Love Bats Last (The Heart of the Game) (26 page)

Trust took time, something they hadn’t yet had much of. You had to know most people before you could trust them. There’d been exceptions, people he knew he could trust the minute he’d met them. Emilio was one. Scotty was another. He looked over at Jackie. He’d have to earn her trust. It was a challenge he was up for.

He walked her to the door of her little house.

She didn’t invite him in. He hadn’t expected her to. But the animal part of him growled and paced inside him and wished she had.

She turned to go inside. He tapped her arm.

“I’d like to have a proper date,” he said, unwilling to let her go. “How about kayaking?”

“Kayaking?” She said the word like she’d never heard it before.

“You know, boats, paddles.” He motioned with his hands. “Skimming across the water?”

She cracked the faintest of smiles at his pantomime.

He pulled his phone from his pocket. “How about the... the twenty-sixth? There’s no game that day. Let’s meet at OceanTrek at sunset, say five p.m.? The bay is beautiful at night.”

“I’m an excellent kayaker,” she said with a wavering smile that told him she still wasn’t sure of his intentions. “You’re not the only one with a body that works.”

She was certainly right there. He couldn’t resist leaning down and kissing her on the cheek. “A date it is, then.”

As he walked to his car, he was glad for the coat that hid the evidence of his body working.

Chapter Twenty

On the evening they’d agreed to kayak, Jackie wore A thick sweater and pulled a winter hat from her bedroom closet. She’d received an email from Alex confirming their date a few days before, but when she’d tapped out her reply, she’d never expected such chilling weather. Twice she’d drafted emails to cancel, but her fingers obeyed her heart and not her brain. Besides, what harm was there in a simple kayak outing?

Heavy winds earlier in the day had blown down the tent covering the dolphin tank at the Center and had caused damage throughout the headlands and in other parts of the park bordering the coast. But now the sky was clear, almost harshly bright, the winds had calmed, and the temperature was dropping rapidly as the sun neared the horizon.

She stopped in her living room and flicked off the baseball game she’d been studying. She imagined it might take years before she really understood the sport.

What she’d learned only increased her respect for the players. For one player in particular. It turned out that the batting title Alex was chasing was almost impossible to achieve. Even the diehard baseball fans among her colleagues remarked about how hard he was pushing. Being an All Star nine years in a row was pretty damn good, they’d agreed. But she was beginning to think she understood what Alex was after. He’d set a goal and was determined to achieve it; she would’ve done the same.

But it wasn't just his drive for achievement and excellence that called out to her; those drives she understood. It was the unfamiliar drives that he'd roused that nearly obsessed her, that tore her mind from her work and haunted her dreams.

She tossed her parka onto the seat of her truck and jumped in, then lifted up to pull out the scraper she’d used that morning to clear ice from her windshield.

She drove the main street of Sausalito as it curved along the west side of San Francisco Bay. Gulls circled overhead, dark slashes against rosy fingers of sunset-streaked clouds. The tourist shops selling T-shirts and hats were just closing. A few tourists straggled by licking at ice cream cones and laughing. How they could eat ice cream in such cold weather was beyond her.

She reached the little cove that was home to OceanTrek Kayaks and walked down to the small crescent of beach. Two kayaks were lined up and waiting at the shore. One of the OceanTrek employees walked down the sloping beach toward her.

“If you decide not to go out in this, we can give you a rain check,” he said.

“I’ll check in with my friend and let you know,” she said.

“No need. Just leave the boats on the beach if you change your mind.” He gave her an assessing look. “You both know how to handle these?”

She nodded.

Apparently satisfied, he turned and walked up the sandy slope and back to his office.

She blew on her hands. The wind might have died down, but the chill was enough to make her pull the hood of her parka over her wool cap and snug it tight around her neck. She paced the beach as she waited, as much from nerves as to keep warm. At five thirty she called Alex’s cellphone. A machine-generated voice told her stiffly that the customer was out of reach.

