The problem with success, in Rhys Carrick’s experience, was that everyone assumed you were enjoying yourself.
On paper, he was. The numbers he’d reviewed that morning—over single-origin coffee in a SoMa loft with floor-to-ceiling windows and a curated view of the Bay Bridge—would have made most investors smile. Year-to-date returns for Crestlake Capital’s Distressed Agriculture Fund were beating projections by four hundred basis points. The almond deal in Kern County had finally cleared the last water rights appeal. And the Figueroa foreclosure up in wine country, tiny as it was, promised a tidy return once they’d repackaged the land for a buyer with deeper pockets and more taste for sipping Cabernet on weekends than farming it.
On paper, it was working exactly as he’d engineered it to.
He took another sip of coffee and stared at the spreadsheet on his laptop, the forest of rows and columns and color-coded risk flags. Each line represented someone else’s desperation. Each green cell represented his firm’s discipline. His victory.
“You’re not looking at the deck,” Aanya said from the other end of the kitchen island.
He glanced up. His COO was perched on one of the barstools, dark hair in a sleek twist, long legs crossed in navy slacks. Her blazer hung on the back of the chair, because she’d walked in like she lived here. Which, given the number of nights she’d crashed on his couch before early flights, wasn’t far off.
“The deck’s fine,” he said. “You made it. You could pitch it in your sleep.”
“You own the fund,” she said. “You get to be the face of this one, remember? The LPs want to hear from the shark himself.”
“Flattery,” he said, clicking to the slide she’d queued up. “Unbecoming in a CFO.”
“I’m COO now,” she corrected. “You gave me a different title, remember? It came with a five percent raise and substantially more stress.”
“COO, CFO, woman who saves my ass,” he said. “Titles are fluid.”
“Spoken like a man who names every SPV after a different lake,” she said dryly. “Crestlake, Arbor Lake, Silverlake—”
“Careful,” he said, “or I’ll demote you back to controller.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t even know what a controller does.”
“Sure I do.” He took another sip. “Controls things. Makes sure your vendor payments don’t bounce. Yells at analysts when they mess up a VLOOKUP.”
“That’s literally your job,” she said. “Yelling at analysts.”
“I don’t yell,” he protested. “I…express disappointment efficiently.”
She snorted, but he saw the way her gaze flicked back to the laptop. To the tab he hadn’t closed. To the name at the top of the spreadsheet: Figueroa Family Vineyards — Asset Summary.
“You’re thinking about the farm,” she said.
“Vineyard,” he corrected automatically. “Farms grow…corn. Or something.”
“Vineyard, farm, same thing. Dirt and debt.” She stole his coffee, took a sip without asking. “You’re not worried about that, are you?”
“I’m not worried,” he said. “I’m mildly annoyed.”
“That’s your version of full-blown panic.”
“My version of full-blown panic involves a bottle of Scotch and me staring at the ceiling at three in the morning,” he said. “We’re not there yet.”
“So what’s the problem?” she asked.
He swiveled the laptop so she could see the highlighted section. “Deed restrictions. From the actual Stone Age, apparently.”
She leaned in. “No transfer of title between—” She broke off, stared, then looked up, eyebrows climbing. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I wish.”
“That can’t be enforceable,” she said. “Can it? ‘No sale between August and the completion of harvest’? That’s…poetic. And ridiculous.”
“Our counsel thinks it’s quirky, but not entirely toothless,” he said. “It never came up because the bank never pushed foreclosure all the way to sale before. They just kept renewing. Now that we’re actually moving on it…”
“You can’t sell until…what, mid-October?” she said. “Late October?”
“Depends on the fruit,” he said absently. “Cabernet’s usually the last in that area. Could be November if there’s a cool September.”
She gave him a look. “Since when do you know Cabernet ripening windows?”
“Since I read the asset memo,” he said. “And the twelve-page market analysis attached to it. And the soil reports. And the production history.”
“Of a $5 million note,” she said. “We have positions ten times that size you barely glance at.”
