Blurb:
In Napa Valley, he who has the best grapes wins.
And in the pursuit of perfection, dreams and hearts can be crushed.
Sophia Stone is a widow on the brink of an empty nest, stuck in an unsatisfying
job managing the vineyard for a mediocre Napa vintner. Faced with an uncertain
future she wonders how do you choose between making a living and making a life?
Between protecting your heart and sharing it? Five years ago, after her husband
was killed in an accident, Sophia put her heart and dreams on ice to care for
those around her. Now her home, her dreams, and her family’s legacy grapes are
threatened by the greed of the new money moving into the Valley. Sophia has a
choice—give up and let them take what is hers, or risk everything fighting a
battle everyone says she can’t win.
Nico Treviani has one goal in life: make brilliant wine. A woman would be an
unwanted distraction. So, while recognized as one of Napa’s premier vintners,
Nico finds himself alone… until his brother’s death drops not one, but two
women into his life—his thirteen-year-old twin nieces. In an instant, Nico
gains a family and loses his best friend and partner in the winemaking
business. Struggling to care for his nieces, Nico accepts a job as head
winemaker for Avery Specter, one of the new-money crowd. And he learns the hard
way that new money doesn’t stick to the old rules.
When Sophia Stone gets caught in the middle of Nico’s struggle to remain true
to himself or sacrifice his convictions to make stellar wine, both Sophia and
Nico are faced with a choice they never imagined. A choice that might
extinguish the hope of a future neither expected.
Excerpt
from Ch. 1:
Sophia
Stone knew life held few absolutes: good
wine is art, good Italian cooking is passion, a good child is a gift, and good
news never comes in a certified letter.
“You
sure this is for me, Tito?” she asked the postman who thrust an envelope toward
her. When she tilted her head she could
read the word “Certified,” stamped in red like a guilty verdict across the
front.
A
heavy-set man, Tito had a ready smile and an easy, engaging manner. Each day while
delivering mail, he also traversed the valley searching for tidbits of gossip
with the zeal of an Army battalion scouring the countryside for
insurgents. St. Helena was a small
community where the denizens believed mining each other’s business was an
inalienable right granted on the theory that without the titillation everyone
would fall over dead from boredom. “Yeah, looks like it’s from Charlie. Certified, too.” Tito didn’t have the decency to hide his
interest as he mopped his face with a dirty handkerchief then stuffed it back
into his rear pocket. The wiping didn’t
help—a sheen of sweat still covered his ruddy cheeks. August had been hot with no break in sight.
Sophia
eyed him. She wouldn’t put it past him
to have already steamed open the letter, a thought that made her a bit
nauseous. Why had she thought a small
town in Napa Valley would be a good place to hide?
“From
Charlie, you say?” Keeping her hands in
her pockets, Sophia tilted her head further and tried to double-check the sender’s
address. Then she looked him in the
eye. “Any idea what it’s about?”
Tito
looked like a bully when his bluff was called.
He shrugged—an exaggerated movement that seemed like the shifting of a
mountain—but a noncommittal answer, leaving Sophia certain whatever was in that
letter would be spread around the valley and germinating in imaginations as
rapidly as seeds on a spring wind.
At
an impasse, Sophia and Tito stood there, the letter between them, Sophia
delaying the inevitable. Unfortunately,
with a dinner to cook and a cake in the oven, Sophia didn’t have time to see if
she could outlast him. So, with a sour
downturn to her mouth and a knot in her stomach, Sophia took the letter.
Tito
motioned for her to flip the envelope over.
“There on the back, that green card?
You need to sign that.” Handing
her a pen, he waited for her to sign, then tore off the return receipt,
pocketing it.
Confirming
the return address, Sophia gave him a distracted wave as he climbed back into
his truck. “Thanks, Tito.” A perfunctory
nicety.
“Sure
thing, Ms. Stone.” In a shower of
gravel, he gunned the mail truck back through the vineyard down the winding
driveway leading to the valley floor.
