Love in the Vineyard (Tavonesi #7)(66)
And she should never, ever have let her heart get the best of her. Adrian had swept in and unbalanced everything.
Two weeks later Natasha sat, staring at the hulking computer monitor on her desk. The machine whirred and then flashed a screen requesting a password. She opened her desk drawer and drew out a slip of paper and concentrated as she slowly typed in each letter and symbol. The password box jiggled, letting her know she hadn’t been successful. She typed in the password again and nearly yelped with joy when the screen brought up the Casa’s order list.
“Hey!” Tammy called from the doorway of Natasha’s office at the back end of the new greenhouse. “I came to see how the new boss is doing.” She glanced around the small space. “Jeez, you need a bigger office than this,” she said with a light laugh.
“It’ll do fine.”
Natasha swiveled her chair around to face Tammy. Swiveling chairs, sitting in an office, answering phones, dealing with the press—no one knew how hard each new experience was for her. And if she had her way, no one would.
She’d managed to stall Eddie. Mary had told her that as long as she had a good job and Tyler was doing well, Eddie couldn’t seek primary custody. But she had to keep her job. Working at Casa meant more to her than a career and a paycheck. It meant protection for her and Tyler against a force she hadn’t yet been able to assess.
“Hardly fine,” Tammy huffed. “The gift shop already has orders for a hundred salvia starts—a hundred! Seems the old-guard vineyard growers are climbing on board with the idea of pollinator gardens faster than Adrian or any of us expected. You’ll need two offices before the end of the month if sales keep mushrooming like they have in the past two weeks.”
It was true. Coco had posted photos of the plants they were growing to the Casa’s Facebook page, and the local paper had interviewed Natasha on the second day she’d been in charge. She’d blustered through the reporter’s questions, and the article took up a full front page in the paper’s community section. The phone had rung steadily all that afternoon. Apparently bees and butterflies and the plants that supported them were more in vogue than she’d imagined.
Tammy plunked a bottle of iced tea and a brown paper bag down on Natasha’s desk. “Sweet tea and a grilled eggplant sandwich.”
“Thank you. How’d you know I needed caffeine?”
“I thought about bringing you one of my triple espressos, but after seeing how jumpy you were yesterday, I thought better of it.” Her smile faded. “How are you doing?”
“Okay. Decent.”
Tammy raised a brow.
“Okay, stressed to the max,” Natasha admitted.
“Is Enrique helping out?”
“I know you must miss him, but I couldn’t do this without his help.”
Tammy couldn’t know how much she needed Enrique. He hadn’t asked any questions when Natasha had asked him to enter the orders into the database. But three days later, when she was still asking him to reconcile the accounts, she could tell by the look in his eyes that he knew something wasn’t quite right.
Too many things weren’t quite right.
The learning curve of her new position was slaying her. Without Enrique’s constant help with the computer and the numbers, nothing would have gone well. She’d deputized him to do the accounting and orders, a task he’d taken on with an eagerness that surprised her.
Thank God the two classes she’d attended at the community college last week had taught her enough to be able to focus and to read the familiar names of the plants, to compare the order screen with the inventory screen and to plan their work for the day—a small task for almost anyone, but a huge triumph for Natasha. But with each passing day, she knew her learning curve was far too slow for the already popular and rapidly expanding business.
“Hey—only the brass get lunch deliveries?” Enrique flashed his bright smile as he sailed into the office.
“Only loyal workers who don’t leave their coworkers short-handed,” Tammy said. “But I might make an exception for you.”
Was Tammy flirting with Enrique? Natasha couldn’t tell. She’d thought she’d noticed a blossoming romance, but she’d been so buried in work that she’d forgotten all about the languorous glances Tammy had sent when Enrique first started work at Casa del Sole.
“No stealing any more of my peeps,” Tammy said with a mock glare to Natasha. “We’re hiring a new guy to do the heavy lifting in the kitchen garden—he’s very, very strong.” She aimed a pointed smile at Enrique.
“I didn’t steal him,” Natasha said, still putting the pieces together. They were an item, Tammy and Enrique. How had she missed it? She’d been distracted by her frantic effort to find an attorney to help her face Eddie—an attorney she couldn’t afford—and by the demands of a job she wasn’t in any way qualified to perform. More distracting were her incessant, unstoppable thoughts about Adrian. What else had slipped under her guard?
Tammy leaned a hip on Natasha’s desk. “By the way, Marcos is already complaining that you worked wonders for the kitchen garden plants and our sweet garden hasn’t been the same since you got promoted. I’m trying not to take it personally,” she said with a laugh. “But I assure you, he’s blaming any menu failures on Adrian’s meddling ways.”