Wife of the Vineyard

Elena Vitale has spent five years pretending the man who owns the winery next door is a stranger. He isn't. Salvatore Rinaldi runs his family's legitimate business from Napa and everything else from the shadows, and he has watched her harvest every autumn from behind a tinted windshield. When her father's debts come due to the wrong people, he buys them quietly and offers one alternative to ruin: marry him, keep the vineyard in her name, let the family's protection do what her stubbornness can't. She says yes with her teeth clenched. He keeps his distance for four months, until a rival burns her crush pad in the night and he moves into the farmhouse to guard the property himself. Then distance collapses, and Elena is pregnant by a man who has never once asked her for anything. What he gives her instead is everything he owns — and a choice.