"You're making it hard to keep my guard up."
"That's the plan."
She laughs softly. "At least you're honest about it."
"I told you. I don't see the point in being anything else."
The waiter clears our plates, and the conversation deepens the way it does when two people stop circling and relax. I tell her about my parents, something I don't share with many people.
"They died in a car accident when Rachel and I were ten. We'd always lived on the farm with my grandparents, so they took over." I turn my water glass slowly on the tablecloth. "They were already both in their sixties, raising two grieving kids and running a large-scale thoroughbred operation at the same time. They never complained."
Sunny's expression softens, and her hand moves across the table before she catches herself and draws back. "That must have been incredibly hard. For all of you."
"It was. But they made sure we had structure and purpose. My grandfather put me to work in the barns one week later, said the horses needed me and I needed them, and he was right." I meet her eyes. "He passed away a few years later and by the time I was eighteen, I was running the program. Not because I had to, but because it was the only thing that made sense to me. Thehorses gave me something to build when everything else felt like it was falling apart."
"I understand that more than you know." Sunny's voice is quiet, stripped of its usual sharpness. "My father left when I was five. He walked out one morning and never came back. My mother raised me alone, worked two jobs to keep us in a decent apartment, and never said a bad word about him in front of me." She pauses, and I watch her organize the next words carefully. "I spent most of my childhood wondering what I'd done wrong. It took me a long time to understand it had nothing to do with me."
The weight of what she's sharing settles over me, and I sit with it, not rushing to fill the silence, not trying to fix what isn't mine.
"I went to UC Davis for winemaking," she continues. "I needed to be somewhere that had nothing to do with Texas or my father or any of it. I wanted to start over, and be good at something that was entirely mine." A faint smile crosses her face. "When Isabelle offered me the job at Willow Sage, I drove straight from California to Stone Creek without stopping except for gas. I walked into that production room for the first time and I knew I was home."
"That's how I felt pulling under the Twin Oaks arch that first time," I say. "Like everything I'd been building toward finally had a place to land."
She nods, and the understanding between us in that moment doesn't need any more words.
The waiter brings the dessert menu, and Sunny waves it off. "If I eat anything else, you'll have to carry me out of here."
"I could manage that."
"I'm sure you could, and I'm sure Gran would approve, but let's save the heroics for the second date."
"Is that a promise of a second date?"
"It's a possibility. Don't push your luck, Hayden."
I settle the check while Sunny excuses herself, and when she crosses back through the dining room the blue dress catches the lamplight. She has no idea how beautiful she is, and for some reason that detail gets me more than the dress does.
Outside, the evening air is warm, carrying the faint scent of lavender. The Saturday crowd moves easily around us, couples arm in arm, kids trailing ice cream drips, live music drifting from somewhere down the block.
Sunny falls into step beside me, and the tension she carried at the start of the evening is gone. In its place is something looser, warmer. We pass galleries and shops, and she points out a wine bar she's been to once and a German bakery that makes strudel she describes in terms that would make Chef Delany jealous.
"This town has more character in one block than most cities have in a mile," I say, pausing to look at a mural on the side of a building.
"Fredericksburg has been reinventing itself for a hundred and fifty years without losing what makes it work." She tucks her hands into the crook of her elbows and looks up at the old buildings. "That's harder than it sounds. Most places try to modernize and end up gutting the soul out of everything."
"Sounds like you're talking about more than architecture."
Her mouth curves. "Maybe I am."
We walk another block, and our arms brush as we navigate around a group of tourists. Neither of us moves away. The contact is small but electric, and the buzz shoots to my shoulder.
"Can I ask you something?" she says after a stretch of comfortable silence.
"Anything."
"Why me?" She stops walking and turns to face me, and under the streetlights her expression is open and earnest. "You could have any woman in this valley. You're rich and kind,you're annoyingly good-looking, and you own a ranch with a duck pond. That's basically a romance novel hero checklist. So why are you spending your Saturday night with the prickly winemaker?"
"Because it’s you," I say. "I’ve met a lot of people. None of them have ever gotten under my skin the way you do. You don’t try to. You don’t even seem to notice it’s happening, but it is." I take a step closer, close enough to catch the faint scent of rose and watch the shift in her eyes. "You make me want to pay attention. And I can’t seem to stop."
