“Margot, you and Luke are both in Napa,” Taylor said. Damn damn damn. She should have said she was staying at the winery to do more work and would get a ride home later, but it was too late now. If she tried to make up an excuse not to share a ride with Luke back down to Napa, it would too obviously look like she was avoiding him, especially since she’d had no time to plan this.
“Great,” she said. She glanced over at Luke and tried to make the look on her face as benevolent boss as she could manage. “Let me just make sure everyone else gets off okay and then we can go.”
He nodded as she turned away, wishing she could go hide in the basement. Gets off? Really, Margot? Did you really need to imply that you get all of your employees off? If her cheeks were red, she hoped everyone blamed all the wine, even though she’d been careful to drink no more than a sip or two from each glass. She couldn’t be the drunk boss, or even the tipsy boss. She was already the boss who’d accidentally fucked one of her employees—she couldn’t take it further than that.
She made sure everyone was in their cars, texted Elliot that she was leaving—he’d already disappeared back into the barn; see, he had the right idea—and then gave Luke a bright smile.
“Ready?”
Luke opened the back door of the car as an answer, and she got inside. He walked around the car and got in the other door, and the driver looked back at Margot.
“Going to the same place?”
“No!” she blurted out. She took a deep breath. “Um, I mean, I’m on Washington Street, and— Luke?”
She could see Luke’s grin in the dark, but he didn’t let the amusement show in his voice when he gave the driver his address. The car pulled out onto the road, and they drove in silence for a few minutes.
“I could easily have been insulted by that ‘NO,’?” Luke murmured.
Margot couldn’t help but smile, but she didn’t let herself look at him.
“But you weren’t,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t.”
* * *
THEY WERE SILENT FOR a few minutes, but it wasn’t the awkward silence from when they’d first gotten in the car. He tried not to look at her, like he’d been trying all night. But like he’d done all night, he failed.
This would all be easier if he weren’t more and more attracted to her every day. Their night together kept coming back to him at odd moments—the look on her face when he’d kissed her against the door of his apartment; the way they’d laughed together at the bar; that low, almost guttural moan she’d made when he’d brushed his thumb over her nipples in the morning; that soft, clinging kiss goodbye when he’d driven her home; that kiss that had made him want so much more.
Damn it. And now he wanted her even more. The way she’d made those speeches to the staff tonight that got everyone laughing; when she’d had that long conversation with Elliot’s assistant, Finn, who Luke had thought didn’t actually speak to anyone; the way she’d ordered everyone at the winery around, sometimes directly, sometimes in a way they didn’t quite notice. He always did, though. And the contrast between how soft and pliable she’d been in his arms that night, and how firm and steely she could be at work . . . God, it made him want her so much it was all he could do not to reach for her right now, while they were alone, in the back seat of this dark car.
“I understood what you meant,” she said, startling him. “About your old job, I mean. Being sick of all the bullshit. And being sick of being one of the only ones. My last job—before I came to Noble, I mean—was like that. I felt . . . Well, I know how it feels, to get out of a place like that.”
He could tell she really did understand.
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was bullshit at first. When I started, I bought into all of it, you know. I went there straight from Stanford, I felt like one of the chosen ones, I absorbed the whole mindset, not just of the company, but that whole Silicon Valley ethos. About, like, grit and whatever, how tech was better than anything else, how we were changing the world.” He rolled his eyes. “Do you know the number of times I’ve seen some pasty dude in a hoodie—or sometimes a fleece—declare he was changing the world? Thousands, I’m sure.”
She laughed.
“I’m sure,” she said.
He shook his head.
“And it’s not like I’m not used to being the only one—I grew up here, after all. But it was different there. The week before I quit, my boss made a crack at a meeting about a neighborhood where I’d met a friend for lunch that day. ‘Look at you, making a trip to the ghetto! I’ve always wanted to go to that place—if I go, I’ll have to take you with me for safety!’?”
“Wow,” Margot said. “Is that why you quit?”
He shrugged.
“That played a role, yeah.” That was partly true, he supposed.
“I know how working at a place like that can be,” she said. “It’s demoralizing.”
He’d told her only a tiny piece of the story. But she’d gotten that right.
“Yeah,” he said. “Demoralizing is exactly the right word. For . . . so much that happened there.” He laughed. “At least I managed not to quit until after the bulk of my options vested.”
She turned, then, to face him, though he could barely see her eyes in the dark.
“I’m glad you got out,” she said. “I’m also glad you waited until your options vested, for your own sake.”
He grinned.
“It means that now I have the freedom to do things like this.” He gestured to the vineyards lining the road.
Which was both true and not true. He had a lot of money saved up, he probably didn’t have to get any kind of job for at least a year if he was careful. He could do things like sublet his old place, move back to Napa, get a job working at a winery. But he still felt guilty, embarrassed, about what he’d done. And hadn’t done.
“Why this?” she asked. “Not just why Noble, but why any winery job, when you could be doing anything at all?” She sat back against the seat. “I understand if you don’t want to answer that, I am your boss, but I truly don’t mind whatever your answer is.”
He shrugged. “Mostly, it was just an impulse. My best friend convinced me to move back up here, for kind of a break, while I figure out what to do next, but once I got to Napa, I realized I’d be bored as hell here without something to do all day. I’ve always been interested in wine, the science of it kind of fascinates me, so it felt like a fun option. And—please forgive me for this—I thought working at a winery would be easy. Don’t worry, I no longer think that.”
She laughed. “What did it for you, that bachelorette party on Thursday, or the eight cases of wine you had to load into a Honda Civic on Friday?”
He shook his head.
“Neither of those things—finding all of those bottles on Tuesday! Taylor just pulled them out, like they’re color coded or something, where I had to read labels and try to remember vintages and varietals and . . . this is a lot harder than I thought.”
Margot laughed again. Fuck, he needed to stop making her laugh. That low, throaty laugh of hers did things to him. It made him feel like it was a private laugh, just for him. That laugh of hers had been one of the things that had first drawn him to her at the bar that night. He had to stop thinking about that night.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she said to him.
“Always,” he said. He shouldn’t have said that, but he couldn’t help it. Luckily, she didn’t really react.
“It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be, too,” she said. “The stuff you do, I mean—the stuff we do, I guess. The business stuff I knew would be hard, I was prepared for that, and the wine stuff—even though I’m not that involved in it, I know some about it just because of Elliot, though a lot of it is still a mystery to me. But I figured the tasting room stuff, the customers, the tours, all of that, I figured it would be easy. How hard could it be, just serving some wine to some tourists who want to spend their money? The answer is: very.”
“Very!” he said, and this time they both laughed.
“Thank you for telling me that,” he said. “I was feeling kind of like an asshole—I grew up here, I should have known that nothing about this business was easy. But I always thought of the winery people as the rich people, you know? It all seemed so snooty. I thought they had an easy life. I was wrong about that, too.”
He was glad they were talking in this normal, relaxed way with each other. At work, after that first day, it hadn’t been awkward between them, but it had been almost worse. Margot had looked at him, talked to him, like he was anyone else in the winery. She’d smiled easily, she’d been businesslike and matter-of-fact, she’d looked neither at him nor away from him in a way that would seem unusual. He’d hated it. It wasn’t like he wanted her to be unprofessional or anything like that—he’d just wanted some sign that she thought about him like he thought about her.