Love in the Vineyard (The Tavonesi Series Book 7) Read online

  Books by Pamela Aares

  The Tavonesi Series:

  Love Bats Last (Book #1, Alex and Jackie)

  Thrown By Love (Book #2, Chloe and Scotty)

  Fielder's Choice (Book #3, Alana and Matt)

  Love on the Line (Book #4, Cara and Ryan)

  Aim For Love (Book #5, Sabrina and Kaz)

  The Heart of the Game (Book #6, Cody and Zoe)

  Love in the Vineyard (Book #7, Adrian and Natasha)

  A Very Daring Christmas (#8, Cameron and Jake)

  also available:

  Jane Austen and the Archangel

  Love in the Vineyard

  Book Seven in the Tavonesi Series

  Adrian and Natasha

  © 2015 Pamela Aares

  [email protected]

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  A Note from Pamela

  Before I had even written the final paragraphs of Love in the Vineyard, reader requests were pouring in asking for more stories of the Tavonesi cousins and their intriguing, sensual, adventurous and wildly romantic friends. Thank you for stoking the fire! In Love in the Vineyard you will meet Adrian Tavonesi, Alex's wickedly handsome cousin and Natasha Raley, whose spunk and courage in the face of adversity shows Adrian that true love is worth the greatest risk of all.

  Love in the Vineyard is the seventh book in the Tavonesi Series. Each book in the series can easily be read as a standalone yet you may enjoy reading the entire series and meeting all of the Tavonesi clan. If you have read the first books of the series, stay tuned as the love stories of some of your favorite characters are in the works!

  Thank you for being the greatest readers in the world--your emails, tweets and facebook messages (and reviews!) keep my fingers flying. I love hearing from readers. You can contact me [email protected] and join my newsletter if you'd like to stay in touch and find out about new releases.

  In the meantime, happy reading!

  Pamela

  In LOVE IN THE VINEYARD, a one-night stand brought Natasha Raley the greatest gift of her life—her son. She wants to give him a better life than she had, but a gambling bet lands both of them in a homeless shelter. When the shelter director gives her a ticket to a masquerade ball, Natasha finds herself dancing with the most intriguing and mysterious man she’s ever met.

  Adrian Tavonesi is creating a paradise on earth in Sonoma California, determined to be worthy of his vast fortune by making the world a better place. Convinced women only like him for his money and his status, he invents an anonymous relationship with the beautiful Natasha to create a dream world for both of them.

  As passion flares into an all-consuming affair, the lies Adrian and Natasha have told each other threaten to ruin everything. Adrian is kind, generous, and sincere—Natasha knows he would be the perfect father for her son. But will her past and the devastating gamble she once made destroy her new world? Or will betting on the truth this time lead to the perfect, ever-lasting love?

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Thank You

  Other Books by Pamela

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For my mother, brother and husband—love really does make the world go around!

  Prologue

  HE’D FIND HER. AND THE KID. HE’D DONE the math—the kid had to be his.

  Fate could push a man to the brink of insanity.

  Eddie stared at the tumbler in front of him. Lifting it, he swigged the tart orange juice and tried to imagine the cool liquid dousing the fire in his belly, the fire that threatened him every day.

  He was better. Nearly healed. But dark forces still lurked, still teased. It took every skill he’d learned to banish them. To find moments of peace.

  He fingered the court seal on his grandfather’s will. Why his crazy grandfather had set the will up like he had, he’d never know. If his father and mother had lived, it’d all be different. Or would it? Maybe his grandfather wouldn’t have left them anything. His parents would have fought him in court, that much he knew. But they couldn’t fight now. Their yacht had gone down in the Greek islands three years ago. Only one crew member had survived the sinking boat. Eddie had never liked boats. Never would now.

  His grandfather was like some eighteenth-century lord, creating a will that required Eddie to have an heir before his thirtieth birthday. He’d never approved of Eddie’s choices. And even dead, the old man had managed one more stab at the heart of his life.

  Three months. He had just over three months before he turned thirty. Maybe if his grandfather had told Eddie the stipulation a couple of years ago, he could have done something about it. Had his grandfather considered that he’d set an impossible mission?

  At least until last night it had been. But last night the tide had shifted. A reward for turning his life around?

  His rehab program required that he at least try to make amends to the people he’d wronged, make an attempt to find those he’d harmed and express his regret. He didn’t believe that good deeds could blot out the bad deeds of the past, but he was committed to the program.

  At first he’d thought that returning to the casino, to the scene of his deepest shame, was ridiculous. The chances of the woman being there or of anyone knowing her whereabouts were slim. It’d been ten years since that horrible night, the night that showed him that he had to get help. It hadn’t mattered that he’d gone back the very next evening to apologize. She hadn’t been there. The bartender had told him she’d quit. No one knew where she’d gone off to.

  She’d disappeared.

  Only he knew why. He’d have run from himself if he could have during those dark days.

