First Comes Love by Heather Heyford

Author:Heather Heyford [Heyford, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

Alex poured an ounce of the same wine from each of two successive vintages into glasses and sat down to compare them with his laptop nearby, prepared to take notes on differences in color, aroma, and taste.

He turned his focus to his blog notes. What he needed was a third vintage to compare with the other two. Most wineries released the same label wines around the same time every year, often in the springtime.

A quick search of the Net revealed he was in luck—May was the release month. And this year, rather than purchasing it at his regular shop in Portland, he could practically walk to the winery where it had been bottled.

That’s what he needed to elevate his blog—a visit to the winery, complete with his own photos. Even better would be if he could somehow get a behind-the-scenes tour, obtain exclusive shots that would scoop all those other wine bloggers competing with him for readership.

He carried his wineglass out back and crept stealthily to a spot beneath the roofline where he’d seen the purple finches carrying wisps of dried grass, to check on the progress of the nest.

But it was nowhere to be found. The half-built nest had been so fragile . . . it must have blown away in the wind.

He looked around, but the birds themselves had disappeared, too.

As usual, whenever he was perplexed or disappointed, his thoughts defaulted to Kerry O’Hearn. Why, after so many years, did she still occupy such a disproportionately large space in his mind?

Around the time of the Sullivan trial, Alex had completed advanced, science-based training designed to optimize his powers of observation. By viewing a series of objects flashing in progressively faster microseconds, he’d learned to rapidly distinguish between, for example, a wallet, a cell phone, and a handgun.

Back then, he’d viewed Kerry as a frigid shrew with a heart of stone.

But maybe he’d been overconfident in his powers of perception. Now that he’d gotten to know her, doubts had begun to poke holes in his original assessment. No longer did anger threaten to swamp him every time he thought of her. He’d seen a gentler side of her, like the way she’d rescued Ella without panicking when she’d fallen face forward in the pool so that she wouldn’t develop a fear of water. How she made sure her middle child always felt included.

She could be a tiger mom, like the time she’d set aside her misgivings and brought Shay to find out about boxing so she could learn to defend herself.

Then there were those passionate kisses in his driveway, the way her eyes burned hot and intense. Alone at night in bed, he’d replayed the scene in his head so many times, he knew each kiss by heart.

In the corner of his eye he saw a flash of magenta feathers and followed one of the finches carrying a twig in its beak to his gutter.

Maybe he and Kerry could never be lovers. But where was the law against

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