“It’s an unusual play,” he said. “Out-of-favor sector, but good macro tailwinds.”
“It’s a vineyard,” she said slowly, like the word might mean something he was missing. “With an on-site operator. With weird deed language that got past a regional bank. Admit it: you like it because it’s messy.”
“I like it because there’s upside,” he said. “Whoever buys it will probably pay stupid money for the romance of it. We clean up the balance sheet, keep the vines producing, and sell the story along with the land. Everyone wins.”
“Everyone except the woman who lives there,” Aanya said. “What was her name again?”
He’d read it half a dozen times on correspondence from the bank, on the foreclosure complaint. Figueroa, Nora M. Owner. Borrower.
He pushed down the faint, inconvenient tug of curiosity. It didn’t matter who she was.
“According to the bank’s file, it’s been a money pit for ten years,” he said instead. “She’s had every chance to recapitalize. She didn’t.”
“Or couldn’t,” Aanya said.
“Same result,” he said.
She studied him. “You know you sound like our old boss when you talk like that.”
He did. Sometimes, late at night, he heard Henry Vance’s voice in his head as clearly as if the man were still standing in a conference room bark-laughing at some regional manager. Sentiment is a cost center, Rhys. We don’t run those.
“He wasn’t wrong,” Rhys said.
“He also went to prison for insider trading,” she said.
“We’re not Henry,” he said, perhaps a little too fast. “We don’t cheat. We don’t lie. We don’t break laws. We just…use the ones that are there.”
“And this time the law says no sale until the grapes are in,” she said. “So what’s the plan? Sit on our hands until Halloween, hoping some hedge fund guy wants to cosplay as a winemaker?”
“No.” He closed the laptop and leaned his forearms on the island. “We go up there. We make sure the operation keeps running. We get the harvest in, square the deed restriction, and prep the asset for sale so that when we can transfer title, we hit the ground running.”
“We?” she repeated.
He met her eyes. “Someone needs to be on-site. The bank had a field officer who swung by once a quarter, but they’re out. I don’t trust a local manager not to get sentimentally attached.”
Her eyes widened. “No.”
“Yes.”
“You cannot be serious,” she said. “You have a fundraise. You have a board meeting. You have—”
“A laptop and a Wi-Fi hotspot,” he said. “I can work from anywhere. You keep things running down here. You’re good at that.”
“And you’re good at yelling at analysts,” she said. “Which is more efficient in person.”
“Expressing disappointment,” he said, but his mind was already moving. Logistics, calendars, flights. There was a private airstrip thirty minutes from the vineyard; he could have the firm plane dropped there, shuttle back and forth as needed. Work out of the farmhouse’s dining room between site walks and calls with potential buyers.
When he closed his eyes, he could see it: the rows of vines marching up a gentle slope, the old farmhouse with the peeling paint. The bank’s risk memo had included a few photos. Something about them had snagged him. The light, maybe. The way the autumn sun had turned the leaves gold around the edges.
Or the look on the woman’s face in one candid shot, standing on the crush pad with her hair pulled back and her hands on her hips, glaring at the camera like it had interrupted something important.
You’re not supposed to be sentimental, he reminded himself.
“This isn’t like you,” Aanya said. “You hate field work. You made me go to Iowa for the ethanol plant.”
“The ethanol plant smelled like a frat house bathroom,” he said. “This at least will smell like…grapes.”
“Rotting grapes,” she said. “With wasps.”
“I can handle wasps.”
“Ha.” She arched an eyebrow. “Remember the time one flew into your motorcycle helmet on Highway 1? You almost drove off a cliff.”
“That was a bee,” he said. “And we are not discussing that.”
She swiveled on the stool, crossing her arms. “So this is happening. You’re going to go live in a farmhouse for two months and play gentleman farmer while I babysit a $500 million fundraise?”
“You make it sound like summer camp,” he said. “It’ll probably be three weeks. Four, tops. I’ll be up for the front half of harvest, get a feel for operations, lay groundwork, and then we hand off to a local manager. The deed language only cares that the fruit is off the vines, not who’s doing the picking.”
