Free Love in the Vineyard (The Tavonesi Series Book 7) by Pamela Aares

fears and buck up, maybe she could create a more secure future for Tyler. She hated that doing so might require a man. A man with means. A kind man, a reliable man, a man with an extended family that wasn’t crazy and would welcome her son. But she didn’t trust fate and sure didn’t trust her own powers of discernment.
    For a few miles neither of them spoke. The silence was more uncomfortable than talking had been. She fought her thoughts and searched for something, anything, to say. But the words wouldn’t come.
    “Here we are.” Adrian turned the car off the main road onto a gravel drive. “There aren’t any docent tours today, so you’re stuck with me. And the brochures.”
    Brochures .
    If she was careful, he wouldn’t notice she couldn’t read them. At least not quickly. And the way her nerves were jittering? She probably wouldn’t be able to read at all.
    She leaped out of the car, not wanting to give him a chance to come around, to open the door, to take her hand. Touching him was a bad idea. Touching him made her thoughts scramble and her desires rev up.
    He dropped five dollars into the plastic box beside the arched fence marking the entrance to the gardens and took a guidebook from the covered rack beside it. He handed the booklet to her.
    She handed it back. “I forgot my glasses.” Sometimes lies were necessary. And they didn’t count when no one got hurt. It couldn’t hurt to have him read to her.
    “You wore contacts the night of the ball?”
    She hadn’t expected him to question her. “I only need them for reading,” she said quickly. “I hadn’t imagined I’d be reading out here. Besides, I find that plants speak for themselves. I rather like looking at them just as they are, without maps and descriptions.”
    They started up a gravel path that wound through a glade of flowering shrubs and plants. They walked side by side, and she was careful not to brush up against him.
    “My sister Amber tells me that plants speak a language all their own,” he said. “She’s done years of research. I don’t remember the science precisely, but she discovered that when insects chew leaves, plants respond by releasing volatile organic compounds into the air, communicating to other plants around them and signaling that they should pump out insect-repelling chemicals to ward off attack.”
    He shot her another of his bone-melting grins. “Other researchers have duplicated her studies, so she’s no longer considered one of the lunatic fringe, much to our father’s relief. For a while, he thought she was losing it. But I never did. I’m sure there are languages and ways of communicating that have nothing to do with words.”
    He waved his hand through the cool morning air. “Imagine how many conversations might be taking place all around us.”
    Evidently he wasn’t the only fascinating member of his large family.
    “I do think we can hear them. If we listen. Really listen.” She knelt in front of a shrub she didn’t recognize and fingered the soft hairs on the leaves. “Sometimes I think I speak their language better than my own.”
    She’d never admitted her feelings to anyone. And now she was the one sounding like a member of the lunatic fringe.
    He crouched beside her. The buff-colored pants he wore hugged his thighs. He had legs like an athlete. Maybe he was one.
    The corners of his mouth lifted in a playful grin. “Maybe they’re eavesdropping on us.”
    Even through the rich aroma of the plants around them, she could detect the scent that was distinctly his. The mélange of spices and citrus and maleness wound into her senses with the same force it had the night of the party.
    He ran his fingers along a lower branch on the shrub. “Amber once told me that plants have genes that use signals similar to the ones we use to relay sensory information through the body.”
    Natasha pulled her hand back from the plant. The sensory signals flooding her were clear enough without adding a