Heard It Through The Grapevine

“Stop it,” Gina hissed at Josh

“Stop what?” Josh asked, putting on an expression that was pure fake.

“There are no cameras here the way there were on the show. You don’t have to pretend.” Thank goodness the aspirin was kicking in. The throbbing in her head had subsided to a dull ache.

“Pretend? Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“And what am I pretending?” His eyes took on a devilish gleam as he treated himself to a long, languorous lick of ice cream. A runnel of it dripped down his wrist and Gina imagined licking it off. She made herself look away.

“That you—that you…” Words failed her. She averted her eyes, no longer angry. She was exhausted, though. Anger could do that to a person.

“That I’m fascinated by you,” he said simply….

Dear Reader,

Most of us, at one time or another, have been dumped by a guy we cared about. Me, too. It wasn’t in front of millions of people, as happened to Gina Angelini, the heroine of this book. But it still hurt.

Oh, you say. I remember what that’s like. It was awful.

I know, my friend. I know.

So there I was, after my own personal experience, watching one of those television reality shows where a handsome bachelor chooses one out of many fabulous women to continue a relationship. The choice was down to two. One was in love with him; the other didn’t seem to be. But guess who he chose? Not the one who loved him.

Afterward I felt so sorry for the one whose heart was broken, because I knew exactly how she felt. I started thinking, what if? What if this guy lives to regret his choice?

Thus the idea for Heard It Through the Grapevine was conceived. I wanted that girl to get the guy eventually, so that’s what happens to Gina. She goes home, gets on with her life and then…the man who dumped her turns up and wants to make amends.

In fiction we can right past wrongs. We can make things turn out happily ever after. That’s not always true of real life, but guess what? It happens sometimes.

You know the guy who broke up with me? I eventually married him. Yes, really. And when I watched the TV show that gave me the idea for this book, he was right there beside me. He said, “You could write a book about this.”

And I did.

With love and best wishes,

Pamela Browning

Heard it Through the Grapevine

Pamela Browning

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Alix, the never-to-be-forgotten frog princess, with wishes for her present and future happiness; and for Bethany, with thanks for her technical advice.

Unlike her heroine in Heard It Through the Grapevine, Pamela Browning has never been on a reality-TV show, but she once was a contestant on Jeopardy!

She divides her time between homes in Florida and the North Carolina mountains, but enjoys visiting her relatives in California’s Napa Valley once or twice a year.

Pam invites you to visit her Web site at www.pamelabrowning.com.

Books by Pamela Browning

HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

854—BABY CHRISTMAS

874—COWBOY WITH A SECRET

907—PREGNANT AND INCOGNITO

922—RANCHER’S DOUBLE DILEMMA

982—COWBOY ENCHANTMENT

994—BABY ENCHANTMENT

1039—HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE

Contents

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 One

The last tourist bus had lumbered out of the Good Thymes parking lot, and Gina Angelini narrowed her eyes at the broad-shouldered guy lurking behind the display of dried sunflowers. At first she thought that maybe he’d missed the bus, but a glance out the window revealed a snazzy BMW parked under the olive tree. It shouldn’t be there. That morning she had posted a neatly lettered sign on the front door notifying customers that her herb shop was closing early today.

“Ah-choo!”

The man’s sneeze startled her so that she almost dropped the tray of dried rosemary that she was removing from the sales floor. “Bless you,” she said distractedly before carefully setting the tray down beside the cash register.

“Thank you,” said her last customer. He emerged slowly from behind the sunflowers and favored her with a brilliant smile. Gina felt her jaw drop, and she grasped the edge of the counter for support. She knew this man. She knew him only too well. But what was he doing in Good Thymes? And two years after he’d dumped her?

“Get out,” she said as soon as she regained her voice. Unfortunately, this wasn’t before she registered that broad chest, those wide shoulders, the blue eyes that sparkled in pleasure as he gave her a quick and appreciative once-over.

He cocked a skeptical eyebrow and stuck his hands deep in his pockets as he leaned against a table holding vases of lavender. “So, Gina, I guess you still love me,” he said.

