Love on the Lake Boxed Set

by Amy Gamet

  It wouldn’t hurt to look.

  Just for a minute.

  Her eyes lingered on the muscles of his arms, the light sheen of sweat on his sun-bronze skin. Her stare moved lower, taking in the way his jeans curved tightly around his backside and hugged his strong-looking legs.

  She swallowed against the strange feeling that was filling her insides.

  Rafael turned and met her stare, and she felt her cheeks burst into flame.

  He smiled. “You came.”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  I really shouldn’t have, and gosh, hey, look at the time.

  She put her hands in her pockets, an image of herself playing Scrabble with her mother forcing her chin a notch higher. “I almost didn’t.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “It doesn’t mean I’m okay with you spying on me, Rafael.”

  “Not spying. Noticing.”

  Her mouth formed a hard line. “Call it what you want. It’s not all right.”

  Rafael narrowed his eyes, resting his hands upon his bin, and she shifted her weight under his scrutiny.

  “You’re still waiting for him to come back,” he said.

  It was such a personal remark, so far into none-of-his-business territory that she snapped at him. “Unless you want me to turn around and high-tail it out of here, you’d better quit talking.”

  He reached into his pocket and handed her a pair of snips. “The first day of the crush is the best day of the year, especially for someone who loves plants.”

  She took the tool from his hand, her fingers accidentally brushing his and sending a bolt of energy up her arm. “Thanks.”

  She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t looking forward to today’s work. She’d invested a lot of time and energy to pursue her interest in horticulture, and this was the first day she actually got to use any of that knowledge. Still, it prickled that she wasn’t really supposed to be up here. “Are you sure Annie doesn’t mind covering the tasting room?”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  “Peter seemed upset.”

  “I suppose he was.”

  “You just don’t care.”

  “Not especially. Peter is often upset with the decisions I make.”

  She turned to the grapevines, the plants growing vertically between paired sets of wires. “I didn’t expect to see you picking,” she said. “I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with picking grapes.”

  “I like physical work, using up my energy instead of pushing papers around a desk. Besides, we have to pick the grapes before we can crush them.” He held out an arm. “Come here.”

  Melanie’s eyes widened, but she took a step forward. He took hold of her upper arms and guided her in front of him, each of them facing the vines.

  “You want to cut right between the larger vine and the beginning of the bunch in a nice, straight cut,” he said.

  His body was lightly touching the back of hers, and she was sure she’d stopped breathing. She turned her head. “I think I got it.”

  He took a step backward, then moved to a new spot beside her and began to work, as if there was nothing unusual about the way he’d touched her.

  She told herself to relax as she cut the first clusters of fruit. He wasn’t going to throw her on the ground and ravish her in front of all these other workers.

  Ravish me?

  She smirked at her own twisted thoughts.

  Rafael moved down a step. “This reminds me of my youth.”

  Melanie laughed. “Your misspent youth, is more like.”

  “Not this part. This was the good part. Working outdoors, the sun on my back and the fruit of the earth in my hands. It was nothing like where I came from.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “A hundred and tenth street. New York City.”

  “How did you end up here?”

  “My father got in some trouble. Packed us up to go live with his brother. It was my uncle who got us the job picking fruit upstate, and Moon Lake was the first stop we made.” He shrugged. “Turned out to be the last. End of story.”

  Melanie furrowed her brow as she worked. That was far from the end of the story as she knew it, the years between then and now stretching out like a silence.

  From the moment years before, when Tori told Melanie that Rafael was back in town and working at Crescent Moon, Melanie had wondered what had taken place to bring him back here. No one seemed to know, and Tori’s father Charlie Henderson wasn’t talking.

  She bit her lip. What did she have to lose?

  “Rafael, exactly what happened when you left Moon Lake?”

  * * *

  His hand froze mid-snip, and he forced himself to complete the action. If anyone else was asking this question, he’d evade it all day long and into tomorrow. But this wasn’t just anyone, and he knew he had to tell Melanie the truth. He watched her carefully for the inevitable reaction. “My father went to prison.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “And I went to foster care.”

  She looked away. “I had no idea.”

  He could hear the pity in her voice and he wanted to erase it. “I ended up at a group home, just over in Ithaca, the Sonnet-Brown house. One of my counselors was Doris’s nephew, and they put two and two together and realized I was the kid who stole from Crescent Moon. Doris got Charlie to come visit me. Next thing you know, he’s signing me out for visitations, teaching me how to grow grapes. When I aged out of the system, he offered me a job. Somewhere to go.”

  “I wondered how that happened.”

  “I’m sure a lot of people did.” He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm. “From the looks I get in town, I think some folks have their own ideas.”

  “You can’t blame them for being curious.”

  “No, but I can blame them for judging me.”

  She placed a bunch of grapes into the bin. “That sounds like a lonely way to think.”

  He straightened to his full height and turned to her. “If I’m alone, it’s through no fault of my own. I’ve spent years making up for my mistakes, and I’m a better person than some of the people looking down their noses at me. Bonnie made me vineyard manager last year. Do you think she would have done that if she had any doubts about my character?”