“You really have read that thing,” she said.
He ignored the comment. “We tell the LPs it’s part of our ‘on-the-ground diligence.’ They’ll eat it up. All that authentic agriculture stuff. Photo of me in boots, shaking hands with a guy in a flannel shirt. Very earthy. Very ESG.”
“You in boots,” she echoed, smirking. “Are they going to be Saint Laurent?”
“Ha ha,” he said. “I own boots.”
“You own Chelsea boots,” she said. “Those are for models who pretend to be cowboys.”
“I went to college in Texas,” he reminded her. “I have real boots. With—” He searched his memory. “—Actual soles.”
“Wow. The technical term.” She shook her head. “You’re going to be insufferable when you come back with a tan.”
“I already have a tan,” he said.
“Right. From your Peloton,” she said.
He checked his watch. “Car will be here in twenty. You ready?”
“Always.” She hopped off the stool, grabbed her blazer, and slid into it in one smooth motion. “Should I add a slide to the deck about your exciting agricultural adventure? ‘Our investment strategy: leverage, arbitrage, and artisanal compost.’”
“Do that and I’ll cut your bonus,” he said mildly.
“You say that every time I make a joke,” she said. “You never do.”
“Maybe this is the year I surprise you.”
She paused by the door, hand on the handle. “Rhys.”
He looked up.
“Don’t…enjoy it too much,” she said. “Okay?”
He frowned. “Enjoy what?”
“Playing pioneer.” Her eyes were serious now, the banter stripped away. “You have a habit of stepping into other people’s lives like they’re…costumes. You put them on, learn them, and then walk away before they can stain.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
“That’s harsh,” he said finally.
“It’s also true.” She shrugged. “Just remember why you’re going. Bring in the harvest. Prep the sale. Come home.”
He smiled, thin. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You know me. I always leave on schedule.”
* * *
The flight up the coast the next morning took twenty-eight minutes. In that time, Rhys answered six emails, skimmed a memo on a possible water rights acquisition in Colorado, and tried—unsuccessfully—not to think about the woman whose signature sat at the bottom of the loan documents sitting in his leather portfolio.
Borrower acknowledges that Lender may transfer this Note and the rights hereunder without Borrower’s consent…
She’d initialed every page. NMF. In a neat, unhurried hand.
He’d seen a lot of borrower signatures. Farmers who’d bet on old-fashioned crops in a new climate. Ranchers who’d borrowed against land their grandparents had homesteaded. Developers who’d assumed the party would never end.
Most of those signatures blurred together. This one…hadn’t.
“So what’s the play with the owner?” his junior associate, Miles, asked from across the aisle.
Rhys glanced over. The kid was fresh out of Stanford, still at that stage where his suit was a little too shiny and his confidence hadn’t yet been tempered by a real loss.
“What do you mean?” Rhys asked.
Miles shrugged. “She’s still on-site. She knows the operation. We can’t exactly walk in and start ordering her around. Not if we want her to bring in the harvest for us. Do we offer a consulting fee? Keep her on as…manager? For optics?”
“You don’t have to say ‘optics’ in that tone like it’s a dirty word,” Rhys said. “Optics are real.”
“I thought we didn’t care about PR,” Miles said. “You always say, ‘We don’t run for office. We run a fund.’”
“We care about reputation,” Rhys corrected. “It’s different. We can’t have people saying we drove some poor widow out of her vineyard at gunpoint.”
“There’s a husband?” Miles asked, blinking.
“Figure of speech,” Rhys said. “Anyway, we don’t need her long-term. Just long enough to keep the fruit from rotting on the vines. After that—”
“—we kick her out,” Miles finished. “Got it.”
Rhys’s jaw tightened. “We enforce the terms of the note,” he said. “Which she agreed to.”
“Sure,” Miles said quickly. “Of course. I just—”
“Don’t make it a morality play,” Rhys said. “You’ll lose sleep and make bad decisions.”
He heard his own voice and wondered, briefly, when he’d started quoting Henry Vance instead of actively trying not to become him.
