Chapter 2
Manolo reached behind the tasting room door to relieve Junie of the broom handle she clutched. “I’ll get that, ma’am.”
“I’ve got it,” Junie snapped. The flame in her eyes would melt steel.
Dammit, he was trying to be a gentleman. He meant well. His behavior leading up to this mess was just his way of warning an attractive woman that he wasn’t cut out for the long haul.
His hands flew open to grant her wish, but she wasn’t expecting it. The long handle teetered on its bristles, then toppled over in slow motion, drawing their eyes downward.
He caught it mid-fall. But not before he saw the crimson ink on the statements scattered beneath the scarred old desk. What’s more, she saw him looking.
Back out in the tasting room, Manolo made short work of the broken glass.
“Where’s the trash?”
Mutely, Junie reached under the counter and held out the can. He dumped the shards, then snatched a length of paper toweling off the roll on the bar.
She leaned over the counter to see where he was wiping the last streaks of blood-red wine from the floor. “You don’t have to—”
“Done.” “Sorry.” Sam winced. “Can’t take these guys anywhere.”
“Yeah, sorry, Junie,” aped Keval, looking genuinely remorseful.
“Having too much fun,” added Rory.
“No,” Manolo said, wondering how he was going to make up for his lousy first impression. She must think I’m a complete assjack. “This is my fault. I take full responsibility.” He jutted his chin toward the others. “Pulling these guys out of work so I could do a little day drinking.”
Sam slapped Rory on the back. “Just wanted Manny to get to know my homies, here.”
The woman wiped her palms down the sides of her slim thighs and tightened her lips against a retort.
Manolo put the broom back in the office, then strode behind the bar, lathered up, and offered her his freshly washed hand. “Please accept my apology.”
Junie hesitated. Even after she grudgingly took his hand, she kept inventing ways to avoid eye contact. She blew a loose strand out of hair out of her eyes and, when that didn’t work, shook back her whole shaggy mane...chewed her lower lip...looked at anything and anyone but him. Finally, she lifted her pointed chin and glared at him defiantly, as if she saw straight through his pretext.
Blue eyes. No, blue-green, like the turquoise drops dangling from her ears. Thankfully, that earlier wildfire in them had simmered down to a slow burn. Below the plane of the bar, her hand felt capable and strong, pressed against his. He brushed his thumb lightly across the base of hers. While he drew lazy circles on Junie’s skin, he recalled the phone conversation when Sam had first told him that the pool of local vintners he’d started was crowding him out of his own house. He needed a real building. Sam’s news had only confirmed the buzz back east: that this corner of the Pacific Northwest was fast becoming America’s new capital of pinot noir.
From inside the bubble Manolo imagined surrounding them, Junie used her left thumb and forefinger to methodically pry his digits off her right hand, one by one. Short of being under enemy fire, nothing got Manolo’s blood pumping like actually having to fight for a female conquest. For the sake of cover, he kept up their light banter while drawing out their private little game of handsies as long as possible. She had succeeded in peeling his grip away once, only to have him immediately retake his lost territory. One honest tug was all it would take to free herself from his covert caresses, if she really wanted to.
“Apology accepted, on one condition. I asked you how long you were going to be wreaking havoc in our neck of the woods.”
“Six months, max.”
She smiled ruefully. “Looks like I’d better stock up on glassware.”
She was a good sport, after all. “Shortest lease I could find,” he said.
“That’ll be September. The crush. All the festivities start on the ninth this year.”
“That’s the plan,” said Sam. “We need to have the new consortium up and running by then for the onslaught of tourists. Manny took a place on Main Street above The Radish Rose.”
“Clarkston’s best restaurant.” She lifted an approving brow.
Finally, he’d done something right. Truth was, Manolo never went anywhere without first scouting out the area’s best places for food and wine. “Speaking of which, what are you doing for dinner?”
Junie’s hand snapped back to her side, and the bubble popped. “Working.”
He waited for her to explain.
“I wait tables at dinnertime during the week so I can be here afternoons and weekends for customers.”
Customers? In the nick of time, he bit back a laugh. They hadn’t seen another soul since Sam’s van had left the main wine trail.
