Wine Astray - Spirit of the Soul Wine Shop Mystery Part 1: A Rysen Morris Mystery, #1

By K.J. Emrick

When her perfect life in the city implodes Rysen Morris has to make some big decisions.

 

No job, no home and a failed relationship make up her mind for her. She packs up her meagre belongings and heads back to her childhood hometown.

 

Moving into her sister's house while wondering what on earth she is going to do with her life she soon finds that Christina is having problems of her own.

 

Wine shipments for the Spirit of the Soul, her sister's wine store, are going missing and Rysen soon finds herself in the middle of investigating the mystery.

 

Complicating her life is her building attraction to the handsome security consultant her sister has hired to help out and old feelings rising to the surface for her high school sweetheart who still lives in town.

 

Torn between feelings for the two men will she be able to find out what's happening to the wine shipments and help her sister save her store while keeping her heart intact?

 

Wine Astray is part 1 of a 3 part series.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: South Coast Publishing
• Release date: Mar 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507058398

Book preview

Chapter 1

Rysen Morris was down on her luck, to say the least. She’d just been fired from her job at a big company out in San Francisco. Not that she'd loved that job overly much but it was a paycheck. Funny how little things like money could suddenly make you wonder where you were going to live or where your next meal was coming from.

So, that had been a great start to her week. Coming home to her tiny apartment and hoping to find some comfort in the arms of her long term, super serious boyfriend, she found a note instead. He was breaking up with her. At least the bastard hadn't dumped her by text message. A handwritten note was oh so much more personal.

She had spent the next day packing up all of her things and loading them into a U-Haul trailer that she could tow with her car. It was all she could afford, and it meant she had to leave a lot behind. Like her loser boyfriend, and her disaster of a life.

Now, she was headed to the only place she knew where someone would have to let her stay no matter how badly she'd screwed up her life. Home, to her sister.

Rysen was a successful woman, really, no matter what recent events showed. Or at least, she had been. She’d been working for an interior design company for the last five years and until that incident with the Persian rug and the space heater, it had felt like a career to her. Decorating was her passion. She’d even had dreams of opening her own business if she ever got enough money together to strike out on her own. Successful or not, she was still a woman, and it would've been really nice to have someone here to save her for a change. Sometimes a girl needed a shoulder to cry on, no matter how strong she was.

Her mother had left when she was little, and had offered no explanation for why. Even when Rysen and her sister had grown into adulthood their mom would never talk about it. Her father was a local fire chief in her hometown, as well as running a hardware store, which meant he was always busy, busy, busy. That was how Rysen had grown up. Sometimes, during lonely nights when she was curled up by herself in bed, she wondered if maybe she didn't even know what love was.

She'd made her escape as soon as she was old enough and until now, she'd never looked back. Well, she was back now. It wasn't that she didn't like the town, she thought to herself as she drove by the small homes and the mom-and-pop stores on Main Street. It was pretty here, and peaceful, and breathing the fresh air through her open driver's side window made her feel better. Her long dark hair was caressed by the breeze as she took it all in again. Cambria wasn’t too far from the Paso Robles wine country, and practically any booming business here had at least something to do with wine. Her older sister had even opened her own wine shop for the tourists.

It was one of those small towns where everyone knew everyone else’s business, and news travelled faster than wildfire. It wouldn't take long before everyone she had left behind heard about her returning. Her little bow mouth turned down in a frown as she thought about that. Terrific, she muttered, pushing the oversized sunglasses further up her face.

The phone call to her sister had been uncomfortable enough as it was. Tears in her eyes, she'd choked her way through an explanation of how her life had fallen apart. Christina had immediately offered her house for her sister to stay in. No questions, no judgments. No matter how screwed up her formative years had been, her sister was always there for her. Maybe it was exactly because of how screwed up things had been at home. The sisters had grown close. Fast friends forever, as they used to say.

Christina was three years older than Rysen, and had assumed the responsibilities of the mother of the house after their own mom had split. Rysen had been too young to take care of herself, and their father was often not around. Growing up, Rysen had promised herself that she would never, ever make her mother's mistakes. She would make a family for herself that lasted. Not one that crumbled to dust the first time things got tough. Yet now, here she was. A failed relationship. A failed life. It hurt to think she might be just like her mom.

It was getting closer and closer to dusk, the sun setting over the mountains in the near distance, the fading light turning the fields full of grapevines to gold. Rysen checked the directions she had scrawled out during her phone conversation with her sister and made a final turn onto one of the little sidestreets in town. Christina had been in her final year of college when Rysen left, and so she’d never seen her new place. New could be good. After all, what would her and her sister have to talk about besides Rysen's mess of a life? They could talk about the new house, and the furniture, and the curtains…

Right. She and Christina had been close, once upon a time, but it had been a few years. There was a gap between them now, one that Rysen had to take most of the blame for. She'd cut her family out of her life as much as possible, wanting to start her exciting new life in the big city up in San Francisco, and now she just didn't know if she'd be able to relate to Christina anymore. Way to go, she chided herself.