“You do think about it, though,” Miles said after a beat. “Right? The people on the other end of this. You’re not a robot.”
“Robots don’t get seventy-page LP agreements shoved at them at four in the morning,” Rhys said. “I’m painfully sure I’m not a robot.”
“That’s not an answer,” Miles said.
Rhys looked out the window. The city had fallen away beneath them, replaced by patchwork fields and hills. In the distance, a thin ribbon of gray-blue marked the bay. Further beyond, the ocean glinted, endless and indifferent.
He’d grown up an hour from here, in a town with one decent diner and a high school where half the kids’ parents worked in warehouses or on construction crews. The valley had been out of reach then, a place they drove through on field trips to learn about “California’s agricultural heritage.” He remembered standing in the shade of a vineyard’s oak trees, staring at the rows of vines, and thinking they looked like code: repeating patterns in tidy lines.
“My dad used to say there were two kinds of people,” he said finally. “Ones who owned land, and ones who worked for them.”
“And now you…” Miles gestured vaguely.
“Now I own the debt they took out to try to hold onto the land,” Rhys said. “I’m not the villain of the story, Miles. I’m the cleanup crew.”
He didn’t add: If I didn’t do it, someone else would. It was the oldest justification in the book. Also, incidentally, true.
The plane began to descend. The patchwork below resolved into more specific shapes: rectangles of vines, their lines so straight they looked drawn, punctuated by copses of oak and the occasional splash of a blue swimming pool. Winding roads threaded between them, dotted with rental cars and tour buses.
As they got lower, he saw a cluster of buildings that had to be the vineyard: an old stone farmhouse, a low winery building with a metal roof, a gravel lot with a handful of dusty trucks. A faded sign by the road: *FIGUEROA FAMILY VINEYARDS – TASTING ROOM. The paint had peeled on Family*. Something in him tightened at that.
The airstrip was five miles away. A rental SUV waited on the tarmac, keys already in the ignition, a folder on the passenger seat with his name on it and a printout from Morrow & Hastings.
*NOTICE OF REPRESENTATION: CRESTLAKE CAPITAL*
The drive took twelve minutes. In that time, he passed three tasting rooms with gleaming glass entrances and signs that looked like they’d been focus-grouped within an inch of their lives. Solstice Ridge. Iron Gate. Seven Oaks Estate. Their parking lots were full. Groups of women in floaty dresses and wide-brimmed hats teetered on wedges toward shaded patios. Couples posed with glasses for selfies.
Then the road narrowed. The pavement got bumpier. The GPS told him: Turn left on Old Creek Road. The sign for Figueroa Family Vineyards appeared, half-hidden behind a stand of eucalyptus.
He turned in. Gravel crunched under the tires.
The vines were closer here, the trellises low and unpretentious. No manicured lavender borders, no art installations. Just rows of green, their leaves a little dusty from a long, dry summer. He could see the clusters hanging beneath, tight and dark.
Harvest wasn’t far.
He parked near the winery building, killed the engine, and stepped out. Heat hit him like a wall, dry and shimmering. The air smelled…different. Less city. More earth. He took a breath and tasted something faintly sweet on his tongue.
A forklift beeped in the distance. The metallic whine of machinery drifted from behind the building. Voices rose and fell. Spanish, mostly.
He straightened his jacket, even though it was too hot for it, and headed toward the sound.
At the corner of the building, he paused.
The crush pad bustled. Three workers in stained T-shirts guided a bin of pale green grapes toward a waiting sorter. Another hosed down the concrete, the spray sending up a fine mist that caught the sunlight. Fruit tumbled from bin to conveyor in a soft, relentless rush.
And in the middle of it all stood a woman in a tank top and work pants, her hair hauled into a knot at the nape of her neck. She was maybe five-seven, with strong shoulders and sun-browned arms. Sweat darkened the fabric between her shoulder blades. She wore no makeup that he could see, no jewelry besides a thin silver chain around her throat.
