“My family is loud, nosy, and annoying as hell. It’s like spending the evening with five of me.” She smiled and he felt his chest relax a little. “At least if you go with me, I can help you navigate the noise.”

“Going to the party together seems less friends and more… couple-y.”

“Couple-y? You do realize that we have a house, share custody of an alpaca, and we eat at least one meal together a day. Oh.” He kissed her again. Quick and hard. “And you’ve seen me naked.”

“Doesn’t mean I want to pick out a picket fence.”

“Which reminds me. We need to add ‘get fence’ to the ‘Mittens’s Habitat List.’”

“Mittens needs a fence about as much as—”

“You need a stress free night of fun and good food with a charming Italian man and his crazy famiglia.”

“Charming, huh?”

“I was going to go with sexy,” he said, playfully tugging at her ponytail. “Now, how about I pick you up at six? ChiChi gets pissy if we are late.”

“We live together, roomie. So there will be no picking up. Plus, I’m going late.”

“Late?”

“Yeah, I have to clean up after the Cork Crawl.” Her hands fidgeted and he knew that they’d reached the heart of the issue. She wouldn’t have a team like everyone else to help with the takedown.

“No problem. I’ll help you clean up then give you a ride.” His eyes dropped to her cleavage. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. “Just say yes.”

He watched her, sitting there, staring out at the lake as though he’d proposed marriage, seven kids, and a budding alpaca farm.

She reached out, reeled in her line, and then recast it. “Why did you bring me here, Nate?”

“Because the water tank was being delivered and—”

She looked at him. “No, I mean, here. Why did you bring me here?”

Nate looked out at the lake. About the size of a football field, it was surrounded by an outcropping of rolling vines that glistened in the afternoon sun, making shadows on the water. The dock moved under them as water lapped gently against the posts.

It was peaceful, they were completely isolated, and she couldn’t run. Most importantly, this was one of Nate’s favorite vineyards and he wanted to share this with her.

“One day a week during the summer, my dad would kidnap one of us kids. Each of us had our special place to go with him. He took Gabe to museums, Abby to the symphony, Trey was forced to take dance, and Marc, lucky son of a bitch that he was, got to go to a daddy-and-me team building camp.” That always pissed Nate off. “On my days, he’d sneak in my room before anyone was awake. We’d pack up the car and spend the day here fishing. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we caught lunch, but we always fished and we always had a good time.”

Nate smiled at her surprise. “I would think that Trey or Marc would have been the more obvious choice in a fishing companion. I mean, fishing is dirty and unpredictable and based on luck. You’re all structure and starch.”

He had to laugh. “To be honest I hated it. After three weeks of catching jack shit, I went to the library and checked out a book. I still remember the look on my dad’s face when he was baiting his line, and instead of a pole, I pulled out What Fish Don’t Want You to Know: A Guide to Freshwater Fishing.” Nate laughed. “I spent more time with my nose in that book than with my hook in the water.”

“Did you catch anything?”

“Nope. And nothing I did mattered. No matter how perfect I baited the hook, how flawlessly I followed the instructions, I could never figure out the system.” He looked over at her and she smiled. “What?”

“That must have been… frustrating,” was all she said, but he could feel her laughing.

“Beyond.” He’d hated it, especially when Trey started giving him pointers. “So one week I asked him why he didn’t take Marc fishing, and he said that I needed it more. Going to the team building camp and problem solving would have been fun, but coming out here forced me slow down, realize that not everything makes sense.”

“Did you ever catch a fish?”

“Yeah, my dad told me to put the book down and forget what I had read. And wouldn’t you know it, I caught a fish.” He’d only been ten, but that was the first time he remembered feeling like a man. “It was a guppy and we had to throw it back, but I had caught my first fish.”

“I bet your dad was proud.” To his surprise, her hand slid all the way down his arms to lace their fingers and then she dropped her head on his shoulder and her feet back into the water.

They sat like that, holding hands, sharing space and watching the lily pads buoy in the water.

