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He holds up a hand. “If you plan to do that with all the customers, I’ll warn Trix never to let you fill in at the restaurant.”
For emphasis, I give him another quick kiss. “Only you.” He picks up my hand off the bar and pulls me in, kissing me back. Longer. Deeper.
“Deal.” He settles himself on his stool and leans against the wrought iron back, tucking his hands behind his head and looking so damn relaxed. “What’ve we got going here?” He tips his head toward the bottles and glasses of wine.
I slide a glass of ruby red toward him. “This is a pinot noir that comes from a strain of French grapes. It’s been growing in Napa for sixty years, and the minerals in the soil have changed it from the original vines.”
He lifts his glass up to let the sunlight stream through the liquid, casting a rosy glow on the beaten wood countertop. I hold mine up, examining the clarity of the wine. “Looks good to me. Does it offend you that I’m a third-generation winery owner and I don’t have more to say than that?”
Laughing, I lean on the bar counter and take a sip from my glass, which barely contains more than a large mouthful. We have a lot of bottles ahead of us, and we’ll be smashed inside of an hour if I pour too much. “It doesn’t offend me at all because you work on the business side.”
“I know what I like from what we grow, the cab specifically.”
“Do you like this one?”
He sips and rolls the liquid over his tongue before swallowing. I stand there mesmerized by the light stain of red on his lips and the way his throat works when he swallows. He’s wine porn in the flesh.
“Not sure. It’s a little sour. Do you taste that?”
I smile, grateful that he wants to share this with me. “I like how light it is, and yeah, a bit sour. Pinots can definitely taste like that if your go-to is a fuller-bodied cab.”
“Like I said, I know what I like.”
I pour from the next bottle, a ten-year-old cabernet sauvignon that’s won several awards. “I think this’ll be more your speed.”
He swirls it in his glass and holds it up to the light. “See how much darker it is? That’s from the grape skin, which gives it that bigger taste you like.”
Jackson nods. “Yup, this is my kind of wine. Get me a steak and some scalloped potatoes and I’m in heaven.”
“Ooh, you like scalloped potatoes? I have a great recipe.”
He lights up like I’ve just surprised him with Christmas in June. “Tonight. Let’s have that for dinner. I’ll have Trix set aside some steaks from the restaurant, and we can pick up potatoes on the way home.”
My heart skips a beat like it always does at the mention of “home.” When I’m there, it feels like home. It almost feels like I’m part of their family, which makes me blurt out a question I hadn’t planned to ask yet. If at all.
“Should we, maybe, tell Fiona? About us?” The words falter awkwardly as they start tripping from my lips. My eyes go wide as though I’ve shocked myself. It’s the wrong question, the wrong timing, just…wrong in all ways.
Jackson has just popped a piece of cheese into his mouth, and I feel like he’s chewing extra slowly as I fan the air around us, trying to dismiss the words before he can answer.
His hand comes up to still my own, and he swallows. I don’t give him time to answer before I start amending what I’ve just said.
“That was too much. We’re good how we are, and she’s impressionable. Would only make things awkward when it ends. More awkward than this conversation, even. We don’t even know how we feel about each other, so just forget I said it, please.”
Jackson cups my cheeks in his hands and kisses the blather from my lips.
“Ruby, stop. I know how I feel about you. I love you,” he says, setting my heart free to bump around in my chest. “I’m in love with you.”
I’m not breathing. I will need paddles or CPR in a second because I’m aware that no air has come or gone from my lungs, but I can’t jumpstart them. My heart floods with so much emotion that a gasp finally charges from my lungs. And I smile.
I want to tell him I love him, too. I want to articulate just how much I love him, but he’s not finished talking.
“But she’s my daughter, and I need to be really careful about her feelings. So if that means waiting to make sure we’re really good before I say anything to her, I…think we need to wait.”
It’s everything and none of the things I want to hear. I focus on the love part.
And my heart goes careening off a cliff.
ChapterThirty-One
