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Ethan, though…he’d looked like he wanted to eat me alive.
And not in a good way.
In a,wrap me in a blanket and throw me into a raging forest-firekind of way.
“I guess there is more to him than I thought I knew…” I murmured while tugging the sheets up.
While plump and new, the duvet looked like a faded antique quilt with a pattern of patches forming interlocking squares—very rustic and nothing like the steel blue back in my old apartment in Denver. Still, I slid sideways on the cool sheets, closed my eyes, and…could not sleep for the life of me.
Again.
Goddamnit, Ethan kept jumping behind my lids. No matter how I tossed and turned, he would never get away for more than a minute. Exhaustion finally took over, and I slipped off to sleep sometime before the witching hour and woke up at nearly midday.
Strong midday sunlight was beaming into the room through the windows, so I knew I had slept through the morning even before I woke fully. Something strange for me because my body was programmed to get up at dawn.
I guess an uneasy night and a jarring meeting with the Montague to my Capulet would do that to me.
Sitting up, I rubbed my eyes with one hand while searching for my phone with the other. With my vision clear, I checked my messages and my calendar—by habit, even though I didn’t have class or a dissertation to hand in—and realized, with shock, that I had the whole day free.
It felt…strange.
Slipping from bed, I went to the bathroom and washed up, got my robe on, and padded downstairs, craving coffee like a fiend. Ryan wasn’t there, and chances were, he had already gone to the town to meet up with his friends, or he was at the library with a pile of books higher than his six-foot-one.
Luckily for me, though, he had the coffee pot already filled.
After pouring a cup, I reached for my cell and called Brodie, my roommate from Denver. I’d promised to let him know when I’d gotten home, but it had been too late to call last night.
“Please tell me your car broke down, and a handsome lumberjack came to your rescue,” he said instead of being normal with ahello. He was a lit major and a romance author, so I gave him a pass.
“Sorry to break your heart, Brodie,” I laughed. “No dice on the lumberjacks coming to my rescue.”
“Bummer,” he grunted, and I heard the muted clickity-clack of his keyboard in the background. He was probably working on his next bestseller. “So, how’s wine country?”
“Same as it always was,” I replied. “Good people in the town, aggravating neighbors a mile away from you. But…” I sighed, “…to be fair, I may be the aggravating neighbor this time.”
“Oh, pray tell,” Brodie said. “But wait a second. I need to refill my coffee.”
“And your half-ton of sugar and crème,” I laughed. “Have some coffee with your sugar, why don’t you?”
He grunted something in French that I knew to be a curse word. But soon, he came back, “So, what did you do?”
Dropping a cube of sugar into my drink, I told him the whole story, from my screw-up with the eavesdropping to the righteous indignation and then to having my bluster flung right back into my face.
“Oi vey,” Brodie grunted. “You jammed your foot into your mouth on that one.”
“I know,” I replied. “And I tipped my hand too. Now he knows about the contract, and if I know Vega, he is going to double down on getting his hands on that one. The only good thing in this scenario is that he doesn’t know my dad is sick. If he did, that would be two weak points, and I might as well roll over and give him every weak point to our machinery.”
“Huh,” Brodie sounded contemplative. “Remind me. How did this rivalry start again?”
“No one knows for sure,” I replied. “Some people say it started on the Mayflower when my great, great, great, and a couple more great grands before we got to my grandfather, who bought his prized grape seedlings, and one of the Vega men dropped one of the two into the ocean. He then waited until the Vega were settled and dumped cattle dung on their orange blossoms, stopping the bees from collecting honey. From there, the long-lasting hatred began.”
“Really,” this time, I heard the scratch of a pencil in the background. “Tell me more.”
I grew suspicious. “Brodie, are you using my family’s history for one of your tawdry plots?”
“There is nothing tawdry about my plots, and yes, I am, without a lick of shame, using your family history to make an updated Romeo and Juliet,” he replied. “So, again, tell me more.”
I rolled my eyes. “Another rumor says my great-great-grandfather tried to make amends and asked a Vega lady to marry him, but on the eve of the wedding, he found herin flagrante delictowith another man. He vowed to hate her and her family to the day he died. Oddly, the Vega said it’s the other way around. My grandfather had knocked someone up and was trying to hide it by marrying the Vega lady, but she found out and, in today’s terms, kicked him to the curb. I doubt that happened, though.”
