About That Kiss Read online

  case, welcome. Come join us. Let me get you a plate—”

  “Oh, that’s okay, I brought a sandwich.” Lanie patted her bag. “I can just go sit in my car until you’re finished—”

  “No need for that, honey. I have lunch catered every day.”

  “Every day?” She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until Cora laughed.

  “It’s our social time,” she said.

  At Lanie’s last job, people had raced out of the building at lunch to escape each other. “That’s . . . very generous of you.”

  “Nothing generous about it,” Cora said with a laugh. “It keeps everyone on-site, ensures no one’s late back at the job, and I get to keep my nosy nose in everyone’s business.” She set aside her bread, freeing up a hand to grab Lanie’s, clearly recognizing a flight risk when she saw one. “Everyone,” she called out. “This is Lanie Jacobs, our new graphic artist.” She smiled reassuringly at Lanie and gestured to the group of people. “Lanie, this is everyone. From the winemaker to the front desk receptionist, we’re an informal bunch.”

  They all burst into applause and Lanie wished for a big, black hole to sink into and vanish. “Hi,” she managed and gave a little wave. She must have pulled off the correct level of civility because everyone went back to eating and joking and talking amongst themselves. “Are you really related to all of them?” she asked Cora, watching two little girls, twins given their matching toothless smiles, happily eating chocolate cupcakes, half of which were all over their faces.

  Cora laughed. “Just about. I’ve got a big family. You?”

  “No.”

  “Single?”

  “Yes.” Lanie’s current relationship status: sleeping diagonally across her bed.

  Cora smiled. “Well, I’ll be happy to share my people, there’s certainly enough of us to go around. Hey,” she yelled, cupping a hand around her mouth. “Someone take the girls in to wash up, and no more cupcakes or they’ll be bouncing off the walls.”

  So the cupcakes were a problem, but wine at lunch wasn’t. Good to know.

  Cora smiled at Lanie’s expression, clearing reading her thoughts. “We’re Californians,” she said. “We’re serious about our wine but laid-back about everything else. In fact, maybe that should be our tagline. Now come, have a seat.” She drew Lanie over to the tables. “We’ll get to work soon enough.”

  There was an impressive amount of food, all of it Italian, all of it fragrant and delicious looking. Lanie’s heart said definitely to both the wine and the lasagna, but her pants said holy shit woman, find a salad instead.

  Cora gave a nudge to the woman at the end of the table who looked to be around Lanie’s age with silky dark hair and matching eyes. “Scoot,” Cora said.

  The woman scooted. So did everyone else, allowing a space on the end for Lanie.

  “Sit,” Cora told Lanie. “Eat. Make merry.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, and be careful of that one,” Cora said, pointing to the woman directly across from Lanie, this one in her early twenties with the same gorgeous dark hair and eyes as the other. “Her bad attitude can be contagious.”

  “Gee, thanks, mom,” she said with an impressive eyeroll.

  Cora blew her daughter a kiss and fluttered away, grabbing a bottle of wine from the middle of one of the tables and refilling glasses as she went.

  “One of these days I’m gonna roll my eyes so hard I’m going to go blind,” her daughter muttered.

  The twins ran back through, still giggling, still looking like they’d bathed in chocolate, which caused a bit of commotion. Trying to remain inconspicuous, Lanie pulled her lunch out of her bag, a homemade salad in a container, sans dressing.

  “Are you kidding me?” Cora’s daughter asked. “Do you want her to come back here and yell at us for not feeding you properly? Put that away.” She stood up, reached for a stack of plates in the middle of the table and handed Lanie one. “Here. Now fill it up and eat, and for God’s sake, look happy while you’re at it or she’ll have my ass.”

  Lanie eyeballed the casserole dishes lining the center of the tables. Spaghetti, lasagna . . .

  “Don’t worry, it all tastes as good as it looks,” an old man said from the middle of the table. There was no hair on his head, but he did have a large patch of gray steel fuzz on his chest sticking out from the top of his polo shirt. His olive complexion had seen at least seven decades of sun, but his smile was pure little boy mischief. “And don’t worry about your cholesterol either,” he added. “I’m seventy-five and I’ve eaten like this every single day of my life.” He leaned across the table and shook her hand. “Leonardo Antony Capriotti. And this is my sweetheart of fifty-four years, Adelina Capriotti. I’d use her middle name, but she refuses to sleep with me when I do that.”

  The older woman next to him was teeny, her white hair in a tight bun on her head, her spectacles low on her nose, her smile mischievous. “Gotta keep him in line, you know. Nice to meet you.”

  Lanie knew from her research on the company that it’d been Leonardo and Adelina to start this winery back in the seventies, though they’d since handed over the day-to-day reins to their daughter, who Lanie now realized was her boss Cora. “Nice to meet you both,” she said.

  “Likewise. You’re going to give us a new updated look and make me look good,” he said. “Right?”

  “Right,” she said and hoped that was actually true.

  He smiled. “I like you. Now eat.”

  If she ate any of this stuff, she’d need a nap by mid-afternoon. But not wanting to insult anyone, she scooped as little as she felt she could get away with onto her plate and pushed it around with her fork, trying to resist temptation.

  “Uh oh,” Cora’s daughter said. “We have a diet-er.”

  “Stop it,” the woman next to Lanie said. “You’ll scare her away and end up right back on mom’s shit list.”

  Cora’s daughter, whose shirt read Live, Laugh, and Leave Me The Hell Alone, snorted. “We both know that I never get off the shit list. I just move up and down on it. Mom’s impossible to please.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” the other woman said to Lanie. “I’m Alyssa, by the way. And Grumpy-Ass over there is my baby sister, Mia.”

  Mia waved and reached for the bread basket. “I’m giving up on getting a bikini body so pass the butter, please. Grandma says the good lord put alcohol and carbs on this planet for a reason and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him down.”

  Her grandma toasted her.

  “Mia and I work here at the winery,” Alyssa said and gently patted the cloth-wrapped little bundle swaddled to her chest. “This is Elsa, my youngest.”

  “Elsa, like the princess?” Lanie asked.

  “More like the queen,” Alyssa said with a smile, rubbing her infant’s tush. “She’s going to rule this roost someday.”

  “Who are you kidding?” Mia asked. “Mom’s going to hold the reins until she’s three hundred years old. That’s how long witches live, you know.”

  Lanie wasn’t sure how to react. After all, that witch was now her boss.

  “You’re scaring her off again,” Alyssa said and looked at Lanie. “We love mom madly, I promise. Mia’s just bitchy because she got dumped last night, was late for work this morning, and got read the riot act. She thinks life sucks.”

  “Yeah well, life does suck,” Mia said. “It sucks donkey balls. And this whole waking up every morning thing is getting a bit excessive. But Alyssa’s right. Don’t listen to me. Sarcasm. It’s how I hug.”

  Alyssa reached across the table and squeezed her sister’s hand in her own, her eyes soft. “Are you going to tell me what happened? I thought you liked this one.”

  Mia shrugged. “I was texting him and he was only responding occasionally with a ’K.’ I mean I have no idea what ‘K’ even means. Am I to assume he intended to type ‘ok’ but was stabbed and couldn’t expend the energy to type an extra whole letter?”

  Alyssa sucked