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“Oh, Kel, be a dear and take everything out for us. I was going to pour Maggie a glass. She’s worked so hard. Come, dear, take a load off.” Jackie doesn’t look at me as she speaks, already pulling a glass out.
“Hmph.” I grunt, not surprised that Jackie is being so solicitous of Maggie. Nevermind that I’ve spent the last three hours digging up tree stumps and rocks in the new field we’re clearing.
Maggie fishes her keys out of a bag, dangling them out to me. As I snatch them, I get a good look at her face. Beads of sweat have gathered at her temples, and an attractive pink flush graces her cheeks. One of them is darker than the other. I pause, comparing the two. I’d noticed the difference this morning, but her cheek has darkened noticeably since then. “Did—” I bite the question off. I don’t need to know why a bruise is blooming on her face. Not my circus, not my monkey.
“Thank you.” Maggie mumbles, turning her face away from me. She steps back as I reach down to gather bags on my arms. Olive bounces over and takes one of them from me.
“This doesn’t guarantee you cake any earlier, you know,” I tease as she follows me out the door to Maggie’s car.
“I know, Daddy. But it won’t hurt my chances either.” She grins as we set our load by the back of a nondescript sedan. “I’ll stay here while you go get more.”
I tousle her hair. “Don’t wander off.” Trust my daughter to figure out how to be “helpful” while letting me do the hardest part of the job. I grin. My daughter is no fool, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
When I step inside to gather the next load, Maggie is flopped onto a chair by the window, wincing as she circles one ankle. “Thanks, Jackie.”
I pointedly ignore the women chatting as I gauge how much I can carry. Except that their conversation is the only sound in the room and impossible not to hear.
“What did you do to your ankle, dear?”
“Oh, just a little accident this morning. I had a less-than-graceful moment in the bathroom.” Maggie’s tone is strained, the same way Olive gets when she trips and falls in front of her friends. I half expect Maggie to add “I meant to do that,” to the end of her sentence.
Ignoring how much I want to turn around and survey her with this new information, I haul the next lot of stuff out to Maggie’s car. Olive is standing by the trunk, one hand on the car like June taught her as a toddler. The day she thinks she’s too old to do it anymore is going to break my heart.
“Dad! Look at their dog.” Olive points to a couple walking through the gravel lot with a smallish dog. It looks like a chicken strip on legs, with curly, light brown fur. “Look at his tail. I wanna touch it.” Olive’s eyes sparkle with mischief as she points to the puffball of a tail on the dog’s rear end. “Can I?”
There are no other cars in the lot, and the couple looks friendly, as does the dog. He’s bouncing with each step, clearly excited to be here. “You can ask if it’s okay.”
Olive is gone before I finish, already approaching the couple, her hands clasped behind her back. Before she can finish asking, the dog has one paw on her knee, excitedly licking her fingers as she pets its head. I exchange head nods with the man as his partner chats with Olive.
Unlocking the trunk, I load up—arranging and rearranging things to fit securely. While I’m loading, my mind keeps turning over the problem I ran into this morning. With harvest looming and her back in school, I don’t have the leisurely weekends to spend with Olive that I’d like. But I spent my morning more worried about her getting hurt on the equipment than actually clearing the field I was working on. With Jackie running the tasting room and Greg out of commission, I need help.
Trunk loaded and Olive wrangled, I head back inside the tasting room. Maggie is still sitting, listening to Jackie with her nose buried in the wineglass in her hand, smelling deeply.
“Can you smell that hint of cherry?” Jackie asks the couple with the dog, pouring them each a glass. Olive is sitting on the floor by their feet, still petting the dog.
I snort, but quickly cover it with a cough. Obviously not fast enough because Maggie catches my eye, her eyebrow lifting as she sniffs. She tips her head to the side and glances at the empty chair opposite her, inviting me to sit. As soon as I do, she leans close.
“You don’t smell cherry?”
I lean in as well, lowering my voice so Jackie and the couple can’t hear me. “Saying a red wine has a hint of cherry is like saying a cupcake is sweet.”
Maggie snorts into her glass, before flashing me a grin. Immediately, she winces and the smile drops.
“So, exactly what did you do to your face?”
Maggie sits back in her seat, rubbing a hand behind her neck. “Please don’t make me tell you. It’s embarrassing.”
“You said it was in the bathroom? Did you fall in the shower?” Why did I ask that? An unexpected image of Maggie in the shower flashes in my mind, and I shove it away.
“I was fully dressed at the time.” Maggie sniffs, her nose in the air as she gives me a sideways look. Like she knows what I was picturing. With those long legs and curvy ass, she shouldn’t be surprised. Her sweater skims her chest, the v-neck only emphasizing the shadow of her cleavage.
I shrug, attempting to adjust my seat at the same time to hide any evidence of my wayward mind. “Would you rather I assume you fell off the toilet?”
Maggie swats at my arm, her light touch sending a zing of electricity down my spine, which I don’t appreciate. I don’t have any reason to like her, and I definitely don’t want to be thinking about her as anything other than a customer. Just another woman who comes here to drink wine with her friends and talk about how useless and horrible men are, as a species.
“I was trying to rinse something off my sweater, and I slipped and banged my cheek on the counter.” She says it in a rush, like that will make it less mortifying. Her cheeks go pink as she finishes and she looks away, deliberately taking a large sip of wine.
“You didn’t think to take the sweater off first?” Maggie rolls her eyes in answer, but her pink cheeks give away her embarrassment. A horrible thought crosses my mind. “Are you single?” The question is out my mouth before I think better of it.