She headed for her truck and closed the door against the cold. Drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, she considered her options. Alex wouldn’t be late, not this time. She might not have much experience with men, but she felt in her bones that their date was as significant to him as it was to her. Something had kept him away.

She typed
Tavonesi
into her phone and pulled up the name of the vineyard Alex’s family owned. When she punched the coordinates for Trovare Vineyard into the weather page, a killer-frost warning flashed orange across the screen.

It made sense. Cloudless, windless nights were the likeliest to bring hard frosts.

She pulled her phone closer and checked the weather map. Trovare Vineyard was only a short distance from the last batch of samples she’d taken. Samples that had shown the highest volume of radon and nitrates.

She squinted at the screen. It looked like the property was maybe half a mile from the river. She’d check the location against the map the Grower’s Association had sent her.

Suddenly she felt stupid for not having asked him about the fertilizers before. Of course he’d know the area. She’d just assumed that their place was in Napa. Gage had given her a bottle of Trovare wine. It had a Napa address, not Sonoma. Or had it? Maybe she’d read it wrong. Maybe she’d just wished that Alex’s vineyard was in Napa.

What else had she missed? The fact that she hadn’t asked him before this only told her how deep she’d fallen. It was time to climb out. She’d meant to talk to him after the day at the ballpark, but then Claire had called and her brains had scrambled.

She started her truck and pulled out of the lot, turning south toward the tunnel leading to the headlands, heading toward home.

But then she swerved, made a U-turn in the turnout and headed north, toward Trovare.

What she expected to find, what she thought she’d do when she arrived, she didn’t know. But she’d made a commitment to go after what she wanted and though it frightened her to her boots to admit it, she wanted Alex. The questions about the farming practices in the region seemed like a simple issue compared to what she was really risking.

She hadn’t dreamed she’d ever again let a man get so close to her heart. But her dreams and fantasies proved that he’d breached her defenses, and she was going to deal. The man had her attention. He was gorgeous, driven, dedicated. And he had her number. She didn’t know if she should be pleased that he was interested enough to try to understand her or afraid that he’d been so successful at it. And didn’t
that
say something about her mixed-up, defensive heart.

As she’d lain awake, unable to sleep because thoughts and images of him were so vivid, she’d cursed him for his perception, for challenging her rather than running off when she pushed back at him. But she was also excited; along with the deep yearning he'd awakened had come an undeniable desire for wholeness. A hope for love.

Her life had seemed simple before he’d shown up at the Center on that stormy night—had it only been five months ago? She knew how to analyze data, how to study what was and wasn’t true. And burying herself in her work hadn’t succeeded in healing anything. If she didn't explore the fire he'd ignited and face the fierce force of wanting he'd unleashed, she was sure the effort to ignore them would continue to derail her. She might as well face the fire he’d lit straight on and see if she could handle the heat. Heat was a transformative power, after all.

Asking him questions about crops and fertilizers would be the easy part.

Forty minutes later, she exited the freeway and headed northeast. Darkness fell swiftly, and she was grateful for the moonlight that helped light the way. It struck her as odd that the few streetlights that did exist weren’t lit. At the side of the narrow road, a deer raised its head, startled, and she slowed to a safer speed.

She tried Alex’s cell again and got the same recording. At a bend in the road, she saw why. One of the cell towers was down; it must’ve been blown over by the high winds that morning. The winds hadn’t brought the rain everyone had expected. Dry, cold conditions and a hard frost did not bode well for farmers who hadn’t yet brought in vulnerable crops.

About five miles farther along, the beam of her headlights lit the sign for Trovare Vineyards. She turned up the drive and swerved around branches that had blown onto the road.

At the crest of a hill she saw the outlines of a building in the distance. No, not a building. A castle. She squinted, unsure of her eyes. When she pulled onto the circular cobbled drive in front of it, she sat in her truck and stared. Not that she hadn’t seen a few castles in her day—several of her friends lived in them back in England. But in California? It astounded her.

The structure was dark except for moonlight reflecting off a window in a distant tower. The rest of the vast building was just a shadowed silhouette against the night sky.

