LITMIR.BIZ

      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.