She barked something in rapid Spanish at the guy on the forklift. He adjusted his angle by two inches. She nodded once, satisfied, and turned to someone else, her hands moving as much as her mouth.
He knew her before he saw her face. Something in the set of her body, the absolute command of the space around her.
Owner: Nora M. Figueroa. He’d seen a photo of her in the bank’s file. Grainy, mid-blink. This was…not that.
“Excuse me,” he called.
No one heard him. The machine whined. The forklift beeped. The woman shouted, “¡Más despacio, Diego! Are you trying to crush your own feet?”
The kid on the forklift—he looked sixteen—yelled back, “If I break my foot I don’t have to pick tomorrow!”
“You break your foot and I’ll put you on punch-downs,” she said. “All night.”
“That’s child abuse!”
“Then don’t break your foot.”
He stepped closer.
“Ms. Figueroa?” he called, louder.
Her head snapped around.
For a second, everything else fell away. The noise, the heat, the movement. He saw her eyes—hazel, or maybe green, hard to tell from this distance but sharp as glass. A smudge of purple grape skin streaked one cheekbone. She took him in in a single sweep: the suit, the shoes, the portfolio in his hand. Her mouth tightened.
“Forklift down,” she called. “Kill the feed for a minute.”
The machine whine subsided. The forklift lowered its tines with a clank.
She wiped her hands on her pants and walked toward him with the steady, unhurried gait of someone who climbed these steps a dozen times a day. Up close, he could see the lines at the corners of her eyes. Not from age—she couldn’t be more than thirty-two, thirty-three—but from squinting into sun. The tan on her arms had farmer’s tan marks where her sleeves usually hit.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Her tone said she already knew who he was. And that she’d rather be literally anywhere else.
He held out a hand. “Ms. Figueroa. I’m Rhys Carrick. Crestlake Capital.”
She looked at his hand. Did not take it.
“You’re early,” she said.
“Traffic was light,” he said.
“Harvest isn’t,” she said. “We’re in the middle of bringing in the Sauvignon Blanc. I don’t have time for a…site visit.”
“This won’t take long,” he said. “We have some things to discuss. Regarding the deed restriction, the harvest schedule, your role in the transition—”
“My role,” she repeated. “My role is getting these grapes off the vines before they turn into raisins. Your role…” She let her gaze travel over him again, slow and not at all appreciative. “…is not my problem.”
He smiled, thin. “On the contrary. For the next few weeks, I’m very much your problem.”
Her jaw worked once, twice. “Oh, good,” she said. “Because my life has been entirely too easy lately.”
He should have anticipated hostility. He’d come prepared for anger, tears, bargaining. He had a script for all three. He’d been doing foreclosures long enough to recognize the risk points.
What he hadn’t been prepared for was the way the hostility sat on her. Like armor that fit.
“Look,” he said, shifting the portfolio under his arm. “I don’t want to get in your way. I’m here to make sure the harvest proceeds efficiently and to evaluate the property for sale. The sooner we get the fruit in, the sooner this is over for everyone.”
She took a step closer. Close enough that he could see the faint spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose under the tan. Close enough to smell the mix of sweat and crushed grape juice on her skin.
“Over for you,” she said. “You get to go back to your glass box in the city and brag about how you flipped another distressed asset. I get to pack my mother’s kitchen into cardboard boxes and figure out where the hell we’re supposed to live.”
Her voice didn’t crack. It was worse than that. It stayed flat.
“I’m sorry,” he said, because it was the thing you said, even when you’d already told your team not to put that in writing.
“No, you’re not,” she said. “And that’s fine. I don’t need you to be sorry. I need you to sign whatever papers you need to sign so that when I drop dead from exhaustion in six weeks, at least I’ll know the wine got made.”
He’d thought of this as a game. Not in the sense that it wasn’t serious—there were real dollars at stake, real reputational risk—but in the sense that there were rules, and he was good at playing by them and winning. Seeing her up close made it…messier.
“You care about the wine,” he said, more to himself than to her.
