Love in the Vineyard (Tavonesi #7)(63)

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.