Sam stepped up to the bar. “Junie’s got a lot on her plate, now that—”
“I can speak for myself, Sam.” She picked up her bar rag with a flounce and vigorously wiped the counter. “Budbreak is a busy time of year. I have to finish weeding and mowing and paying the bills—” Her mouth snapped shut again at the mention of bills.
Well played, Santos. You’ve just been shot down—in front of four other men.
Manolo waved away his dinged pride. “Don’t worry about it. Good meeting you, Junie.” He reached for his wallet. “Before I go, here, take this for the wineglasses. And I’ll take six bottles of that pinot. Once word gets out, it’s not going to last long.”
* * * *
Sam and Manolo lagged behind the others on their way back to the van.
“Don’t take it personal, man.” Sam always could read him like a book. But then, he’d been highly trained to spot people’s vulnerabilities or, as they said in military jargon, “handle assets.” “Junie keeps to herself. Ever since she got back from UC Davis, she’s been working her ass off.”
“The big winemaking school?”
Sam nodded. “Right after she graduated, her dad died. That left just Junie and her mom to run the place”—he glanced backward out of an abundance of caution—“by which I mean, just Junie.”
“Shame.”
Manolo’s practiced eyes skimmed over the faded brown landscape, across a winding silver ribbon of water to the misty distant hills. Evaluating ground for its development potential came as second nature to him. “Hard to believe grapes’ll grow here. Day’s more than half gone and those hills are still shrouded in fog.”
“That was the old way of thinking,” said Sam. “Brendan Hart was one of the first to see climate change coming.”
From where Manolo was standing, the Willamette Valley felt different from anywhere else he’d been—and he’d been to a lot of places in his thirty-four years. While the East Coast seemed suddenly tired...sedate, rural Oregon still epitomized the frontier spirit, fresh and thrumming with possibility, its people brassy and vibrant.
“Pinot noir’s the polar bear of grapes. The wine gets flabby if it’s too hot. People assume it’s cold here because of the latitude, but the Willamette today is like Napa was ten years ago. Now Cali’s fried, and we’re more temperate, like the Med. These hills are ideal for pinot.”
“So, what happened?”
Sam made a face. “Do I look like a climatologist?”
“Junie’s dad, numb nuts.”
They struck out again across the uneven landscape. “The Harts aren’t originally from around here. Junie was in middle school when Brendan retired as an MP. He was still young, so he started a second career as a state trooper. First month on the job, he neutralized some wing nut with an AR-15 holding a farm family hostage. Overnight, Brendan Hart was a hero.
“But being a cop was never Hart’s main ambition. He might have gotten an instant reputation as a badass, but in person he was kind of quiet, mild-mannered. He found this old farm where hazelnuts and filberts used to grow, and somehow convinced his wife that this was where they were going to settle down, plant their family.”
“Family?”
“Junie and her brother, name of Storm. Soup sandwich, you ask me. You know the type. Always looking for a fast buck without paying his dues. Back when we were in school, you could always find him and Junie out here working alongside their dad. Once he graduated, though, it only took one crush for him to realize what the next fifty were going to look like. Got out while he still had a strong back.”
Manolo winced. He knew what it felt like to be saddled with someone else’s dream. Like you were slowly suffocating.
“Last I heard, Storm was making money hand over fist running one of those cannabis outfits in Colorado.”
Asking would only dredge up pain. But a deep-seated guilt made him need to know. “How’d the old man take it, his only son taking off like that, reneging on his family duty?”
“On top of a decade of tending grapes by moonlight after pulling eight-hour shifts busting drug dealers? Massive coronary, that’s how. Junie found him one morning lying right over there, where he’d gone out to graft rootstock the night before.” Sam pointed between long rows of stakes to where a flock of robins pecked at the thawing earth. Their chirps filled the resulting silence.
Neither Sam nor Manolo were strangers to death. Right now, Sam was probably reliving his own horrors from his time in Iraq. But, as for Manolo, he was obsessing over wayward sons and how they broke their fathers’ hearts.
“Maybe the brother’ll man up, once he matures a little.”
“Doubt it.” Sam pulled a blade of wild garlic and stuck it between his teeth. “Some say Storm got his mom’s good sense and Junie’s a dreamer like her old man.”
Some were probably right. “What about her mom?”