Her laugh was short and sharp. “No, I do this for the glamorous lifestyle,” she said. “The broken equipment. The bank calls. The way my hands smell like fermenting juice for three months. It’s my spa treatment.”
He couldn’t help it. His mouth twitched.
She caught it and narrowed her eyes. “Is that funny to you, Mr. Crestlake?”
“It’s Carrick,” he said. “And no. It’s not.”
“Good.” She jabbed a finger at him. “Because here’s how this is going to go. I’m going to finish bringing in the whites. Then I’m going to start sampling the Merlot. Then the Cab. I will pick when I say it’s time, not when your spreadsheet does. If you try to tell me otherwise, I will personally escort you off my crush pad and you can call whatever sheriff you want.”
He opened his mouth.
She barreled on. “I will show you where to sleep. It is not fancy. If you want fancy, there’s a resort fifteen minutes up the road where they’ll serve you wine that tastes like a focus group. I will not be your tour guide. I will not be your therapist. And I will not smile for your Instagram.”
“I don’t have Instagram,” he said.
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “Too many paper trails.”
He should have felt offended. Instead, absurdly, he felt…intrigued.
“Ms. Figueroa—”
“Do you like being called that?” she cut in. “Figueroa?”
He blinked. “It’s your name.”
“It was my father’s name,” she said. “Everyone called him that. Then he died, and suddenly I’m ‘Ms. Figueroa’ in every letter that tells me how badly I’ve failed.” Her mouth twisted. “Call me Nora. That way I’ll know who to hate.”
Heat pulsed at the back of his neck. “All right…Nora,” he said. Saying her name felt strangely intimate, like stepping closer to an edge. “Then you can call me—”
“Crestlake,” she said. “That seems appropriate.”
That pulled a real smile out of him. “I see we’re going to get along beautifully.”
“Oh, we’re going to get along just fine,” she said. “As long as you remember one thing.”
“And what’s that?”
She leaned in until there were only a few inches between them. He could see sweat beading at her temples. A curl of hair had escaped and stuck to the side of her throat.
“For as long as there are grapes on those vines,” she said, enunciating each word, “this is my vineyard. Not your ‘asset.’ Not your future golf course. Not your goddamn line item. Mine. You get to push your papers and make your calls and measure things with whatever yardsticks you use. But out there—” She jerked her chin toward the rows. “—you do what I say. Or you go back to wherever you came from and explain to your investors why you let ten tons of Cabernet rot because you couldn’t handle being told no by a woman in dirty boots.”
Something low in his chest tightened. Challenge. That, he recognized.
“I’m not in the habit of letting produce rot,” he said, matching her tone. “Or walking away from value. So it seems we have aligned incentives.”
Her lip curled. “Don’t make it sound like we’re on the same team,” she said. “We’re not.”
“Maybe not.” He dropped his voice a fraction. “But for the next few weeks, we’re going to have to work together.”
Her pupils flared. Whether in anger or something else, he couldn’t say.
She took a step back, as if remembering herself. “Diego!” she shouted over her shoulder. “Start the press. We’re wasting daylight.”
The kid climbed back on the forklift. The machinery whined to life.
“You want to help?” she called to Rhys. “Grab a hose. Or go stand in the shade and make notes about my inefficiency. Whatever makes you feel important.”
He wasn’t sure what made him say it. Maybe the heat. Maybe the way the air tasted. Maybe the stubborn tilt of her chin.
“I’ll take the hose,” he said.
Her eyebrows rose, just a little. Then she shrugged. “Suit yourself, Crestlake.”
He rolled up his sleeves. Took the hose she thrust at him. Water surged through, icy against his hand.
His Italian leather shoes were going to be ruined. His trousers would be stained. His inbox was probably filling with messages marked URGENT.
He aimed the spray at the concrete, at the rivers of juice and skins sluicing toward the drain.
He felt, for the first time in a long time, absolutely awake.
* * *
That night, after twenty-seven emails, three calls with his team, and one excruciating attempt to connect to the farmhouse’s patchy Wi-Fi, Rhys lay on his back in a narrow bed in an upstairs room that smelled faintly of lemon oil and old books.
