A desperate desire to see her more built up in my chest as she finished gathering soil samples from the legacy crop, and as we headed toward the final testing area, I decided to give it a shot. What was the worst she could say?
She could say no. That was the worst she could say. But still, it was worth the try.
“Do you have to wait around at the university?” I asked.
“Yes, sadly,” she said, squishing through the wet soil in her rain boots. “I could drop them off and come back, but it would be better if everything was done on the same day.”
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Do you have plans for dinner tonight?”
There it was, the big question. But Danica seemed to not understand, and she furrowed her brow, pursing her lips on one side.
“No,” she said. “The bed-and-breakfast doesn’t really do dinner service on weekdays, so I was probably going to order a pizza or something.”
“Would you like to?”
“Order a pizza?” she asked, seeming even more confused. “Maybe. I don’t know. I like pizza, but I feel like I have had that a lot recently. Maybe I’ll just stop at a grocery store and get a big premade salad. That would be better.”
“Or,” I said, a grin crossing my face as it dawned on me she had no idea what was going on, “you could join me here at the restaurant.”
“Oh.”
I could tell she was feeling a little weird about it. The last thing I wanted to do was scare her off, so I had to think fast.
“I think it would be important for you and your evaluation to experience the restaurant,” I bluffed. “Just to try it out, see what the wine would be doing on the menu, how it would pair, stuff like that. Plus, it would give me a chance to tell you about what I had been planning and the things I had discovered about the grapes and the soil from a firsthand perspective.”
“I don’t know,” she hesitated.
“Think of it this way. When you make your evaluation, you will know more than just the grapes. You will know the whole operation, which should help you form a fuller idea of who we are and what the wine will like when I can sell it.”
“Okay,” she said awkwardly. “I’ll meet you here after I get out of the labs.” She was pointing at the main doors to the restaurant.
“See you then,” I said, feeling my heart thump in my chest.
“I look forward to it.”
8
Danica
As I got into my car to head to the university, my mind raced as it went over the last two days. I was sure I had missed something along the way. There was a distinct possibility that Kane was flirting with me, and I needed to figure out exactly what fresh hell I had entered to be tempted by someone that gorgeous while performing the duties of my job.
How was it even possible? I was wearing my hair in a ponytail and had my mud boots on again. I wasn’t exactly dressed for seduction. And yet…
I had noticed him staring at me a couple of times. It wasn’t the stare of someone who thought I was being too weird or didn’t belong. It was the type of look someone gave when the person they were looking at was someone they wanted to see more of. I knew that look all too well, because I had caught myself giving it to Kane a couple of times.
Driving through town, I went over the conversations we’d had, picking them apart to find any other meaning behind him asking me to dinner than the one I had a growing suspicion was true. When none presented themselves, I sighed.
What the hell was I going to do about this?
There weren’t any real rules about sleeping with a client, for one. Not that it would necessarily get that far. But at least as far as I knew, there were no set-in-stone rules that I would definitely get fired for if somehow, I ended up tipping into bed with the most attractive grape farmer I had ever met. It might be considered unprofessional, but that was a far cry from criminal.
Besides, he was stupidly hot, and I was ridiculously underserved.
In the years I had been doing my job, I had met tons of people in the industry, and they usually seemed to be one of three types. Older folks who had been doing it their whole lives, young people who had no idea what they were doing, or crunchy hippies who knew a lot about plants and not much about the rest of the job of wine making. Very rarely I met someone who didn’t fit in one of those roles.
Then here comes Captain Hotpants, with his tattoos and boyish grin, and I was completely and utterly lost.