“You ride?”
“It’s been a while.”
“Then you’ll meet people on the trail rides and round the campfire.”
“Night then.”
“Night.”
Hank was halfway back to the inn when he realized the throbbing in his temples was gone.
He shook his head. What did he care what she was planning for tomorrow? Lord knew he had enough work for two men.
His trip to Denver couldn’t get here soon enough. Delilah, a friend from college who still lived there, had invited him down for a visit.
Back in the kitchen, the dishwasher hummed in the background. Ellie set out a stack of gingham napkins for the breakfast crowd. “Get Jamie squared away?”
“Uh-huh.” He hung up his hat for the last time that day.
“She seems like a sweet girl.”
“I guess.” He stopped halfway to the door between the kitchen and the great room. “Before I go up, tell me something. I get why you invited her to eat in the kitchen, seeing’s how she didn’t get any supper. But how come you acted like I hadn’t already eaten, too?”
“Just a feeling I had. I didn’t see the harm in getting better acquainted.”
“What kind of feeling?”
As often as Grandma wished aloud about wanting him to find someone, she’d never singled out any particular individual. If this was her way of telling him that she’d picked Jamie—whom she’d only met that day—out of all the other women in the world, she’d sure picked an odd choice.
“Oh no you don’t.” Hank ran a hand through his hair, flattened down by his ball cap. There was no doubt in his mind.
“Why not? What’s wrong with her?”
Because Jamie was as different from Hank as two people could be, that’s why not. She had these romantic notions about winemaking and vineyards. What she didn’t know was that growing grapes was in many ways the same as any other kind of farming—a tough way to make a living. If not for his parents dying unexpectedly, Hank wouldn’t be here now. But fate had intervened, and now Ellie and he were all each other had left. She had raised him right alongside his parents. He could never do anything to hurt her.
“She’s just not the one, that’s all. End of story.”
“When I was your age I was already married to your grandfather.”
“That was then. This is now. People don’t get married just to get married anymore.”
“As far as supper goes, I thought you wouldn’t mind eating again. You don’t like my chicken?” She lifted a brow.
“You saw how much I ate.” He bent and kissed her papery cheek. “G’night, Grandma.”
On his way upstairs to his suite he pictured Jamie earlier, in his truck. Blonde or redhead? Her hair changed, depending on the light. At the airport, it’d glowed honey. But in the waning light in the truck coming home, it’d taken on a cinnamon hue.
Strawberry blond? Copper? While he brushed his teeth, stripped out of his clothes, and peeled back the covers, he kept hunting for the right word. For some reason beyond his grasp, it was important that he nail it down.
He lay down on his side and squeezed his eyes shut. Three years ago his world had shifted without warning. He’d left a life of unfettered freedom, skiing whenever the spirit moved him, on the brink of learning to fly. Now his every waking moment was dictated by a constant stream of income and expense statements, weather patterns and consumer buying trends. And even though he was raised to be a man who accepted his responsibility, he felt trapped. Thinking of it made his head start aching all over again. He flipped his pillow over to the cool side. What did he care what color her hair was? The coming months would bring a steady flow of visitors passing through his place, just like in every crush. They would drink his wine, ride his horses, and eat Ellie’s old family recipes for a week or so, and then they’d fly away, most of them never to be seen again. Some of them were bound to be . . . what? What was it about Jamie Martel that had him losing precious sleep?
Chapter Three
After lunch, Jamie sat down on the grassy bank behind her cabin, pulled her sneakers and socks off, and wiggled her toes into the coolness of the creek.
Aaah, heaven. Slippery brown minnows swam around her ankles. She stretched her neck, and then lay back on the grass, closing her eyes to the sun’s warmth until a strange, yet somehow familiar sound made her sit up and look toward the bend in the creek.
She’d heard that sound a million times on the farm, growing up. The rhythmic shush of a spade into damp earth and the sucking scrape as it was withdrawn.
She quickly put her shoes and socks back on, then rose and using the opposite creek bank as a guide, climbed up a gentle slope through tall grass, ducking beneath the branches of maple trees until she came upon a wheelbarrow along the edge of a cliff. She peered over and saw Hank and the yellow Lab, Homer, standing in a few inches of water along the edge of the stream.
Homer looked up at the snap of a twig beneath Jamie’s foot and Hank’s eyes followed.
“Thought I heard the sound of shoveling,” she called down to him. “What are you digging for?”
“Quartz.”
Quartz? “Can I watch?”
“Suit yourself.”
She started carefully down the bank. From the steep-sided wall of earth she saw that it was pockmarked with holes.
When she reached the bottom, Homer greeted her with a sniff and a wag of his tail.
“I saw the purple geode in the great room. Are you into rock collecting?”
“I remember the day I found that. I was with my dad, just a little north of here. That was a rare find. We use common quartz in our viniculture. Here.” His wet, muddy hand held out a two-inch-long foggy ice cube with six equal sides. “Doesn’t look like much, but it’s a natural crystal. I’ll admit the science is kind of squishy. But they say they have special powers.”
She turned it over in her hand. “What do you do with them?”
