Page 13 of While You Were Trending

Then at the mug.

Then back to me.

Like he’s connecting the dots that the mug looks like a Ginny Rhodes original.

He shifts his attention to Mabel. “I read that privacy clause. Pretty extreme.”

“My aunt insisted.”

“Your aunt who asked half the guests last night if they wanted to blow on her husband’s urn for good luck for the new couple?”

Pip is outlandish and I love her.

Most days.

“Yes,” Mabel says, as if she’s daring him to push it further.

Declan does another sweep of the room from Mabel to the mug to me to the mug to me to Mabel.

And once again, I get goosebumps.

Fucking alcohol.

“None of the staff you’ve hired have wine-making experience?” Declan asks.

Mabel doesn’t blink. “Everyone starts somewhere.”

“So you’re reopening a winery with…friends?”

Dori grew up helping her grandpa make fruit wines as a hobby, and she has a biochemistry degree. She’s young, but she’s already proving she has instincts and the nose for the job.

Not that Mabel tells Declan that. “I believe you’re here for filming a documentary and not for judging how we choose to do our business,” she says.

He holds eye contact with her. “I get wanting privacy, but something feels off.”

“Managing your feelings isn’t part of our contract.”

Declan pushes away from the counter, rising to his full height and widening his shoulders, still gripping my mug. “What are you doing here that you’re not being honest about?”

“I’m living my life and trying to get my aunt’s winery reopened.”

He glances at me again. “And Cricket and Dori—they live here too?”

“They’ll be available for filming through harvest, crush, and initial fermentation.”

“How’d you all meet?”

“You want to save some of these questions for the cameras?”

“If you’re doing something shady?—”

Mabel actually snorts. “Yes, clearly I’d reopen a winery and consider letting someone film the process while running secret shady operations here. Having people crawling all over the property during celebrity weddings makes it super easy to hide our underhanded business arrangements too.”

He doesn’t say anything else for a long minute while he stares into the mug, gripping it in both hands.

It’s what he always did when he was thinking hard.

With a mug that I made him in college when I was still trying to win him over.