  He still couldn’t think about what he’d done that night. She’d tried to change her mind, leave the room. He’d been drunk, had lost at the tables. He’d snapped. Had taken his pent-up rage out on her. But that night and what he’d done to her had made him change. Got him to get help. Real help. Now he had his life in front of him. And just maybe it would be a wealthy one.

  Because when he’d heard the doorman talking over the stall to one of the croupiers in the casino’s men’s room, it wasn’t only amends that had risen in his mind. Natasha—if her name really was Natasha—had a son. A ten-year-old son. What were the odds that it was his child? Unlikely. But possible.

  Hope surged. He had a chance.

  He just had to find the kid. And her. Shouldn’t be too hard. And if he did? How many women would walk away from a billionaire father for their kid? None that he knew.

  But he’d always believed that hope was fuel for insanity. Without hope you could just drop into the abyss and stay there until life flickered out. But hope? Hope kept a man’s nose just above the water and forced him to face life.

  He’d questioned the doorman a second time, confessing that he’d heard him talking about Natasha with the c
roupier. The man remembered Natasha, he’d finally admitted. Knew she had a son. But said she’d left ten years before and had never been back. The doorman was adamant about that. Eddie had experience interrogating people; the Air Force had trained him well. His instincts and training told him the doorman hadn’t lied.

  Eddie took another swig of the now tepid orange juice and flipped through the pages of his grandfather’s will, stared at the familiar, slanting signature. His attorneys were searching for loopholes. He hoped to make a case that his grandfather hadn’t had a full grip on his mental faculties when he’d written it. But the odds of proving that weren’t good.

  Some days he worried that insanity ran in the family. But his therapist had assured him he was sane. Troubled but sane and on the mend. Nearly there.

  He shoved the will across his desk, and it fluttered to the floor. He should just forget the whole thing. Forget that he needed the money, the lure the crazy man dangled from the grave.

  But disability pay didn’t cut it.

  Since he’d returned from Afghanistan, he’d found he had an appetite for the riches and privilege of his younger years. The privilege he’d turned his back on when he’d bucked his parents’ wishes and joined the Air Force. After their deaths he’d inherited some money, but in his traumatized drunken days, he’d foolishly run through it. He knew better now. He had his feet under him. What an irony that he had a chance at having the resources for a new life and that chance had the odds stacked against him.

  He pulled the will from where it had landed on the carpet. He’d find the woman and her son. He had to. He still had three months. She’d covered her tracks well. But she couldn’t know that tracking people was his forte.

  That and killing.

  But killing was a tool he’d sworn to leave behind.

  Chapter One

  NATASHA’S HAND SHOOK WHEN SHE PLACED her stack of chips on the felt surface of the roulette table. Hope laced through the desperation gripping her chest as she pushed the chips onto the square marked seventeen. Numbers had never been her friend and lately luck hadn’t been going her way, but seventeen was her favorite number. When she’d turned seventeen, she’d pocketed one of the false IDs her foster mother had counterfeited and bolted for freedom, leaving the East Coast and its troubles behind.

  Had it only been ten years since that rainy day when she’d boarded a bus with a single suitcase and set out for California? So much had happened since then. Some good, some bad. But the good was why she edged closer to the table and gripped her hope tighter.

  “I love the thrill of this moment,” the well-dressed woman standing next to Natasha whispered in an almost reverent voice. “The delicious rush of anticipating where the hand of fate might fall.”

  The diamonds on the woman’s hands and wrists told Natasha that the woman had far less at stake at the turn of the roulette wheel than she did.

  Far less.

  Voices of partying gamblers in the casino faded as Natasha whispered a silent prayer. But memories flooded in, breaking the flow of her carefully rehearsed mantra.

  The last night she’d spent in this very casino she’d been a coat-check girl. It was the only job she’d found after she’d arrived in the Bay Area. The only job that didn’t require that she read or do math. No one knew that words slid off the page when she looked at them, that numbers danced and shifted and made her mind go blank. And no one had ever guessed back then that she hadn’t been of legal age to be working in a casino. Her dark makeup and weary expression had fooled everyone.

  But one night, one of the regulars who’d been her biggest tipper had gotten under her careful guard. He’d treated her to dinner and drinks after she’d finished her shift. She’d ended up in his suite, naked, bruised and broken. She’d fled the suite and quit her job the next day, fearful that the man she’d mistaken for a Prince Charming—the man she’d willingly given her virginity to before he’d turned unspeakably violent—would come after her. Stalk her. His crazy talk and his fists had planted fear deep.

  She’d never returned to the casino.

  Until now.

  Her palms sweated against the wooden rail of the roulette table. The only blessing of that horrific night was her son. Tyler and his future were the reason she’d returned, the reason she was wagering the last of her savings.