“Grind them into a powder called silica. Then we pack the silica into cow horns and bury them in the vineyard. After a couple months, we dig the horns up, mix the silica with water, and broadcast it over the leaves.”
Despite growing up on a farm, nothing had prepared her for that. She didn’t know what to say.
He dumped the contents of his bucket into the sieve. “My dad began experimenting with hyper-organic farming over a decade ago. He believed it helped with photosynthesis, healthier leaf growth, and protection from disease, among other things. All the better when you use crystals found on the same or contiguous property you intend to use it on.”
His phone rang. He dried his hand on his pants and dug in the pocket of his overalls stained red with clay, while Jamie’s eye flickered over Hank’s equipment—a ten-gallon plastic bucket, a spade, and a digger bar.
“Hey, Tom. Thanks for calling me back. You looking for work by any chance? I already have a man laid up with a broken ankle, and now I’m short another hand all of a sudden.”
Pause.
“What you heard is true. Bailey’s gone AWOL. I need someone for the tasting room right away.”
Pause.
“You can’t. Well, all right. Thanks anyway, and good luck. Later . . .”
Hank shoved his phone back in his pants pocket. At the faint buzz of a small plane overhead, Hank looked up with his hands on his hips and longing in his eyes. Then he looked down with a sigh of resignation at his empty sieve. “Looks like that’s all I’m going to get today.” He straightened his cap and began gathering up his tools.
“Can I help you carry something?” Jamie asked, picking up his spade.
“If you want.”
They climbed the creek bank, loaded the gear in the barrow and headed down the slope. “You say you’re a farm girl?”
“Growing up we had twenty-five head of Holsteins and a handful of quarter horses. But I’ve been in Philly since college.”
“What do you do when you’re not teaching school?”
&nbs
p; “Write songs. Sing in coffee shops and at church. I spent the last three summers working on my master’s.”
“You’re a busy girl.”
“If you want to do something badly enough, you find a way to fit it in. Now that my master’s is finished, I’m looking forward to going to wineries and spending more time with my niece and nephew. My mom died when my sister and I were in high school, but my dad sees her family practically every week.”
“Anybody else?” he asked off-handedly. “Anyone special?”
She kept her eyes on her sneakers as they strolled together. “Not anymore.”
“Didn’t mean to pry.”
“It’s okay.” Tentatively, she added, “What’s Textron Aviation?”
He looked up sharply.
“Your ball cap.”
“Textron is the parent company of Beechcraft, my dad’s old plane. Why?”
“The only time you don’t have it on is indoors.”
The cap had become a part of him. It was the one remaining vestige of what could have been. He couldn’t bear to give it up. “I used to dream about being an airline pilot, but looks like that wasn’t in the cards.”
Hank had come up with an abridged version of his life’s defining event to date, paring it down to the bone. “I’d just started flight school when my parents’ small plane went down on the way home from Seattle.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I always knew I’d follow in the footsteps of my dad, and his dad before him. I just thought I had more time.”
Jamie gazed out at the rolling acres of vines, the inn, the tasting room, and the outbuildings with a new appreciation. “It’s a lot to take on.”
“Didn’t have much choice in the matter.” He couldn’t let Ellie shoulder it all herself.
When they got back to the stretch of creek behind Jamie’s cabin, Homer bounded after something in the tall grass. Hank headed away from the creek toward the barns and sheep pen, Jamie still carrying his spade.
“Ellie seems like a wise lady.”
“She’s like a second mother to me.”
“Is it just the two of you?”
“I have a cousin, Jack. He’s got twin girls. And I got second and third cousins out the wazoo. Some of them are in the wine business, too.” His various cousins had inherited Hank’s uncles’ shares belonging to their common ancestor.
But as the direct descendant of the original immigrant to Oregon, the main estate was his.
At the sheep pen, Hank got a slice of apple from a wood box hung on the wall. He handed the fruit to Jamie and nodded toward the animals.
“They like these.”
Jamie took the slice and reached over the low fence. Two ewes and their lambs strained forward, their damp, velvet noses tickling her palm.
“We use the sheep to keep down the weeds between the vines. Preserves the soil by eliminating the need for herbicides. Free fertilizer, too, if you get my drift.”
Smelling the fruit, a couple more sheep tried to horn in on the action.
“Sorry, guys. All gone.”
With an irrational desire to please her, Hank scraped the bottom of the box for the rest of the fruit and dumped it all in her hastily cupped palms.
She fumbled, and he surrounded her feminine hands with his rough, calloused ones, unnerved by the unexpected, sensual feel of skin on skin.
He turned abruptly. “Don’t spoil ’em, now. I got work to do. I’m filling in for Bailey in the tasting room—that is, unless she decides to show up.”
Abandoning Jamie with her hands full of apples, he strode back to the tasting room to make more calls for help.
But he’d already gone through a dozen old job applications, a list of former employees, and checked with his best vintner friends. Seasonal workers arranged for summer employment way back in March or April, and it was already late June.
He scooted his chair into his battered desk only to be interrupted by the image in his head of Jamie in a proper English riding habit astride a bay thoroughbred, cantering through gently rolling Pennsylvania countryside.