  “I wasn’t questioning your character, Rafael.”

  “What were you saying, then?”

  She shook her head. “Never mind.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “I was just saying that maybe the people around you aren’t judging you as much as you’re judging them.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like. You haven’t been on the receiving end of that look your whole life. You never had to work for anyone’s respect, it was just handed to you.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “You don’t have any idea what my life has been like. You just assume because I never broke the law that everything’s been coming up roses…”

  He held up his hand. “Whoa. Let’s stop right there.” He forced himself to measure his words, not wanting his temper to plant the seeds of regret. Even now she was beautiful, the sun shining on her golden hair, but he couldn’t tell her what to think, or beg for her understanding. “I enjoy having you here, Melanie, but perhaps it’s not meant to be. If you don’t want to work for someone you don’t respect, you should find another job.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t respect you.”

  He pulled off his gloves and tucked them in his pockets. “You just think I don’t deserve good things because of my past mistakes.”

  “That’s not true.”

  He took a deep breath and leveled his gaze on hers. “Can you honestly tell me you think I’m just like every other man in Moon Lake, just as respectable, just as trustworthy, just as much a valued part of this community?”

  Her eyes dropped.

  Even though he’d said it, even though he’d forced the issue, he couldn’t help
but feel she had let him down. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Rafael…”

  “You should go. Leave the snips in the bin and I’ll have someone else finish this row.” He threw his own snips in the bin and turned away. “I’ll see you around, Melanie.”

  * * *

  The rest of the day went by in a blur of hard work, with Rafael supervising the efforts at the crush pad. He drove the forklift, transporting the Welch bins to the crusher, each one carrying a full ton of fruit. Then he helped pump the crushed grapes to a tall steel tank, where the juice would separate from the solids over the next several days.

  It was hard, physical labor, and he loved every moment, though his mind was still on Melanie. At the end of the day when he walked into the tasting room, he couldn’t believe how empty it seemed without her in it, after the one single day she’d been here.

  He thought he’d gotten used to the comments people could make, the judgments of his worth. But it was different hearing them out of her mouth.

  She would never care about a man she couldn’t respect and understand. He’d been foolish to believe she was different, that she could see the real him that others had failed to notice.

  Years ago, she gave him food for his hungry belly. It didn’t make her the woman for him. It was a fantasy, and now he’d have to let that fantasy go, and it hurt more than it should have to admit it.

  A door behind the counter opened, and a young woman with short brown hair appeared. “Hey, Rafael,” she said. “Long time, no see.”

  “Hi, Annie. How’d it go down here today?”

  “It was good. It got busy for a few hours after lunch. How was the crush?”

  “Good.” He noticed she was too dressed-up to have been in the winery at all today, and felt instantly guilty for having pulled her from her regular job so he could be closer to Melanie. “I hope you didn’t mind too much.”

  She went into the fridge and pulled out a bottled water, handing it to him. “Not at all.”

  Annie was eager to please, which made her a good employee. It also made Rafael just the slightest bit uncomfortable, and he was grateful he didn’t often need to work alongside her.

  Doris walked in the room. “Hey there, Rafael,” she said. “Bonnie called. She’s on her way over.”

  Charlie’s widow let Rafael handle the bulk of the vineyard operations, but she was still a fixture come harvest time. “I wondered why she didn’t put in an appearance today. Has she ever missed the first day of the crush?”

  “I don’t think so. How did it go?”

  He thought of his argument with Melanie, but knew better than to share it with Doris. “Pretty well. We racked a full tank of juice and we have another full day ahead tomorrow.”

  “How’d Melanie do?”

  He worked to keep his face impassive. “Not so good. She left this morning.”

  Doris furrowed her brow. “What happened?”

  “She decided she doesn’t want to work for me. We were talking one minute, then the next minute we were arguing.”

  “About what?”

  “Stupid things that belong in the past.”

  “Ah.” Doris pulled up a bar stool. “Sounds like she touched a nerve.”

  His head jerked back. “No, not at all.”

  “Rafael, I haven’t heard you talk about your past in all the years I’ve known you, but you were talking to Melanie about it on her second day at work. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she’s more to you than just an employee.”

  “Ex-employee. And you do know better.”

  The bell above the door jingled and Peter walked in, talking to someone. “…we do that to prevent a second fermentation. You want the wine to stay sweet.”

  Melanie walked in behind him, her face freckled and slightly pink, and Rafael’s eyes widened. When she met his stare, she smiled slightly.

  Rafael turned questioning eyes back to Doris, who grinned. “She was picking most of the day, then Peter asked if he could leave Annie down here and keep Melanie up at the winery. I’m surprised you didn’t see her.”

  Rafael narrowed his eyes. “You knew she didn’t quit.”

  Doris winked and stood up. “I know all sorts of things, now.”

  Melanie was talking to Peter. “Thanks so much for letting me stay with you. I learned a lot and it felt so good to be working out in the sun.”

