Drunk on Love(22)

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.”

His small smile turned into a grin.

“This whole thing is all your fault; you’re the one who pointed out the Barrel to me when we drove by my building.” He looked around at the parking lot. “But you have to keep this a total secret, okay? I shouldn’t have even told you, but honestly there was no way I could meet you for dinner tonight and answer questions about how my first day of work was and keep this in.” He shook his head. “I should have known this would be a problem after I kissed her outside the bar and she said we couldn’t do that there, that too many people knew her around here. Do you know the kind of women who say things like that? The kind of women who end up being your new boss, that kind.”