This was a heart-racing, blood-pumping, you’re-the-one-for-me kiss.
As quickly as he’d latched on to her, Slade let her go. This was madness. He knew better. No woman could ever love him again. His only hope was that he’d shocked her with his zeal.
She staggered back, a dazed look in her eyes, if the fading light of summer was any indication.
“There,” he said, forcing the word past a too-tight throat. “It’s done, then.”
He left her there in the gathering darkness.
Left her knowing he’d scared her away for good.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HUGE MISTAKE.
Christine had assumed that Slade would kiss with methodical control. It was how he approached everything. Like adding up a column of numbers in his head. Or creating a graph of growth rates. Predictably ho-hum.
Huge, huge mistake.
The passion in his kiss had been methodical in its heart-stopping assault, but there was nothing controlled about it.
What she’d hoped would be a brief moment of embarrassment, closing the door on any niggle of attraction between them, had opened the door to possibilities and complications.
Worse. Slade’s kiss left her hungry for more.
He was her boss. She couldn’t quit. Her career would be blindsided if she left before bottling even one vintage. Slade thought Harmony Valley residents were gossips? Try winemakers.
He was her boss. If word got out, her path to starting her own winery would have a footnote. The wine wouldn’t stand on its merits as much as the feet of a romantic liaison. She had to set her feelings aside and focus on her dreams. When she had her own winery, she’d give Slade a call. They’d laugh about this night over a glass of wine.
She wasn’t in the mood to laugh now. How could she look at Slade again without reliving the urgency with which his hands had touched her? How could she look at his necktie and not recall the thin scar that curved around part of his neck?
He’d tried to do something terrible to himself. When and why had he done something so desperate?
She wanted to comfort, to question, to hide. She understood why his ex-wife had left. What he tried was horrifying. But his ex-wife was a coward for not standing by Slade. Christine liked to think she wouldn’t have dumped him had she been in the same situation, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know. Who was she to judge Slade’s ex-wife’s choice?
And how could she ignore these feelings? Even now, instead of going to sleep, she wanted to talk to someone about them. She wanted to talk about it with Slade. He’d think it meant she wanted to date him.
It wasn’t just Slade she’d have to deal with if they started something. Slade’s was the kind of secret you didn’t keep from family if you were in a relationship with him. Her grandmother would try to reason with her about her safety—ridiculous, since she didn’t see Slade hurting anyone. Her brother, Jake, would tell her she was crazy to stay with him—not that he had a track record of success in the romance department. Her father would insist she leave Slade and the winery—although whether he would advise her to quit before or after her first vintage was hard to predict.
She tossed and turned all night, eventually dragging herself out of bed for coffee as dawn broke over Parish Hill. She had no answers. She couldn’t run from this. And she sure as heck couldn’t tell her grandmother. Nana sat in the control room at Gossip Central.