Love in the Vineyard (The Tavonesi Series Book 7) (27 page)

The horror of having to track figures—handle ordering, use a computer—took shape in her mind. And it was a nasty, scary shape.

Her throat tightened as despair rose to curl around her anger. She considered telling him about her dyslexia, but what would happen when his attentions shifted, when he came to his senses and reentered the world he’d been born into? When she wasn’t special to him and was the wrong person in a key job?

No matter what happened between her and Adrian, she had to think of Tyler, of his future. She needed her job. She had a new rent to pay. A college fund to save for. She’d just have to buck up and find a way to bumble through until she figured out her next step. Mary might help. Petey could advise her. Maybe Mary was right, maybe the tapes or the classes would work. She could look for another job in the meantime, and maybe she could—

“We
need
someone to get more of these plants into the world,” Adrian said, his smile returning and his tone becoming more animated as he spoke. “Did you know that the honeybees are disappearing? I mean, I know we don’t need the bees for our self-pollinating grapevines, but without plants for the bees and butterflies and other pollinators, we lose the integrity of the ecosystem. And even the diehard growers are beginning to recognize the benefits of having plants to draw in ladybugs and lacewings along with butterflies and bees—they provide the best sort of protection against insect pests.”

His enthusiasm teased some of the energy out of her anger, but it didn’t ease the anxiety building in her chest. As he took her hands in his and kissed her fingertips, she tried to swallow back her building fear. There was no way she could run the business. No way she’d be able to do a job that required her to use computers and keep track of numbers and accounts.

“This is important work, Natasha, and you are the perfect person to do it.
You
are that someone, Natasha.”

He lifted her chin with his fingers. “And it’s not all doom and gloom about disappearing bees and plants. This could be
fun
—Alana has already offered to help integrate our new business with her body-care line. Just think of the possibilities—our flowers, their olive oil, your
magic
.”

If only she did have magic. She’d wave a wand and make her dyslexia disappear. She’d make it so that the difference in class and income and life experience between her and Adrian didn’t matter.

But it did matter. All of it mattered.

As he walked her to her car, her battling thoughts made it hard to respond to his enthusiastic chatter. Even the prospect of getting to work with the plants she loved didn’t cheer her.

When he kissed her goodbye, a numbing feeling of dread spread in her chest. It wasn’t just her looming failure at the work that horrified her.

She’d fallen in love with Adrian, something she’d sworn she wouldn’t do. He might be infatuated enough at the moment to forget about the gap that separated them, but she wasn’t enough of a fool to pretend that such a chasm could ever be crossed.

Chapter Eighteen

ANXIETY HAMMERED HARD AS NATASHA drove home. Once there, she tried to focus on straightening up the apartment, on organizing Tyler’s school clothes. She tried not to worry about Eddie and not to wallow in her misgivings about the job Adrian had thrust onto her. But most of all she fought to battle back the sadness she wished she didn’t feel. Sometimes it didn’t pay to be a realist. But she’d lived too long in the world not to know what lay ahead.

Still fighting her warring feelings, she stirred the minestrone she’d made the day before and dished it into bowls. She glanced at the clock and then headed outside. As the light lingered later in the day, it was harder and harder for her to call Tyler away from his friends and inside to do his homework.

On their small porch, she shaded her eyes from the slanting sunlight.

“Tyler!”

“One more inning?” he shouted from the field beside their apartment.

He took a swing at the ball a neighbor boy pitched to him.

She tapped at her wrist, even though she wasn’t wearing a watch. “Dinner.”

With a shrug to his friends, Tyler grabbed his glove from the grass and headed in her direction. She couldn’t help but smile. He’d made new friends. He was doing well in school. He’d made the school baseball team. And although she thought some of the boys were too young for hardball, the coach had reassured her that none of the boys was in any danger. She needed to relax, that coach had said. If only she could.

Later that night after Tyler went off to bed, she opened the tablet the school had given him. She tapped at the screen, and letter by careful letter she typed in the name of the local junior college. But the screen that flashed up was gibberish to her. In a blue box at the top she spied a phone number and copied it onto a scrap of paper. She checked and rechecked the sequence of numbers, making sure they matched, that she hadn’t reversed any or left any out.

In the morning she’d call and sign up for the class Mary had recommended. And dared to hope that she might learn to function well enough, quickly enough, to keep her job.

Where had this new willingness to try come from? If anyone had told her that physical desire could bolster self-esteem and make her want to leap tall buildings, she’d have been convinced they were full of beans. Or deluded.

Deluded
.

Adrian was likely deluded too. Even so, she shouldn’t have blown up at him. He was a good man, but he’d put her in an impossible situation. And that was her fault. Though she hadn’t lied, she’d lied by omission. A quote from one of the audiobooks she’d listened to ages ago came back to her.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence
. Now she knew too well what the author had meant. She should’ve told Adrian right then, when they’d left the cave, or as he’d seen her to her car. If only she’d had the courage to come clean, to tell him about her limitations. Perhaps even own up to her fears. But she’d been raw, torn open by the passion they’d shared, by the feelings that had laced through her, leaving little rips in the protective cocoon she’d carefully spun for so many years.

