‘It’s true. I’m always getting myself into trouble.’
‘It all seems to have worked out,’ Kenzie said, looking over at her daughter, sitting with Vera and the two boys as she was obviously explaining how everyone was related. ‘She doesn’t have any cousins back home, so she’ll love that she does now.’
‘I can only imagine how much you’ve had to deal with lately. Ewan explained what happened. Must have been like being sideswiped for both of you,’ Floss said.
‘And then some,’ Kenzie agreed with a small smile.
Dinner was announced, a welcome distraction. Kenzie followed the others into the dining room, where the long timber table had been set with elegant Royal Albert bone china.
‘Poppy, would you like to sit with Cameron and Angus?’ Vera asked, ‘Or would you prefer to sit with Mummy?’
Poppy immediately glanced up hopefully at Kenzie. ‘Can I sit with the boys?’
‘Sure, if you want to.’
She watched her daughter scamper off to the other end of the table, where a slightly lower children’s table had been set up.
‘We only use this dining room for special occasions, and we find the table’s always too high for the children to reach properly,’ Vera said. ‘So they get their own special one.’
It was nice to see how family-orientated they were. Just like her own family, really … without the manor house … and gazillion acres … and money …
Ewan pulled out a seat for her, opposite his sister and brother-in-law. She smiled slightly as she sat down, admiring the dinner set laid out on the table. It was the same as her grandmother’s, a pretty red rose design which brought back a flood of memories and a wave of homesickness.
‘Everything okay?’ Ewan asked quietly from beside her.
‘Yep. Fine. You?’ After all, he’d known he was a father for just over a week, but now he was a daddy.
‘Yeah. Good,’ he said, not quite succeeding in trying to sound casual. The joy was radiating off him.
The marble fireplace mantelpiece dominated the wall behind the head of the table with its intricate carvings. A large marble statue of a semi-naked woman holding a candlestick held centrestage, and although Kenzie knew next to nothing about art, this particular piece looked extremely old and very expensive. It was a lot to take in, everything was just so …grand.
Dinner was a pleasant surprise, not something posh and unpronounceable, but a good old-fashioned Sunday roast with all the trimmings. Again, the similarities between this and her own family’s get-togethers were unexpected.
She found Floss and Joe refreshingly easy to talk to, and listening to their banter and gentle teasing made her smile. She occasionally sent a covert glance sideways at Ewan to gauge his reaction and found he looked far more relaxed tonight than he had since they’d arrived.
‘How did you and Joe meet?’ Kenzie asked.
‘Joe was working for one of the clients—a winery in Italy—that my company was doing some advertising for. While my boss was talking to the client in the carpark, I wandered across to a nearby vine and picked a grape. Well, next minute I hear, “Oi! You’re not allowed to eat the grapes!” Then, after scaring the hell out of me, this big, giant Australian walks across and laughs. I’d been working in England and didn’t speak Italian,so hearing an Australian accent for the first time in about two years made a pretty big impression.’
‘I thought it was my charm and good looks that made the impression,’ Joe said, looking offended.
‘No, darling,’ she said, lightly patting his hand. ‘It was the accent.’
‘So you were working for an Italian winemaker, Joe?’ Kenzie asked.
‘At that point,’ he said. ‘Before that, I’d been working my way around France, Germany, Spain and New Zealand.’
‘Wow. That must have been an awesome experience.’
‘Sure was. After school, I left for a gap year, and it turned into a ten-year working pilgrimage.’
‘Andthat’show I discovered wine,’ Floss said. ‘When you fall in love with a vigneron, it’s very hard to get his attention away from anything that isn’t a vine or a wine.’
‘And she turned out to be even better at this whole thing than I am—go figure,’ Joe said with a grin.
‘We haven’t heard the way you two originally met,’ Callum said from the head of the table, having sat silently throughout the majority of the conversation so far.
Kenzie slowly chewed the mouthful of roast pork she’d just put in her mouth, hoping the delay would give Ewan time to come up with a good, clean lie.
