Too Close to the Sun (16 page)

"Oh . . ." She waved a hand in the air,
causing the silver bangles on her forearm to crash together in a
tinny collision. "Last year's sauvignon blanc sold out so fast, our
distributor wants the new shipment earlier than we expected. So
we've got to bottle all weekend."

He nodded, his businessman's mind immediately
dismissing that explanation. Given what he'd learned about the wine
industry, it made no sense. Sauvignon blanc was bottled in the
early spring. Plus, all the overtime—probably double?—made it too
expensive to be plausible. Maybe he could get Gabby to confess what
was really going on over dinner.

"Shall we?" He crooked an arm toward her.

"Sure," her lips said, but she didn't move an
inch. Instead her gaze fluttered toward the assembly line. Then,
"Just a sec," and she ran off to huddle with what looked to be the
senior man on the line. A half-minute later she hurried back.
"Okay."

"Is everything all right?"

"Fine."

But her voice was unnaturally chirpy, and
there was something jittery about her movements. Still, she grabbed
a small black handbag from atop a crate and accepted his arm. They
had made it nearly to the big oak door before a cacophony rang out
behind them. Two women shouted "Stop the line!" Equipment clanged;
a bottle broke; then another. Finally a loud male voice called out
"Shit! Stop!" and a prolonged mechanical groaning rent the air.
Followed by silence.

Gabby halted in her tracks. Will looked down
to see her features twist into a grim mask of indecision and worry.
"What is going on?" he asked her.

She hesitated, then, "We're having a little
trouble with the bottling."

Unfortunately, that much was becoming clear.
So was the fact that it was her responsibility. Holiday weekend or
no holiday weekend. Date or no date.

He watched her and saw a woman aquiver with
tension. Brow furrowed, lips clenched. Her reluctance to leave
radiated like a force field.

It was admirable, he had to admit, though his
own competing desires roared through his head. He saw the evening
he'd been anticipating for days slip away like a party balloon in a
summer sky. His heart sank as he envisioned a long disappointed
drive back to the city, hungry, alone, frustrated, Gabby-less. He
steeled himself. "You're not okay with going out to dinner, are
you?"

She said nothing, just drew in a breath
through her teeth. Then what to do hit him, and he smiled. Like all
good solutions, it was obvious and made perfect sense. "How about,"
he said, "we stay here and I help you guys bottle?"

Her head swung back toward him, her eyes
wide. "What?"

"I don't know, it might be fun!" He laughed.
Actually, it might be. He hadn't done anything remotely resembling
physical labor since the days of his youth, when he'd routinely
pitched in to help with the grunt work at Henley Sand and Gravel.
In some ways that had been more satisfying than a lot of what he
did now.

"But Will . . ." Gabby's voice faltered. "You
don't really want to bottle. It's assembly-line work, it's tedious,
you're all dressed up, and besides, you couldn't help anyway
because of insurance problems. You're not a Suncrest employee."

"Hire me as a consultant. Just for tonight."
He was Mr. Problem Solver now, a guise as comfortable for him as
old jeans.

She shook her head, disbelief still evident
in her voice. "But aren't you hungry? Don't you want to go out to
dinner?"

"Gabby." He took her hands. Small, cool to
the touch, wonderfully delicate. "We could go out to dinner or not.
It doesn't really matter." He stopped himself from voicing the next
unrehearsed line that sprang to his lips.
I just want to be with
you. It's kind of all the same to me what we do.

But he might as well have said it for the
smile that came to her lips. Something passed between them then,
something more than a look and less than an electric charge, though
Will could swear he felt the air around them still, enveloping them
in a bubble of their own creation. He had the same sensation he'd
had at the hospital:
I can't believe I just met this woman. I
feel like I've known her all my life.

She cocked her head, teasingly. "I bet
there's some pizza left."

And there was. They ate their impromptu
dinner sitting on crates, knees almost touching, occasionally
leaning their heads in close to talk, because once the assembly
line got moving again, the noise was deafening. Between bites of
black olive and pepperoni, Gabby explained how bottling worked—the
orbiter that jetted air into the bottles to rid them of debris, the
filler function, the corker. Soda cans in hand, they strolled to
the capsuler, where the metal casing was put on the bottles,
followed by the spinner, which tightened the casing. Labels went on
last.