She charged toward him past the goldenseal, the chamomile, the valerian. A pot of chives sat close at hand, and she could have thrown it at him. Instead she showed remarkable restraint, considering that he’d humiliated her in front of millions of people on national TV.

“Wrong,” she said. “It’s not the first misjudgment you’ve made, either.”

“I had my reasons for choosing Tahoma,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to hear them.” It didn’t help that he looked as if he’d stepped right out of Gentleman’s Quarterly. The blazer was Armani, Gina was sure, and his Italian leather loafers were polished to a high gloss.

She turned her back on him with all the determination she could muster, considering that she didn’t trust him not to pounce. There was a certain tigerish quality contained in Joshua Corbett’s well-groomed, well-mannered personage, which was probably why he’d been chosen to be Mr. Moneybags on the reality-TV show. That’s where Gina had met him, thanks to her overzealous cousin Rocco, who had submitted her name to a contestant search unbeknownst to her.

“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say,” she said, stalking back to the cash register and taking refuge behind the counter. She’d never thought she’d set eyes on him again, and though she never let him know it, she was seriously rattled, so much so that she was trembling.

“Maybe you should,” he said mildly. “It might be a good idea to have this conversation outside, if you don’t mind.” He sneezed again.

“I don’t love you, I don’t like you, and what are you doing here in the Napa Valley, anyway?” It seemed like a logical question, since he used to live in Boston.

“I happened to be in the neighborhood and came to see if you’re married and have a couple of kids,” he said, moving closer and hitching himself onto a stool nearby.

“She isn’t married, and that’s why she doesn’t have children,” said a little voice from beneath the counter. A curly red head popped up. The moppet to whom it belonged stared at him curiously for a moment before breaking into a wide gap-toothed grin.

Gina wondered if it was too late to clap a hand over her niece’s mouth. Probably it was, and anyhow, she’d done her own share of talking.

“Who are you?” Josh asked.

“Mia Suzanne Sorise. My favorite color is purple, I love lasagna, and I live next door. Who are you?” she asked, abandoning the hidey hole under the counter where she had staked out the cat’s old bed as a good place to read the latest Harry Potter book.

“I’m Josh Corbett,” he said, smiling as Gina rolled her eyes in disbelief. She’d watched as he’d charmed twenty contestants vying for his affection on Mr. Moneybags, and now he was charming her own nine-year-old niece.

Mia’s eyes grew even rounder. “Ooh, you’re the guy who dumped my aunt Gina,” she said.

“I wish you wouldn’t put it that way,” Josh said, a pained expression flitting across his features.

Mia leaned her elbows on the counter and studied Josh. “Why didn’t you pick her?” she asked. “My aunt Gina is really a very nice person.”

“No argument there,” Josh said with a faint smile.

“Ha!” Gina replied, reflecting that it was sometimes possible to be too nice. She pretended to stack papers and clip them together. She needed something to do if Josh insisted on eyeing her in that coolly appraising way of his. She wished she’d run a comb through her hair after picking up Mia from soccer practice. She wished she had worn something other than her old peasant blouse and a skirt that fell short of her knees.

Josh had the good grace to look uncomfortable. “Actually, there was a lot more to the situation than that.”

“And less. Mia, you’d better finish that chapter you’re reading. We need to go soon,” Gina said. She sounded more confident than she felt.

“I already read it. I’m playing ticktacktoe now, but it’s not much fun to play against yourself.”

“I’m a great ticktacktoe player,” Josh said.

“Good! You can play with me.” Mia laboriously spread a grubby piece of notebook paper on the counter and handed Josh a pencil.

“How about a chance to explain,” Josh asked Gina.

“When you play, do you like Xs or Os?” Mia asked.

“Xs will be fine,” he said, but he was watching Gina expectantly. “Well?”

Despite the impending game, Gina decided against her better judgment to continue the conversation. “How about telling me why you were so insistent on showing me the heather back at Dunsmoor Castle? How about explaining what that—that procedure behind the pantry door meant?” She slapped the papers into a drawer beneath the cash register and slammed it, summoning up her recollection of the heather, which had been rippling gently in the breeze, and of Josh’s eyes, which had been blue and sincere. They were still blue; it was his sincerity that was in doubt here.

