The Italian Billionaire's Christmas Miracle

“Not at all. He’s very businesslike and quite distant, in fact.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it really matters. Just as long as you leave here knowing a heck of a lot more about running a vineyard than you did when you arrived, he doesn’t have to be witty or charismatic, does he?”

“No.”

Arlene did her best to sound emphatic, but something in her tone must have struck a hollow note because Gail removed her sunglasses, the better to skewer her in a mistrustful gaze. “Uh-oh! What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing,” she insisted, not about to confess that, in the space of three hours, she’d almost fooled herself into believing she might have met Mr. Right. Gail would have laughed herself silly at the idea, and rightly so. There was no such thing as love at first sight, and although a teenager might be forgiven for believing otherwise, a woman pushing thirty was certainly old enough to know better. “I find him a little…unsettling, that’s all.”

“Unsettling how?”

She aimed for a casual shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe ‘intimidating’ is a better word. He’s larger than life somehow, and so confidently in charge of himself and everything around him. I don’t quite know why he’s bothering with an ignoramus like me, and I guess I’m afraid I’ll disappoint him.”

“So what if you do? Why do you care what he thinks?”

Why? Because never before had she felt as alive as she did during the time she’d spent with him. “His mood changed, there at the end,” she said wistfully. “I could hear it in his voice and see it in his expression, as if he suddenly regretted his invitation. He seemed almost angry with me, although I can’t imagine why.”

Gail popped her sunglasses back in place and turned her face up to the sun. “Arlene, do yourself a favor and stop analyzing the guy. Bad-tempered and moody he might be, but as far as you’re concerned, he’s the means to an end, and that’s all that matters. Once we leave here, you’ll never have to see him again.”

She was unquestionably right, Arlene decided, and wished she could find some comfort in that thought. Instead it left her feeling oddly depressed.

That night at dinner in the main house, the reaction of his brothers-in-law to what he’d done was pretty much what he expected. Mock disgust and a host of humorous comments along the lines of, “Where do you find these lame ducks, Dom?” and, “Just what we need at the busiest time of the year—the distraction of a useless extra female body cluttering up the landscape!”

His sisters, though, twittered like drunken sparrows, clamoring for more personal information.

“What’s her name?”

“Is she pretty?”

“Is she single?”

“How old is she?”

“Don’t just sit there looking stony-faced, Domenico! Tell us what makes her so special.”

“What makes her special,” his uncle Bruno declared, stirring up another flurry of over-the-top excitement, “is that she could be The One. Trust me. I have seen her. She is lovely.”

The squeals of delight that comment elicited were enough to make him want to head for the hills. His mother and sisters’ chief mission in life was to see him married, and the last thing they needed was Bruno or anyone else encouraging them. “Don’t be ridiculous, Uncle Bruno,” he snapped. “She’s just an ordinary woman in the extraordinary position of finding herself with a vineyard she hasn’t the first idea how to manage. I’d have made the same offer if she’d been a man.”

But she wasn’t a man, and no one was more conscious of that fact than Domenico. Throughout their extended lunch, he’d been struck by the sharp intelligence in her lovely gray eyes. But it took more than brains to succeed in viticulture, and given her small, delicate bones, he wondered how she’d begin to survive the tough physical demands of working a vineyard.

Not my concern, he’d told himself, more than once. Yet he admired her determination and he’d enjoyed their spirited debate on marriage, enough that he’d been tempted to ask her out to dinner, just for the pleasure of getting to know her better. Until she let slip that she hadn’t come to the island alone, that was—and then he’d felt like a fool for not having figured it out for himself. If she was not a raving beauty, nor was she as plain as he’d first supposed. Rather, she possessed a low-key elegance of form and face that any discerning man would find attractive.

Too bad another had already staked a claim to her, he’d thought at the time, covering his irritation with a brusqueness he now regretted. She’d almost flinched at his tone, as he spelled out what he expected of her when she showed up tomorrow morning. If it weren’t that she was in such dire straits, she’d probably have flung his generous offer of help back in his face. He would have, in her place.

Aware that his family continued to stare at him expectantly, he said, “At the risk of ruining your evening and dashing all hope of marrying me off before the last grape is picked, I feel compelled to point out that this woman is already spoken for. Not only that, she’s here for only two weeks, after which our relationship, such as it is, will come to an end.”

“But a great deal can happen in two weeks,” Renata, his youngest sister, pointed out, ogling her husband. “Our honeymoon lasted only that long, but it was all the time we needed for me to become pregnant.”

“Lucky you,” Domenico replied testily, amid general laughter. “However, my ambitions with this woman run along somewhat different lines, so please don’t start knitting little things on my behalf.”

