She told that part to shut up.
It had taken her three days to accept the inevitable—that she would have to come here, to stand on his land and breathe his air and somehow maintain the professional distance she'd been clinging to like a life raft in a hurricane.
The email he'd sent had been infuriatingly reasonable.*We should walk the grounds together so you can see the layout. Bring comfortable shoes.*
No flirtation. No teasing. Just… logistics.
It was the normalcy of it that had finally broken her resistance. That, and the fact that she genuinely did need to see the venue before she could finalize anything with vendors.
"This is a business meeting," she told her reflection in the rearview mirror. "A professional site visit. You are going to be calm, collected, and completely unaffected by?—"
A tap on her window made her jump hard enough to bang her elbow against the door.
Thallos stood outside, grinning down at her through the glass. His horns caught the sunlight, small and curved and somehow elegant where they rose from the waves of his light brown hair. His golden-brown eyes crinkled at the corners.
"Talking to yourself?" he asked, his voice muffled by the window. "Should I come back?"
She took a deep breath, smoothed her expression into something she hoped resembled professionalism, and opened the car door.
"I was reviewing my notes."
"Out loud."
"Some people process verbally."
"And some people psych themselves up before entering enemy territory." He stepped back to give her room to exit, his hooves crunching softly on the gravel. "Which category do you fall into, Marigold Bloom?"
She refused to answer that. Instead, she reached back into the car for the tote bag stuffed with folders and her color-coded notebook and approximately fifteen pens because she'd learned never to trust just one.
When she straightened and turned to face him properly, she had to fight not to react.
He looked… different here. More at ease, maybe. More himself. He was wearing a simple white t-shirt that clung to his chest in a way that made her shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and the fabric moved against his broad shoulders as he gestured toward the vines.
"Welcome to Thallos Fine Wines. Want the tour?"
"I thought that was the point."
"The point is to assess the venue for the festival." He started walking, clearly expecting her to follow. "The tour is a bonus."
She followed. What else could she do?
The gravel path wound between the first rows of vines, close enough that she could have reached out and touched the leaves. The plants were healthy—even with her limited knowledge of viticulture, she could see that. Full and green and heavy with clusters of developing grapes, not yet ripe but promising.
"These are the Riesling vines," Thallos said, his voice taking on a different quality. Softer. More genuine. "My mother planted them thirty-two years ago, when my parents first bought the property. They'd come from Greece with nothing but a dream and—" He stopped, shook his head slightly. "Sorry. You don't need the family history."
"No, I—" Marigold hesitated, caught off guard by the sudden shift in his demeanor. "You can tell me. If you want."
He glanced at her, something flickering behind his eyes.
"My mother always said that wine is just time made drinkable. That when you taste a vintage, you're tasting the year it grew—the rain, the sun, the soil. The care that went into tending it." His hand brushed one of the leaves, almost a caress. "She died four years ago. Ovarian cancer."
"I'm sorry."
"Me too." He said it simply, without self-pity, and then the moment passed. The grin returned, though she thought it looked slightly more practiced than before. "Come on. I want to show you the main lawn."
The main lawn was, objectively speaking, perfect.
It spread out behind the tasting room in a gentle sweep of green, bordered on three sides by vines and on the fourth by the stone buildings of the winery complex. A massive old oak tree stood near one corner, its branches spreading wide enough to shade a significant portion of the space. Near the tree, a small wooden stage had been erected—temporary but sturdy.