“She’s originally from down south. It’s a wonder Hart ever got her to move to Clarkston in the first place. She never really fit in.” Then Sam’s detail-obsessed nature asserted itself. “Check that. To be fair, she’s a surgeon. Could be she just never had the time to get in good with the locals.”
“A surgeon. Impressive.”
Sam gestured broadly. “You think you could raise two kids, put one through college, and subsidize all this on a cop’s salary? Everyone in Clarkston says it’s only a matter of time before Jennifer Jepson-Hart gets tired of throwing good money after bad and talks her daughter into moving back to civilization.”
“Sounds like Junie’s inherited some good genes.”
“What Junie’s trying to do takes more than good genes. Running a vineyard and a winery is like operating three businesses at once.”
“Growing grapes...making wine...what else?”
“Entertainment. Junie’s one of the most gifted winemakers in the valley. Hart Vineyards is starting to get noticed. But that’s not enough. People want to be entertained as part of the wine-buying experience. If she falls short anywhere, it’s there. I can’t seem to get that through her head. But then, speaking of gifted, you know about the seven intelligences.”
“Say again? I know what kind of structure works best on any given site and how to throw together a decent marinara. You’re the smart one. Enlighten me.”
“You just nailed it without even trying. Seven intelligences theory says the average guy has two or three things out of a possible seven in his wheelhouse.” He counted off on his fingers. “Math, verbal, spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, kinesthetic.
“Take you, for example. You see a piece of ground and you instinctively know what kind of building will work best on it. That’s spatial intelligence. Me? Back in OCS when they gave me the aptitude test, I scored high in intrapersonal—knowing myself—and interpersonal—knowing others. On the other hand, I don’t know a noun from an adverb, and I have zero chance of being drafted by the Seahawks. Junie? She might have kick-ass winemaking chops, but it doesn’t automatically follow that she knows how to sell what she makes.”
Manolo nodded in assent. “That tasting room’s a disaster. Best thing that could happen would be to gut it and start over.”
“Hart didn’t see the point of a fancy tasting room, either. He invested the bulk of his hard-earned cash in the actual winemaking equipment. I suspect Junie’s still paying for those French oak barrels. Nothing’s lacking down there in the cellar. But as far as marketing, Junie’s got her work cut out for her. She’s strong, though. Strong and proud.”
The image of Junie’s late notices strewn across the tasting room floor popped into Manolo’s mind. But he made it a policy to steer clear of women’s personal business. Getting too close only made it harder to pull up stakes when the time came to leave.
He tipped back his head, inhaling the sharp tang of wood smoke and manure. Ahh, the smell of springtime in the country. That wasn’t what Hoboken smelled like. The fresh air cleared his head, bringing him back to less disconcerting problems. Problems that could be solved using inductive reasoning and logic.
“That’s some great pinot she’s got. You’re right, though. This property needs a major overhaul if she wants to turn it into a point of destination. For instance...” Manolo jabbed his bag of wine toward a slope just south of the tasting room. “Over there.” He backtracked several steps. “That grade is just begging to be terraced.” In an instant, the development crystallized in his imagination. “Maybe a pergola there, some tables there. Optimize the view while people are sampling the wine. Put them in the mood to buy.”
Sam followed him a few steps to humor him. “It’s not me you have to convince.”
But Manolo wasn’t listening. His head was exploding with ideas. He turned on his axis, pausing when the dove-gray siding and cheery yellow door of the main dwelling came back into view. “The house looks solid enough, except for that skeleton of two-by-fours on the north end. Is that an addition?”
“Junie hired some fly-by-night to start the side porch over a year ago, to be true to her dad’s original plan. The guy promised her the moon, stayed a couple weeks, then disappeared with her partial payment in his pocket.”
“That’s the kind of jerk that gives my profession a bad name. Not good for the frame lumber to be exposed that long, especially in this climate. The wood’s susceptible to mold.”
Sam shook his head. “That’s all Junie needs, to have to start the porch over on top of everything else.”
“Nice-size house. Junie live there all by herself?”
Sam headed back to the path. “She’s still got her mom.”
There was a flash of wings as a hawk zoomed down on an unsuspecting robin.
