Once Tasted: A Silver Creek Novel (16 page)

“You know Jay, Mia’s older cousin?”

Ward’s mouth turned down at the corners as if he’d tasted something vile. “Yeah.”

“He got hold of a diary Mia was keeping and brought it to the locker room for show-and-tell.”

“Always was a jerk.”

“An understatement. He’s slime. Anyway, Mia’d written stuff about me. I should have decked Jay when he started reading—”

“If memory serves,” Ward interjected, “he had about fifty pounds on you. He played football, right?”

“Defensive tackle. He got off sacking quarterbacks.”

“That’s right. He used to gloat at the lunch table whenever he’d sidelined another player. Asshole.”

“The point of this story is, it doesn’t matter that Jay was a pumped-up goon in high school and that I was still a scrawny runt. I didn’t stick up for Mia when he began entertaining the other guys with story hour. I didn’t do anything. Actually, I did.” And Reid felt that familiar wave of self-disgust wash over him. “I hit the showers and pretended I didn’t care that he was humiliating his cousin.”

“Ah.” Ward took his sweet time following up on that insightful comment. “And you still feel guilty because Jay was a shithead to Mia? I guess that explains it.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Explains what exactly?”

“Why you’re always so jumpy around her.”

“I’m only jumpy because she hates my guts.” But, damn, their bodies had liked each other just fine. He still couldn’t believe how explosive the sex had been between them and how responsive she’d been. Or how easily she’d brushed him off this morning. So she never wanted to have sex again with him?

Remembering her categorical statement ticked him off all over again.

“You think she hates your guts?” Ward asked, interrupting his thoughts. Trading the currycomb for a mane brush, he circled around to Gomez’s face and began to comb out his long white forelock.

“She’s given a damned good impression of it for more than a decade now.” She hadn’t been exactly lovey-dovey this morning, either.

Ward smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think it’s hate she’s feeling.”

“You don’t, huh?” Okay, maybe her body didn’t hate
him, but her mind wasn’t any too crazy about him. He ducked under Felix’s neck and was grateful to find the other side of the gelding free of caked dirt. He resumed brushing. “So, Ward, when did you become such a flippin’ expert on the female psyche?”

“Funny, isn’t it? That’s supposed to be your area of expertise. You’ve got women staring at their cellphones, hoping your number will flash on their screen. Hell, they adore you even when you
don’t
call.”

Reid shrugged. “I like women, women like me. It’s not a complicated equation. The reason they continue to like me is equally simple. I don’t make promises I won’t keep.”

“Only proves my point,” Ward said, nodding. “You’ve got the opposite sex pretty well figured out. Which means you’re smarter than the rest of us guys.”

“Glad you finally noticed.”

Ward continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “So I think the question is, if you’re so smart about women, why are you so dumb about one in particular?”

W
ITH THE SLAM
of the front door still reverberating, Mia had realized she needed to do something even more urgently than having a good cry. She’d raced to the bathroom and, after seeing to vital needs, showered, scrubbing herself pink. Afterward, she dressed in an old button-down shirt of Thomas’s and jeans she would have given to Goodwill if they’d accepted them.

In the kitchen she downed two Advil and, as added penance, ate her yogurt spartanly unadorned. It tasted as yucky as she felt.

Her head ached. It would be nice to blame it on alcohol. But it was mortification that made her temples throb. That, and the countless pins she’d stuck in her hair. She’d been ruthless with it, going for her severest style, one that involved tying, twisting, and pinning, something right out of a BDSM fantasy.

After the excruciating scene in her bedroom, awkward minutes ticking away while Reid extricated himself from the “jungle” of her hair and while she wished her bed would swallow her whole, she’d been tempted to take a machete—or her pruning shears—and hack off every last one of her curls. But the only period she could remember when her hair had been short was
when Jay coated her head with Gorilla Glue while her aunt and uncle were out running errands.

Upon their return, Jay had been punished in the usual way: sent to his room without supper. Hardly a deprivation, since he had eaten the entire banana nut loaf Aunt Ellen had baked that morning. Distraught, her aunt had scoured the shelves at Wright’s Hardware for a product to remove the glue. Nothing worked. Mia’s fifth-grade school picture showed her with a buzz cut and a wobbly smile.

The memory of that early-October day extinguished what little appetite Mia had. Dumping the remains of her yogurt, she put the bowl and spoon in the dishwasher, absently wondering how long it would take before the machine was full enough to justify running it.

The dishwasher was too empty, the house too quiet. Vincent didn’t even meow when she fed him his breakfast. He simply regarded her as if she were a stranger, ate a few bites, and then, crooking his tail haughtily, padded over to his cat door and leapt through it with the elegance of a circus lion navigating a suspended ring.

There went another male all too willing to desert her. She tried to take it in stride, reminding herself that only yesterday, before the martinis led her to a series of disastrous choices ending with Mr. Terribly Wrong in her bed—and, no, she couldn’t truly blame the alcohol for what happened with Reid, but what was the harm in indulging in a brief pity fest—she had made one good decision. She’d resolved to be less like herself, at least less like the Mia she was sick and tired of, the one gripped by fears and insecurities.

She needed to act on that resolution.

On an ordinary day, she would have gone directly into the vineyard and walked among the rows of grapes, checking them and their verdant canopy. Simply picturing
how the vines would shortly be heavy with black-purple fruit never failed to calm and center her.

Today, she instead followed her feckless cat outside and crossed the yard, pointing her feet in the direction of the winery. Thomas had pulled its sage-green doors shut after taking a farewell tour of the stainless-steel fermenting tanks and the rows of oak barrels lining the cellar.

