation lines—except when the coyotes were thirsty. The creatures were smart; they chewed through the plastic, got their drink, and wandered off, leaving precious California water to gush through the break until the pressure dropped and Roy or Eli or one of the hands hurried to fix it.
    “Maybe it’s that girl. The one you were waiting for.” Roy gloated.
    Damn it. Roy hadn’t been at dinner with Eli’s family. He hadn’t had to be. Gossip slid through this valley on a greased track. The cashiers in Safeway knew Eli was expecting a girl who would stay with him. The Luna Grande cocktail waitresses knew he was putting fresh flowers in the cottage every day. Every time he saw them, his brothers gave him a ration of