She nodded.
“Taylor should be here any minute, and then Daisy will be here this afternoon—you haven’t met her yet, she’s great. It’s good we have so many people here today, it’s a packed schedule for a Tuesday.”
He took a step closer to her as if to glance at the schedule, but then stopped, still a few feet away. Yeah, that was for the best. Just the idea of him standing so close made a shiver go down her spine.
He looked at her for a moment, still a few feet away, and she looked back at him. Then, almost simultaneously, their faces both relaxed from their polite, tense smiles, into grins.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she said.
“This is going to be weird, isn’t it?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Yeah. Probably. At least for a while.” Maybe it was easier to talk about this, at least briefly, than to avoid it. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head.
“You have nothing to apologize for.” He glanced around the room, then back at her. “I’m going to try my best to not make it weird, but these first few days might be a challenge.”
She laughed. At least she wasn’t the only one who was feeling like this.
“I was just about to say the same thing.”
“Good morning!” Taylor said as she opened the front door.
Margot turned in her direction. A few moments ago, she would have jumped guiltily at being caught in here alone with Luke, like she was doing something wrong just by looking at him. But their brief conversation and acknowledgment that they were both struggling with this made her feel almost as relaxed as she sounded.
“Hey, Taylor, good morning. I was just going over the schedule for the day with Luke.”
Taylor came over to the bar and glanced at the schedule.
“Is he going to shadow you on that tour and tasting at one?”
It did make the most sense for him to do that, but Margot hadn’t wanted to suggest it herself. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he nodded.
“Good idea,” she said. “Don’t worry, Luke, you’ll get lots of training before we send you out to do tours on your own.”
He gave her a wry grin.
“Was it so obvious that I was worried?”
She and Taylor both laughed.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you this yesterday—maybe Taylor did?—but there’s always coffee in the kitchen in the back, and often baked goods. The vineyard manager’s husband loves to bake, so he’s always bringing stuff in. Today there’s coffee cake.”
Taylor immediately turned toward the employees-only door leading to the kitchen.
“Be right back,” she said. They both laughed when the door closed behind her. And then they turned to face each other again.
“If you don’t want to shadow me today, I understand,” Margot said in a low voice.
Luke shook his head.
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about that.”
She glanced back at the schedule, then stepped out from behind the bar.
“Okay, thanks. Just . . . let me know, okay? If it’s ever a problem.”
Luke nodded.
“I will.”
Taylor walked back into the tasting room, a square of coffee cake in her hand and a blissful expression on her face.
“I know that man is happily married, but I swear I want to marry him. Have you tried this coffee cake?”
Margot laughed.
“Wouldn’t Gemma have a problem with that?” Taylor’s girlfriend worked at a winery down the road.
Taylor waved that away.
“She would be fine with it if she got coffee cake like this. Luke, you should go get some.”
“That sounds like an order.” Luke disappeared through the door.
Margot turned to Taylor.
“Let’s hope that within a few weeks he and Marisol will both be able to take tours on their own, and I’ll be able to get some other work done.”
Taylor brushed sugar off her fingers.
“Oh, I bet he will—he’s a quick study. He was pretty good with the guests yesterday. Where did you find him?”
At the bar at the Barrel, and then I went home with him and we had sex for hours.
“I didn’t,” she said. “Elliot found him. Incredible, right?”
Taylor’s eyes widened.
“Incredible, yes.”
Just then, Luke walked back into the tasting room.
“What do you think of the coffee cake?” Taylor asked.
“I think I’m going to fight you for him,” Luke said. “It could be a slightly awkward workplace issue, especially on my second day, but I hope the boss will understand.”
Margot locked eyes with him, and then all three of them laughed.
* * *
“YOU SLEPT WITH MARGOT Noble? The night before you started work at NOBLE?” Avery’s eyes were wide open.
“Shhh! Keep your voice down!” he said.
She looked around.
“Luke. We’re sitting inside a parked car with the windows up, and no one is around us. No one can hear me.” She turned to look directly at him. “I wondered why you made me come get in your car when we were supposed to be meeting for dinner. I assumed you wanted to show me some fancy thing about your car, but this is definitely more interesting.” She rubbed her hands together. “I’m so glad you moved back here.”
Avery had that grin on her face she always got when he told her anything about his love life. He hated that grin.
But he was glad to see her smiling, after how sad she’d looked last week when he’d helped her move. If his ridiculous story could bring her some joy, he supposed it was worth her making fun of him.
“I’m glad the roller coaster of my life is entertaining to you. But this has felt sort of like those roller coasters where someone promised you it was just a regular ride, so you got some really great ice cream right before you got on, and then you get on and there’s a huge drop and then it gets stuck and you feel like there’s no escape and also you’re going to throw up. That kind of roller coaster.”
Because when he’d woken up with Margot in his bed on Monday morning, he’d thought this impromptu move back to Napa was going to be great. He’d had great sex; he hoped to have more of it; he had a new, fun job very different from his old one; he’d have some space to figure out his next steps. But instead, the woman he’d had the great sex with was his new boss, more sex with her was definitely off the table, and that all made his new job much more stressful than he’d planned on.
Stressful, but also very enjoyable. Because God, that day at work, while he’d been shadowing Margot on that tour, he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off her. He’d been glad that they’d given him a job where he was supposed to look at her, listen to her, pay attention to her, because that’s all he’d wanted to do.
It was good that they’d had their brief clearing of the air that morning—that had been much better and less stressful than their conversation yesterday, when both of them had still been in shock from waking up together that morning and then seeing each other at work a few hours later (and with some pretty excellent morning sex in between).
Should he have quit? Even though she’d told him not to, should he have not gone back that day? He flashed back to that look of pure horror on her face when he and Elliot had walked into her office the day before.
The problem was, he didn’t want to quit. Was that so wrong? That he didn’t want to lose the chance to see her every day? Plus, what else was he going to do all day if he didn’t have this job? He needed to look for a new real job, he knew he needed to. But he’d put that off for the past two weeks—the idea of it seemed so stressful, so overwhelming. He’d been almost relieved when Avery had needed his help. He felt bad thinking that way, but her crisis had given him something to do. And then, after he’d sublet his old place and moved back up here, he’d applied for the job at Noble on a whim. He’d thought it would be so much less stressful than his old job.
He would have quit if Margot had asked him to. But she hadn’t.
Avery laughed at him again.
“What’s so funny?” he asked her.
“Do you really need me to answer that?” she asked. “Because this whole thing is hilarious, and you know it.”
He let himself smile, a tiny bit.
“Look, I suppose if it was happening to someone who wasn’t me, I would be able to find the humor in it a little more.”
She patted him on the arm.
“Ahh, there’s the real Luke Williams. I was also laughing because this whole thing is so not you. You always do the right thing, never get into trouble—hell, I’m surprised that you even went out the night before you started a new job. Honestly, if you found this as funny as I did, I would be concerned that you’d been replaced by some sort of impostor.”