Deep down inside, some part of her wished she could tell Adrian the truth. Tell him not only about her disability but about the inner darkness she fought every day. But fear whispered its convincing song. Her foster father’s condemning words always lurked, stabbing at her.
You’ll never amount to anything, Natasha. You’re a marginal person, just like us. A creature on the run.
The man’s cruel words had left more scars than his hands had.

Afraid that the flicker of strength, of courage—of hope—that she held so tightly to would be extinguished, she decided her secrets were best kept locked away.

Two nights later, Natasha tossed in her bed, unable to sleep. Adrian was in Rome. Living the life he was born to. She tried counting backward from fifty to zero, measuring each intake and exhale, following the instructions on the tapes Mary had given her. But nothing she tried stopped her imagination. The images of him in lush settings, surrounded by beautiful women—of him happy in his realm—took on rich colors, sounds and shapes, like a Hollywood blockbuster on a huge screen playing relentlessly in her mind.

When sleep finally came, it brought fitful dreams.

Always the dream of her mother’s voice, calling her to bet on the number seventeen. She never refused her mother’s summons. She always made the bet. But the dream had changed. Instead of just a voice, she saw her mother surrounded by a white ethereal light and smiling at her. Natasha reached out to touch her, and she disappeared. The dream morphed, and a man whose face she couldn’t see rained stacks of papers down onto her. Adrian appeared beside her, and soon he too was covered by the endless float of papers until he disappeared completely. She called out his name.

A pounding knock answered her. It shook the bed she saw herself in, shook the apartment. She called out, but the sound continued so loudly that it had her bolting up in her bed.

She glanced at the clock. Squinted and then focused. Nine fifteen! She’d overslept. The first day of her new job, and she’d overslept.

The knocking continued. It wasn’t her dream.

She grabbed her robe and ran to Tyler’s room. His bed was empty. She ran down the hall, pulled the scribbled note from the dining room table and headed for the front door. She glanced at the note. A smiley face and the word school was scrawled in his confident handwriting. When had he grown up so much that he could make breakfast on his own and catch the bus to school? With a lighter heart, she opened the door.

And came face-to-face with Tyler’s father.

If she hadn’t been holding tight to the door frame, she might’ve fainted.

“I would’ve called first, but your phone number’s unlisted,” Eddie said with a palms-up shrug.

He didn’t move toward her. But he loomed over her as tall and broad as he had in her memories and nightmares.

“Why are you here?” Natasha hated the waver in her voice. Hated the fear that shot adrenaline through her, making it hard to think.

To her surprise, Eddie stepped back. Still, the distance between them didn’t make her feel any safer.

“Look, I’m sorry to show up like this. But I didn’t want to wait for you outside Tyler’s school. I thought that would be creepy.”

His words slammed into her.
Tyler
. He knew about Tyler.

“Why are you here?” she repeated, as if feigning ignorance about Tyler would make any difference.

Eddie glanced around at the street. “Could I come in? What I have to say is going to take more than a few minutes.”

He must’ve seen the fear flash in her eyes, because he waved his palms the way men did in old westerns to show that they were unarmed. “I mean no harm, Natasha. But I understand if you don’t trust me. Maybe we could go somewhere and talk.”

“I’m late for work.” But then she considered that a villain you knew was better than one you didn’t. She didn’t want him inside her home. She didn’t want him in her
life
. But now that he’d discovered Tyler, she had to know what he wanted. Had to be armed to counter any plan he had cooked up.

“Okay. But fifteen minutes.” She nodded toward a bench at the edge of the field. “We can talk over there. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

After throwing on a pair of jeans and a work shirt, Natasha glanced in the mirror in the small bathroom she shared with Tyler. Fear smiled back. She had to squelch the rising anxiety, had to keep her head about her if she was going to keep negative forces at bay. To keep Eddie at bay. She stuck out her tongue. “Not this time,” she said, squaring her shoulders.

But fear jabbed under her ribs as she locked her door and headed to where Eddie sat on the bench. Waiting for her and God knew what else.

He stood as she approached.

“Thank you, Natasha.”

He looked as nervous as she felt. She’d forgotten how handsome he was. And now, face to face with him after all the years, she did recognize aspects of him in Tyler. Something she wished she’d never seen.

She didn’t sit. He looked down at his feet, then met her gaze.

“I can’t expect you to forgive me,” he said. “Not for what I did to you that night. I lost it. I got help. Three
years
of help, to be precise. I’m still in a program. Sort of a twelve-step for vets with PTSD and drug issues. I’m clean, Natasha. Eight years sober. And the program requires that I make amends to anyone I wronged.” He gestured open-palmed toward her. “I’m here to make amends. To move forward. To make up for what I didn’t do right.” He looked away quickly, but then turned back. He took a deep breath and added, “For what I did wrong.”

He was laying open his secrets, his darkness. Telling the truth, from what she could see. But something in his eyes shouted a warning.

“That’s quite an accomplishment. Congratulations.” In her heart she regretted the terseness of her tone. But it set her boundary. She had more than herself to protect now. She had to protect Tyler.