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“It’s Sunday.”

“The law remains operational on weekends.”

“That seems excessive.”

“I’ll raise it with Congress.”

He smiled, still holding the wine while she finished the message.

When she finally sent it, he looked at his watch.

“Nine minutes.”

“Close enough.”

He handed her the glass again. She took a sip.

“Better,” she admitted.

“You were right.”

“I generally am.”

“Do you ever get tired of that?”

Her gaze lifted to his.

Kai took a drink from his own glass, as if the question had been entirely casual.

“Of being right?” she said.

“Of everyone needing you to be.”

For the first time, she didn’t have an answer ready.

Her phone lit again. She turned it facedown on the cushion.

“The wine’s still too cold,” she said.

“Then I suppose we’ll have to sit here.”

I mingled with a few guests, including Amethyst Vaughn, who treated me to a full seven minutes of information about her latest placenta painting, and I narrowly avoided being cornered by Parker, who was skulking around the shaded area by the lemon trees with a dry martini in his hand.

Kai had moved on to the harpist, who had taken a break to refill her glass. He charmed her, too, letting his baby blues travel over her harp approvingly, and gave her a smile warm enough to melt more than butter.

I pulled him aside when she resumed her strumming. “You don’t have to make the harpist leave her husband, Kai. It’s just the women we talked about.”

He looked at me sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I guess I just have a thing about pleasing older women.”

I went still. Of course he did.

He walked off before he could see that his words had left me cold.

The guests were settling into organic clusters of conversation. One guest complimented the vineyards, like Vivienne owned all of them, too. Beside the pool, Blythe told two women in enormous sunglasses that her divorce had been “less a separation than a conscious decoupling and rediscovery of the self.” Another guest talked about the trauma her real estate was holding onto, and Karen looked up from her phone like she’d witnessed a moment of derangement. Raff was talking about hedge funds to a woman whose eyes appeared to be dying of boredom.

Caspian glanced up from his plate of Dungeness crab tartlets and looked in the direction of the French doors, mild alarm on his face.

Damian had just arrived and was now crossing the stone terrace toward me with the confidence of a man who had every right to be there, the reflected sunlight doing something magical to his bone structure. He looked a little bored by privilege, the linen and Italian leather flattering his body like they loved it as much as I did.