An annoyed huff escaped from my lips as I pinched the bridge of my nose between two fingers. “Isn’t it the same over at your house? Can’t imagine your dad approving of you hooking up with the La Bella girl.”

“Yeah,” he started as he reached for his napkin and unfolded it, “you’re definitely a taboo subject, but my dad has never once threatened to take the winery away from me. I think my mom would throw a fit if he tried. That’s pretty messed up, you know.”

“It’s kept me away from you for this long.” The truth slipped from my lips before I could take it back.

I watched as his expression fell before he drew in a long breath, and his eyes lit up, as if the realization from our past years hit him all at once.

“That’s why you’ve always stayed away from me.” He moved to the seat next to mine and reached for my hand under the table. As our fingers interlocked, I squeezed them tighter instead of pulling away. “Because you were scared of losing everything, not because you weren’t interested.”

“I never said I was interested,” I said with a grin. But I was desperate to change the subject, to steer him away from the topic of him and me because absolutely nothing for me had changed, and I didn’t know how to handle it. My father would still take everything away from me without a second thought, so my feelings for James didn’t matter; they couldn’t. “So, did you hear about how the fire had started?”

He stared at me like he knew exactly what I was doing and why. He squeezed my hand once before releasing it and moving back to the seat across from mine. “A transformer blew, and it sparked some dry brush.”

“Yeah. You caught it just in time. How did you do that, by the way?”

“I was in the barn and smelled the smoke.”

“You were in the barn? Doing what?”

I’d watched James go in and out of the barn a lot when we were younger, but I never knew what exactly he did in there. He shifted in his seat and looked like he was having an internal battle, although I had no idea why.

“Tell me, James. What do you do in that barn all the time?”

He rattled the ice around in his otherwise empty water glass. “Are you sure you want to know?” He cocked an eyebrow at me.

I planted my elbows on the table and rested my chin on top of my hands in anticipation. “Tell me everything.”

He hesitated before a weird look I couldn’t place passed over him. “I box,” he offered nonchalantly with a slight shrug.

Leaning back, I repeated, “You box? Like you have a whole setup in there or what?”