Page 9 of Lighting Up Christmas

She couldn’t picture him presiding over large wine release parties. But if he could afford the land and to plant grapes, he could afford the staff to run it all while he remotely enjoyed his hobby or investment, however he chose to.

Riley shut off the engine, hoping her distracting thoughts would follow suit. She hopped out of her truck, half expecting Zhang to emerge from the open door where Leah’s sheep had once slept to keep them safe from the hungry coyote population.

Her tummy flipped, but no Zhang.

What a beautiful name.

“You’re acting like it’s middle school all over again,” she muttered, disgusted. Determined to be her usual professional, outgoing self, not beset by nerves and inconvenient feminine interest, she strode into the smaller barn, shoulders back, head high and work boots crunching in the fresh dusting of snow. And then she stopped short in the entry as a massive ladder forming a tunnel inviting bad luck loomed in the dim light of the entrance. She looked up, up, up. Zhang straddled a huge beam; his long, muscled thighs gripped what looked like highly polished reclaimed wood anchored by massive iron brackets. But it was the sliver of taut, darkly tanned flesh exposed as he reached up to finish installing a burnished copper warehouse-style pendant light that made her mouth pop open.

She tugged her gaze away from Zhang and instead looked critically up at his evenly spaced industrial-looking lights.

There was a lot of yuck to unpack, in Riley’s professional opinion. The look was utilitarian. No aesthetics. If he only wanted function over form, she’d have grudgingly agreed, but he had neither. It was the lack of efficient light distribution along with the utter disregard for style. A shallower, wider hood would provide more light, and raising them higher would also increase the light’s reach. At least they were LED bulbs.

This looked like a box store, not a winery.

“Need a hand?” she called out cheerfully.

What company had upgraded his original power grid, and why hadn’t she heard any buzz in the community? What kind of a load were his circuits carrying, and how many had he had installed? She longed to look around. She had never worked on wiring a winery since her training and commercial internship more than ten years ago. The demand for juice could be intense depending on what he had planned in the barn. She’d been right. This was the wine cellar—the massive, stainless steel equipment and racks of stacked barrels proved her hunch.

But he had a large, reclaimed wood table on casters pushed awkwardly in a gloomy corner and some stacked leather cubes and chairs still in shipping plastic piled up near the table. Was he planning to also have the tasting room in the cellar?

That seemed like it would be loud and chilly to wine tasters dressed in flirty, stylish clothes, as Southern Oregon could definitely bring the heat even on the slopes of one of the area’s largest mountains in the summer.

Zhang scrambled down a ladder and closed the distance across the polished acid washed concrete floor smoothly and silently all while she’d been silently judging his electrical setup. He now stood beside her, aviators still on.

It was sexy as anything, when it should have seemed pretentious.

“I plan to install the light I’m purchasing up front over the bar.” He walked toward the massive double barn doors that were rolled only partially open to let twin shafts of pale winter light pierce the gloom that was assisted by the placement of several windows every twenty feet or so high up near the roof line of the barn. Those were new yet looked as if they were original.

She tried not to notice his innately sexy, fluid walk but found herself staring anyway.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

“Where is it?”

What?

Oh. The light. Not her mind. Sheesh. She was a professional, and even in high school when her hormones had supposedly been running amok, she hadn’t been this boy crazy—though calling Zhang Shi a boy was like calling the Mona Lisa a nice painting.

“Impatient much?” She dug for spunk, not wanting him to know he was getting to her.

But she wasn’t going to win new clients with sarcasm, and while Flanagan & Sons was reasonably successful, most customers in Bear Creek were still expecting her dad or uncle to show up and give them a bid or fix something. And not many clients had yet ceased to make some variation of the joke demanding to know where the sons were.

She’d once responded that her transition would take a little more than a year, which had gone over about as well as anyone would have expected in rural Southern Oregon once the misogynistic septuagenarian client had understood what she’d meant. His granddaughter had thought she was hilarious, though.

Wooing commercial clients was a high priority, and she couldn’t afford to vent her feelings, but somedays, her tongue seemed determined to slip its leash. Still, Riley felt she wasmaking progress. She’d redesigned her company’s webpage after taking a web design class, and she’d launched an Instagram account and uploaded more than a few how-to fix-it videos to YouTube that received a rather astonishing amount of views and positive comments.

Small steps that would one day have a big pay off if she could keep her cheeky mouth shut.

Starting today. She would not criticize his light placement.

Riley pulled herself back from the brink. “I brought a selection of the vine light collection for you to choose from,” she said easily, pleased that she sounded like she had more than one toe in the lighting design business.

“I wanted the one I saw.”

“How do you know?” she asked curiously. “You have no idea what I’m bringing to show you.”

“I don’t like choices.”

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