  Petey, her trusted friend and the casino doorman, had tried to talk her out of her plan when she’d called earlier in the week to tell him she was coming to place a bet. He didn’t believe in gambling. And the truth was, neither did she. And that evening as she’d walked in the door, he’d told her a man had come in the previous night looking for a woman named Natasha but that Petey had convinced him that the only Natasha he knew hadn’t been around in years. His description of the man had stopped her heart, but she’d told Petey not to worry. Told him that coincidences happened all the time. The man couldn’t be Eddie. Not after ten years. Why would he come looking for her after all that time? Why would he even remember? But even as she tried to focus on her mission for the evening, she glanced over her shoulder, her body poised to run.

  Hands clenched, she recited her carefully memorized phrases of hope, trying to banish the images of that terrible night and calm her racing pulse.

  She’d make this one bet and never return.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Petey watching her. Petey was the only employee still at the casino who knew about Tyler. Petey she trusted. He was a storehouse of well-kept secrets, and he’d never give hers away. He came over to her and tried once again to talk her out of betting, but she’d made up her mind. And two decades of casino work had probably taught him better than to stand in the face of desperate hopes.

  But it wasn’t just hope that drove her. She trusted the dreams.

  She trusted the images that had recurred night after night, always the same. Images so real that she felt she could reach out and touch her mother as she spoke. For two weeks her mother had come to her, repeating the same message over and over in the soft voice Natasha still remembered.

  Bet on number seventeen at the roulette table, and your destiny and hopes will be fulfilled.

  She didn’t much care about her own destiny, but worry and hope and all her dreams for Tyler drove her. She didn’t want so very much, wasn’t greedy. All she wanted was to get Tyler out of the bad neighborhood they lived in and into a good school district, to give him the chance at success she’d never had. But to accomplish that she needed money. Money for higher rent, money for a move. Money that her paltry income at the plant nursery didn’t afford.

  Her mother’s voice whispered in her mind, in her heart, and penetrated the fear and doubt coiling in her chest.

  She would trust her dreams.

  Surely the forces of good would shine on her just this once.

  The croupier closed off the bets.

  He spun the wheel in one direction and with a deft flick of his wrist sent the white ball rolling in the other. The colors blended as the wheel picked up speed and then separated as the wheel slowed.

  Natasha shut her eyes and prayed.

  Chapter Two

  NATASHA’S AGING TOYOTA SPUTTERED AND died at the stop light on Adobe Road. Ignoring the honking line of cars behind her, she gripped the wheel, said a quick prayer and, with unsteady hands, turned the key in the ignition. The car chugged to life. She threw it into gear and headed north on the ribbon of road nestled along the foothills of the Sonoma Mountains.

  If it was true that bad luck came in waves of three, then Natasha was due for a turn of fortune. But maybe such reversals of fortune only happened for people who could keep a positive attitude. God knew she was trying for Tyler’s sake. But her hope had vanished with a fateful spin of the roulette wheel. Losing all her savings on a badly placed bet had snowballed in ways she’d never imagined.

  Instead of moving to a new home—a home away from the unpredictable violence of the street gangs that terrorized them—now she was vying for a spot in a homeless
shelter for single women with children.

  At least the shelter was in a safe neighborhood. And the nearby schools were good. Better than good. The first thing she’d done after the shelter director had called her was to visit her friend at the library and have her look up the school Tyler would be attending. Two thumbs up, her friend had reported. And the school had a baseball field. Tyler would be ecstatic. He excelled in school, but he lived for baseball.

  Natasha turned into the drive behind the row of buildings. The Inspire shelter had no visible sign. It wouldn’t. In addition to providing interim housing, the shelter served as a safe house for women running from abuse. At least she didn’t have that problem. Not now. And never again. But her visit to the casino three weeks ago had told her that the trauma hadn’t faded. Maybe there were wounds that time didn’t heal no matter how hard a person tried.

  A security camera hovered like a watchful eye above a set of sturdy doors. She pressed the button beside the doors and jumped when a buzzer sounded.

  “Sorry it’s so loud,” a voice said through the white box. “We’re working on having it adjusted.”

  “I’m Natasha Raley,” Natasha said into the plastic grid of the security system.

  “I’ll be right down to meet you,” the cheery voice said.

  “Thank you,” Natasha said into a stream of static.

  Maybe this was how Dorothy felt when she presented her case in front of the curtain obscuring the Wizard of Oz. Right about now, a wizard would be a welcome addition to her life. Too bad she didn’t believe in such nonsense.

  Natasha was ten minutes early. She wasn’t taking any chances that she might not lock in the spot at Inspire. The shelter was the best facility in the Bay Area. And the only one with room for her and Tyler right then. Wait lists for homeless shelters was an absurd concept. What were homeless people supposed to do while they waited—sleep on the street? Stay with relatives? Most of them were like her and didn’t have family they could turn to. The prospect gave her chills. She’d discovered too late just how thin the line was between having a home and not having one. One missed paycheck and everything went downhill from there.