They halted at packing, where two people
worked at a breakneck pace to put twelve bottles into each case.
"You might be able to handle this," she told him, her breath a
tingling kiss on his ear. "But I'm not sure you're up to it." He
pulled away to see her eyes sparkle with a mischievous light.

"Or maybe you could do this." She stopped at
flap-gluing and box-flipping. A woman slapped preprinted labels on
each case, detailing the winery name and wine type, plus the date
and time of bottling and UPC code.

"What's your job?" he asked her.

She tossed her soda can into the trash with
apparent nonchalance. "I'm the boss."

He smiled. He'd figured.

Gabby ended up assigning him a brute force
task—stacking the labeled cases. After that they were
shrink-wrapped and carted away by the forklift. Will rolled up his
sleeves and was about to get started when she reappeared at his
side, by now out of her little black dress and into jeans and a hot
pink tee shirt. She looked pretty darn good that way, too.

"There's something I didn't tell you," she
said, and handed him ear plugs and plastic safety glasses.

"What's that?"

She winked. "Your shift won't be over till
after ten," she said, then sashayed away, distracting him for some
time from his carrying and stacking duties. But once those got
under way in earnest, he had a lot less leisure than he would have
liked for eyeballing the boss. The cases came fast and got heavier
and heavier, though he felt compelled to keep moving them along
just as fast. Muscles he rarely gave much thought to began to ache
in earnest.

He noted that Gabby herself was in constant
motion, pitching in at various stops around the line, relieving
people when they slowed or needed a break. Every once in a while
she halted near him and caught his eye through her safety glasses
and his. A smile—an
Are you okay?
—and she moved on. Once she
relieved him briefly, and he was mightily impressed by her hauling
and stacking abilities.

It was strenuous. It was dusty. His hands
blackened with dirt; his muscles rebelled. This was so far from how
he'd imagined this Saturday night when he'd sent Gabby the
capitalist pig. Yet music blared. People laughed. Dancing broke
out, usually by Gabby's sister Cam and the label-slapping woman he
learned was named Zenobia. Once Cam and Gabby danced together, and
once he and Zenobia did. There wasn't a Winsted in sight, and not
once did he miss them.

When ten minutes past ten rolled around and
the line clanged to a halt, he was almost disappointed. Until
people started washing their hands and stamping their time cards
and filtering out into the night, when it occurred to him that he
might finally get Gabby alone.

She tore her safety glasses off her head and
approached him. Her hair was matted, most of her makeup was sweated
off, and her tee shirt sported a lightning streak of grime down the
front. But she lit up that warehouse like a klieg light.

"Good job!" She high-fived him. "Thanks to
you, we met our goal of four thousand cases for the day. We might
use you again if you can keep up that pace."

He wouldn't tell her he'd be sore for days.
Instead he said, "You hungry?"

"I'm starving."

"Any place still open at this hour?"

"Little place called DeLuca's."

It took him a second to comprehend. When he
did, his smile widened. "What's their specialty?"

Gabby grinned back. "PB and J. Served
alongside a nice chardonnay."

There was that electric charge again. It
pulsed through Napa's night air—blessedly cool now—all the while
Gabby closed down the winery for the night. And all the while his
Z8 trailed her Jeep along the narrow moonlit roads that led to her
home.

In Gabby's estimation, Crystal Mountain Road
lived up to the latter half of its name. Narrow, twisted, and
steep, it snaked uphill from Highway 29 through a forest of oak and
eucalyptus—the sort of road where one vehicle had to pull over to
the dirt-packed shoulder to let oncoming traffic pass. During
daylight hours, the higher elevations revealed stunning mountain
and meadow and vineyard panoramas. At night, with no streetlights
for miles and a leafy canopy obscuring the moonlight, all Gabby
could make out was the strip of asphalt illuminated by her high
beams, and occasionally the yellow-eyed stare of a startled feral
cat whose nocturnal wanderings she'd interrupted.

