am to Ashley White.
She’s not for me.
I’d just ruin her. Take away her loveliness.
I can’t do that to her. I can’t do that to anyone, but especially her.
I pull into the parking lot next to the Steel building. It’s pretty big, for a building in the middle of a ranch. We do all our business here except when we need to go to Grand Junction or Denver to sign documents and whatnot. My dad and all my uncles have offices here as well as in their homes. Truth be told, though, they’re all more comfortable outside, doing the real work.
They always have been, and so am I.
Today, though, I’ll show Ashley where she’ll be doing her busy work.
“Why aren’t we at the winery?” she asks.
“We’ll go there next, but this is first and foremost a business. This part of it is important.”
“Says the guy who sleeps with his vines.”
“I do my share here as well.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“That’s exactly how you meant it.”
She doesn’t try to contradict me. If I had it my way, I’d live in the vineyards and do all my work from there. She knows this. Already, she knows me. Which is disconcerting. How did she get in so quickly?
She only knows part of me, anyway. No one truly knows the real me. Not even my father, though he gets me better than anyone else ever has.
We walk into the building and take the elevator to the third floor. I take her past the first corner office. “This is Uncle Ryan’s. Mine’s on the next corner.”
“Corner office, huh? Nice.”
Is she being facetious? I can’t quite tell. Of course I have a corner office. I’m an heir to this ranch, and I’m the assistant winemaker, soon to take over as master winemaker.
I open the door to my office and gesture for her to precede me. No degrees on the walls. I don’t have any.
“Where are your awards?” she asks. “I know you’ve won some.”
“There isn’t room for all of them.”
Truth. I’ve won a ton.
She meets my gaze and opens her mouth, but no words come out. She doesn’t quite know how to respond.
“I don’t do this for the glory,” I say. “I do it for the love of the work. For the art. For the sake of the wine.”
“L’art pour l’art,” she says softly.
“What?”
“Sorry. It’s French. It translates to ‘art for art’s sake.’”
“That’s a nice philosophy. I share it, but I also know art has another purpose. In my case, producing wine that consumers love.”
“For money, yes,” she says.
“Of course for money. And the more awards I get, the better my wines sell. But as I said, I don’t do it for the glory.”
“Because you already have all the money in the world.”
I hold back a chuckle. How easy it is for someone outside our family to judge our motives. I’ve seen it again and again. “We’re very charitable with our money. The more we have, the more we can give away.”
“Still, you pretty much live like kings here.”
“We do. I stopped apologizing for that a long time ago.”
“I’m not asking you to apologize for it.”
“Yeah, you kind of are. Not one of us is a spoiled brat. We work our asses off, and we were raised to be grateful for our good fortune, to be generous with it. Part of good fortune, though, is to be able to live comfortably.”
She chuckles. “Comfortably? Or luxuriously?”
I shake my head. “If you’re gunning for an apology, I already told you that you won’t get one.”
“I’m only gunning for reality. This is beyond comfortable, and you know it.”
For some reason, this hits a nerve. She doesn’t know about my past. I get that. But damn, she’s being rude about our fortune—a fortune we’re sharing with her.
I stare straight into her burning blue eyes. “Why exactly did you come here, Doctor?”
She rolls her eyes, clearly irritated. “I’ve told you, time and again, I’m not yet a—”
“Semantics. Just answer the question. Why did you come here?”
“You know exactly why I came here. To learn. To experience. And for the credit.”
“I could accept those reasons,” I say. “In fact, I think you actually believe them.”
“Uh…yeah. That’s because they’re true.”
“You may be a California girl, but you’re also studying oenology, which means you’ve heard of Steel Vineyards.”
“So?”
“And you happened to meet my sister at a lecture given by my uncle. Nice, the way things work out, huh?”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I’m making perfect sense, and we both know it. You’re getting all uptight