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Josh just nodded, munching on his cake, sipping on his coffee. ‘You like her, don’t you?’
Where the hell was this going? Was Josh still fretting about that stupid hair tie? ‘Who, Angela?’ he said, being deliberately obtuse. ‘I’ve never met her.’
‘No. Holly. You like Holly.’
And if Franco had ever had a twitch in his eye, it would have been twitching like mad now. ‘She’s all right,’ he said, choosing his words ultracarefully. ‘She and Gus clearly make a great team—with your help, of course.’
‘Only we all like her around here.’
He nodded. ‘Ri-ight.’ And swirled the coffee in his cup and drank some more.
‘But she got burned once. By this rich guy who promised her the world. Only what he really wanted was the vines.’
Somewhere in a gum tree nearby a kookaburra laughed and Franco found himself half wondering whether that was entirely coincidental.
He guessed enough to know whatever had happened back then hadn’t ended well. And now he was being warned.
‘I have no intention of hurting Holly, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
The other man stood, looked abashed, not expecting a direct answer to his indirect line of enquiry. ‘Good. Well, I better be getting back.’
Franco just swallowed the dregs of his coffee, bitter and cold, with the chorus of the kookaburra playing in his head.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FORECAST WAS for wall-to-wall rain, a huge low stuck over the southeast region of the state, and Holly decided they’d be better off getting the sparkling wine order for the Port MacDonnell wedding settled and come back to the pruning when there was a break in the weather.
They left at six in the morning, the rain already pelting down, the wipers going overtime. With a good run they should be at Purman’s Adelaide Hills vineyard by lunchtime.
Except there was a truck rollover on the highway and the backtracking and the diversion cost them another two hours, so it was mid-afternoon by the time Franco took the Crafers exit from the South Eastern Freeway and followed Holly’s directions through the picturesque Adelaide Hills towns of Piccadilly and Summertown.
Travel weary, Holly was wondering how they were going to make it back the same day. It was always going to be a long day without the delays and now they faced the prospect of not getting home before midnight, hard going on the rain-slick roads.
The sensible thing to do would be to stay overnight and drive back tomorrow fresh. The key to the guest suite they’d built for just such overnight stops was on the car keys. Then she glanced at the man alongside her, at his long-fingered hands on the wheel, at his strong too-perfect profile, and felt that strange clenching inside and looked away.
Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be quite so sensible, and if Holly Purman could be summed up in just one word, sensible was probably the one. Maybe it was because she didn’t have brothers or sisters or maybe it was because she’d grown up with Pop and was used to adult company, but she’d been that way as long as she could remember.
And staying overnight would definitely not be sensible.
She stole another glance at him and gazed at his lips and thought about the feel of his kiss and felt a shivery tingle blossom inside her. Then again, sensible had never felt like this.
Maybe sensible was overrated.
And maybe it was time to throw caution to the wind.
She sucked down air and gazed out her window, her cheeks burning, wondering if it was a kind of madness to be thinking what she was thinking. To be contemplating sleeping with a man she’d once considered her enemy.
It must be some kind of madness. But then it made a kind of sense too. He was no longer the enemy. He was … Franco—the man who worked the vines with her, the man who stirred her slumbering femininity as nobody ever had.
But best of all, he’d be gone soon, and nobody need ever know.
But would he even want to?
‘This is more like the kind of country I’m used to,’ Franco said alongside her, interrupting her thoughts. The land here dipped and rose, valley floors planted as market gardens, hillsides under orchard or vines, interspersed with pockets of bush. ‘Without the benefit of your gum trees.’
Holly’s ears pricked up. Beyond offering a name of the region, Franco had never willingly spoken of where he lived. Previously he’d clamped if the conversation edged anywhere near his life back in Italy or his family for that matter. It had irritated her at the time but she hadn’t been interested enough to persist. He’d been something to be tolerated for the duration, that was all. But that was before, when she’d thought of him more as an inconvenience than a man. Now the man seemed front and centre of her imagination. Now she wanted to know all she could about him.