Behind her she could hear the guttural growl
of Will's automobile. She smiled. So much for its city-clean
chassis. It would get baptized by Napa dust tonight.

She flipped on her left directional to alert
Will, then made a sharp turn onto the even narrower dirt drive that
climbed farther uphill to her house. Her Jeep rocked on the rutted
surface, while branches reached out from the surrounding woods to
slap the vehicle's sides. She halted on the small pebbled clearing
in front of the house, and Will parked behind her. Engine sounds
died away, replaced by the wind's whisper through the treetops. On
this fogless night, so rare in the valley's summer, stars winked
against their black velvet backdrop, peering down with curiosity on
the man and woman who stood in awkward poses on the earth
below.

Gabby was nervous suddenly. Was it a huge
mistake to bring Will here? What would they talk about? What did
she want?

For the night to go on. Not to have to say
good-bye too soon. Another chance to get back into that bubble with
him, that bubble where the rest of the world falls away.

He came to stand beside her. "This could
safely be described as remote."

She laughed, though she was embarrassed by
the observation. "I guess I have a little hermit in me."

"Does your family live nearby?"

She heard the puzzlement in his voice, the
words he didn't say.
What are you doing living up here on this
mountain all alone?
But she didn't want to answer that
question. Not yet anyway.

She made her voice light. "No, they live down
in Napa," and began walking toward the house. "Come on, I'll show
you around."

She fumbled with the house key, her fingers
clumsy and uncooperative, her every sense vibrating with the
awareness of Will hovering behind her. She wished she'd disposed of
the recycling piled by the stoop, hosed down the canvas barbecue
cover, visibly grimy even in the dark. Finally she pushed open the
door and hurried inside to turn on a few lights.

Her house showed best at night, she knew,
when soft lamplight smoothed its rough edges. Worn turned into
cozy, frayed into charming. Her furnishings were a hodgepodge of
heirlooms, hand-me-downs, and flea-market finds. Grandma Laura's
sideboard, shipped a decade before from Milan. Her mother's cedar
hope chest, draped with the white runner the young Sofia had
handstitched in high school. The rustic pine dining-room set
Gabby's father had restored. The iron fireplace pokers Gabby had
picked up in Castelnuovo, now ensconced beside the stone
fireplace.

That night, a ceramic pitcher of yellow and
orange zinnias graced the low pine coffee table and filmy white
curtains at the paned windows danced in the night breeze. Gabby
thought the effect was delightful; but that was no surprise. This
was her oasis, her refuge, the place where she both escaped the
world and readied herself for it. But she knew how shoddy and
unsophisticated it might appear to Will. She didn't know much about
him but could guess that country casual wasn't his style.

He stood in the doorway as imposing as a
Viking, tall and broad shouldered, sleeves rolled up to reveal
well-muscled forearms covered with light blond hair. Gabby realized
with a start that he was the first male who wasn't a relative who'd
ever visited her home.

He stepped farther inside. "This is great!
When was it built? Was it a house originally or something
else?"

Either that's real enthusiasm in his voice
or he's a fabulous actor
. "It was a barn first, built in the
late 1800s. I know it went through several renovations. These fir
floors were put in fifty or sixty years ago. And I'd bet the
skylights are a seventies addition."

He grinned. "That sounds about right," and
shook his head. "So this was built before Napa was real wine
country."

"Not true! There were tons of wineries here
in the late nineteenth century. But then came Prohibition."

He stood across her living room. Watching
her. Smiling. All of a sudden, she didn't know what to do with her
hands. Her mouth kept moving as if it had a will of its own.

"It got really crazy during Prohibition.
There's a story that the Foppiano family was forced to dump ninety
thousand gallons of red wine into the Russian River."

He moved a step closer. "What a waste."

"Not really. Lots of folks came out to the
riverbank to drink."

He laughed, then stepped even closer until he
was breathtakingly near. She was forced to tilt her head back to
look into his eyes. His voice softened as his blue gaze held her
hazel one captive. "So, Gabby DeLuca, you're a local historian as
well as a winemaker."