“Kestrel,” said Sam, as they watched the raptor fly away with his prey. He turned to Manolo. “Let’s get something straight. We pushed the envelope today. No real harm done other than a few broken glasses. I’ll take the blame for not stopping after two wineries—I like giving Junie business when I can. Just don’t go getting any half-assed ideas. Junie’s not hookup material.”
Manolo almost ran into him. “Hookup material?”
“You know. ‘Hit it and quit it.’ You don’t need to add Junie to your list of Tinderellas. And don’t think I won’t hear about it if you try to sneak in under the radar. Clarkston’s a small town. We all look out for Junie. Same way her dad looked out for us.”
They walked on. Behind Sam, Manolo grinned. “Now, that’s going to sting for a while. I’m more highly evolved than that. Don’t you know? I actually think of myself as a feminist.”
“Hah!” Sam huffed without turning around. “I must’ve missed the memo.”
“In fact—no disrespect, Cap’n—but I’m thinking maybe you got a bad case of the hots for Juniper Hart, yourself.”
“Negative, Lieutenant,” Sam replied without missing a beat.
A rush of relief surged through Manolo, surprising him.
“I blew my chances with Junie Hart a long time ago.”
Now this was interesting. “Out with it. You can’t leave me hanging after a line like that.”
“If you got to know. Ninth grade, spring dance. You remember ninth grade. Hormones raging? Junie was still new, didn’t have many friends yet. On top of that, she was kind of quiet. When it came down to time for the dance, I still hadn’t gotten around to asking anybody, and she was one of the last ones left.”
“So you asked her.”
Sam nodded. “Strictly platonic. We danced, some with each other and a little with other people. I left the gym to get a Coke or something, and that’s when I got kidnapped by Mona Cruz.”
“Ah.” Manolo nodded. “No mother should ever name her daughter Mona. That’s just asking for it.”
“Roger that. Mona was a sophomore, but she should’ve been a junior. A silver ring in her bellybutton, jeans so tight you could see the outline of her new permit in her back pocket. She’d been giving me signs all year, but I was too dumb to do anything. Finally she saw her chance, and dragged me around the corner and down the hall. I was supposed to fight that off?”
“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, even if he’s only in ninth grade.”
“Next thing I know, Mona’s got her tongue down my throat, I’m copping my first feel—and Junie comes walking around the corner. Woody melted like a popsicle in an oven.”
“Christ.” Torn between Sam’s predicament and Junie’s hurt, Manolo’s face twisted in a half grin, half grimace. “At least you went to your ninth grade dance.”
“What?” asked Sam. “You couldn’t get a date?”
If only Manolo could put a humorous spin on his own freshman dance. But even after all these years, there was nothing remotely funny about missing out on the cardinal event of his high school career to do what he did every Friday night, which was work. Even worse was when clusters of his classmates clamored into his family’s restaurant after the dance ended. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never be able to un-see all the other guys and their cute dates, un-hear their exclusive laughter over all the fun that he’d missed. Scribbling down their food orders, scurrying to fill them, he had never felt so left out, before or since.
“I don’t think I had a single date all through high school. My old man was unrelenting. All we ever did was work. My sisters didn’t date, either. Two of my sisters ended up marrying the first guys that came along after graduation, for better or worse. I hightailed it in the opposite direction.”
“You more than made up for lost time,” Sam joked.
“You could say that.” Manolo grinned unapologetically.
“Anyway, now I hear Mona’s got kids by two different baby daddies,” said Sam, going back to his story. “And I got my sights set on a full-bodied red with legs that’d make you cry.”
Well now. This is a good sign. Manolo had been concerned that the only people Sam trusted anymore were the ones he’d served with. Covert assignments that ran a couple years over time tended to mess with a man’s head like that. He slung an arm over his compatriot’s shoulders. “Why, Samuel, you old rascal, you.” Maybe Sam’s invisible wounds were finally starting to heal.
Sam grinned, glued his eyes to his feet, and endured Manolo’s brusque, one-armed squeeze.
“But I meant what I said earlier,” he added earnestly. “Bad as we pissed Junie off today, we take care of our own around here. You two would never work. She’s got enough aggravation.”
“That big-brother act wouldn’t have anything to do with old ninth-grade guilt, would it?”
“Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. And, Lieutenant?”
At the look on Sam’s face, Manolo’s smile faded.
“That’s an order.”