Tangled Vines (11 page)

He leaned a shoulder against the glass and glanced back at the open doorway and the throng of well-dressed guests beyond it. The din of their collective voices filtered into the room. He brought his gaze back to her. The metallic threads woven through the gold lace of her dress shimmered in the room's subdued lighting. It caused him to wonder if she wore more silk beneath it, or simply nothing at all.

“I take it you felt the need for a little quiet, too,” he said and took a sip of beer.

She smiled and nodded, something automatic in both responses, as if they were programmed. “It's been a long day for me.”

“I imagine it has.”

“For you, too, I suppose,” she added. She looked relaxed, at ease, but there was a guarded look to her eyes when she glanced at him, giving Sam one more thing to wonder about. “Did you fly in today?”

“Yesterday. Which gave Katherine a chance to rest a little before all the activities started.”

He had calm eyes, Kelly thought. Dark and calm with a kind of quiet strength that would draw a woman. She had the impression he would defend what was his, protect it from harm.

Annoyed, she looked away. She had learned to fight for herself long ago. She didn't need anyone to look after her. She could take care of herself with no help from anyone.

“Didn't your wife come with you?”

“I don't have a wife.”

Kelly gave him a half-startled look. “I thought I read somewhere that you were married.”

“Past tense. We're divorced.”

“I never know what to say when people tell me that.” She toyed with her cigarette. “Whether I should be sympathetic and say I'm sorry, or rejoice with them and be glad.”

“Be glad.” He smiled faintly. “I am.”

“All right. I'm glad for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Katherine seems to be enjoying herself.” Kelly had a brief glimpse of the Rutledge family matriarch through a break in the string of guests clustered around her.

“She's had an audience surrounding her all evening.” Which thankfully had meant Kelly had needed to do no more than catch her eye, smile and nod from the fringes, and any social obligation was satisfied.

“Katherine enjoys any opportunity to talk about the wine trade. Which is hardly surprising, I guess. To the whole Rutledge family, life is a cabernet.” His mouth slanted in a wryly cynical line.

Kelly smiled at his play on words, and then eyeing him curiously, she felt compelled to point out: “You're a Rutledge.”

His grin became more pronounced, as did the gleam of amusement in his eye. “Katherine would tell you that I'm one of those big, strong, slow-growing cabernets, with a little too much tannin yet. She tends to describe people as wines, regarding both as living things with individual characteristics. In your case -” He paused, his look turning thoughtful as he studied her, his gaze a little too direct, and a lot too personal. “I think she would have some difficulty figuring you out. You're definitely a dry wine rather than a sweet. Probably a white variety-“

“I hope not,” Kelly interrupted with deliberate lightness. “They don't have a very long life.”

“Some do, depending on the variety and the vintage.

“That wouldn't be so bad then.” She tapped her cigarette on a crystal ashtray, knocking off the buildup of gray ash. “I hope Katherine wasn't offended by any of the questions I asked during the interview.”

“If she was, you would have known it already,” Sam assured her, conscious that she had deliberately swung the focus of the conversation away from herself. “I have the feeling she probably found your questions challenging and Katherine likes challenges. Any vintner does. If they don't, they'd better get out of the business.”

“Obviously that has to mean you like them, too.”

“I do.” And he was looking at one now. “How long did you live in Napa Valley before your family moved away?”

“Not long.” She let out the smoke slowly, stalling. “Iowa is a great place to grow up, though. The air is fresh. No smog, no pollution. Everybody knows everybody, and there's always something going on – Friday-night football games at the high school, homecoming parades, hayrides, Christmas programs at the church, sledding parties, Memorial Day parades, summer softball games, county fairs, detasseling crews walking the corn rows-“

“Did you detassel corn?” he broke in curiously.

“By that, are you implying that you think I was tall enough?” She raised an eyebrow in light challenge.

“Actually I was trying to picture you in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, your hair in pigtails and a straw hat on your head.” His gaze skimmed her face. “With your fair skin, you must have wound up with a ton of freckles.”

