Maverick shook his head. “That would require moving. Don’t foresee that happening anytime soon. Used up all my energy just getting my ass out of bed and walking here.”
As far as commutes went, Maverick figured his was the best, considering all he had to do to get to work was throw on clothes and walk half a mile to the winery.
There were three buildings attached to the Lightning in a Bottle Winery side of his family’s businesses. He and Grayson worked in the building that they referred to as the winery, which housed the offices, fermentation tanks, crush pads, and bottling line. There was a cellar beneath it, which served as their barrel room, the place where they aged the wine.
Their cousin Nora worked in the second building, the tasting room, which—in addition to wine sampling—offered simple fare, like fire-roasted pizzas and charcuterie boards.
The last building was a large warehouse where they stored finished wine. Boone kept a small office there because it was closest to the vineyard, and it wasn’t like the man spent much time inside anyway. Boone’s preferred work lighting was the sun.
Their second business, Rain or Shine Brewery, had a similar setup—a brewhouse, tasting room, and warehouse.
Between those two businesses, the B&B, the event barn that Gretchen ran, and a slew of rental cabins peppered all around the farm, the Storm family was busy year-round. Luckily, they tempered their headstrong natures with a powerful work ethic, every single member of the family pulling their weight to ensure the businesses not only prospered but thrived.
“So, I’m holding down the fort. Awesome.” Grayson rose from the chair, grumbling under his breath as he walked out of the office. Maverick couldn’t hear everything his brother was saying, but he caught enough to catch the gist that his brother was bitching about working solo today. If he thought Graysonwas really annoyed about that, he’d summon the strength from somewhere and get his ass out of the chair. However, they didn’t have a great deal on their agenda for today, so Grayson’s complaints were just for show. Because brothers never let other brothers get away with shit, especially hangovers and stupid hookups.
Maverick released a long, slow breath once Grayson was gone, reaching up to rub his temples, cursing himself for being such an idiot. Despite the fact he worked at a winery, which was located right next to a brewery, Maverick wasn’t that big of a drinker.
Apart from tasting the wines they created, most nights, he never indulged in more than one glass of wine or a bottle of beer with dinner.
So he’d let things go too far Saturday, under the guise of celebrating.
And while he had been thrilled to his toes for Levi and Kasi, he knew his overindulgence in drink had more to do with self-pity than happiness.
He put his feet down, groaning slightly at the endless throbbing in his head. He deserved this hangover. It was his punishment for letting old wounds rise to the surface.
Maverick stopped fighting it and let himself think her name.
Ella.
He closed his eyes, recalling her face. It was one that had snuck into his dreams too many times over the years, his subconscious refusing to forget her the way he was determined to.
Maverick wasn’t sure why she was returning to his thoughts more often these days. After all, he hadn’t seen the woman in person in fifteen years. Of course, that wasn’t to say he hadn’t done a search of her socials once during a very weak moment a few years after she left town. He’d seen a picture of her, standingin the middle of a college campus, smiling with a man, who was clearly her boyfriend, and peaced right the hell back out. After that, he refused to look again, and for the most part, that social media blackout had helped. Because while she’d broken the fuck out of his heart, time had done its thing, healing the wound so that he could move on.
Or at least he thought it had.
Until last summer, when Levi came home, head over heels in love with Kasi…and awakening something in Maverick that he hadn’t considered. Or maybe it was more accurate to say he hadn’t let himself acknowledge.
Because it seemed too farfetched, or too much like full-blown teenaged melodrama, to be real.
Lately, though, it was starting to occur to him that his aversion to commitment had less to do with his self-proclaimed love of the bachelor life and more to do with the fact that he—like his dad and Theo and Levi and Mila—had been struck down by love at first touch.
He’d been just seventeen, but he could still recall the day that lightning crashed on his head. It had been so powerful, it almost knocked him on his ass.
He’d simply been walking down the hall between classes…
Junior year sucked,Maverick thought to himself. He and his classmates had just returned from the holiday break, ten glorious days of food, gifts, video games, and no fucking school. Apparently, the second half of junior year meant something to his teachers, who were suddenly balls to the wall about preparing him and his classmates for college and the future and SATs and a bunch of other shit he didn’t care about.
As such, he’d just been assigned to write a big-ass essay on the American Revolution, told to read some book calledThe Scarlet Letterthat sounded boring as fuck, and he was expected to start collecting bugs—for God’s sake—for some unit his science teacher was all fired up about.
And that was just from this morning. He hadn’t even made it to math or Spanish class yet, so who knew what fresh hell homework assignments were yet to come.
Maverick was counting down the days until graduation, because as far as he was concerned, English and history and geometry and Spanish were all a big waste of his time. He already knew what his future involved, and it didn’t include any of that shit. Maverick had chosen his career path when he was eleven. That was when every sixth grader went through the annual Gracemont Career Day lesson, which essentially meant they got to miss a day of school to follow a family member or mentor around as they did their job.
Maverick had chosen to “go to work” with his grandfather at the winery. That day had been one of the best of his life as Granddaddy taught him about growing grapes, the different varieties, and then described the process for making wine. Maverick had been bitten by the bug, and from that day on, he bypassed his family’s farmhouse after getting off the bus, making a beeline for the winery where Granddaddy put him to work, continuing to teach him everything he knew about winemaking.
When a fourteen-year-old Maverick announced he was going to be a winemaker, Granddaddy had taken him seriously, doubling down on his tutelage, putting him to work every summer and on weekends, passing along his knowledge.
So Maverick didn’t get why he had to read a stupid book about some Puritan woman or learn about a war that happened a long time ago, because neither of those had a damn thing to do with winemaking. On the other hand, while he didn’t really want to do the assignment, he could begrudginglyadmit there might be some value to the bug project, since he’d need to be able to identify insects who might damage the grapevines.