“The heather was a planned date. The producers of the show set it up. I had a great time, though, didn’t you? And the procedure behind the pantry door—it was a way to proceed, if you know what I mean.” He nonchalantly entered an X in one of the ticktacktoe squares.

The procedure had been a kiss; only, Gina didn’t want to say it in front of her niece, who could be counted upon to ask too many questions. In fact, on that night before his final choice of the twenty contestants, Josh had sought her, Gina, out and kissed her so tenderly and then so thoroughly that she’d known for sure that she would be the winner the next day. Wrong-o. He’d chosen the other semifinalist, a schemer named Tahoma. Gina found no consolation in the fact that according to one poll, seventy-eight percent of the viewing audience believed that Mr. Moneybags had made the wrong choice.

“The procedure was something you threw in to confuse people, including me,” Gina said.

“Not exactly,” Josh said seriously. “The only person I confused was myself. If you’d let me—”

“I’m not letting you do anything,” Gina said pointedly.

“I won! I won!” Mia crowed. She grinned up at Josh. “Hey, you know what? I really like you.”

“In that case, isn’t there a consolation prize? Like dinner with your aunt?”

“No,” said Mia. “But you could come to crush if you like.”

“Crush?”

“You know, it’s what we do after harvest. There’s this really funny I Love Lucy show where Lucy and Ethel are in a big barrel stomping on grapes. It’s like that.”

Gina glanced at Josh to see how he was taking this.

“That’s one of my favorite I Love Lucy episodes, but I thought they had machinery for squeezing the juice out of the grapes these days,” he said to Mia.

“The stomping is just matrimonial,” Mia replied.

Gina hastened to correct her. “Ceremonial, Mia. Wrong word.”

“Ceremonial, then. Ooh, that’s a good one to tell Frankie.” Mia prided herself in collecting words to impress her eleven-year-old cousin. “Anyway, at our family’s winery we have a grape-stomping contest. They don’t use any of the stomped juice to make wine, though, because we stomp barefoot and that wouldn’t be sanitary. They have crushers to get the juice out of the grapes for the wine that we make, and after that there’s a whole lot of things they do to the grapes to make them into wine. My dad’s the winemaker, so that’s how I know all this. It’s cool. Would you like to come to crush with us?” She gazed disingenuously up at Josh.

“I—” Josh began, but Gina had heard enough.

“He would not like,” she said pointedly. “He has other things to do, I’m sure.” To Josh, she added, “Did Tahoma come with you?”

“Tahoma?” he replied, wrinkling his forehead. “Why would she?”

“I thought you were in love with her. Why else would you toss me aside like yesterday’s old salami?” Gina walked to the far end of the counter.

“Maybe because I really cared about you,” Josh said with a determined air.

Gina indulged in a ladylike snort. “How could I not have known? Who would have thought?”

“Listen, Gina, I’d like a chance to talk it over.”

Gina treated this statement with the stony silence it deserved.

Josh turned to Mia. “Crush sounds like so much fun that I’d like to go.”

“Oh, it is.” Mia’s eyes sparkled up at him. She ducked under the counter and bobbed back up with the Harry Potter book, careful to mark her place with the ticktacktoe paper. “You can explain everything to Aunt Gina when we’re at crush. You can’t miss it. It’s bad luck if someone doesn’t go.”

Gina set her straight. “That only applies to family members, Mia. It doesn’t apply to people you’ve invited for no reason at all.”

“But, Aunt Gina, I invited Josh because he likes I Love Lucy,” Mia said, frowning. “My mom says that we can invite anyone to crush. She says it’s hospital.”

“I think you mean hospitable, Mia. It means making people welcome. And we don’t have to show that kind of courtesy to Mr. Corbett.”

“But, Gina, we’re old friends,” said Josh. “Doesn’t that count for something?” He beamed the full wattage of his smile on Gina, who immediately steeled herself against his charm.