Sophia glanced up as the trees enveloped him and her normal quiet
smothered the sound, wiping away all vestiges of his presence.
Except
for the letter.
From
her landlord.
At
least the return address was his—and Sophia was certain he hadn’t moved from
the corner lot at the bottom of her hill.
She could probably throw a bottle and hit his roof, with a little help
from the wind
Charlie
had owned this patch of five acres on the top of Howell Mountain since his
parents had died in a small plane heading up from L.A. over thirty years
ago. Sophia had lived here for fifteen
of those years and, through feast and famine, the ups and downs of the wine
industry, she’d never received a certified letter from Charlie. In fact, she couldn’t remember having
received any letter from Charlie. Their
business dealings were usually hammered out at the kitchen table over a bottle
of wine and sealed with a handshake.
Napa Valley was a handshake kind of place.
Sophia
reached up and rubbed the worn piece of iron Daniel had nailed to one of the
porch supports. Tocco Ferro. Her family had been steeped in the ways of
the Old Country; her husband had become a believer. Touch iron to ward off bad luck. Being a bit too pragmatic, Sophia didn’t
necessarily believe, but it couldn’t hurt.
God knew she’d had enough rough patches.
With a finger, she traced the initials the four of them had carved in
the porch support. Time had whittled
their number to one … almost.
Tapping
the white legal-sized envelope on her open palm, she squinted against the sun
as she looked out over her small patch of heaven. A rolling hillside with a couple of acres
under vine, grapes from the Old Country, grafts of her grandfather’s original
vines. A small garden flanked the
house. Her own private retreat sheltered
from prying eyes by a ring of trees.
The
farmhouse had been billed as a “fixer-upper.”
She and Daniel had packed up the kids, moving up valley from the Bay
Area, and spent the next several years making the remnants of a house into a
home. They’d bribed the kids into
helping by letting them paint their own rooms.
Dani had picked pink, hot pink.
As if the view from his window wasn’t enough, Trey had chosen wood
paneling and a bucolic scene of vineyards on one wall. When he’d moved away for college, Sophia
hadn’t had the heart to change it.
Perhaps she’d harbored the hope that he would come home someday. He hadn’t.
Now Dani was poised to fly.
Soon
Sophia would be alone, the house emptied of youthful buoyancy. The prospect filled her with dread. Stripped of purpose, she half-feared she
would grow brittle like the old vines until the weight of loneliness shattered
her into bits and pieces of who she used to be.
When Daniel had been killed, she’d had the kids. Now the false friend of sadness stayed ever
near, her house echoing with memories.
But memories didn’t make a life any more than the past made a
future. However, the past was her
tether. Without it, Sophia felt she
would float away like a balloon loosed to the sky, growing ever smaller until
vanishing from sight.
While
the house cradled her past, the rows of vines just reaching their peak marching
down the hill across her two acres held her dreams. Her grapes, started from grafts from her
grandfather’s stock back in Italy, each juice-filled orb bursting with hope,
with promise. Her life’s work hanging on
the verge of a promise.
Through
the screen door, the aroma of a cake on the verge of disaster wafted into
Sophia’s consciousness, and she turned and bolted for the kitchen, the screen
clattering shut behind her. With a
dishrag to protect her hand, she opened the oven. The smell of chocolate carried on billows of
steam engulfed her. She waved it away,
squinting through the heat. She
deposited the cake pan on the stainless steel countertop. Pressing her thumb lightly on the cake, she let
out her breath in a long rush. Just in
time.
Her
mother loved chocolate cake. Sophia
planned to visit her this afternoon.
Perhaps a peace offering would soften her harsh moods of late.
Sophia
spied the letter, pristine white and accusing, laying casually on the sideboard
where she had tossed it in her haste.
Without further thought, she stuffed it in the old cookie jar on the
countertop and crammed on the lid. That
cookie jar held a lifetime of happiness and heartache—her marriage license, the
kids’ birth certificates, Daniel’s death certificate and obituary—it could
handle the letter as well. Whatever
problem lurked inside that envelope, it could wait.
