Crushed
by Deborah Coonts
GENRE: Contemporary Romance
BLURB
In
Napa Valley, he who has the best grapes wins. And in the pursuit of perfection,
dreams and hearts can be crushed.
Sophia Stone is a widow on the brink of an empty nest, stuck in an unsatisfying
job managing the vineyard for a mediocre Napa vintner. Faced with an uncertain
future she wonders how do you choose between making a living and making a life?
Between protecting your heart and sharing it? Five years ago, after her husband
was killed in an accident, Sophia put her heart and dreams on ice to care for
those around her. Now her home, her dreams, and her family’s legacy grapes are
threatened by the greed of the new money moving into the Valley. Sophia has a
choice—give up and let them take what is hers, or risk everything fighting a
battle everyone says she can’t win.
Nico Treviani has one goal in life: make brilliant wine. A woman would be an
unwanted distraction. So, while recognized as one of Napa’s premier vintners,
Nico finds himself alone… until his brother’s death drops not one, but two
women into his life—his thirteen-year-old twin nieces. In an instant, Nico
gains a family and loses his best friend and partner in the winemaking
business. Struggling to care for his nieces, Nico accepts a job as head
winemaker for Avery Specter, one of the new-money crowd. And he learns the hard
way that new money doesn’t stick to the old rules.
When Sophia Stone gets caught in the middle of Nico’s struggle to remain true
to himself or sacrifice his convictions to make stellar wine, both Sophia and
Nico are faced with a choice they never imagined. A choice that might
extinguish the hope of a future neither expected.
PURCHASE LINKS (Click on Links):
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EXCERPT
Chapter
One
Sophia Stone knew life held few absolutes: good wine is art, good Italian cooking is
passion, a good child is a gift, and good news never comes in a certified
letter.
“You sure this is for me, Tito?” she asked the postman who
thrust an envelope toward her. When she
tilted her head she could read the word “Certified,” stamped in red like a
guilty verdict across the front.
A heavy-set man, Tito had a ready smile and an easy,
engaging manner. Each day while delivering mail, he also traversed the valley
searching for tidbits of gossip with the zeal of an Army battalion scouring the
countryside for insurgents. St. Helena
was a small community where the denizens believed mining each other’s business
was an inalienable right granted on the theory that without the titillation
everyone would fall over dead from boredom. “Yeah, looks like it’s from
Charlie. Certified, too.” Tito didn’t have the decency to hide his
interest as he mopped his face with a dirty handkerchief then stuffed it back
into his rear pocket. The wiping didn’t
help—a sheen of sweat still covered his ruddy cheeks. August had been hot with no break in sight.
Sophia eyed him. She
wouldn’t put it past him to have already steamed open the letter, a thought
that made her a bit nauseous. Why had
she thought a small town in Napa Valley would be a good place to hide?
“From Charlie, you say?”
Keeping her hands in her pockets, Sophia tilted her head further and
tried to double-check the sender’s address.
Then she looked him in the eye.
“Any idea what it’s about?”
Tito looked like a bully when his bluff was called. He shrugged—an exaggerated movement that
seemed like the shifting of a mountain—but a noncommittal answer, leaving
Sophia certain whatever was in that letter would be spread around the valley
and germinating in imaginations as rapidly as seeds on a spring wind.
At an impasse, Sophia and Tito stood there, the letter
between them, Sophia delaying the inevitable.
Unfortunately, with a dinner to cook and a cake in the oven, Sophia
didn’t have time to see if she could outlast him. So, with a sour downturn to her mouth and a
knot in her stomach, Sophia took the letter.
Tito motioned for her to flip the envelope over. “There on the back, that green card? You need to sign that.” Handing her a pen, he waited for her to sign,
then tore off the return receipt, pocketing it.
Confirming the return address, Sophia gave him a distracted
wave as he climbed back into his truck.
“Thanks, Tito.” A perfunctory nicety.
“Sure thing, Ms. Stone.”
In a shower of gravel, he gunned the mail truck back through the
vineyard down the winding driveway leading to the valley floor. Sophia glanced up as the trees enveloped him
and her normal quiet smothered the sound, wiping away all vestiges of his
presence.
Except for the letter.
From her landlord.