“We were friends,” Gina corrected him. Turning her back on Josh, she said, “Mia, I have to run upstairs and get my jacket.” The October day was cool, and the night might become chilly.

“Please hurry,” Mia said. “We don’t want to be late.”

With one last scalding look over her shoulder at Josh, Gina ran up the stairs of the rustic stone cottage that served as both shop and living quarters. When she returned, Mia was pulling on her own sweater, a cable knit in bright purple.

“Now we can leave,” Gina said.

“When you have a customer?” Josh asked plaintively.

“That’s not what I would call you.” For emphasis, she went to the door and flipped the Open sign so that it read Closed.

“I was going to buy—” he cast his gaze around wildly “—some sachets for my landlady.”

“At this moment, nothing in here is for sale. We officially closed at noon. Are you ready to go, Mia?”

“Yes, and I can’t wait to get there. Josh, you can ride in the front seat with Aunt Gina. We have to pick up Frankie ’cause his dad’s helping to cook the barbecue.”

“Oh, I forgot about Frankie,” Gina said. Frankie was at his accordion lesson about a half mile away. She had no idea what to do about Josh short of a knock-down, drag-out argument, which didn’t seem fair to Mia.

Shooting a go-eat-roadkill look in Josh’s direction, Gina grabbed her keys and ushered Mia out of the shop in front of her, with Josh following along behind. She had probably no more than a minute to think of some tactic that would send Josh on his way. So far, nothing had occurred to her. Nothing legal, anyway. Murder was not an option, and neither was assault. She could only hope that he would take the hint and back off.

Her red-and-white 1966 Ford Galaxie convertible was parked with its top down in its customary spot under the olive tree, and Mia climbed into the back seat.

“We could ride in my car,” Josh said.

“There is no ‘we’ as far as you’re concerned,” Gina retorted. She started the car.

“I invited Josh,” Mia piped in her clarion voice. “It would be rude to tell him he can’t go.”

Mia was into defining the differences between rude and polite these days, mostly because her parents emphasized good manners at their house. Gina, knowing this, wavered under the power of Mia’s righteous and expectant gaze.

“I invited him,” Mia repeated. Her voice was beginning to take on the aggrieved tone that preceded a bunch of difficult questions.

Gina exhaled and rolled her eyes. “Get in,” she said to Josh, who beamed.

He opened the door and slid in beside her with the air of someone who expected to be included all along. “Nice car,” he said.

She edged a glance toward the BMW parked near the door of the shop. “So is yours,” she pointed out as she backed out and turned.

“It’s rented,” he said. “I flew in a couple of days ago and had to have wheels.”

So he’d been here for a while and was only now getting around to saying hello? She could have taken offense at the delay if she cared anything about him. Which she most emphatically did not.

“Aunt Gina loves this car,” Mia said, squeezing her head through the gap between the front seats and sending a whiff of Juicy Fruit their way. She chomped on the gum enthusiastically.

“Mia, dear, would you mind leaning back?” Gina said, trying not to sound as annoyed with her niece as she felt.

“It is a fine car,” Josh said, taking in the restored upholstery, the gleaming knobs on the radio.

“My father bought it used when I was a kid,” she said. She didn’t add that she’d fallen in love with the Galaxie’s style and elegance from the first moment that her father wheeled it into their driveway. “He always meant to restore it and give it to me, and after he died, I discovered that he’d put money aside for years for the restoration. My cousin Rocco volunteered to do the work.” For a moment she had forgotten that she was talking to the man who’d broken her heart two years ago, and she fell silent as she headed down the bumpy road toward Vineyard Oaks, the winery that the Angelini family had owned ever since her grandfather, Gino, his brother and two sisters had bought it shortly after arriving in the United States sixty-seven years ago.

The vineyard, planted with merlot, sangiovese, petite syrah and zinfandel vines now stripped of their grapes, stretched out toward the distant mountain ranges on either side of the fertile valley. After a few minutes, Gina pulled the car over in front of a small house set back from the road, where Leo Buscani, retired Vineyard Oaks winemaker now accordion teacher, lived. A boy of eleven emerged, lugging an accordion case.