Leaving
the cake to cool, Sophia strode through the door to the porch, pushing through
the screen and down the steps. The
grapes, fragrant in the midday sun, neared perfection—harvest a few days away,
at best. Sophia had plans for those
grapes, unique varietals that would make unusual yet palatable wine … if she
could just figure out the last piece.
She was close, though, closer than ever before. Grapes—creating them, growing them, cajoling
them to trust her—they were her true passion.
Unfortunately dreams didn’t pay the bills, as her mother never missed a
chance to bludgeon her with that little bit or ironic reality. So Sophia had to sell her skills to pay the
bills and now found her days consumed with tending to grapes owned by Pinkman
Vineyards, one of the vast commercial operations in the valley, that turned her
carefully nurtured grapes into mediocre table wine.
She
walked the rows testing the scent once more—the perfume of near perfection as
her grandfather called the sweetness of grapes.
Memories filtered through the shadows of time like wraiths, translucent,
elusive … fleeting. When she quieted,
stilled her mind and opened her heart, Sophia could hear his voice, rich and
deep, his laugh, and smell the scent of earth and sun that clung to him, the
wine on his breath. But, she couldn’t
see him anymore. Like sun on paper, time
had weathered and faded her mental pictures until only shadows remained, as if
the present was slowly erasing the past.
Worry
dogged her, the letter and its unknown message on her mind as she tended to
each vine, brushing back the canopy, weighing the clusters. This far along in the season not much remained
to do; nature would run her course. This
year Sophia had planted wildflowers and grasses under the vines to entice the
bugs and keep them off the fruit. The
plan had worked well, as had her choice to prune more aggressively than normal
this past winter. Under her care, her grandfather’s grapes flourished, and just
now they were beginning to trust her, to give her their best.
This
year’s wine had the potential to be the stuff of dreams.
At
the far end of her property movement across the fence caught Sophia’s
attention. Shading her eyes with one hand, she still had to squint against the
assault of the sun. Her next-door
neighbors had sold their property recently to Specter Wines, a new player with
new money. Scuttlebutt had it the owner
had made a mint somewhere back east.
Sophia shook her head as she watched heavy equipment struggle to tame
the hillside, prepare it for planting.
These days it seemed just about every rich guy wanted a piece of Napa to
cultivate his own grapes, make a signature vintage that would rock the world.
Author
Bio and Links:
My
mother tells me I was born in Texas a very long time ago, but I’m not so
sure—my mother can’t be trusted. She’ll
also tell you I was a born storyteller.
That I believe—I have the detention notices and bad-conduct reports to
prove it. However, the path from minor
hyperbolist, or as I prefer to think of my former self, Grand Master of the Art
of Self-Prevarication, to the author of the New York Times Notable Crime Novel
and double Rita ™ finalist, Wanna Get Lucky?, the book that launched the
bestselling series, was a bit tortured.
Someone
once told me I lived a peripatetic life—yes, I had to look it up. And he was right. I’ve been everything from a mom, business
owner, accountant, wife, pilot, flight instructor, lawyer …worse, a tax lawyer…
to a writer. The three personas I’ve kept suit me the best: mom, flight
instructor, and writer. And the other personas I’ve tried on then shrugged out of
and discarded like an itchy coat were great grist for the story mill.
Chasing
stories keeps me busy and out of jail…for the most part. Researching in Vegas
can be a bit… sketchy.
Prodded
by the next adventure and the police, I keep moving. Right now I have a house
in Texas, but that will change soon. I lived in Vegas for 15 years—the longest
I’d stayed anywhere. And I get back there often. But other places, too, are
calling.
Someone
asked me the other day where I lived. The question stopped me cold. Finally I said, “On Southwest Airlines, third
row, window seat, either side.” Always in search of a story. And the adventure would be perfect if they
could just stock a split of nice Champagne.