At least the return address was his—and Sophia was certain
he hadn’t moved from the corner lot at the bottom of her hill. She could probably throw a bottle and hit his
roof, with a little help from the wind
Charlie had owned this patch of five acres on the top of
Howell Mountain since his parents had died in a small plane heading up from
L.A. over thirty years ago. Sophia had
lived here for fifteen of those years and, through feast and famine, the ups
and downs of the wine industry, she’d never received a certified letter from
Charlie. In fact, she couldn’t remember
having received any letter from Charlie.
Their business dealings were usually hammered out at the kitchen table
over a bottle of wine and sealed with a handshake. Napa Valley was a handshake kind of
place.
Sophia reached up and rubbed the worn piece of iron Daniel
had nailed to one of the porch supports.
Tocco Ferro. Her family had been
steeped in the ways of the Old Country; her husband had become a believer. Touch iron to ward off bad luck. Being a bit too pragmatic, Sophia didn’t
necessarily believe, but it couldn’t hurt.
God knew she’d had enough rough patches.
With a finger, she traced the initials the four of them had carved in
the porch support. Time had whittled
their number to one … almost.
Tapping the white legal-sized envelope on her open palm, she
squinted against the sun as she looked out over her small patch of heaven. A rolling hillside with a couple of acres
under vine, grapes from the Old Country, grafts of her grandfather’s original
vines. A small garden flanked the
house. Her own private retreat sheltered
from prying eyes by a ring of trees.
The farmhouse had been billed as a “fixer-upper.” She and Daniel had packed up the kids, moving
up valley from the Bay Area, and spent the next several years making the
remnants of a house into a home. They’d
bribed the kids into helping by letting them paint their own rooms. Dani had picked pink, hot pink. As if the view from his window wasn’t enough,
Trey had chosen wood paneling and a bucolic scene of vineyards on one wall. When he’d moved away for college, Sophia
hadn’t had the heart to change it.
Perhaps she’d harbored the hope that he would come home someday. He hadn’t.
Now Dani was poised to fly.
Soon Sophia would be alone, the house emptied of youthful
buoyancy. The prospect filled her with
dread. Stripped of purpose, she
half-feared she would grow brittle like the old vines until the weight of
loneliness shattered her into bits and pieces of who she used to be. When Daniel had been killed, she’d had the
kids. Now the false friend of sadness
stayed ever near, her house echoing with memories. But memories didn’t make a life any more than
the past made a future. However, the
past was her tether. Without it, Sophia
felt she would float away like a balloon loosed to the sky, growing ever
smaller until vanishing from sight.
While the house cradled her past, the rows of vines just
reaching their peak marching down the hill across her two acres held her
dreams. Her grapes, started from grafts
from her grandfather’s stock back in Italy, each juice-filled orb bursting with
hope, with promise. Her life’s work
hanging on the verge of a promise.
Through the screen door, the aroma of a cake on the verge of
disaster wafted into Sophia’s consciousness, and she turned and bolted for the
kitchen, the screen clattering shut behind her.
With a dishrag to protect her hand, she opened the oven. The smell of chocolate carried on billows of
steam engulfed her. She waved it away,
squinting through the heat. She
deposited the cake pan on the stainless steel countertop. Pressing her thumb lightly on the cake, she let
out her breath in a long rush. Just in
time.
Her mother loved chocolate cake. Sophia planned to visit her this
afternoon. Perhaps a peace offering
would soften her harsh moods of late.
Sophia spied the letter, pristine white and accusing, laying
casually on the sideboard where she had tossed it in her haste. Without further thought, she stuffed it in
the old cookie jar on the countertop and crammed on the lid. That cookie jar held a lifetime of happiness
and heartache—her marriage license, the kids’ birth certificates, Daniel’s
death certificate and obituary—it could handle the letter as well. Whatever problem lurked inside that envelope,
it could wait.
Leaving the cake to cool, Sophia strode through the door to
the porch, pushing through the screen and down the steps. The grapes, fragrant in the midday sun,
neared perfection—harvest a few days away, at best. Sophia had plans for those grapes, unique
varietals that would make unusual yet palatable wine … if she could just figure
out the last piece. She was close,
though, closer than ever before.
