Page 83 of Drunk on Love

This whole first-date thing was kind of fun. Well, a first date with Luke was.

“My Uncle Stan—my dad’s brother—was a winemaker, and hestarted a winery in Napa Valley when I was a kid,” she said. “My brother, Elliot, and I spent a lot of time down here with him. He died a few years ago and left the winery to the two of us. So I quit my old job and moved up here to run the winery.”

“Oh, really? What did you do before moving up here?” he asked.

They’d never really talked about this, had they?

“I worked in marketing at a handful of big companies in the Bay Area and in L.A. I kind of miss living in big cities sometimes, but I get to visit a lot, and I love my current job, so it all balances out.” Now it was her turn. “You said you recently left your job at a winery—what are you doing now?”

He almost, but not quite, winked at her.

“Now I’m helping my mom out at her inn. She got in a car accident the other night; nothing serious, but she can’t work for a while. But before I was at the winery, I was a software engineer at a big tech company.”

“Oh? How’d you like that kind of work?” she asked, and then almost immediately regretted it. She knew exactly how he felt about his old job.

He half smiled, half shrugged.

“The work itself, I actually really enjoyed. When it was good, it was like a fun puzzle, where I learned something new every day and got to exercise my brain in all kinds of ways. I actually really miss that.” He’d never really told her about the parts of his old job that he’d liked. That was good to hear. “But I got a new boss about two years ago, and it stopped being quite so fun.” The smile left his eyes for a second. “But now I’m back home in Napa, and glad to be here.”

“Oh, Napa is home for you?” she asked. “Did you grow up here?” She knew he’d gone to high school up here, and that his parents were divorced, and that was about all.

He nodded.

“For middle school and high school, at least. We used to live down in San Jose, and then moved up here for my dad’s job. My parents split up when I was in high school and he moved back down there, but my mom loved it up here, and I stayed here with her. I still saw my dad a lot, though.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “What about you? Did you grow up here in Napa?”

“No, I grew up in Sacramento. My parents still live there.”

He hadn’t actually known that, she realized by the look on his face. There was a lot they still didn’t know about each other.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” he said. “You went to high school there? When did you graduate?”

She had to smile at that question.

“Is that your subtle way of trying to ask me how old I am?”

He grinned at her.

“Apparently not all that subtle,” he said.

“I’m thirty-four,” she said. Was that a problem for him? That she was so much older than him? Did he care?

“Ah,” he said. “Well, I’m almost twenty-nine. So... pretty much the same.”

She smiled slowly.

“Yeah,” she said. “Pretty much the same.”

WHEN THEY GOT BACKto Margot’s house, he reached for her hand as they walked up to the door. He’d felt a little silly at first, when he’d made first-date small talk with her, mostly to shake off his own—and, he sort of thought, her—first-date jitters. But she’d clearly been just as amused by their fake getting-to-know-each-other conversation as he had. And they’d both learned things about each other they hadn’t known.

After they got inside, Margot looked over at the door, and then at him.

“You’re going to stay, right? Tonight.”

Luke smiled at the matter-of-fact way she’d said that. A few days ago, he never would have believed he’d be staying over at Margot Noble’s house as a matter of course.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to stay.”

She looked him up and down.

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