Mia bounced up and down. “That’s Frankie. He’s okay most of the time—for a boy, I mean. Get in back with me, Frankie. I’m being hos-spit-able.”

Frankie balked. “You’re going to spit on me?” he asked skeptically.

Mia dissolved into giggles. “That’s my new word. It means making someone welcome.”

Frankie chucked his accordion case in the back seat and climbed in after it. He was a captivating, curly-haired boy whose dark eyes snapped with merriment.

“Aunt Gina, Mr. Buscani says I’m the best student he’s ever had,” Frankie announced. “He wants me to join his accordion band.”

Everyone in the family was pleased that Frankie, who possessed an aptitude for getting into trouble, had taken so well to the accordion. Gina glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him. “That’s wonderful,” she said.

“Do you think Pop will let me?”

“Oh, Rocco will probably go for it.” Rocco and his son were closer than most, possibly because Frankie’s mother had died when he was only six.

When Frankie and Mia settled into a spirited discussion about whether or not she should give him her last stick of gum, which Frankie argued was only hospitable, Josh turned to Gina. “You’re more beautiful than ever,” he said in a low tone.

The compliment discombobulated her more than she liked to let on. “Yeah, right,” she said.

“I mean it, Gina.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“Why shouldn’t I? It’s true.”

Thanks to her Norwegian mother, Gina had grown up blond in a family of dark-haired, olive-skinned Italian-Americans, convinced that her light coloring wasn’t attractive. She’d longed to resemble the rest of the family for most of her life, but the only features she seemed to owe to the Italian side of her family were dark eyes and tawny skin. These days, she could finally accept that men found her beautiful, but she wasn’t in the mood to hear compliments from Joshua Corbett.

She kept her eyes focused forward. “You act as if nothing happened between us.”

Josh slid a cagey look in her direction. “More should happen, don’t you agree?”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Not if I can help it.”

“Would it change things if I told you that I wasn’t smart in the way I handled the Mr. Moneybags choice? That I realize it now? That I want to make amends?”

Gina bit back an exasperated retort. “Didn’t it work out with Tahoma?”

Josh kept his eyes focused on the road ahead. “The woman happened to be living with a boyfriend she never mentioned. After she walked away with the million dollars, I never heard from her again.”

“Bummer,” Gina said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. She’d never liked Tahoma much, though she’d been cordial to her for the sake of the show. The woman had pranced around the chilly Scottish castle where the show was filmed thrusting her silicone-enhanced chest in front of the ever-present video cameras while stuffed into dresses the size of cocktail napkins. It was a wonder she hadn’t caught pneumonia.

“You live and you learn,” Josh said philosophically.

“Did it ever occur to you that I might be angry about losing the million dollars I would have won if you’d chosen me?” Of course it hadn’t; he was independently wealthy. The show’s publicity had touted him as being the scion of a prominent Boston family. Gina seemed to recall pictures of a huge mansion and a family of bluebloods with ties to the Mayflower.

He appeared disconcerted. “If you’ll recall, no one told me that the woman I chose would win that much money. I thought—”

“They told the contestants right at the start. You mean you didn’t figure it out?” He had a Yale education, for Pete’s sake.

“The million dollars for the winner was a total surprise to me. The first I knew about it was when the butler marched into the room carrying a check on a silver platter and handed it to Tahoma. If I’d caught onto that little secret, I’d have realized early in the game I couldn’t trust anything the contestants told me.”

“Did you trust what I told you?”

He took his time answering, and when he did it was with an air of thoughtfulness. “Whenever the conversation touched on the Napa Valley and your family, your eyes shone. You didn’t promote yourself like some of the other contestants. You seemed sincere in everything you said. Of course I trusted you.”

She was touched that he’d recognized her sincerity; it was how she had determined to play the Mr. Moneybags game in the beginning, and she’d stuck to that decision even when it might not have been in her best interest. And she couldn’t believe he recalled how longingly she’d spoken of home, family and her good fortune at having been born and reared in Rio Robles, California, population eight thousand, many of them Angelinis.