At present, some of those barrels were filled with wine still aging and developing. She’d be responsible for finishing and shaping it, judging which barrels from which lots needed blending, and determining when the wine was ready for bottling.

She needed to become acquainted with the barrels’ contents and know them as well as she did the grapes growing in the vineyard.

That was one challenge. The other that loomed was overseeing the
vendange
—the fall harvest. Every stage involved in turning the selected grapes into a nuanced and delicious wine would depend upon her ability to mix craft, science, and artistry.

She’d studied enology, had been an excellent student, but very soon she would actually have to put her learning into practice. For all intents and purposes, she was a rank rookie and just a little terrified.

So many things could go wrong. And it would matter if they did. Paul, Roberto, Johnny, and Leo were salaried employees. To up the stakes, the winery now had an investor. As Thomas had pointed out, the Knowleses weren’t in the business of throwing away money. They expected a return. A 40 percent share of the profits, to be precise.

Her stomach knotted.

But her worries weren’t centered solely on money. Being able to fashion a wine that came close to what a Pinot Noir could taste and smell like—an extraordinary
bouquet of fruits and flowers—was also about identity. Her identity. Mia didn’t know her father’s name. Her mother was a memory supplied by others’ stories, her face little more than a blurry vision from faded snapshots. But if Mia could make wine, really good wine, then she had an identity, a solid link to her uncle Thomas that went beyond the sharing of a name and DNA strands. It would justify her having been taken in by him and Ellen. It would say to the world that, yes, she was a Bodell and deserved to live and work on this beautiful parcel of land.

Even though she couldn’t help but feel hurt by the careless way Thomas had given himself over to his new love and life with Pascale, Mia still craved his approval, wanted him to boast to every vintner in France about how smart he’d been to leave the vineyard and winery to her stewardship.

And maybe this was totally out of left field and utterly irrational, but even more than a nod of approval from Thomas or a glowing write-up from the likes of Robert Parker, Mia wanted to knock Reid’s boots off when he took his first sip of her wine.

But could she do it, could she make a wine that good? And if she failed? Who then would she be?

Squaring her shoulders, she pulled open the heavy doors and stepped inside.

The tractor rumbled beneath Reid, its massive wheels rolling down Silver Creek Road to its destination: the rut-gouged lane that led to the Bodells’ winery. The tractor’s crushing noise was the perfect soundtrack to his mood, a mood soured by his conviction that once again he’d blown it with Mia.

Who had a playbook for what to say or do after the kind of night they’d shared? With anyone else, he would
have turned on the charm and parlayed it into some brand-new-day sex.

Not with Mia. For his efforts he’d received a beaut of a black eye. Good thing the forecast was for sunshine and lots of it. He could justify wearing his aviators well into the evening. Unintentional as it had been, Mia’s elbow slam had set the tone for their first in-bed conversation. It hadn’t helped his own mood that she was appalled at finding them still entangled—kind of funny when he considered just how wrapped up in each other they’d been only a few short hours before. Apparently the only dewy-eyed one in the bed had been him.

So he had fought the urge to flip Mia onto her back and find out what she looked like bathed in the soft dawn light, to discover how big and what color her nipples were and whether the skin between her thighs was as satiny smooth as he remembered.

His restraint hadn’t ended there. He hadn’t even attempted to caress the pale nape of her neck, exposed when he pushed back her thick curtain of hair to free his watch. He hadn’t pressed his lips against the knobby bone of her spine bumping her sweetly scented skin. He’d wanted to do all those things and more, but he’d been right to deny his need.

Ward might think that being an engaged man meant he was ready for the afternoon talk shows on the Oxygen channel, but when it came to analyzing Mia and him, Reid’s brother was way off the mark.

Reid wasn’t dumb where Mia was concerned. He was wary. And with very good reason. It wasn’t simply the awkward history between them that made him extra cautious. Mia was different from the women he dated. Take Lana Cruz. She knew the score and was as determined to retain her independence as he. She had plans, a future that didn’t include him. And he was more than fine with that.

With Lana, things had been safe, contained. If he were to text her and suggest they get together, their evening wouldn’t lead to her dreaming of mutual exclusivity and setting up house. He could rest easy.

He hadn’t been bullshitting when he told Ward that the reason women liked him was because he kept his promises. He slept with women like Lana, who were fun; he danced and shot a few games of pool with women like Maebeth Krohner and Nancy Del Ray, making sure never to lead them to believe he wanted a “relationship”; he stayed the hell away from women like Mia.

Usually.

And though she’d left him dumbfounded with her cavalier claim that they didn’t need to have one of those “Discussions,” with a capital “D,” and annoyed him, too, because who the hell wouldn’t want a repeat of sex that was as stellar as what they’d shared, Reid knew he should be dropping to his knees and giving thanks for his reprieve.

He reached the end of the ranch’s private road, downshifted, braked, and then pulled out onto a deserted Bartlett Road. The tractor’s tires were quieter on the asphalt, but he noted the decrease in volume only absently.

He couldn’t get Mia out of his thoughts—which was further proof that he needed to keep his distance. A woman like Mia represented serious, heavy-duty promises. Even sitting with her on the bed had been dangerous—his self-control had almost spun off into the stratosphere at the thought of her mouth opening under his and her body melting under his as he deepened the kiss. He’d wanted to devour her. Every frowning amazon inch of her.

The best thing he could do was to behave as always and avoid occupying the same space as she did. Since
they were supposed to be working together, that would be a challenge, but he figured he’d perfected the art of dodging her.

But if he knew what he needed to do for his self-preservation, why in the hell was he making his way back to her place on a big green 150-horsepower chugging giant when he could simply have asked Howie Briggs to repair the blasted road by himself?