That gave rise to such hilarity that, so help him, if he’d known at which hotel Arlene Russell was staying, he’d have phoned and left a message saying something had come up and he’d had to cancel their arrangement.

Domenico Silvaggio d’Avalos was already directing operations when Arlene showed up as planned at the back of the winery, the next morning. Stepping away from a crowd of about thirty men and women being loaded into the back of two trucks, he eyed her critically, then gave a brief nod of approval. “You’ll do,” he decided.

“What a relief, signor!”

Either he didn’t pick up on her lightly sugared sarcasm, or he chose to ignore it. “Since we’ll be working closely for the next several days,” he announced briskly, “we’ll dispense with the formality. My name is Domenico.”

“In that case, I’m Arlene.”

“Yes, I remember,” he said, rather cryptically she thought. “And now that we’ve got that settled, let’s get moving. Those people you see in the trucks are extra pickers hired to help bring in the harvest. Stay out of their way. They have a job to do. If you have questions, ask me or my uncle.”

She’d have saluted and barked, Yes, sir! if he’d given her half a chance. But he herded her into the Jeep and followed the two trucks up the hill to the fields, talking on his cell phone the entire time. When they arrived, his uncle was already assigning the extra laborers to their designated picking areas under the leadership of one of the full-time employees, but he stopped long enough to welcome Arlene with a big smile. “Watch and learn, then you go home the expert,” he shouted cheerfully.

Hardly that, she thought. But hopefully not a complete nincompoop, either.

“Although some cultivators bring in machinery to get the job done quickly, we handpick our grapes,” Domenico began, wasting no time launching into his first lecture.

“So I see. Why is that?”

“Because mechanical harvesters shake the fruit from the vines, often damaging it. This can result in oxidization and microbial activity which, in turn, causes disease. Not only that, it’s virtually impossible to prevent other material also being collected, especially leaves.”

Oxidization? Microbial? Whatever happened to plain, uncomplicated English?

Covering her dismay at already finding herself at a loss, she said, “But isn’t handpicking labor intensive, and therefore more expensive?”

He cast her a lofty glance. “Vigna Silvaggio d’Avalos prides itself on the superiority of its wines. Cost is not a factor.”

“Oh, I see!” she replied weakly, and properly chastised, wondered how she’d ever manage to redeem herself for such an unforgivable oversight.

Unfortunately her woes increased as the morning progressed. Although recognizing that she’d had the extreme good fortune to find herself involved in a world-class operation, what struck her most forcibly as the hours dragged by was that her back ached and the sun was enough to roast a person alive.

Under Domenico’s tutelage, she picked clusters of grapes using a pair of shears shaped like pointed scissors. She learned to recognize unripe or diseased fruit, and to reject it. Because bruised grapes spoil easily, she handled the crop carefully, laying the collected clusters in one of many small buckets placed at intervals along each row.

Not that she’d have understood them anyway, but none of the migrant workers had much to say for themselves. They bent to their task with dogged persistence, seldom sparing her so much as a glance. Once assured that she wasn’t about to lay devastation to his precious crop, Domenico essentially ignored her, too, and Bruno was too far away to offer her a word of encouragement. Over the course of the morning, however, four women found occasion to stop by separately, each offering a friendly greeting and, at the same time, subjecting her to a thorough and somewhat amused inspection. Even if they hadn’t introduced themselves as his sisters, she’d have had to be blind not to see their resemblance to her mentor.

“Don’t let my brother wear you out,” Lara, the first to pay a visit, counseled, her English almost as flawless as Domenico’s. “He’s a slave driver, especially at harvest time. Tell him when you’ve had enough.”

Not a chance! Arlene knew from the way Domenico periodically came to check on her that he was just waiting for her to throw in the towel—which she would have done, if her pride had permitted it. But despite a dull, persistent ache above her left eye which grew steadily worse as the morning passed, she refused to give him the satisfaction.

The sun was high when a van rolled to a stop on a dusty patch of rocky ground some distance away from the fields. At once, the sisters converged on it and started unloading its contents onto a long table set up under a canvas awning supported by a steel frame.

As everyone else working the fields downed tools, Domenico approached Arlene. “Time for a break and something to eat,” he declared, in that lordly take-it-or-leave-it manner of his.

By then, the pain in her head was so severe, starbursts of flashing light were exploding before her eyes and she wasn’t sure she could crawl to where the women were laying out baskets of bread and platters laden with cheese, thinly sliced smoked meat and olives. But either he was blessed with second sight, or the stabbing agony showed on her face because, just when she feared she’d pass out, he grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet. “Still want to run a vineyard?” he inquired smoothly.

“You bet,” she managed, and disengaging herself from his hold, managed to totter off and collapse in the shade of the awning.