“No.” But she noticed he had some, although very faint beneath his sun-bronzed tan. They should have given him a boyish look, but his face was too rugged. “I looked like a boiled lobster instead.”

“Then you did detassel corn.”

Little escaped him – she needed to remember that. “Just one summer. After that, I got a job at a low-budget, low-frequency radio station first as a receptionist and general dogsbody. Within a couple months the station manager had me subbing for the disc jockeys whenever one of them didn't show up. It wasn't long before I got a slot of my own.”

“With your voice, I'm not surprised.”

“It helped. And it also helped that I could double as an engineer, newscaster, weather-person, and interviewer. Even program director and salesperson, if I had to.”

“I suppose doing the news on radio is when you decided you wanted to get into the television side.”

“Not really.” Kelly saw that he wasn't drinking his beer, merely holding the glass, swirling it occasionally and letting the beer ride up the sides. “It was a very small radio station,” she reminded him. “Doing the news consisted of tearing the latest sheet from the wire and reading whatever was there. We called it rip ‘n' read. At the time I wanted to get into print journalism, become a newspaper reporter. It wasn't until my second year of college that I became interested in the television side. I worked as an intern for one of the local television stations for credits. Then, right before I graduated, they offered me a job as a reporter. I accepted.” She lifted one shoulder in a light shrug. “The rest, I guess you would say, is history.”

She had spoken easily and naturally about her early work in radio, but Sam had noticed the subtle changes that had occurred the instant she mentioned television: the added warmth in her voice, the softening around the lips, and the quickening light in her eyes. Television was a medium Kelly Douglas loved, even if she didn't express it with words. Just as he had never found the words to explain the challenge and contentment he found working in the vineyards and winery.

“Your family must be very proud of you.”

“I don't have any.” Kelly ground her cigarette out in the ashtray and instantly regretted it. Now she had nothing to occupy her hands. “My mother died when I was eight, and I had just graduated from high school when I lost my father. There wasn't anyone else, no brothers, no sisters, no one.”

“It must have been rough for you.”

“Life always seems rough – until you consider the alternative.”

“True,” he conceded, a smile briefly lifting the corners of his mouth. Then he tipped his head to one side. “What kind of work did your father do?”

“Anything, everything. As they say in Iowa, he would work wherever he was hitched.”

Sam nodded absently as a hint of a frown touched his expression. “I just realized you said you were born in Napa Valley, but you never said what part. Was it St. Helena, Rutherford, Napa, Calistoga Springs?”

When he started naming off the towns in the valley, Kelly knew she had to stop him. She crossed her arms and cocked her head, giving him an amused look.

“What is this? Am I being interviewed or something?” she chided. “If you're trying to find out how old I am, the answer is twenty-nine. I'm five-foot-eight, one hundred and twenty-five pounds, auburn hair and green eyes, single. I attended the University of Iowa, graduated fifteenth in my class. I like earth colors, Calvin Klein clothes, Cole Porter music – especially when it's sung by Sinatra. I like Yoplait yogurt better than Dannon, and German chocolate cake, but I can't stand devil's food. I'd rather drink Evian water than Perrier. I have an occasional glass of wine, but never drink so-called hard liquor. I smoke, though I'm trying to cut back. There, have I left anything out?”

“No hobbies?” His eyes glinted with something between admiration and amusement.

“You are relentless,” Kelly declared, stunned that her factual recitation hadn't brought an end to the probing personal questions.

“Curious,” Sam corrected, his mouth curving in a crooked smile. “It's obvious that you are a very private person. And as expert as any politician at dodging questions.” He straightened from the window glass. “No offense intended.”

“None taken.” But she was shaken that he had so easily recognized her evasive answers for what they were.

“Good.” He continued to regard her steadily. “I imagine privacy is important to someone in the public eye the way you are.”

“It is.”

