“No, you can take charge. Only for the kissing part, though.”
He shook his head. “I want you breathless, not nervous, so we’re going at your pace.”
“But—”
“You managed to take the lead last time.”
Didn’t he realise that last time, I’d been panicking, scared of losing my best friend and terrified of being kidnapped by CPS? I’d acted out of desperation to keep Nolan with me and more than a little stupidity.
“Asshole.”
He ignored that as wine trickled out of a sampling spigot into one of the glasses.
“This is a Zinfandel. Still sharp, slightly tart. Try it.”
“So we’re just changing the subject?”
Once again, he held the glass to my lips, and I had to sip or spill wine down my shirt. It wasn’t balanced the way his older creations were. “Ugh.”
“The malolactic fermentation hasn’t finished yet. We’ll try the Syrah next. It’s even younger, still on its primary fermentation.” He moved to a different tank and poured another sample. “The fizz comes from the carbon dioxide.”
I took a mouthful, held it for a second, then spit it over Nolan’s shoes. “That’s absolutely disgusting.”
His brows pinched. “It should taste rough, but not spit-it-on-my-feet rough.”
“You could have warned me it was cabbage juice.”
“Cabbage juice?” He poured a sample for himself, sniffed, and tasted. His rapidly darkening expression sent a wave of ice water over the night, along with the foul aroma of rotten eggs. “Fuck, what the hell is this?”
I didn’t know the answer, but a whole new kind of fear welled up in me. And anger. Don’t forget the anger.
Rotten eggs… “Sulphur?”
“We don’t add sulphur dioxide until the end, and only a tiny amount to act as a preservative. Not enough to cause this.” Now I saw fury in his eyes too. “It’s as if a shitload of potassium metabisulfite got dumped in here.”
Panic hit, and he ran to the next tank. His hands were shaking as he tasted a sample.
“Is it okay?”
“Yeah.” He was already moving to the next spigot. “This one’s fine too.”
Only one fermenter had been affected, and Nolan swore it had been fine when he did the punch-down earlier. The potassium metabisulfite powder came in ten-pound tubs, and now that the stock system was up and running again, we worked out that two of them were missing. If someone had tipped them into the fermenter, that meant the wine had been poisoned with twenty times more sulphur dioxide than it needed, and Nolan was adamant that couldn’t happen by accident. You didn’t just trip and spill twenty pounds of powder into a ten-foot-tall tank.
Suddenly, I felt completely sober.
Someone had tampered with the winery while Nolan and I were in the caves, and that gave me the creeps.
Someone.
That attention-seeking bitch.
And how many other “accidents” had there been?
“Tomorrow, I’m installing cameras,” I told Nolan. “In here, in the house, and in the yard. Somebody’s screwing with you—first, the temperature on a tank mysteriously increased, and then the destemmer jammed. You got a nail in your tyre. Vines were damaged.”
“Tomorrow, you’re flying to Japan.”
“Fuck Japan. You think I can sit and eat sushi while that psycho screws with your livelihood?”
