Tempt Me, Taste Me, Touch Me

It all seemed so obvious now how wrong she and James were for each other. If only she could have figured this out a week ago. Before the proposal at Farallon.

She sighed deeply. It was time for her to face the cold, hard truth. Time to admit that she'd been ignoring the warning signs for the past year. She'd let her landscaping business drop off because James had needed her to attend more events with his mother during the day. She hadn't seen nearly enough of Rose and Vanessa and had only been able to schedule this weekend with them because James was busy with a men's-only golf tournament on Saturday.

Little by little she'd allowed him to take over her life. She'd always thought of herself as an independent woman, but now she wondered-if she'd really been self-sufficient, then why had she let her life be taken over?

If she'd grown up poor, if her parents had struggled to clothe and feed her, if she'd had to scrape her way to the top, she might have had some excuse for having fallen so hard for James. And all his stuff. But her upbringing had been comfortably middle class, her parents were still married, and neither she nor her sister had been the least bit traumatized by their childhoods.

The truth was, until he popped the question, until she really had to take a hard look at becoming Mrs. James Carrigan, she hadn't let herself think clearly about the reality of spending the rest of her life with him. Thank God she hadn't done all the wedding planning and then jilted him at the altar. She looked up again to get her bearings, but she had no idea where she was, no sense of how to get back to the hotel. This I,vineyard looked exactly like all the others. Beautiful, green, lush j!'with ripe grapes, but indistinguishable. She was lost.

TYSON GREEN LIKED TO END every day in his wine cave. Especially when it had been a grueling one-his afternoon having

been all but wasted with a near-miss labeling debacle for the new Petit Syrah. One of the best ways to revive his spirits and his passion for wine-making was to shove back from his desk, don his well-worn cowboy hat, and disappear into the cool serenity of the underground cave. His ex-wife, Kimberly, had called him a living, breathing version of the caveman, but frankly, her opinion no longer mattered. He pushed open the thick oak door and inhaled the scent of fermenting grapes. A man couldn't ask for more than this, his own underground castle beneath the award-winning grapevines of Napa Valley.

If only that were true, he thought as he adjusted the brim of his hat to examine a hairline crack in the bottom of a barrel of Pinot. A man could ask for love, real love that lasted. And he had. But for all the success he'd had as a vintner, he'd failed miserably at being a husband.

Tyson made a mental note to send his foreman in to check the cave's temperature and to see if there were any other cracks that needed dealing with, then he turned and pushed back through the thick wood door into the rapidly darkening evening. He was going to take his bad attitude, and worse memories, out of the cave and turn them around with a juicy, grilled steak out on his porch.

His long, muscled legs ate up the quarter mile between the winery and his ranch house. On a good day, when he was able to forgo paperwork for the joy of working with the vines, his jeans and denim "Green Vineyards" work shirt would end up covered in dirt. Today, unfortunately, his shirt still had the dry-cleaner's lines on it. Still, he pulled the button-down shirt off as soon as he walked inside the foyer, preferring to relax with a glass of wine out on his covered porch in his well-worn T-shirt. He poured himself a large glass of fruity red wine and opened the French doors that led from his kitchen out to the porch to let the warm, endof-summer air in.

Walking to the rail of the deck, he surveyed his land. His vines.

Everything he loved was out there. The dirt, the trees, the grapes, the mountains. He'd given his heart to wine-making, and it had rewarded him a thousand times over. Not only with money but also with satisfaction. He'd grown up comfortably middle class, and he had no complaints about his parents or brothers. They were engineers and bookkeepers, and he'd always thought to follow in their footsteps. But then he'd taken an agriculture class at the University of California in the small farm town of Davis and discovered viticulture. He hadn't been old enough to drink back then as a nineteen-year-old sophomore, but he'd been hooked. He'd worked his ass off, and fifteen years later, he called a small part of Napa Valley his own. With nightfall, the vineyard was silent, save for an occasional wildcat on the prowl for mice. So when he heard the sound of dried grape eaves crunching, he sharpened his gaze. And saw a gorgeous blond walking through the vines.

In the moonlight, the woman's hair glowed like a halo. And where the ends brushed against her br**sts, well, that was a beautiful thing. A small waist and great legs rounded out the exceptional package. For the first time in six months, Tyson found himself wondering what it would be like to sink into a woman. To have her naked and slick beneath him, crying out as she came.

It was a relief to feel desire again. He'd worked to push away the image of his vineyard manager, a man he'd believed to be, loyal and steadfast, pumping in and out of his wife. On their bed. His bed. Even when Kimberly had seen him standing in the doorway, she hadn't been able to hide the pleasure of being in Rogelio's arms.

He'd thought her betrayal had stolen his heart. But when he'd examined their relationship from all angles, he hadn't been certain that they'd ever truly been in love. Just a powerful lust that had burned out in less than a year.

Which meant that what she'd really taken from him was his pride. And he had no intention of ever allowing a woman to rip his pride to shreds again.

But as he stood on his covered wraparound porch, watching the tall, curvy blond hike across the land he was more proud of than anything else, Tyson decided he was sick of letting his ex-wife's transgression ruin his sex life. Sure, lust had sucked him into a bad marriage, but he knew better now than to confuse sex with love.

Every weekend women came to his tasting room for wine and the hope of a weekend fling. And every weekend he turned them down. But not this time.

Tyson straightened his well-worn cowboy hat and headed down the stairs into the field. He'd go say hello, and if it turned out that his trespasser was looking for a weekend of wild sex in the wine country, well, he'd just have to oblige her, wouldn't he?

CARRIE HEARD A RUSTLING to her left, but the rows of vines that surrounded her were so tall she couldn't see anything. Didn't mountain lions come out to hunt at dusk? Her heart jumped in her throat as she remembered a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle. This year's rainfall was so low that the pumas were coming down to the lowlands for water. And, if she wasn't mistaken, the wine country was rife with rattlesnakes. How could she have been stupid enough to off-road in flip-flops?