you?” Jaye asked.
“Yes. But I don’t think I have to work every job to understand its demands or to appreciate the people I pay to perform it.”
“Fair enough. So, if I’m no longer head vintner, who’ll be in charge of winemaking?” she asked.
Zack only smiled.
“You?” Her tone was incredulous, so much so it bordered on insulting.
“No need to look so shocked. I have some prior experience,” he informed her.
Jaye wasn’t impressed by his claim. All she could see was that she would have her hands full in the coming months, likely pulling double duty while he dabbled. She cleared her throat. “I believe in being honest.”
“That’s good to know,” he said slowly.
“I’ll stay on, managing and assisting with the winemaking when necessary—”
“You’re already assuming I’ll need your help?”
“I said I believe in being honest.”
“Yes, but what about tactful?” he asked wryly.
“I’ll work on it.”
“Fair enough,” he replied.
“As I said, I’ll stay on, but I won’t be doing it for you or even for the paycheck.”
His eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
“I’ve got an investment here that goes well beyond money. Your name might be on the deed now, but make no mistake, Mr. Holland—”
“Zack,” he said, for the first time sounding truly annoyed. “My name is Zack.”
“Fine. Zack. I want Medallion. And I plan to keep making you fair offers for its sale until you finally accept one. I don’t give up easily.”
“So I’ve noticed.” Then his expression turned oddly grim. “Do you love it that much?”
“Love it?” Jaye shook her head, not surprised in the least that someone who could walk away from his family’s land would fail to understand the attachment she had to hers. “This vineyard is everything to me.”
“Everything? It’s just a place. It’s not…people.”
“No. It’s more reliable than people.” She hadn’t meant to say that. Thankfully, he didn’t understand her meaning.
“It’s dirt and vines. It’s real estate, an investment,” he countered, blue eyes glittering like ice.
“Is that all it is to you?”
Zack didn’t say anything, although for a moment she thought she saw something contradictory flicker in his expression. Then it was gone.
“Well, that’s not all it is to me.” She glanced back out the window. Her voice was low, her tone reverent when she added, “My dad and I built Medallion from nothing. It’s…it’s my life.”
CHAPTER TWO
ZACK spent the following week getting acquainted with the winery’s day-to-day operations and the people who performed them. As he’d told Jaye on the first day, other than the manager and the vintner, he didn’t have any immediate plans to let people go, change their duties or make new hires, but neither did he intend to maintain the status quo. He saw potential at Medallion for greater profit, just as he saw potential for a superior product. He planned to achieve both.
Zack had something to prove.
He was sitting at his desk late Friday going through invoices when the telephone rang. It was his mother.
“I thought I’d call since you haven’t.” Judith Holland’s tone held teasing censure as well as a little hurt. He regretted that. It wasn’t his intention to wound her.
“Sorry. It’s been a busy couple weeks. The harvest is beginning,” he said.
“Here, too.” It was her subtle way of saying she didn’t buy his excuse.
“How is it looking?” he couldn’t help asking. Hearing her voice had made him a little homesick for California and the vineyard he’d left behind. Winemaking was in his blood. It had been in the Holland blood for three generations.
“Good,” she said. “Ross says it will be a better yield than last year, especially for the Sangioveses.”
“That must please Dad.” The Italian varietal was one of his father’s personal favorites.
“It does. Phillip thinks we should expand that section of the vineyard and increase our production, given the rise in popularity of the wine.”
“Of course he does.” Zack’s mood soured. He’d suggested the very same thing to his father two years ago without success, but only because Phillip had been against it at the time.
Phillip was Zack’s cousin but the two men were more like brothers. They had been raised together after a car accident had left a four-year-old Phillip orphaned. Zack had been two at the time. Over the years the pair had butted heads often, enjoying what his mother termed sibling rivalry. It had run deeper than that. Now as adults, Holland Farms and their opposing visions for it posed the biggest source of friction.
No matter what innovations or changes Zack proposed, to make the staid winery stand out in a changing and ever more competitive marketplace, his cousin effectively vetoed them. It wasn’t that Phillip had any more say or power than Zack did. No, what he had was more damning. He had Zack’s father’s ear. He’d always had his father’s ear.
“How is old Phil these days?” Zack drawled. “Still sitting to the right hand of the father?”
“Zackary.” Judith’s tone sounded more weary than scolding.
“Sorry.” And he was. He hadn’t meant to put his mother in the middle.
She seemed satisfied with the apology. “Your cousin is well.”
“And Mira?”
“She’s well, too.” The words came out slowly.
“They’re still together then?” he asked.
Zack’s fiancée’s affections had soured quickly when he began talking about selling off his share of Holland Farms and shopping for his own vineyard. Soon after ending things with Zack, she’d turned up on Phillip’s arm at his family’s annual charity ball. It had been a hell of blow to his ego to learn that she’d considered the vineyard to be Zack’s most appealing attribute.
“Yes.” Judith cleared her throat before continuing. “In fact, she and Phillip recently became engaged.”
It wasn’t heartache he felt. He’d moved beyond that. What was left was bitterness. “Proof that one Holland is as good as the next as long as he comes
