“Sorry, what cushions?”
“For her sunroom. We were talking about custom options, and the next thing I know, she’s already bought them.”
“Maybe she just saw what she wanted and figured it would be quicker?”
Marielle huffed. “What happened to community spirit? Can you go get my drink? I need to find the powder room and loosen this corset, then we have to speak with the Cunninghams.”
“We do?”
“I heard a pipe broke in their bathroom while they were away last week. They didn’t come home until Friday, and apparently, it was like Niagara Falls in there. They’ll definitely be needing to redecorate.”
“Isn’t it a bit soon to start with the sales pitch?” Nolan asked. “Shouldn’t you wait until the house has dried out?”
“You snooze, you lose. Got to strike while the iron’s hot.”
Nolan stared after Marielle for a moment as she sashayed away. The more time he spent with her, the more relieved he became that he’d tried to keep her at arm’s length. At first, she’d acted charming, and he’d been grateful when she stepped in to organise his mess of a life as well as overhauling the tasting room, the guest cottages, his home… And she was a talented designer. Before Marielle moved to Mason’s Hill, Lisanne had tried hiring two different decorators, and both had been a disaster. For the showpiece in the mine, they’d used a lady named Wanda from Sacramento, who presented them with an eye-watering bill for a Temu tasting room. The sinks leaked, the table wobbled, the decals she’d stuck to the walls had begun peeling a week after she left, and those were the least of the problems. And the second hire? She’d described herself as an “aesthetic architect” and tackled the smaller tasting room attached to the on-site shop. One journalist had described the decor as “confused,” and another had written that “the room unfolds like a painter’s palette gone riotous, a spectacle so exuberantly layered it hovers in that delicious borderland between genius and bad taste.”
When Nolan decided to target the top end of the market, he’d soon realised that selling the aesthetic and the experience was almost as important as selling the wine itself, so having facilities that appealed to his well-heeled guests was vital. Marielle had snapped her fingers, said, “Understated elegance is what you need,” and fixed that shit.
Now Nolan was stuck with her, at least until the rehab project was finished.
And then there was Alexa.
As Chase carried her bags out to their rented BMW on Sunday evening, Nolan had tripped over the words he might come to regret.
“I want you to come back.”
Having her around wasn’t easy, but the thought of never seeing her again was worse. He’d take awkward friendship over nothing. Anyhow, Alexa had just shrugged and headed out to the car, leaving Nolan none the wiser about her plans.
Now, he fired off a message:
Nolan
Ruffles?
He spotted Roy Leland across the yard with his wife, a beer in his hand—because he’d never drink Dionysus wine—and performed an avoidance manoeuvre, only to back into Donna Hayes. Something splashed over his shirt. Red wine? No, cola, which wasn’t much better.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Donna exclaimed. “Here, let me…”
She dabbed at Nolan’s shirt with a napkin, but the napkin had ketchup on it, so that only made things worse. Now he looked as if he’d committed a murder. Ironic, given both his heritage and what was to come. But that day, he was still blissfully ignorant about the future, so he just stepped back as she began freaking out.
“Aw, heck! I didn’t mean to… I’ll launder your shirt. Or pay for the dry cleaning? Or…or buy you a new one?”
Her husband ambled up behind her, beer in hand, probably his third or fourth if his unfocused eyes and unsteady gait were anything to go by.
“Now what you done, woman?”
Donna was a sweet lady who’d made many mistakes, and the biggest one was her marriage to Bo Hayes. Having two sons with him ran a close second. Tucker and Wyatt took after their old man, and while Nolan didn’t mind Antonella riding on his land, he’d lost count of the times he’d cleared the Hayes boys out of the forest. They hunted rabbits, they waded through the stream with gold pans in an attempt to find an elusive nugget, and on one occasion, he’d caught them burying stolen property at the base of an old blue oak. After every incident, Donna promised it wouldn’t happen again, but Bo just laughed it off and said, “Boys will be boys.” Asshole.
“It’s fine,” Nolan told Donna. “This is an old shirt.”
“I think a few drops splashed on your jeans too.”
“Not the first time, won’t be the last.”
“She never does look where she’s going,” Bo put in. “Always trippin’ over something or other.”
Yeah, right. Nolan didn’t doubt that Donna’s regular bruises had a different explanation, but whenever he asked if she was okay, she shrugged off the damage with, “I fell over the step,” or, “I caught my hand in a drawer.”
