Brent stepped in as close as he could, and clapped his hand on Evan’s shoulder, squeezing the way Evan liked to do to him. “This is your baby. I get it.”
“Thanks for coming with me.” Evan gave him a hollow look. “I’m going to stay here for a while. But you should go and get Jess. Give her the update, and take her home for the night. I don’t think I’m going to sleep. I want to be close.”
Brent felt a stab of guilt for not thinking of Jess at all. “Right. Yeah, I’ll go take care of her.”
“Thanks.” Evan nodded again, then slid away, his attention already focused in the distance.
24
The fire investigation took days. The clean up took weeks. In the end, it had been a pallet that had oil spilled on it, stuck in the middle of all the others, that had heated up and caught fire spontaneously. Bad fucking luck.
Their insurance coverage was decent. They immediately rebuilt the exterior of the production building, and decided to move the location of the greenhouse away from it—and then Ty said he didn’t want to rebuild it at all until the fall.
They’d both been scarred by what could have been, by the potential loss of their entire business. Everyone who worked for them was rattled. Evan threw himself into reviewing all of the insurance, going over their entire risk exposure, and finding a way to distill it down into easily understood terms in English. Then he had the whole thing translated into Spanish so he could share it with their workers that way, too.
He wanted everyone who worked for him to know that he had them covered. Nobody was going to lose their job, or their life, working for his winery.
God fucking damn it.
One morning a few weeks after the fire, Evan woke up on the couch in his office to the sound of someone moving around him. With a start, he sat up, on guard.
It was Jess.
“What are you doing here?”
She shrugged. “It’s not a bad question for me to ask you. You live four hundred yards down the road and have a perfectly good bed there that I don’t think you’re using.”
“I—” He cut himself off. “How did you know I was sleeping here?”
“Beth mentioned it. She didn’t realize what she was telling me, of course. It was an aside at Mommy’s Muffin Time.”
“At…what?”
“That part doesn’t concern you.” She grabbed a takeout coffee cup from his desk, sniffed it, and tossed it in the garbage. “Come on, let’s go out for breakfast.”
“I’ve got food here.”
“I looked in your fridge. You don’t.”
He was pretty sure had some trail mix and energy drinks, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. “We can have food delivered. Or there’s an entire catering team that will be in soon.”
“Evan! You need to leave here. You cannot stand guard around the clock in case there’s another fire. There won’t be another fire. It was a freak occurrence, and it was handled as best as it could be. You’ve gone above and beyond. Your PowerPoint presentations are the talk of the town, and I didn’t think I would ever say something like that. But most of all, people are really starting to worry about you, and frankly—they don’t know what to do about that.”
“So you’re their designated Evan Caretaker?”
She didn’t reply to that.
“Jess, I’m—”
“You’re not fine, so don’t even try to play me like that. Nobody sent me here because nobody knows how much I care about you, okay? Everyone is worried about you, and nobody knows that you have two people youcouldlean on, but you don’t, and frankly, I’m tired of waiting for you to call. You’re fucking up my life, Evan. Can I be blunt about that?”
“I think you already are.” His sarcasm was probably a mistake, but she had a full head of steam going, and didn’t even notice.
And then she slaughtered him with what she said next. “Brent is beating himself up, you know that? He’s not the same without you. You gave me back my husband, but it turns out, you’re part of the deal.”
He shoved to his feet. He needed a shower. A toothbrush. Whiskey. Anything. “Whoa. Dial that back.”
“Why? It’s the truth. And here you are. Hungry and sad and grumpy, and you won’t even let me take you out for breakfast. Well, there you go. I tried. If the citizens of Wardham knew that I was your lover, I’d tell that I gave it my best shot. But since I’m just your dirty little secret, I’ll slink my way back home and lick my wounds in private. Have a nice life.”
