Ridges release wicked wi.., p.1
Ridge's Release (Wicked Winemakers: First Label Book 2), page 1
RIDGE’S RELEASE
HEATHER SLADE
Wicked Winemakers First Label Book Two
Ridge’s Release
© 2022 Heather Slade
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
CONTENTS
Ridge’s Release
1. Seraphina
2. Ridge
3. Seraphina
4. Ridge
5. Seraphina
6. Ridge
7. Seraphina
8. Ridge
9. Seraphina
10. Ridge
11. Seraphina
12. Ridge
13. Seraphina
14. Ridge
15. Seraphina
16. Ridge
17. Seraphina
18. Ridge
19. Seraphina
20. Ridge
21. Seraphina
22. Ridge
23. Ridge
24. Seraphina
25. Ridge
26. Seraphina
27. Ridge
28. Seraphina
29. Ridge
30. Seraphina
31. Ridge
32. Seraphina
33. Ridge
34. Seraphina
35. Ridge
36. Seraphina
Epilogue
Want more?
Press’ Passion
Want even more?
Code Name: Ares
About the Author
Also by Heather Slade
RIDGE’S RELEASE
A charming billionaire winemaker with a broken heart.
An assistant DA who's sick of the men interfering in her cases.
And the WICKED WINEMAKER’S auction that changes everything...
RIDGE
My family started Ridge Winery, so I’m no stranger to getting what I want. But, I was shot down, turned down by a woman I thought was mine. That’s old news now, though. Water under the bridge. I’m not one to wallow or get discouraged, not my style, not my thing. This auction is everything I tried to avoid, and everything I needed. But, I’m determined to make the sassy DA see me in a new light. Let’s just see how WICKED it’s really going to get…
SERAPHINA
I don’t care how irresistible they are. The so-called good guys shouldn’t be butting into our cases. This isn’t a game of cops and robbers. This is real danger and real lives are on the line. But when it’s my life that hangs in the balance, there’s only one man I trust, one man who can save me. And believe me, he’d climb to the top of the RIDGE to protect me.
1
SERAPHINA
Los Caballeros. There was no proof the secret society even existed, yet my boss had ordered that I, an assistant district attorney, head up the task force to take them down. How many people were on the task force? One. Me. It would be laughable if my job—my reputation as a prosecutor—didn’t depend on it.
So here I was, poised to go after the most powerful entities in the wine industry, starting with the Ridge family. In particular, Noah Ridge, the man I’d asked to meet me for breakfast.
The family was renowned for wine-making, both on the Central Coast of California as well as in the Napa Valley, Sonoma, and Russian River regions. While their Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay were acclaimed, their Zinfandel outsold the other two varietals at least five to one. Not the syrupy pink kind, but the rich, full-bodied red the grape made when used to its full potential.
The pink stuff was a billion-dollar accident, according to wine-industry lore. Someone at a lesser-known winery forgot about the vat of juice, so the owners decided to put it in a bottle and give it away. At the height of its popularity, the stuff the winery had named “White Zinfandel” sold twenty million cases per year.
Regardless of the money they could’ve made jumping on the White Zin bandwagon, Ridge never had.
They’d stayed their course, continuing to produce some of the best red wine in the world. By doing so, they’d won endless awards and made billions of dollars without succumbing to the hype, thus maintaining the integrity of the varietal. It was a position I envied. Maintaining integrity, that was.
When I’d interviewed for the position of assistant district attorney with San Luis Obispo County, I knew part of the reason I was invited to do so was my connection to the wine industry.
At one point in my life, I’d wanted to pursue a degree in enology—the science of wine and wine-making. From there, I had two options. Either vinification, aka making the stuff. Or viticulture, aka growing the grapes used to make the stuff.
Instead, I’d charted a different course after my father lost the winery that had been in his family for generations to none other than the Ridges.
While coincidental, it wasn’t their fault he’d lost it to them. In fact, Noah’s father, Hewitt Ridge, had been generous when he bailed mine out of bankruptcy after his experimentation into “non-traditional” varietals failed catastrophically.
Had the saga ended there, I might’ve been able to follow my dream of working in the industry myself, but in the years following his bankruptcy, my father began drinking heavily. On a fateful night when I was eighteen years old, he left a bar after being there for several hours and got behind the wheel of his car.
He’d made it within five miles of home when he veered into the opposite lane, causing a head-on collision. The family of four in the other vehicle all died on impact, according to the police report filed on the accident. My father, though, had lingered in a coma for four painfully long years before dying.
