by Jill Shalvis
case, welcome. Come join us. Let me get you a plate—”
“Oh, that’s okay, I brought a sandwich.” Lanie patted her bag. “I can just go sit in my car until you’re finished—”
“No need for that, honey. I have lunch catered every day.”
“Every day?” She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until Cora laughed.
“It’s our social time,” she said.
At Lanie’s last job, people had raced out of the building at lunch to escape each other. “That’s . . . very generous of you.”
“Nothing generous about it,” Cora said with a laugh. “It keeps everyone on-site, ensures no one’s late back at the job, and I get to keep my nosy nose in everyone’s business.” She set aside her bread, freeing up a hand to grab Lanie’s, clearly recognizing a flight risk when she saw one. “Everyone,” she called out. “This is Lanie Jacobs, our new graphic artist.” She smiled reassuringly at Lanie and gestured to the group of people. “Lanie, this is everyone. From the winemaker to the front desk receptionist, we’re an informal bunch.”
They all burst into applause and Lanie wished for a big, black hole to sink into and vanish. “Hi,” she managed and gave a little wave. She must have pulled off the correct level of civility because everyone went back to eating and joking and talking amongst themselves. “Are you really related to all of them?” she asked Cora, watching two little girls, twins given their matching toothless smiles, happily eating chocolate cupcakes, half of which were all over their faces.
Cora laughed. “Just about. I’ve got a big family. You?”
“No.”
“Single?”
“Yes.” Lanie’s current relationship status: sleeping diagonally across her bed.
Cora smiled. “Well, I’ll be happy to share my people, there’s certainly enough of us to go around. Hey,” she yelled, cupping a hand around her mouth. “Someone take the girls in to wash up, and no more cupcakes or they’ll be bouncing off the walls.”
So the cupcakes were a problem, but wine at lunch wasn’t. Good to know.
Cora smiled at Lanie’s expression, clearing reading her thoughts. “We’re Californians,” she said. “We’re serious about our wine but laid-back about everything else. In fact, maybe that should be our tagline. Now come, have a seat.” She drew Lanie over to the tables. “We’ll get to work soon enough.”
There was an impressive amount of food, all of it Italian, all of it fragrant and delicious looking. Lanie’s heart said definitely to both the wine and the lasagna, but her pants said holy shit woman, find a salad instead.
Cora gave a nudge to the woman at the end of the table who looked to be around Lanie’s age with silky dark hair and matching eyes. “Scoot,” Cora said.
The woman scooted. So did everyone else, allowing a space on the end for Lanie.
“Sit,” Cora told Lanie. “Eat. Make merry.”
“But—”
“Oh, and be careful of that one,” Cora said, pointing to the woman directly across from Lanie, this one in her early twenties with the same gorgeous dark hair and eyes as the other. “Her bad attitude can be contagious.”
“Gee, thanks, mom,” she said with an impressive eyeroll.
Cora blew her daughter a kiss and fluttered away, grabbing a bottle of wine from the middle of one of the tables and refilling glasses as she went.
“One of these days I’m gonna roll my eyes so hard I’m going to go blind,” her daughter muttered.
The twins ran back through, still giggling, still looking like they’d bathed in chocolate, which caused a bit of commotion. Trying to remain inconspicuous, Lanie pulled her lunch out of her bag, a homemade salad in a container, sans dressing.
“Are you kidding me?” Cora’s daughter asked. “Do you want her to come back here and yell at us for not feeding you properly? Put that away.” She stood up, reached for a stack of plates in the middle of the table and handed Lanie one. “Here. Now fill it up and eat, and for God’s sake, look happy while you’re at it or she’ll have my ass.”
Lanie eyeballed the casserole dishes lining the center of the tables. Spaghetti, lasagna . . .
“Don’t worry, it all tastes as good as it looks,” an old man said from the middle of the table. There was no hair on his head, but he did have a large patch of gray steel fuzz on his chest sticking out from the top of his polo shirt. His olive complexion had seen at least seven decades of sun, but his smile was pure little boy mischief. “And don’t worry about your cholesterol either,” he added. “I’m seventy-five and I’ve eaten like this every single day of my life.” He leaned across the table and shook her hand. “Leonardo Antony Capriotti. And this is my sweetheart of fifty-four years, Adelina Capriotti. I’d use her middle name, but she refuses to sleep with me when I do that.”
The older woman next to him was teeny, her white hair in a tight bun on her head, her spectacles low on her nose, her smile mischievous. “Gotta keep him in line, you know. Nice to meet you.”
Lanie knew from her research on the company that it’d been Leonardo and Adelina to start this winery back in the seventies, though they’d since handed over the day-to-day reins to their daughter, who Lanie now realized was her boss Cora. “Nice to meet you both,” she said.
“Likewise. You’re going to give us a new updated look and make me look good,” he said. “Right?”
“Right,” she said and hoped that was actually true.
He smiled. “I like you. Now eat.”
