Chapter One
Eleven years later…
Five years had passed since she’d seen the winery, the stables, the fields of grapes, the house, and the beautiful rolling valley where she’d spent five years as Alexa Dupree, indentured servant to Warren Tatum. The contracted ten-year tenure ended prematurely and in spectacular fashion, when a riding accident, a twist of the neck, ended the life of the man who held her fate in his hands. Except for the occasional verboten s****l moment she enjoyed in the arms of his winery foreman Bo Hitchcock, Alexa had no reason to stay in the valley once Tatum was gone. She’d immediately thought of home, of bustling London streets and the salty air surrounding the summer cottage where she’d spent her happiest days as Phillip Wittendon’s daughter. But England was not s