During that time, the legal fight between the deceased victims’ family and mine resulted in us losing what little we’d had left, including the home where I’d grown up.
The decision to become an attorney had been made out of necessity. Once I started, though, I knew it was what I was meant to do. I loved the law and had taken my oath to uphold it seriously.
Now, though, my boss was pressuring me to dismantle Los Caballeros as well as prosecute the man rumored to be at the secret society’s helm—Brix Avila. He knew as well as I did we didn’t have any evidence to prove they existed, let alone convict them of illegal activity.
In fact, his continued insistence that I make this task force my top priority started to feel as though I was carrying out a personal vendetta against Brix and the perhaps-mythical Los Caballeros.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, answering her call as I left the house.
“Hi, baby. By any chance, have you talked to your sister lately?”
“Not since last week. Why?”
“She, um, hasn’t come home.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been a few days.”
My baby sister had been missing for a few days, and I hadn’t heard about it until now?
“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked, trying not to let on that I was about to jump straight into panic mode.
“Two days ago.”
I sat down, put my head in my hand, and breathed a sigh of relief. Two wasn’t a few. In fact, depending on what time she’d last seen her, it might not be the forty-eight hours required to report someone missing.
Not to mention, at twenty-three, my sister, who was six years younger than me, was an adult. Perhaps it would’ve been nice of her to inform our mother of her whereabouts. However, that wasn’t the relationship the two had.
“What happened, Mom?”
“Nothing.”
“What was the last thing the two of you talked about?”
When she hesitated, I knew they’d had an argument.
“Let me put it this way. What did you fight about?”
“It wasn’t a fight. I told Luisa I didn’t want her to bring Jorge to the house anymore. I don’t trust him.”
Neither did I, but my mom had to know confessing her feelings to Luisa would backfire.
“She’s probably staying with him. I’ll give her a call.”
“Staying with him, but without taking any of her belongings with her? That makes no sense, Seraphina. Not after two days.”
“What do you mean by ‘belongings’?”
“Her computer, a toothbrush, anything more than the clothes on her back.”
I could see Luisa not caring enough to return home for anything my mother had mentioned, except her computer.
In a little over a month, my sister would graduate with a master’s degree in business administration. I had no doubt she had final projects due, along with exams to study for. She wouldn’t risk failing her classes now, after six years of hard work. Especially not over a fight with our mom.
“I’ll give her a call.”
“I’ve been calling. It goes straight to voicemail.”
I didn’t bother to explain that would be exactly what happened if my sister had blocked our mother’s number.
When my call went straight to voicemail too, I got an uneasy feeling. There was no way Luisa would block me. And, like me, she was a morning person. She wouldn’t have her phone turned off at this time of the day.
2
RIDGE
From the window by the table, I had a perfect view of the restaurant’s entrance as well as the ocean, volatile with today’s storms.
I’d arrived early for my meeting with Seraphina Reeve, San Luis Obispo county’s new assistant district attorney and the woman hell-bent on bringing an end to Los Caballeros—an organization whose traditions withstood the tests of hundreds of years.
That she knew about the secret entity was a problem in itself. Did she truly, or like so many others, had she heard the rumors but had no confirmation?
Glancing up, I saw her walk through the front door, the look on her face as angry as the sea. Or was it troubled?
“Noah,” she said, pulling out the chair on the opposite side of the table I’d chosen. “Not surprised you arrived before me.” She, too, was early.
I waited for her to get settled. After she had, I still didn’t speak. She’d asked for this meeting, and I’d let her show her hand before I did mine.
“I see. Well, this is a waste of time,” she muttered when I didn’t offer up as much as a hello.
“Why did you ask for this meeting, Sera?”
Yeah, when we talked on the phone the first time and I used the nickname, she’d vehemently told me not to call her that. However, I’d also told her everyone called me Ridge—not Noah—yet she insisted on doing so.
“As you know, your club has operated outside the law for years. I’m here with an offer.”
I raised a brow and waited.
“Brix Avila pleads guilty to several counts of obstruction of justice, and that will be the end of it. Along with proof you’ve disbanded. If you or anyone else is found guilty of interfering with a single other investigation, we’ll prosecute to the full extent of the law.”
I took a minute to process the words she’d just vomited and did exactly what Brix would’ve done in my place. I sat back in my chair and laughed. Hard. Then signaled Barb, the waitress who usually waited on me.
“Check, please.”
I shook my head as I left, rushing to my truck once I was outside. The storm was picking up, and soon, there’d be a downpour.
