Page 103 of Let It Breathe
“Maybe so.”
“She deserves it.”
“Absolutely.”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
Clay froze, the box of wine suddenly deadweight in his arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’ve seen how you look at her. How you’ve always looked at her. And the way she looks at you. I know, I know—” He held up his hands to silence the objection Clay was too dumbfounded to raise anyway. “I know you’re not planning to lay a hand on her. I know there’s the whole guy code and all that shit about her being my ex-wife and you not wanting to screw up the friendship. But I also know how things can happen.”
“Nothing’s going to?—”
“You two would be the worst thing in the world for each other.” Eric picked up another box, his eyes still fixed on Clay’s. “She’s got all these hang-ups about marriage and her parents, and you’ve got your issues with addiction and recovery. Seriously, you’d be a disaster together.”
Clay stared at Eric for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’m touched by your concern.”
“Yeah. Well, just forget about any touching and you’ll be fine.”
Clay turned his back and headed toward the far wall with his box of wine. “I can pretty much guarantee there won’t be any touching between Reese and me.”
Not now, anyway, Clay thought. Not after today.
“Good. That’s good.”
It wasn’t. Not in Clay’s opinion.
But he politely refrained from saying so.
Reese’s mood was as gray as the Willamette Valley sky on the car ride back from the meeting with the bank. With her mother behind the wheel, Reese’s mind could drift like an untethered buoy.
June sighed. “That didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.”
Reese looked at her mother. “They might as well have locked the front doors when they saw us coming.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“Not that bad? The bank manager laughed at us. Hard. Did you miss the part where he choked on his danish?”
June frowned and steered the car back toward Dundee. “We’ll come up with something, sweetie. Just because this bank won’t loan us more money for the construction doesn’t mean?—”
“You heard what he said. No bank is going to loan us money with a fire under investigation and a budget so rubbery it could work as a prophylactic.”
“That reminds me, Axl asked us to stop at the drugstore for a box of those ribbed condoms.”
“Can it wait? I’d really like to get back and start crunching some numbers.”
June nodded and kept the car pointed forward. “Maybe we could scale back on some aspects of the construction. We just got started, so we could go for smaller square footage or do away with some of the custom woodwork or?—”
“That costs money, too. We’d have to have new plans drawn up, new blueprints, new permits—not to mention the fact that Wine Spectator just ran that article with the sketches that show our current plans.”
“Right, right.”
“And Larissa’s been chatting with that producer about the wine film.” Reese felt her head start to throb. “She said most of her questions were about the new pavilion.”
“Wow.” Her mother chewed her lip. “The documentary got the green light?”
“Yeah, but we may not be included. I got the sense it hinges on how things progress with construction.” Reese closed her eyes and slouched lower in her seat. “We’ve made the whole damn thing so public.”
