AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Slowly, I nodded.
“We don’t need to decide anything today,” he continued. “We don’t need to be official or anything like that if you don’t want to. But we can just decide that we could try and see where things take us.”
Again, I nodded, and the grin slowly returned to his lips. I felt one stretch across my own too. I wanted to resist it, to pull it back and be hesitant, but I couldn’t. Hope had planted its seed.
“What now?” I asked.
“Now? Now we have breakfast,” he said. “How do pancakes and omelets sound? I actually have things to make us a proper breakfast this time.”
“Frankly, that sounds amazing,” I admitted. He winked at me, and my heart jumped again.
“Awesome. You make yourself comfortable. The remotes are on the table there if you want to flip on the TV.”
Kane stood and crossed back to the kitchen. I sat in the silence for a moment, letting the moment sink in. After a little bit of time of letting my heart pound and the sensation of hope swirl inside me, I picked up the remotes and turned on the television. I found a cooking show, and a short time later, Kane returned with a TV tray and a plate of amazing food.
“Wow,” I said as I sat up and took the glass of orange juice he was holding out to me. “Can all of you boys cook?”
“More or less,” he said. “Some of us are better at it than others. My expertise pretty much begins and ends with breakfast and soup though.”
“It smells amazing.”
We sat and ate, casually watching the television and beginning to chat about how things would work out. There were logistics involved in making a long-distance relationship work, and as we tiptoed through the issues of how it would all play out, I found myself feeling like they weren’t as preventative as I had thought they were just hours before.
“It’s not all that hard to take time off for me,” Kane said, finishing his plate and setting it aside. He was a much faster eater than I was, and his plate was clean before I was even halfway done. “As you know, the grapes can kind of grow themselves to a point, and we have volunteers here all the time. In a few months, I want to hire an assistant who can look after things so I can take days off.”
“Do you think you would be able to come into my town during the week?” I asked. “It would be easier for me to come here on the weekend, but I can imagine it would be difficult to get away from here then.”
“Yeah, I would think Derek would want me here on the weekends for the restaurant. If anyone is going to act as sommelier, it would have to be me for now. Plus, that’s when he gets all his big ideas for pairings and wants me around. But the middle of the week would be easy. I could take two days off in the dead center and move my rotation of work so the volunteers would barely have to do anything,” he explained. “Even if that doesn’t work, we can figure it out.”
“We can,” I agreed.
“If you believe we can,” he said, “then there’s nothing stopping us.”
I smiled, letting the unfamiliar feeling of hope fill me. Then I shook my head and tried to tie myself back down to reality.
“I should get going,” I said. “It’s getting pretty late, and I have some things to wrap up at the labs. Other than that, this is my last on-site assignment. Once I sign off on King Vineyard and clear out my stuff at the lab, I am officially working from home.”
“Which means you could technically work from anywhere with an internet connection,” he said, grinning.
“Technically, that is true,” I said, returning the grin. “But I should get dressed.”
“If you insist,” he said, and I laughed.
I dressed quickly, eager to get back and wrap up the things I needed to back home so I could embark on what I had decided to tell myself was an adventure. Not a separate one from the baby, but instead, just a bigger one. All of it was happening together.
We kissed and said goodbye in the doorway, but it wasn’t really goodbye. It was just goodbye for now. The promise of his lips was just a few days away as I made my way across the vineyard and back to my car.
25
Kane
I watched her drive away in the distance as I opened my door. She had wanted to get out of town and back home to finish things up there early, and I needed to get into the winery and talk to my brothers. Rather than wait on me, she had run off with a kiss and a promise of more soon, when either she could return to me or I could make it to her. I was satisfied with that.