He stood up and looked out the window at the paddock, thinking to distract himself with the view. But in place of his horses he saw her leaning against her teacher’s desk before a class full of students, long legs extending from beneath her skirt, crossed at the knee.
He dropped back into his seat, adjusted the bill of his ball cap, and forced himself to try to think of one more person with a dependable reputation who might be able to help him out until Bailey showed up.
Her hair is reddish gold, he decided.
Either that, or goldish red.
Chapter Four
In the need to learn, as soon as possible, all of the varied aspects of the business that had suddenly fallen into his hands, Hank hadn’t been back to Denver since college. He was still mourning his parents’ passing when he’d had to start making crucial decisions affecting the business. Complicating matters was the fact that things were always in a state of flux. He soon realized the computer system was out of date, and he was faced with a bewildering number of choices with which to replace it. And no sooner had he memorized which grape varietals were planted in which vineyards, than consumer tastes began to change. Joy, his winemaker, was lobbying him to rip out some perfectly good chardonnay rootstock and replace it with pinot gris at a considerable expense of time and money. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Joy, but his father had believed in the promise of that chardonnay. Hank didn’t feel confident enough to second-guess his extensive experience. Besides, all Joy had to worry about was the wine. Staying within a budget and managing the vineyard crew wasn’t her concern.
And then, one gray day last March when he thought the job of supervising the pruning and tying-up of two hundred fifty acres of vineyards would never end, out of the airport limo parked beneath the canopy of the inn at the Sweet Spot emerged a pair of brightly painted toes laced up in high-heeled sandals.
“Delilah?”
“Hank? Hank Friestatt? Is it really you?”
They hadn’t spoken since graduation. Last Hank knew, Delilah had accepted a job as a flight attendant. He’d kept his ski lodge job and got his EMT certification. At twenty-two, he wanted to soar, not be tethered to one spot. He was all set to start aviation lessons when his dream of flying was whipped out from under him like a throw rug.
Once in a while, when Hank looked up and saw a jet contrail, he envied Delilah her independence, flying here and there. He never dreamed that one day she’d land at the Sweet Spot.
“What are you doing here?” he’d asked, looking her up and down.
Delilah had always been a head-turner. Now she had blossomed into full-blown womanhood.
“I could ask you the same question.”
“I live here. This is my place.”
“You own the Sweet Spot? I had no idea!”
To his surprise, something about hearing it on Delilah’s lips awakened a latent pride in Hank. As if pride could be inherited, like brown hair or the enduring Friestatt sense of duty.
Over a glass of wine, she had explained the reason for her visit. “Some of my frequent flyers and first-class passengers are always asking for my advice on out-of-the-way destinations. I listened to what they wanted, started collecting business cards and reaching out to small resorts, making deals with the proprietors in return for commissions.”
“You started your own travel agency,” he said in frank admiration. As often as he felt trapped by his family business, it had given him an appreciation for what it took to become a successful entrepreneur.
“It’s just a sideline,” she said modestly. “I don’t intend to stop flying. I came to the Sweet Spot to see if it would be a good fit.”
Following a two-day tour, she’d seemed enthusiastic about partnering with him. When it came time for her to check out, Ellie gave her the standard industry discount.
“Thanks for the hospitality,” Delilah told Hank as she said good-bye. “And if yo
u’re ever in Denver, you’re always welcome in my guest room.”
“Tell me,” asked Ellie as she and Hank waved to the van receding down the lane. “How come I never heard of this Delilah before?”
“We went out a couple of times,” replied Hank.
He’d only half noticed Ellie’s raised brow. He was remembering the first time he’d spotted Delilah strolling across the campus of the University of Denver, laughing with the center of the basketball team at some private joke. With those long, tan legs and high heels, she was nothing like the girls back home. Delilah Arnold wouldn’t be caught dead walking to first period bleary-eyed, wearing sweatpants and a messy ponytail. Delilah. Even her name sounded exotic.
He’d made it his mission to find out more about her. He’d spent weeks trying to figure out what her schedule was so that he could occasionally end up in the same place at the same time.
Then, one day at the cafeteria salad bar, Hank reached across Delilah for the salad tongs, his arm brushing against hers.
She scanned him from head to toe, her initial frown turning upside down. “I’ve seen you before. On the quad, the other day, coming out of Sturm.”
He shook his head. “Tsk. I don’t think so,” he said, playing it cool. He turned to go, only to be stopped in his tracks by manicured fingers on his bicep.
She had the whitest smile he’d ever seen.
“It was in the morning. I was leaving Speech.”
“Wait.” He frowned and pointed to her legs, as if just remembering. “Black miniskirt?”
Her pursed lips and the tilt of her head said his pretense hadn’t fooled her for a second.
Next thing he knew he was carrying her tray with its plateful of leafy greens back to the spot where she’d left her jacket when she’d gone up to get her food. “Speech, huh?”
“Yeah.” She sighed, sliding into a chair. “Gotta get up early for Petrosky three times a week.”
The following Friday, he was waiting for her outside of Sturm Hall.
She gave him a sly grin but didn’t break stride, so he hurried to fall into step with her.
The Sweet Spot Page 3
