Page 22 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

Something about the way he says it. The weight of it, like it means something adjacent to but not quite the same as what the words are.

“Thank you,” I say. “For the opportunity. I won’t waste it.”

He holds my gaze for one second longer than necessary. “I know.”

I turn and walk to the door and open it and step into the hallway and pull it shut behind me.

I stand there.

I have Killian Thorne’s personal number in my phone.

And Asher’s.

Which makes sense. Obviously. I’m working here. This is a professional arrangement. Of course, I have their contact information. This is how employment works. I would have the contact details of anyone I was professionally coordinating with and that’s all this is, a professional coordination situation, and I need to stop staring at my phone like it’s done something remarkable.

I open my messages to text Sophia that the celebration is officially on.

There’s a notification already sitting at the top of my screen.

Unknown number. One message.

I tap it.

Maddox St. James: For emergencies

I stare at it and my face goes warm in a way that starts at my cheekbones and travels down to places it has absolutely no business traveling.

Well, okay then.

9

HARPER

Mallory Summers is exactly the kind of person I would have hired if I’d ever had a budget and a staffing decision to make.

She’s waiting for me in the tasting room at eight fifty-eight with a color-coded binder, a radio clipped to her hip, a coffee in each hand, and the calm, slightly caffeinated energy of someone who has been doing this long enough to stop being impressed by chaos. She hands me one of the coffees before I’ve said good morning. I decide immediately that I like her.

“So,” she says, already walking, already expecting me to keep up, “the opening summer event is Saturday. That’s four days. The layout is locked, the catering menu is approved, the florals are confirmed, and the entertainment schedule is set. What we’re doing this week is making sure every single one of those things actually shows up and performs as promised, because in my experience, confirmed and present are two very different categories.”

“They really are,” I say.

She points at me. “I already like you.”

We spend the first two hours walking the event footprint together, the south terrace, the tasting room main floor, the outdoor vineyard path that’ll be lit for the evening reception, and the private dining room that’s been reserved for the board and senior staff. Mallory narrates everything as we go, not in a teaching-someone-new way but in the lateral, equal way of someone thinking out loud with a collaborator. I pull my tablet out and start making notes and she glances over once at what I’m flagging and nods like I’ve confirmed something she suspected.

She’s good. Better than good. She runs this vineyard’s events the way I ran galas in Manhattan, two steps ahead of every possible failure point with contingency plans she doesn’t advertise because she’d rather just not need them.

“The one thing I’ll warn you about,” she says, turning us toward the main building, “is Asher.”

I look at her.

She catches my expression and holds up a hand. “Not like that. He’s brilliant and his food is extraordinary and working with him is genuinely great. But he has strong opinions about how his catering and the event programming interact and if you don’t loop him in early he gets very quiet about it in a way that means he’s reconfiguring everything in his head and not telling you.”

“The silent problem-solver.”

“Exactly. So I always do the catering walkthrough first, before anything else gets locked. Come on.”

The vineyard’s main kitchen is the kind of space that justifies the whole building around it.