Love, Chocolate, and Beer (Cactus Creek #1)(25)

Cowboy in the city sexy.

And he was looking at her like she’d just brought the first sunrise he’d seen in ages.

“Hey, beautiful. Quinn is manning the rest of the delivery so I thought I’d stop by a little early to get my Dani-fix with a side of lunch.” His eyes crinkled at the corners affectionately. “I swear, getting to see you and eat your food every day are my two favorite added perks for moving my shop here.”

There was that gnawing guilt again.

Dani contemplated running back to get his and Quinn’s order herself. Coward. She sent a waiter instead.

“I don’t suppose you’ve checked the brewpub’s twitter feed yet?” he asked with a teasing glint that normally would’ve had her racing off on a Scooby search for answers. But not today. All her mind could focus on right now was the corrosive pit in her stomach, growing bigger the more the man kept giving her those sexy, eye-twinkling smiles.

“I usually check it at lunch,” she replied absently, studying the cash register extra-closely to add the two lunch orders to his tab. Clicking on random buttons to avoid making eye-contact, she probably could have kept at it all day long if Luke hadn’t leaned his elbows onto the counter.

She jumped back away from the counter.

A purely olfactory response.

Her mood now spinning in a complete one-eighty, she stifled a laugh, mostly to keep from breathing in the heavy perfume smell that was clinging to him. “Let me guess, you signed up for a Farmer’s Market booth today didn’t you.”

His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Either you’re psychic or very weird things get circulated as gossip around this town. I just signed up for a booth an hour ago.”

She backed up another step. As did the sympathetic bartender standing next to her. “I take it no one warned you about the Carradine sisters before today?” Though long-retired, the two nearly identical women still ran the town center activities office as volunteers. Notorious flirts who weren’t shy about broadcasting their fifty plus years of practice in competitive dating and professional marrying, they never missed an opportunity to hug it out with any of the town men who made the mistake of getting within arm’s reach.

Understanding lit his eyes. “The two old biddies at the town center.” He shook his head and lifted his shirt to sniff it. “I took off my jacket and stuffed it in a plastic bag as soon as they finally let me leave. Is the perfume smell really that strong? I thought I was the only one suffering through it.”

Dani’s bartender reached under the back counter for an Ocotillos shirt. “On the house, man. We’ve all been there. And trust us on this, laundry won’t exorcise the smell. You need to take it to the dry cleaner. They’ll give you a Carradine sister special.”

She chuckled sympathetically. “On the plus side, this means you’re now officially one of us.”

His lips tugged up on one side. “Then it was worth it.”

And just like that, the guilt she’d been feeling multiplied tenfold. His open pleasure over being part of the town just about gutting her.

Lordy, was it possible for a person to drown in guilt?

Flicking his wrist over to check his watch, Luke quickly gathered the bags of food off the bar counter. “I’d love to stay and talk more but I have Quinn’s order in here too. Hard as it is to believe, she is actually capable of getting even, ahem, ‘witchier’ when she’s hungry.”

Dani tried to keep the tension from showing in her off-kilter smile as he gave her another warm grin on his way out. Calm down. You’re getting worked up over nothing.

Trademark Dani. She couldn’t just let it go. She had to know.

Pulling out her phone, she called her good friend Connor, who handled all of Noah’s legal paperwork and corporate research. If any information gathering or proposal vetting was going on in relation to her winery idea, the private investigator that Connor had taken with him to his new firm would be the one handling it. He was the best.

“Dani?” came Connor’s voice over the phone line, promptly after the first ring. The surprise in his tone was obvious, the concern as well. For good reason. She never usually called his cell phone. “Everything okay? You haven’t gotten yourself thrown in jail have you, young lady?”

She almost laughed then. Connor was only about seven or eight years older than she was but because he’d been friends with her father and most of the other brewpub workers from back when she’d still been in college, he always treated her like a niece.

“Hey Connor. No, no. Nothing like that. I just had a quick question for you.”

“Sure. What’s up?”

She tried to think of how best to phrase her question without breaching Connor and Noah’s attorney-client privilege. “Has, err, Noah mentioned me at all in the past few weeks? Like, say, after the holidays?”

Yeah…a covert CIA recon specialist, she was not.

The brief pause that followed had her holding her breath.

“Dani, tell me you’re kidding about this.”

Oh, crap. Was her plan really that bad? “I put a lot of thought into it, Connor. I thought it was a good idea at the time…”

“You know I’m not one to butt into other people’s choices but sweetie, trust me, this isn’t a good idea.”

Her heart plummeted to her feet. “But he sounded so interested in the winery.”