A wavering light to the east of the castle caught her eye. She pulled out her binoculars. It looked like a fire, flanked by men who appeared to be dancing around it. She grabbed a flashlight and headed toward the flames.

As she maneuvered along the rows of grapes, she saw the profile of huge fans among the rows of vines much further toward the horizon. Their spinning blades made them look like airplane motors fallen from an errant jet. But there weren’t any fans in the section of the vineyard where she walked.

She ducked through a gap in the vines and blinked. About a hundred yards away, two men waved huge winglike devices strapped to their arms. If she hadn’t known better, she might’ve thought they were oversized fairies.

She turned and saw Alex digging near a trench of fire.

Drenched in sweat and smudged with soot, he looked like a blacksmith manning some mythical forge. His shirt clung to him, accentuating his muscles and the rhythm of his movements. Gnarled vines flanked him, lit by the firelight licking across them and casting macabre shadows onto the path. Rough, with thick, knobbed trunks, the vines here were older than those she’d passed nearer the castle.

He looked up and stopped moving. Shadows flickered across his face. Her pulse beat hard and fast in her throat. Time stopped. Then Alex squinted and wiped the back of his glove across his brow as he shook his head.

“Jackie?”

“Expecting anyone else?” she said, sounding more composed than she felt.

“The phones are out,” he said. “The cell tower blew down.”

“I noticed. And I do know how to read a weather report.” She tried to keep her tone casual, measured, but the emotions rushing through her made her voice waver. She opened her arms toward the fire and the vines. “When I saw the frost alert, I thought you might be rather busy tonight.” She stepped closer and lifted a shovel that lay near the trenched fire. “Let me help
you
this time.”

He didn’t move, only stared at her. “You
knew
about the vineyard?”

She leaned against the handle of the shovel. “Was it a secret? Michael Albright told me.”

A spark landed on Alex’s hand. He batted it away and looked back to her. She knew he was watching for a sign. For a signal. It thrilled her more than she wanted to admit.

“And Gage gave me a bottle of wine—another of his not-so-subtle hints for me to be nicer to you. It had a map on the label.” She nodded her head in the direction of the castle. “But you could’ve told me about
that
.”

“Do most guys go around describing their houses to you?”

“Most guys don’t live in a castle,” she said, hefting the shovel.

“Wait.” He pulled a pair of stained gloves from his back pocket. “Use these.”

The gloves were loose, but she was grateful to have them.

One of the men with the wings shouted at Alex in Spanish.

“
A la derecha,
” Alex answered and pointed down the row of vines.

“Gage tells me I don’t pay enough attention to the world outside the Center,” she said when he turned back to her. She bent and speared the shovel into the dirt, scooped some up and mounded it along the side of the trench.

“Easy,” he cautioned. “Eight or ten inches should do it. We’re taking the fire trench to the end of this row.” He wiped his sleeve across his brow again. “I just want to contain it.” As he levered up an enormous shovelful of dirt, he caught her eye. “I don’t want to save a few grapes and burn down the rest of the vineyard.”

“So practical,” she teased. “Hadn’t expected it. But where’s your crew?”

“We hire as a cooperative. We scheduled them for next week. It was a mistake. It happens. This freeze caught us all off guard.”

She averted her eyes and shoveled another mound of dirt. He stepped close and they dug side by side. The rhythm of her movements matched his, but she couldn’t scoop out nearly as much of the heavy soil as he could.

They worked in near silence, moving smoothly in the night, until a sharp crack sounded, followed by the snap of a burning branch as it collapsed in the center of the trench. Sparks crackled and swirled around them. Alex leapt to her and pulled her head to his chest, rubbing his gloves roughly across her hair. As his body enveloped her, the acrid smell of burnt hair mixed with the unmistakable scent of man. He backed away and pulled the band from her ponytail.

“Shake it out,” he directed. “I don’t want the help burning up either.”

Bending at the waist she shook out her hair, running her hands through it as she did.