My club, as Seraphina called it, had been in existence since the fourteen hundreds. A junior prosecutor working for a central California coastal county was hardly a match for us. No matter how beguiling she was.
“If I have to, I’ll subpoena Addison Reagan and her mother,” said the woman, who’d followed me out to the parking lot. “Maybe then Brix will listen to reason.”
The woman she was referring to, Addison Reagan, had been charged with a murder both Seraphina and I knew she didn’t commit. I didn’t bother to tell her that by the time either woman received as much as a summons, the murder charges against her would be dropped. She’d find out soon enough on her own. Not that it was what she’d subpoena her for. No, it was Los Caballeros’ involvement in finding the real killer the ADA would question Addy about. Neither Brix nor any of the rest of Los Caballeros would ever allow that to happen.
I opened the driver’s-side door and was in my truck, about to shut it and drive away, when I heard her say, “Wait. Please.”
Her two simple words would have been easy to ignore if I hadn’t heard the tone in which they were uttered.
“What?” I said, not looking at her.
“There’s another reason I wanted to talk to you.”
“Not interested, Ms. Reeve.”
“But—”
“If you’d led with something other than an idle threat, Sera, maybe then I would’ve listened.” I slammed the door shut, started the engine, and drove away, wishing I could stop myself from glancing in the rearview mirror at the woman still standing in the rain, looking as though she was about to cry.
After driving far enough away that she couldn’t see me, I pulled over, dug out my cell phone, and sent a text to the man who had been my best friend since we were both in elementary school. Hard to believe that was thirty years ago.
Call me ASAP, read the group text I sent to Brix and the San Luis Obispo County sheriff, Conrad Krouse, a man everyone called Vader. He’d been given the nickname of the Star Wars character because of how loud his breathing sounded on the other end of a phone call.
Since I knew they were currently on a private plane, returning from Alamos, Mexico, I wasn’t sure when they might have a signal. I put the truck in gear and took the back roads south to where my new house was being built.
When I’d purchased the property on See Canyon Road and walked the land to find a building site that would take advantage of the sweeping ocean views, I envisioned living there with the woman I’d planned to ask to marry me.
Instead, Alex—Brix’s younger sister—had married someone else. In hindsight, thinking I had a shot with her had been naive at best. Stupid was more accurate. Alex and Maddox, her now-husband, had been together off and on since high school. Brix had warned me pursuing her wasn’t the best idea. However, I’d been “in love” with her before she met the man she’d married.
So much water had gone under that bridge; it was long since time I moved on. Finding someone I considered half as appealing as Alex, though, seemed unimaginable. She wasn’t only beautiful and sexy; she was also smart and funny.
My cell rang, yanking me out of yet another round of lamenting her loss.
“Hey, Brix,” I said after swiping the screen to accept his call.
“Ridge, I’ve got Vader here with me.”
“Listen, this new prosecutor is becoming a huge pain in the ass. She’s threatening to subpoena both Addy and her mom.” I decided to lead with that rather than her threat against Brix and Los Caballeros.
“Why? They’re in the clear. Why is she contacting you anyway? Zin is Addison’s attorney.”
I’d wondered that myself, but maybe I was the only one who’d answered my phone.
“I’ll get in touch with her,” offered Vader. “She should be working with me, not around me.”
“Her name is Seraphina—”
“Yeah, Ridge, I know.”
When Brix asked what progress was being made in tracking down the person we believed was responsible for the murder Addison had been charged with, it reminded me there were other things I needed to deal with this morning rather than check the progress on my house.
“When will you be back?” I asked after telling him the little I knew.
“About an hour. Maybe less. By the way, Alex called to say the ball is back on for next weekend.”
I’d forgotten all about the annual fundraiser benefiting the children’s hospital in San Luis Obispo. A couple of years back, Alex had taken over the event, whose biggest moneymaker was a bachelor auction. One that, in a moment of weakness, I’d agreed to participate in.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.
Brix laughed. “I hear you, buddy.”
Easy for him to find it humorous since he already knew who would cast the winning bid for a date with him. Brix had convinced Alex he’d make a sizable donation on top of paying the bid amount himself as long as she agreed to let Addison win. While he hadn’t been infatuated with her for as long as I had been his sister, it had moved beyond that now. I had little doubt once they returned to the States, he would ask Addy to marry him if he hadn’t already.
As for me, I didn’t know exactly who would bid on a onetime date with me, but I predicted it would be a nameless, faceless daughter of one of the area’s winery owners. Someone I’d known most of my life, given I was the son of the same, and whom I already knew I had so little interest in. Getting through the evening I had to spend with her would be agony.
