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“I suppose that’s fair enough. You’re just having a little look at him.”
“Yes! A tiny baby of a look. For nostalgia’s sake.”
Lavinia was beginning to nod along with her. “Fuck me, I’m actually getting a little excited about this, Hal. It’s not every day a girl gets a second shot at kissing her lifelong crush.”
Exactly. That’s why she wasn’t going to overthink this. Act first, reflect later. Her credo worked out at least half the time. A lot of things had far worse odds. Like . . . the lottery. Or cracking open a double-yolked egg. No matter what happened, though, she’d be laying her eyes on Julian Vos again. In the flesh. And soon.
Obviously, this course of action could backfire. Righteously.
What if he didn’t even remember her or that night in the vineyard?
After all, fifteen years had passed and her feelings for Julian in high school were woefully one-sided. Before the night of the almost-kiss, he’d been blissfully unaware of her existence. And immediately afterward, she’d been pulled from school by her mother for an extended road trip to Tacoma. He’d graduated soon after, and she’d never seen him again in real life.
A blank look from the man who starred in her fantasies could be a crushing disappointment. But her impulsivity had gotten worse since the loss of Rebecca in January, and it was too tempting to throw herself into one of her unknowns now. To let the chips fall where they may without reasoning through her actions first. A little niggle beneath her collar warned her to stop and slow down, take some time to think, but she ignored it, her spine snapping straight when Corinne Vos’s crisp, almost amused-sounding voice curled in her ear. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Vos, hello. It’s Hallie Welch from Becca’s Blooms. I do the landscaping around your pool and refresh your porch every season.”
The slightest pause. “Yes. Hello, Miss Welch. What can I do for you?”
Hallie held the phone away so she could gulp down a breath for courage, then settled the screen once more against the side of her face. “Actually, I was hoping I could do something for you. My waxed begonias are just stunning this year, and I thought some of them might look beautiful around your property . . .”
Chapter Two
Julian Vos forced his fingers to move across the keyboard, even though the plot was going off the rails. He’d set aside thirty minutes to write without stopping. Therefore, thirty minutes needed to be completed. His hero, Wexler, who had time traveled to the past, was now musing over how much he missed fast food and indoor plumbing of the future. All of this would be deleted, but he had to keep writing for another thirty seconds.
Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.
The front door of the guesthouse opened and closed. Julian kept his eyes glued to the cursor, though he frowned. On the screen of his desktop, Wexler now turned to his colleague and said, “No one is scheduled to be here this afternoon.”
His timer went off.
Julian slowly sat back in the leather executive chair and allowed his hands to drift away from the keyboard to rest on his thighs. “Hello?” he called without turning around.
“It’s your mother.” Her crisp footsteps moved from the entryway to the hall beneath the stairs, which led to the back office overlooking the yard. “I knocked several times, Julian,” she said, coming to a stop in the doorway behind him. “Whatever you’re writing must be quite engrossing.”
“Yes.” Since she didn’t specifically ask what he was writing, he assumed she wasn’t interested and didn’t bother elaborating. He turned the chair around and stood. “Sorry for the wait. I was completing a thirty-minute cycle.”
Corinne Vos cracked a small smile, briefly unearthing the lines around her eyes and sides of her mouth. “Still sticking to your tight schedules, I see.”
Julian nodded once. “All I have in the fridge is sparkling water,” he said, gesturing for her to precede him out of the office. Deleting words was part of the writing process—he’d read extensively about drafting methods in Structuring Your Novel—but his mother didn’t need to see Wexler waxing poetic about cheeseburgers and toilets. The fact that Julian was taking a break from teaching history to write fiction was already providing her with more than enough amusement. He didn’t need to add fuel to the fire. “Have a glass with me?”
She inclined her head, her gaze ticking briefly over his shoulder to the computer screen. “Yes, please. Sparkling water sounds fine.”
They relocated to the kitchen in silence, Julian removing two slim glasses from the cabinet and filling them up, handing one to his mother, who hadn’t taken a seat. Not wanting to be impolite, Julian remained standing, too.
“How is this place?” Corinne asked, tapping her row of Sacramento-green nails on the glass. They were always painted the same shade, to match the Vos Vineyard logo. “Comfortable?”