Through the open window, he could hear crickets. A frog, maybe, somewhere near the irrigation pond. The soft creak of the house settling.
He was sore in places he’d forgotten he had muscles. His shoulders ached from wrestling hoses. His hands bore new calluses from the lugs they’d loaded at the end of the day when the part-time kid had had to leave early for some family thing. He’d ruined his shoes, ruined his pants, and ruined any illusion he’d had that he could keep this visit strictly professional.
He’d meant to observe. Instead, he’d found himself…participating. Grunting alongside Diego as they shifted a heavy bin. Taking grape samples at Nora’s brusque instruction, spitting seeds into the dirt as she walked him through tannin development like he was an intern.
“You taste for sugar and flavor,” she’d said, holding a berry between her stained fingers. “Not just the Brix. If you pick when the numbers tell you to but the seeds are still green and bitter, you’ll get thin wine with harsh tannins.”
“I could read that in a book,” he’d said.
“You could,” she’d agreed. “Or you could learn it with your tongue, like a real person.”
Then she’d popped the berry in her mouth, closed her eyes, and chewed, her throat working. He’d watched her lips, the way they parted, the way the juice shone on them when she licked them clean.
He’d taken his own berry then, determined not to think about the act of putting it in his mouth in anything but analytical terms.
Seed crunch. Slight bitterness. Skin tannins moderate. Flavor…
Flavor.
He rolled onto his side, pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. This was ridiculous. He was tired, that was all. Jet lagged, even though he’d only flown an hour. Overstimulated. Too much sun, too much newness, too much Nora.
He barely knew the woman. A handful of hours, a dozen barbed exchanges. He knew her cash flow statement better than he knew her. He’d seen her P&L more times than he’d seen her smile.
And yet.
When she’d shown him the room, earlier, she’d paused in the doorway, as if crossing some invisible line.
“This was my brother’s,” she’d said. “Before he moved out. We use it for guests now.” A tiny shrug. “You’re the first one who’s not related.”
The bed was narrow. The dresser scarred. A poster from some band he’d never heard of hung crooked on the wall, its corners curling. A baseball cap sat on the nightstand, dust gathered in the mesh.
“Thank you,” he’d said, more formal than he meant to.
“Don’t thank me.” Her jaw had clenched. “We’re not doing this because I want to. We’re doing it because my great-grandfather had control issues and wrote fairy tales into deeds.”
He’d almost said, You could have fought it. But she had been fighting. That was the point. Ten years of grinding it out, patching equipment, hauling hoses.
“What happened to your brother?” he’d asked instead.
“He moved to Sacramento,” she’d said. “Got a job counting other people’s money. He says it’s ironic.”
“And you stayed,” he’d said.
“Someone had to,” she’d said. “And I was too stupid to know better.”
He’d told himself not to ask what she’d meant by that. He’d told himself a lot of things that afternoon. Like: Don’t stand too close when she leans over the fermentation tank. And: Don’t look at her mouth when she talks.
He’d failed at most of them.
Now, in the dark, he could see the shape of her in his mind as clearly as if she stood at the foot of the bed. The slope of her neck, the strong line of her jaw, the way her forearms flexed when she tightened a valve.
He shifted under the sheet, annoyed to find his body reacting like it was twenty and stupid.
No.
He turned onto his stomach and focused on the feel of the cheap cotton, on the distant hum of a pump somewhere in the night, on the soft murmur of voices downstairs where the last of the crew was probably finishing a beer before heading home.
This was temporary. A project. An asset to be managed. A deed restriction to be cleared. He’d be gone in a month, back to glass and steel and antiseptic conference rooms.
He did not get entangled. Not with investments. Not with people. Not anymore.
He closed his eyes.
Tomorrow, he told himself, he’d be smarter. Colder. More like himself.
Tomorrow, he’d remember that she was the opposition, not the temptation.
Outside, in the dark vineyard, a breeze moved through the leaves, making a sound like a hundred soft whispers.
* * *