If she ate any of this stuff, she’d need a nap by mid-afternoon. But not wanting to insult anyone, she scooped as little as she felt she could get away with onto her plate and pushed it around with her fork, trying to resist temptation.
“Uh oh,” Cora’s daughter said. “We have a diet-er.”
“Stop it,” the woman next to Lanie said. “You’ll scare her away and end up right back on mom’s shit list.”
Cora’s daughter, whose shirt read Live, Laugh, and Leave Me The Hell Alone, snorted. “We both know that I never get off the shit list. I just move up and down on it. Mom’s impossible to please.”
“Don’t listen to her,” the other woman said to Lanie. “I’m Alyssa, by the way. And Grumpy-Ass over there is my baby sister, Mia.”
Mia waved and reached for the bread basket. “I’m giving up on getting a bikini body so pass the butter, please. Grandma says the good lord put alcohol and carbs on this planet for a reason and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him down.”
Her grandma toasted her.
“Mia and I work here at the winery,” Alyssa said and gently patted the cloth-wrapped little bundle swaddled to her chest. “This is Elsa, my youngest.”
“Elsa, like the princess?” Lanie asked.
“More like the queen,” Alyssa said with a smile, rubbing her infant’s tush. “She’s going to rule this roost someday.”
“Who are you kidding?” Mia asked. “Mom’s going to hold the reins until she’s three hundred years old. That’s how long witches live, you know.”
Lanie wasn’t sure how to react. After all, that witch was now her boss.
“You’re scaring her off again,” Alyssa said and looked at Lanie. “We love mom madly, I promise. Mia’s just bitchy because she got dumped last night, was late for work this morning, and got read the riot act. She thinks life sucks.”
“Yeah well, life does suck,” Mia said. “It sucks donkey balls. And this whole waking up every morning thing is getting a bit excessive. But Alyssa’s right. Don’t listen to me. Sarcasm. It’s how I hug.”
Alyssa reached across the table and squeezed her sister’s hand in her own, her eyes soft. “Are you going to tell me what happened? I thought you liked this one.”
Mia shrugged. “I was texting him and he was only responding occasionally with a ’K.’ I mean I have no idea what ‘K’ even means. Am I to assume he intended to type ‘ok’ but was stabbed and couldn’t expend the energy to type an extra whole letter?”
Alyssa sucked
her lips into her mouth in a clear attempt not to laugh. “Tell me you didn’t ask him that and then get broken up with by text.”
“Well, dear know-it-all sister, that’s exactly what happened. And now I’ve got a new motto: Don’t waste your good boob years on a guy that doesn’t deserve them. Oh, and side note: No man does. Men suck.”
Lanie let out a completely inadvertent snort of agreement and both women looked over at her.
“Well, they do,” she said. “Suck.”
“See, I knew I was going to like you.” Mia reached for a bottle of red and gestured with it in Lanie’s direction.
She shook her head. “Water’s good, thanks.”
Mia nodded. “I like water too. It solves a lot of problems. Wanna lose weight? Drink water. Tired of your man? Drown him.” She paused and cocked her head in thought. “In hindsight, I should’ve gone that route . . .”
A man came out onto the patio, searched the tables and focused in on Alyssa. He came up behind her, cupped her face and tilted it up for his kiss. And he wasn’t shy about it either, smiling intimately into her eyes first. Running his hands down hers arms to cup around the baby, he pulled back an inch. “How are my girls?” he murmured.
“Jeez, careful or she’ll suffocate,” Mia said.
“Hmm.” The man kissed Alyssa again, longer this time before finally lifting his head. “What a way to go.” He turned to Lanie and smiled. “Welcome. I’m Owen Booker, the winemaker.”
Alyssa, looking a little dazed, licked her lips. “And husband,” she added to his resume. “He’s my husband.” She beamed. “I somehow managed to land the best winemaker in the country.”
Owen laughed softly and borrowed her fork to take a bite of her pasta. “I’ll see you at the afternoon meeting,” he said, bent and brushed a kiss on Elsa’s little head, and walked off.
Alyssa watched him go. Specifically watched his ass, letting out a theatrical sigh.
“Good God, give it a rest,” Mia griped. “And you’re drooling. Get yourself together, woman. Yesterday you wanted to kill him, remember?”
“Well, he is still a man,” Alyssa said. “If I didn’t want to kill him at least once a day, he’s not doing his job right.”
“Please God, tell me you’re almost done with the baby hormonal mood swings,” Mia said.
“Hey, I’m hardly having any baby hormone related mood swings anymore.”
Mia snorted and looked at Lanie. “FYI, whenever we’re in a situation where I happen to be the voice of reason, it’s probably an apocalypse sort of thing and you should save yourself.”
“Whatever,” Alyssa said. “He’s hot and he’s mine, all mine.”
“Yes,” Mia said. “We know. And he’s been yours since the second grade and you get to sleep with him later so . . .”
