Made in Wine. Love Without Borders, #3

Chris Leonard didn't come to Cape Town to start something. He came for a speaking engagement, a few weeks of vacation, and the kind of distance that lets a man stop performing the life he's built. What he didn't plan for was Alex. Alex is twenty-two, sharp-eyed, and apprenticing at a wine estate in the Cape winelands, carrying a year's worth of carefully managed silence about the man who runs it. What starts as a kindness on a cold beach becomes something neither of them is prepared for, and something one of them is being actively threatened for.
As Chris is pulled deeper into Alex's world, he discovers the quiet, sustained cruelty Alex has been enduring alone, and the lengths one man will go to protect his power. What begins as a vacation romance becomes a fight to get Alex out from under a threat that's been growing for months, one photograph, one whispered warning at a time. Made in Wine is a slow-burn, age-gap romantic suspense novel about the difference between surviving and living, the cost of carrying something alone, and what it means to finally let someone help.
Set against the vineyards and coastline of the Western Cape, it's a story about two men learning that the real version of something is always better than the emergency version, even when the real version takes time. Content note: this novel deals with workplace coercion, blackmail, and abuse of power, alongside a slow-burn romance.