Rainy Day Friends Read online

  And that was the thing she was just starting to understand. As busybody and in everyone’s business as they were, they understood individuality.

  As often as he could manage, Mark showed up, blowing in like a wild force of nature, looking badass in his uniform as he accepted a huge plate of food from one of his sisters or his mom, shoved his lunch in his mouth, loved up on his girls, and blew back out again.

  Which was a relief. For whatever reason, he just wasn’t as easy to ignore as the rest of the Capriottis, especially as he was cool and distant now, not giving her that flirty smile as he had at first.

  She deserved that. She’d earned that. And it was exactly how she wanted things. At least she believed it during the days, but the long, lonely nights . . . they told her something else entirely.

  Which she steadfastly ignored.

  One afternoon at the end of her third week, she was deep in computer mode, working on the different specs required for the variety of media she was creating, from billboards to boxes to sell sheets to stationery, when she realized her neck was burning like maybe she was being watched. Lifting her head, she found four eyes on her.

  Sam and Sierra were leaning against the far corner of her desk. “You two need to wear bells,” she said.

  Samantha smiled. “Grandma says that too!”

  Sierra nodded and Lanie felt her own smile curve her mouth. Sierra had gone from never making eye contact to actually smiling at her. She still hadn’t spoken, but then again, there probably was no real need when Samantha spoke at one hundred miles per hour for all of them. “You two aren’t my Secret Santa, are you?” she asked. She nudged her chin toward a mug of coffee that had appeared on her desk when she’d gone on break. And it hadn’t been the first time either. She owed someone a most heartfelt thank-you. “Someone keeps leaving me a new coffee with three sugars in it, just the way I like it.”

  “We’re not allowed to touch the coffeemaker,” Sam said. “Not since the time we put peanut butter and chocolate chips in it to try and make a peanut butter hot chocolate. It sorta exploded.”

  “Okay,” Lanie said. “Good to know.”

  “That’s what I told Grandma, but she still got mad. We’ve got a question.”

  “I don’t know how to make peanut butter hot chocolate,” Lanie said.

  “No,” Sam said. “We want to know where babies come from.”

  Lanie choked on the coffee her Secret Santa had left her, spilling it down the front of herself.

  Sierra patted her sweetly on the back and silently offered her a napkin.

  Samantha just waited patiently for her answer.

  “You know,” Lanie finally said, swiping her chin. “Maybe this is a question for your dad.”

  “Oh, we’re going to ask him too, but Tommy at school just told us a gross story about how his dog pooped out her puppies and that it was really, really icky. Do you think that human babies get pooped out too?”

  God help her. “Uh . . .”

  Luckily she didn’t have to figure out an end to that sentence because Mark himself appeared in the doorway. He took one look at his girls crawling all over her desk and looked pained. “What have I told you about leaving Miss Lanie alone?”

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” Samantha shouted in glee. “Miss Lanie was just about to tell us where human babies come from!”

  Mark’s brows arched so high they vanished into his hairline and he too took a stance leaning against her desk, all long and leanly muscled, armed to the teeth, his expression mockingly expectant. “Was she now?”

  Lanie narrowed her eyes, but all he did was smirk, the ass.

  “’Cuz, Daddy! Tommy said his dog pooped out her babies! But we’re not borned like that, right? Where did we come from?”

  Mark’s expression softened as he picked her up and swung her around to hang off his back piggy-back style. Then he reached his arms out for Sierra, who took a flying leap for him. “You both came straight from heaven,” he said.

  This invoked peals of giggles, and then Sam had one more question. “Daddy, will I have kids from heaven too?”

  “Someday,” he said. Then he paused. “Just promise me you’ll ignore boys who text you after eleven o’clock at night.”

  “Well, duh,” she said. “I’m sleeping then.”

  Mark smiled and he turned to the door to leave, but paused, looking back at Lanie.

  “Sorry for the intrusion,” he said.

  “They’re never an intrusion,” she said and was shocked to realize she meant it.

  He registered her words with a single nod of his head. Then he walked out with the girls, one upside down and one right side up, both beaming from ear to ear and absolutely not tugging at her cold, hard heart.

  But only a little tug, she told herself. She needed to remember why she was here. To reset her life after Kyle had detonated it. With his $100,000 life-insurance policy payout in her bank account, she’d had the luxury of making this temporary change to recover. Not to get involved in these people’s lives.

  Period.

  IT WAS NEAR the end of the day when Lanie walked by the front reception room and found River looking more green than the grass out front. River was still keeping her distance, so Lanie’s first instinct was to keep walking, but she couldn’t do it. “Hey, you okay?”

  River held up a finger, closed her eyes, and did some deep breathing while rubbing her belly.

  “Do you need a doctor?”

  “No!” River drew in a careful breath. “I can’t afford one right now, but I’m okay and so’s the baby. I just still get morning sickness all day sometimes—” She broke off and moaned a little, and if possible went even greener. When the desk phone beside her rang, she moaned again and grabbed the trash can.

  Oh shit, Lanie thought, wanting to take a big step backward. And maybe two weeks ago she’d have done just that, but one thing working here had taught her, they were a team.

  Dammit.

  So she leaned past River hunched miserably over her trash can and grabbed the phone. “Capriotti Winery.”

  “You’re supposed to say how can I help you?” River managed to whisper.

  “How can I help you?” Lanie added into the phone.

  “Yeah, hi,” came a nasally female voice. “I’d like to book a wedding for this coming Saturday for me and my husband. Well, husband-to-be. Okay, so he doesn’t know he’s my husband-to-be—he hasn’t asked me yet, but he’s going to. Tonight, if he knows what’s good for him. But in any case, I want to book our wedding for Saturday.”

  Lanie didn’t know much about running the front desk, but she knew this much. “We’re booked out the next six months of Saturdays.”

  “Okay, fine, we’ll take Sunday. Or Friday, but I’d expect a deep discount to get married on Friday, so—”

  “No,” Lanie said. “All days are booked out six months.”

  “Are you shittin’ me?”

  Lanie looked over at River, who’d gotten her color back somewhat. Or at least she’d gone from green to a sort of opal. River shook her head and Lanie said into the phone, “Nope, I’m not ‘shittin’ you,’ we’re booked solid.”

  River let out a horrified laugh and shook her head no a little frantically.

  “Well, that’s just crap!” the bride-to-be said in Lanie’s ear. “I’m going to stop drinking your wines immediately!”

  Click.

  Lanie shrugged and set the phone down. “Her loss. We make some damn fine wine. Do you deal with this stuff all day long?”

  “Well, not exactly like that,” River said. “You’re supposed to be nicer.”

  “She hung up on me.”

  “I take it you’ve never been in a customer service job, like waitressing.”

  Lanie shook her head.

  “You’re supposed to make the customers happy.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure she was a lost cause.” Lanie pulled her blueberry-vanilla snack bar from her pocket and handed it over to River.

&nbs