His smile widened a little. “So what are your hobbies? You still haven't told me.”

Bothered by the way he was looking at her – and the way she was reacting – Kelly hesitated an instant. “I don't know whether this qualifies as a hobby, but I like to restore and refinish old furniture, take something that's scarred and battered, strip it down to bare wood, then sand away all its scratches and gouges, give it a fresh coat of stain, and make it look all shiny and new again.” As she warmed to the subject, she gradually lost that initial self-conscious quality. “It started out as a way to fill the unfurnished apartment I rented when I moved to St. Louis. Now it's something I just enjoy doing. In fact, I'm in the middle of restoring a gorgeous old turtle-top center table I found at a thrift shop just a few blocks from where I live in Gramercy Park. It's made out of mahogany. So far, I have managed to strip off the old paint and stain it, but it needs two or three coats of wax yet. Hand-rubbed, of course.”

“Of course.” His answering smile was quick and warm, a look of understanding in his eyes that Kelly hadn't expected. It drew her, even as she recognized the danger of it, and the attraction she felt.

“What can I say? Doing it gives me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction.” She tried to sound offhand, without success.

“That's obvious.” He paused and reached out to take her right hand, turning it palm up as the fingers of his other hand tactilely examined its smoothness. “It's also obvious that you wear gloves while you're doing all this stripping and sanding and staining.”

The caressing brush of his fingers took her breath and sent little tingles rushing up her arm and down her spine. No man's touch had ever made her feel breathless before. It wasn't fair that it should belong to Sam Rutledge. And it wasn't fair that she saw the same awareness flickering in his eyes.

“As a matter of fact, I do wear gloves.” Kelly drew her hand free and tried bodily to pull back from this trembling edge of tension.

“Funny,” he murmured.

“What is?” She slipped a hand onto her evening bag, clutching it a little tighter than necessary while searching through her mind for some casual way to end this conversation.

“I like old things, too. Only in my case, it's planes.”

“Planes,” Kelly blurted in surprise. “You fly?”

He nodded. “When I can get away, which isn't often, unfortunately. I own a vintage Cub.” Seeing her blank look, Sam explained. “That's an old, two-seater biplane, with open cockpit.”

“A biplane. Like the kind Snoopy flies when he's out looking for the Red Baron in his Sopwith Camel?” she asked, referring to the character from the “Peanuts” cartoon strip, unable to keep a smile from breaking across her face.

Sam grinned back. “My little Cub is nowhere near as old as the Sopwith, but there are similarities. Mine was built about forty years ago, designed for aerobatics. It was in pretty bad shape when I bought it. It took me almost two, years, working in my spare time, to get it back in flying condition.”

“It must have been quite a thrill the first time you took her up.” Remembering the way she felt each time she viewed a piece of furniture she had restored, Kelly could readily imagine the immense feeling of pride and satisfaction Sam must have known.

“It was,” he agreed.

She studied him thoughtfully. “Flying isn't a sport I would have associated with you. If you had asked, I probably would have picked racquetball or tennis or polo.” All choices that were physically and mentally demanding, and suitable for someone from the vintner set. “I suppose there is a great sense of freedom when you are up there in your plane.”

He nodded in agreement. “Freedom, power. But more than that, a sense of total control. That's something you learn to savor when you work with the land, always at the mercy of Mother Nature's whims.”

“I guess it is.” A burst of laughter came from the living room. Kelly glanced at the doorway. “Someone's having fun.”

“Sounds like it.”

She saw her opening and took it. “I think it's time I slipped back and rejoined the others.”

“Katherine is probably wondering where I am. Maybe it's time we both went back.”

It wasn't the kind of remark that required a verbal response. Turning, Kelly started toward the door, uncomfortably aware that Sam was directly behind her. The instant she set foot in the living room, she gave him an over-the-shoulder smile and parting nod, and headed toward the closest cluster of guests.

Hugh intercepted her before she reached them.

“Kelly. I was beginning to think you had already left.”