Alyssa laughed. “I know. Isn’t it great? All you need is love.”
“I’m pretty sure we also need water, food, shelter, vodka and Netflix.”
“Well excuse me for being happy.” Alyssa looked at Lanie. “Are you married, Lanie?”
“Not anymore.” She took a bite of the most amazing fettuccini alfredo she’d ever had and decided that maybe calories on Monday’s didn’t count.
“Was he an asshole?” Mia asked, her eyes curious but warmly so.
“Actually, he’s dead.”
Alyssa gasped. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked—”
“No,” Lanie said, kicking herself for spilling the beans like that. “It’s okay. It’s been six months.” Six months, one week and two days but hey, who was counting? She bypassed her water and reached for the wine after all. When in Rome . . .
“That’s really not very long,” Alyssa said.
“I’m really okay.” There was a reason for the quick recovery. Several, actually, not the least of which was the fact that after Kyle had passed away, some things had come to light. Things such as the husband she thought she’d known and loved had hidden an addiction from her.
A wife addiction.
So far two other women had come out of the woodworks claiming to also be married to Kyle. Not that she intended to share that humiliation. Not now or ever.
You’re my moon and my stars, he’d always told her.
Just one lie in a string of many . . .
Cora came back around and Lanie nearly leapt up in relief. Work! Work was going to save her.
“I see you’ve met some of my big, nosy, interfering, boisterous, loving family and survived to tell the tale,” Cora said, slipping an arm around Mia and gently squeezing.
“Yes, and I’m all ready to get to it,” Lanie said.
“Oh, not yet.” Cora gestured for her to stay seated. “No rush, there’s still fifteen minutes left of lunch.” And then she once again made her way around the tables, chatting with everyone she passed. “Girls,” she called out to the cupcake twins who were now chasing one another around the other table, “slow down, please!”
At Lanie’s table, everyone had gotten deeply involved in a discussion on barrels. She was listening with half an ear to the differences in using American oak versus French oak when a man in a deputy sheriff’s uniform came unnoticed through the double French doors. He was tall, built, and fully armed. His eyes were covered by dark aviator sunglasses, leaving his expression unreadable. And intimidating as hell.
He strode directly toward her.
“Scoot,” he said to the table, and since no one else scooted, in fact no one else even looked over at him, Lanie scooted.
“Thanks.” He sat, reaching past her to accept the plate that Mia wordlessly handed to him without pausing from her conversation with Alyssa. The plate was filled up to shockingly towering heights that surely no one human could consume.
He caught Lanie staring and went brows up.
“That’s a lot of food,” she said inanely.
“Hungry.” He grabbed a fork. “You’re the new hire.”
“Lanie,” she said and watched in awe as he began to shovel in food like he hadn’t eaten in a week.
“Mark,” he said after swallowing a bite, something she appreciated because Kyle used to talk with his mouth full and it had driven her to want to kill him. Which, as it turned out, hadn’t been necessary. A heart-attack had done that for her.
Apparently cheating on a bunch of wives had been high stress. Go figure.
“You must be a very brave woman,” Mark said.
And for a horrifying minute, she was afraid she’d spoken of Kyle out loud and she stared at him.
“Taking on this job, this family,” he said. “They’re insane, you know. Every last one of them.”
Because he had a disarming smile and was speaking with absolutely no malice, she knew he had to be kidding. But she still thought it rude considering they’d served him food. “They can’t be all that bad,” she said. “They’re feeding you, which you seem to be enjoying.”
“Who wouldn’t enjoy it? It’s the best food in the land.”
This was actually true. She watched him go at everything on his plate like it was a food-eating contest and he was in danger of coming in second place for the world championship. She shook her head in awe. “You’re going to get heartburn eating that fast.”
“Better than not eating at all,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I’ve got ten minutes to be back on the road chasing the bad guys, and a lot of long, hungry hours ahead of me.”
“One of those days, huh?”
“One of those years,” he said. “But at least I’m not stuck here.”
It was her turn to go brows up. “Are you making fun of my job?”
“Making fun? No,” he said. “Offering sympathy, yes. You clearly have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into. You could still make a break for it, you know.”
That she herself had been thinking the very same thing only five minutes ago didn’t help. Suddenly feeling defensive for this job she hadn’t even yet started, she looked around her. The winery itself was clearly lovingly a
nd beautifully taken care of. The yard in which they sat was lush and colorful and welcoming. Sure, the sheer number of people employed here was intimidating, as was the fact that they gathered every day to eat lunch and socialize. But she’d get used to it.
Maybe.
“I love my job,” she said.
Mark grinned. “You’re on day one. And you haven’t started yet or you’d have finished your wine. Trust me, it’s going to be a rough ride, Lanie Jacobs.”
Huh. So he definitely knew more about her than she knew about him. No big deal since she wasn’t all that interested in knowing more about him. “Surely given what you do for a living, you realize