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Grayson was different from other people too. He treated me like a lady, which sounds old-fashioned and ridiculous but it’s true. He had these manners out of another century. I was only at my job at BlueNet for a year when we met, and I was already burnt out on the tech world.

I was working more than eighty hours a week.

Fifty of them in an open-plan office filled with the same rich kid douchebags I’d gone to college with.

Then I did another thirty hours as an assistant pastry chef at an up-and-coming spot in Hayes Valley, making no money and getting no respect and not giving a damn because it was the only thing that made me feel whole.

When my friend Jamie invited me up to Sonoma to a wine-tasting event at some fancy vineyard on the one Saturday I had off in months I jumped at the chance.

Getting dolled up in San Francisco meant putting on my sleek black hiking pants and fancy fleece vest instead of the nubby one I usually wore on Saturdays.

I paired it with some nice wedge heels and blew out my hair.

You could never look like you were trying too hard in that city.

It was the opposite of going to college on the East Coast, where you were supposed to major in trying too hard just to go out to get a bagel in the morning.

Jamie was a friend from the tech job. She worked in marketing for BlueNet and said it was a little bit better over there since her department was about 80 percent female as opposed to the 5 percent (me) in finance.

But the hours still sucked, and she was just hanging on to the job until the company went public and she’d get paid out for her stock options.

I smelled Grayson before I saw him. Is that gross?

It’s a little gross. But it’s true. He smelled better than anyone I’d ever met.

We were standing thigh to thigh at the bar trying to get a drink and suddenly I was overcome by the scent of pine needles and leaves burning and salty sweat after a long day’s work.

Maybe I describe it like that now because I know it so well. I don’t know what I thought at the time except that it smelled delicious and I wanted to swallow it.

“Oh excuse me,” he said as we knocked gently into each other.

His bright green eyes met mine and I was a goner.

“Can I get you something? I think I have this young lady’s attention.

” Of course he had the bartender’s attention.

He had the attention of every woman in the room.

I could feel everyone watching him and, by extension, watching me.

“I’ll take a tasting flight,” I said, thrusting my shoulders back and my boobs out. “The red. What are you having?”

“Diet Coke for now. My drug of choice.” He said it so sheepishly that it was cutely weird. I assumed he must have been driving. The bartender had been listening to us and my wine flight was ready in less than a minute.

“Do you want me to explain the wines to you?” she asked. I didn’t. I wanted to stare at this gorgeous man a little longer and think of something brilliant to say to make him fall in love with me. I also wanted to down that first glass to get my hands to stop shaking.

“You can explain them to me. I’ll take a red too.” Jamie slid in next to me.

“There are a couple of seats open by the firepit if you want to take them, babe,” she said to me.

Jamie was a truly excellent wing woman. I wish I’d stayed in touch with her when I left the Bay Area, but I didn’t stay in touch with any of those women.

I regret it now. Not as much as I regret what happened with Lizzie, but I do regret it.

Gray eventually ended up hating Jamie and all the girls like her from the office.

He hated any woman I got close to. Now I know that he wanted to keep me all to himself, or at least keep me away from anyone I might confide in.

But at the time he told me those girls were all trashy and ridiculous, that I was so much better than them and hanging out with them would only bring me down.

He told me I had so much potential. Why would I waste any energy on people like that?

“I just want the best for you, and I think you deserve the world,” he’d said over and over through the years. Pathetically enough I believed him.

I barely remember what Gray and I talked about for the next two hours at that winery, but it was two hours.

All around us everyone was drinking and dancing to the bluegrass band that had been flown in from Austin.

Jamie brought me another wine when the flight was finished, and I didn’t even clock that Grayson only drank water and soda.

What I did notice was how he kept bringing me water and how he stood when I stood to go pee and remained standing with his hands behind his back until I returned.

He asked me questions about myself, and he seemed truly interested in the answers.

There was lively conversation and giddy laughs at dumb jokes, shared interests in mountain biking and musicals.

A strange but earnest detour into our favorite childhood Disney movies.

And then Jamie stumbled over singing “Sweet Caroline.” Before I knew what was happening she spilled a goblet of red wine down the crisp white front of Grayson’s shirt.

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry,” I mumbled, holding on to Jamie with one arm and trying to mop up Grayson’s chest with a Kleenex I found in my pocket with the other.

“Good time never seemed so good, so good, so good.” Jamie belched in Grayson’s face.

“Nothing a proper soak won’t get out,” he said with an honest smile.

A proper soak? Who the hell was this guy and why did it turn me on so much to think about him taking off that shirt and soaking it in some big old farmhouse sink somewhere?

Maybe it was because the wine was making the fabric cling to his fantastically cut stomach in a way that would have been obscene if not for his goofy grin and the blond curls flopping into his face.

“I’m fine. You should take care of your friend,” he whispered to me.

And because he told me to, I ushered Jamie into one of the taxis waiting in the circular drive and directed it to the motel room we had rented for the night on the banks of the Russian River.

A staff member chased after the cab, tossing two gift bags into the backseat, because he would be damned if we didn’t depart with our complimentary bottles of their brand-new rosé.

I expected Jamie to crash once we got to our room, but she was fired up with a second wind and pouring us glasses of wine by the time I got out of the shower.

“Your phone is buzzing,” she said, dangling the device between two of her fingers.

“Probably work,” I said.

“Or a handsome man in need of a new shirt.”

“I can’t believe you spilled wine all over him, Jamie. I’m mortified. And it isn’t him. I didn’t give him my number.”

“I did. As you were dragging me away, I passed him your business card. Because. I’m. A. Good. Friend.”

I tried to snatch the phone away from her, but she was shockingly fast for a person with the blood alcohol level of a rodeo clown. Before I knew it, she’d dashed out the screen door in the back of the motel room. I followed her in just a towel.

“You can’t write back yet. You’ve got to play hard to get, Bex. Trust me on this one.”

Everything in my body burned to get to that phone, to see what he wrote, to call him back and beg him to meet me at my motel that very minute.

“Time to cool off. Come on.” Jamie placed my phone on a rock on the riverbank and wiggled out of her jeans. Before I knew it I’d dropped my towel and dove in after her. She was right. It was the only way I could play it cool.

And now all I can wonder is how that man went from someone I had to jump into an icy cold river to get out of my mind to someone I would do anything to escape from.