  “No problem, I had fun.” Peter walked to the bar and helped himself to a bottle of wine. “Come back again sometime and I’ll show you some more.”

  Rafael cleared his throat. “Melanie, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  She crossed to him. “What’s up?”

  “I thought you quit.”

  “And miss your sunny personality? Never.”

  He grinned at that. “You’re downright pleasant, yourself.”

  “I do respect you, Rafael. I want you to know that. But when you asked if you were part of this community, I had to stop and think. In all honesty, I think you choose to be on the outskirts of it.”

  Rafael’s mouth settled into a hard line, his eyes wandering the room, unfocused. There might be a kernel of truth to what Melanie was saying—the type of kernel that stuck in your teeth and hid from a toothpick.

  He realized he was staring at Annie without even meaning to. She was flushed, with the slightest smile on her face, and he quickly looked back to Melanie. “Maybe it is a choice. Maybe it’s not.”

  Melanie bobbed her head from side to side. “Maybe it’s both.”

  The bell over the door jingled and Bonnie Henderson walked in, her curly gray hair soft around her shoulders. She cocked her head at Melanie. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m your newest employee. Rafael hired me to work in the tasting room.”

  “That’s wonderful.” Bonnie gave her a warm squeeze. Melanie had been friends with Bonnie and Charlie’s daughter Tori since they were little, and most recently worked at Tori’s jewelry shop, Tori’s Treasures.

  Bonnie frowned. “Though I’m afraid you won’t be my employee very long.” She sank into one of two upholstered chairs. “Doris, may I have a glass of pinot noir, please?”

  Rafael and Doris exchanged a look. Bonnie never drank in the tasting room. He cleared his throat. “We missed you today. Didn’t you get my message that we were harvesting the chardonnay?”

  “I did.” Bonnie sighed. “I wanted to see if I could do it.”

  “Do what?” he asked.

  “Stay away. Miss the harvest. I’ve looked forward to the crush every year for most of my life. It’s a new beginning. A fresh start.”

  “Why would you want to miss it?” asked Melanie.

  “Because I’ve made a decision, and it affects all of you. Peter, come and join us.” When he sat down, she continued. “You know Edward’s been ill,” she said, referring to her second husband. “Now that the cancer is in remission, he wants us to travel. Spend the winters somewhere warm and the summers somewhere warmer. See the world.”

  She shook her head, a winsome expression on her face. “Charlie and I always said we’d do that. What’s that expression? Life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Well, I mean it this time.” Bonnie’s eyes moved slowly around the tasting room. “I’m selling the vineyard.”

  Rafael felt his jaw hanging open and deliberately closed it.

  “Will Tori take over?” Peter asked.

  “I offered it to her, but she and Jed have their own businesses to run, and I won’t have them take on Crescent Moon just for my sake.”

  Rafael’s thoughts were spinning. What would this mean for him? In the back of his mind, he’d hoped to have his own vineyard one day. This one, if the family would sell it to him. But he never expected that day to come so soon, and despite his best efforts, he knew all too well he wasn’t financially able to afford what an established operation like Crescent Moon would cost.

  “Congratulations,” said Melanie. “That sounds exciting.”

 
“Thank you. I am excited for the trip, if only slightly wary of losing this place. It’s not easy to go globetrotting with roots as deep as mine.” She turned to Rafael, then to Peter. “I’m sure you two have a lot of things to consider. Rafael, if there’s any chance you want to buy Crescent Moon, you will have that opportunity before it goes on the market. That’s how Charlie would have wanted it. Peter, you will have the chance if Rafael refuses. But once we list it, any offer is fair game.”

  Rafael’s eyes met Peter’s, and his friend lifted his glass to Rafael before taking a sip. It pained Rafael to see Peter put so firmly in his place, though Rafael knew in his heart Bonnie was right about Charlie’s wishes.

  Rafael pictured his mentor in his mind.

  Thank you.

  He would find a way, and he would buy Crescent Moon. There were loans. Investors. People in this town who could back him financially.

  People I barely even know.

  People who never welcomed my presence in this town in the first place.

  “How long do we have?” he asked.

  “Two weeks,” said Bonnie. “Three at most.”

  During October.

  The harvest.

  The crush.

  The busiest time of the entire year.

  Rafael’s eyes sought out Melanie’s. There was comfort there, and good counsel, and he wanted both, badly. Doris was talking, giving her well-wishes. He had to get out of here, had to think, had to plan. He stood up.

  Bonnie touched his sleeve. “I’ve given you a lot to think about, and I do apologize for the timing. Edward and I want to make the most of the time we’ve been given.”

  Worry was clearly etched on her lovely face, and Rafael hoped Edward was as healthy as he appeared to be. “I understand.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “I am happy for you, Bonnie. You deserve this opportunity.”

  “Thank you, Rafael. That’s exactly how I should look at it. As an opportunity.”

  Chapter 4

  Rafael drove the dark winding road that led to his house, the window of his truck open to the crisp night air and the smell of a distant wood fire. In the miles between Crescent Moon and here, he had somehow managed to convince himself he’d never find an investor to go in with him.