Drunk on Love(13)

And he’d really liked having sex with her. He’d definitely wanted to do that again.

“Great idea,” Elliot said. Luke looked at him. What was a great idea? He couldn’t remember now.

Elliot turned and walked down the hall, and Marisol and Margot both followed him. Right, a tour. Luke walked fast to catch up with them.

“Back here are the offices,” Margot said. “Mine, where I usually am during the day, if I’m not out in the tasting room or at a meeting.”

“Which is often,” her brother cut in.

“Elliot’s office, where he almost never is,” Margot continued, with a sideways smile at her brother. “He’s usually either down in the barn or out in the vineyard—just FYI, if someone makes a big to-do about wanting to meet the winemaker.”

Elliot made a face, and Margot laughed. There was clearly some backstory there.

Margot turned back to Marisol and Luke.

“Actually, if that does happen, come find me. I have to prep Elliot for stuff like that.”

Luke tried to catch her eye, but failed. She was so smooth and businesslike right now. But in the way that she’d joked with her brother, he’d seen the funny, alluring woman he’d kissed outside the bar last night, who had gone back to his apartment with him after very little consideration, who had woken up this morning, her hair all tousled and makeup smeared, and had made fun of him for using a line on her and then had rolled over and fucked him again.

Shit. He had to stop thinking about that. At least, for the moment.

“The tasting room is in here, but I’m sure you both already know that,” Margot said as she walked through the door to the tasting room. “This is where you’ll both spend most of your time; Taylor, our tasting room manager, and I will train you on all of that. We have other tasting room staff, and you’ll meet them as your shifts align.”

Luke nodded as she and Elliot showed them around the spacious, well-organized room. The winery had obviously been a family home at one point. Those offices in the back must have been bedrooms, and the tasting room seemed like it was a few rooms that had been knocked together and renovated to feel like a library, just with lots of wine in it. There was a bar by the back wall, with stools in front of it, and the rest of the room was full of clusters of easy chairs and love seats and coffee tables. It was a great room; he’d liked it immediately when he’d walked in on Friday.

“We have different levels of tasting,” Margot said. “Some people just want to drop in to taste a few wines, maybe buy some, and get a discount if they do—those people sit at the bar. Then, there are the people who want to hang out longer—often members of our wine club. We craft a more extensive—and more expensive—tasting for them, and we seat them at the tables or on the couches. And then the top level is for people who want to get a tour of the winery, see where we make the wine, and get to taste some of our library wines.” She grinned at them. “Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of training on our wines before you do one of those; the people who take the tour ask lots of questions.”

Margot started to turn away, but Luke stopped her.

“What kinds of questions do they ask?” He’d applied for this winery job just to have something to do all day for the next month or however long he’d be up here. His best friend Avery had told him to take a real break after quitting his job, but he couldn’t just do nothing. Plus, he liked wine, and he was interested in the science behind it, so he’d thought this could be fun and easy. He was smart, he was a quick study. How hard could slinging wine at a bunch of tourists really be?

Margot glanced in his direction.

“Oh God, so many,” she said. “You’ll see. Everything from details about where the grapes come from, to questions about Napa wines versus Sonoma wines and California wines versus French or Italian wines, to stuff about old vintages of ours, to how much money we make, to questions that more or less boil down to ‘So, you guys are . . . Black. And you own a winery? Are you . . . sure you own it? Yourselves?’?”

He and Marisol both laughed out loud. Margot and Elliot grinned, but she clearly hadn’t been joking.

“I actually love giving the tours, even though they take a ton of time that I can’t afford anymore. People are usually in great moods and super excited about wine. Some people are interested, some people are nosy, some are nice—sometimes there’s the guy who’s trying to trip you up, but that’s easy to defuse. We won’t send you out there alone for a while—you guys will shadow me or other experienced staff until you get the swing of things.”

He would shadow her? He tried not to look at her when she said that, but failed. But she’d turned and was looking out the front window.

“Let’s take them outside,” she said to her brother.

The next hour was like this, with Margot talking the whole time, Elliot occasionally saying something about wine Luke only half understood, Marisol asking smart questions, Luke asking whatever questions he could think of to get Margot to look at him, Margot answering him brightly and never meeting his eyes. She hadn’t, at all, since that first shocked look.

Finally, they ended the tour back in the tasting room, just as a woman with light skin and lots of dark curly hair walked through the door.

“Taylor, hi,” Margot said. “Our two new members of the Noble team, Marisol and Luke. And we’re thrilled to have them here.”