Grapes—creating them, growing them, cajoling them to trust her—they were
her true passion. Unfortunately dreams
didn’t pay the bills, as her mother never missed a chance to bludgeon her with
that little bit or ironic reality. So
Sophia had to sell her skills to pay the bills and now found her days consumed
with tending to grapes owned by Pinkman Vineyards, one of the vast commercial
operations in the valley, that turned her carefully nurtured grapes into
mediocre table wine.
She walked the rows testing the scent once more—the perfume
of near perfection as her grandfather called the sweetness of grapes. Memories filtered through the shadows of time
like wraiths, translucent, elusive … fleeting.
When she quieted, stilled her mind and opened her heart, Sophia could
hear his voice, rich and deep, his laugh, and smell the scent of earth and sun
that clung to him, the wine on his breath.
But, she couldn’t see him anymore.
Like sun on paper, time had weathered and faded her mental pictures
until only shadows remained, as if the present was slowly erasing the
past.
Worry dogged her, the letter and its unknown message on her
mind as she tended to each vine, brushing back the canopy, weighing the
clusters. This far along in the season
not much remained to do; nature would run her course. This year Sophia had planted wildflowers and
grasses under the vines to entice the bugs and keep them off the fruit. The plan had worked well, as had her choice
to prune more aggressively than normal this past winter. Under her care, her
grandfather’s grapes flourished, and just now they were beginning to trust her,
to give her their best.
This year’s wine had the potential to be the stuff of
dreams.
At the far end of her property movement across the fence
caught Sophia’s attention. Shading her eyes with one hand, she still had to
squint against the assault of the sun.
Her next-door neighbors had sold their property recently to Specter
Wines, a new player with new money.
Scuttlebutt had it the owner had made a mint somewhere back east. Sophia shook her head as she watched heavy
equipment struggle to tame the hillside, prepare it for planting. These days it seemed just about every rich
guy wanted a piece of Napa to cultivate his own grapes, make a signature
vintage that would rock the world.
As if it was that easy.
PURCHASE LINKS:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR BIO
My mother tells
me I was born in Texas a very long time ago, but I’m not so sure—my mother
can’t be trusted. She’ll also tell you I
was a born storyteller. That I believe—I
have the detention notices and bad-conduct reports to prove it. However, the path from minor hyperbolist, or
as I prefer to think of my former self, Grand Master of the Art of
Self-Prevarication, to the author of the New York Times Notable Crime Novel and
double Rita ™ finalist, Wanna Get Lucky?, the book that launched the
bestselling series, was a bit tortured.
Someone once
told me I lived a peripatetic life—yes, I had to look it up. And he was right. I’ve been everything from a mom, business
owner, accountant, wife, pilot, flight instructor, lawyer …worse, a tax lawyer…
to a writer. The three personas I’ve kept suit me the best: mom, flight
instructor, and writer. And the other personas I’ve tried on then shrugged out of
and discarded like an itchy coat were great grist for the story mill.
Chasing stories
keeps me busy and out of jail…for the most part. Researching in Vegas can be a
bit… sketchy.
Prodded by the
next adventure and the police, I keep moving. Right now I have a house in
Texas, but that will change soon. I lived in Vegas for 15 years—the longest I’d
stayed anywhere. And I get back there often. But other places, too, are
calling.
Someone asked
me the other day where I lived. The question stopped me cold. Finally I said, “On Southwest Airlines, third
row, window seat, either side.” Always in search of a story. And the adventure would be perfect if they
could just stock a split of nice Champagne.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Tracee has walked many paths in her
life as a playwright, director, and a puppeteer. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Social
Sciences and Psychology which she earned from Shawnee State
University. Currently, she is an instructor for the SSU Department of English
& Humanities as well as the Department of Social Sciences. She also has a
Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology from the University of North
Dakota. 
My mother tells
me I was born in Texas a very long time ago, but I’m not so sure—my mother
can’t be trusted. She’ll also tell you I
was a born storyteller. That I believe—I
have the detention notices and bad-conduct reports to prove it. However, the path from minor hyperbolist, or
as I prefer to think of my former self, Grand Master of the Art of
Self-Prevarication, to the author of the New York Times Notable Crime Novel and
double Rita ™ finalist, Wanna Get Lucky?, the book that launched the
bestselling series, was a bit tortured.