“Last night, after you fell asleep, I got to thinking about your dad, which led to thinking about my dad and I knew I wanted to bring you here.”

He felt Frankie’s chest rise and take in a breath, then slowly let it out. “What were you thinking? About my dad, I mean?”

“That you are a lot like him and he knew that. Maybe he didn’t leave you any of the vineyards because he knew you didn’t need it. Your brothers have never been connected to that land like you have, they needed the ties. But you, you don’t.” He felt her tense, but she didn’t move, so he continued. “What if it was his way of showing you his love? Doing what he thought was best, not for the winery, but for you.”

Head still on his shoulder, Frankie tilted her face toward him, looking up with wide baby blues. “You don’t think he did it because I chose to live with my mom?”

God, is that what she’d thought all these years? That her father hated her because of a single decision she’d been forced to make when she was six?

“No, I don’t.” He bent down and kissed her nose. “Your dad and grandpa went at it for years over how to run the winery. You being tied to that place would have made you miserable.”

“Right, because we’re such a big happy family now.”

“You’re happy though,” Nate said gently and they both knew it was true. She might be hurt over Charles’s behavior, but she loved making her own wine. “You are loyal and honest and you lead with your heart, Frankie. But you’re also a dreamer. You’d rather take a huge risk on the off-chance that it produces something unique, than play it safe. And spending your life working Charles’s land, following his rules and making his wine would have made you miserable, just like it did your dad. It would be a life of expectations, constraints, duty, and your dad knew that if you inherited those shares, you would have never broken free.”

“Yeah, well, that vineyard was the only thing we had in common, the only tie I had to the Baudouin side of the family that had nothing to do with my mom or the divorce. So the only thing he broke was my belief in what I thought we had.”

And my heart. It went unsaid but Nate knew that it had happened all the same.

“The funny thing,” she continued, her voice so quiet he barely heard it over the lapping of the water. “I’ve worked that land every day since his death, next to a man who I idolized more than life only to discover that in the end, he didn’t want me there either.”

“Your dad loved you, Frankie. He wanted you to find happiness in just being you, without the weight of Charles. Maybe his plan just didn’t go as he’d hoped.”

“Maybe,” Frankie whispered.

“And I think that Charles, although he is being difficult, is secretly proud that you went after what you wanted.”

“I think,” she said, leaning up and snagging his lower lips between her two plump ones and sucking him into her mouth. “That you secretly brought me here to go skinny dipping.”

She untangled herself and stood, the dock shifting under her motions. Although skinny dipping sounded fan-fucking-tastic, and just the suggestion had him going from zero to fully-loaded, Nate wanted to finish their talk. But then Frankie stripped her shirt over her head and, hello, one problem solved.

No bathing suit or bra.

Then her fingers went to the button on her shorts.

Yeah, she was done talking. That much was obvious. He was starting to realize that whenever he tried to talk to her about something even semi-serious, she dangled sex in front of him. Not that he was complaining. Especially when she dropped trou and Nate finally got a look at the small tattoo on the upper curve of her heart shaped ass as she executed a perfect dive right off the end of the dock. And oh baby, now he was incapable of speaking.

He watched her tan skin glide beneath the surface, swimming farther and farther away from him and all the feelings that he just drudged up. He’d pushed a little, and she’d given a little. It was a start.

CHAPTER 14

Frankie waited until her lungs burned for air before she surfaced. She needed a moment of quiet to collect herself, to absorb what Nate had said and then store it safely away to revisit it—never. She was running, and they both knew it. More importantly, Nate knew when to push and when to let it go. And he had wisely let it go.

Diving back under, she allowed herself to just glide, let the water slide over her body. Everything seemed clearer under the water, the quiet flow made it easy to forget—about her grandfather, about her money problems, and most importantly about Nate and the genuine concern in his eyes, which made her wish for things that scared her.

When she was in the middle of the pond, she came up for air. Involuntary chills ran down her body. But it wasn’t from the shock of the cold water lapping against her heated skin, it was from the strong, masculine hands that gripped her hips and ever so slowly slid up her body.