Lee Mckenzie - The Wedding Bargain

There was something surprisingly suggestive about his inference. “Involved as in…?”

“You know what I mean.”

Was she supposed to be flattered that he’d gone to the trouble to find that out? “All right, then, it only seems fair that I have a few facts about you.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Are you ‘involved’ with anyone?”

“Not at the moment.” He touched her glass with his.

Interesting. She was tempted to ask if he was on the rebound, but that might sound as if she had more than idle conversation in mind. Instead, she decided on a different line of questioning. “How long have you known Rory’s mother?”

“Several years. We met at one of her art exhibits.”

Also interesting. She was usually quick to figure out what people did for a living, and she had not pegged Michael as an artist, or even an art aficionado. “Are you in the art business?” she asked.

He hesitated before answering, which made her suspect he was hiding something.

“Business, yes,” he said finally. “Not art. As it turns out, your friend Nicola’s husband is also a colleague of mine.”

Jonathan was a lawyer. “Do you work with him?” she asked.

“No, I’m not a lawyer. Just a client.”

“One of their criminal cases?”

His laughter was genuine. “Good one. I try to stay out of trouble, or at least not get caught. Besides, Jonathan is a corporate lawyer.”

Did that make Michael a corporation or just someone who worked for one? She owned her own business, but the only time she’d talked to a lawyer was when she had settled her grandfather’s estate.

“You haven’t tasted the wine.”

Neither had he, she noticed. She obliged and took a sip. “Nice.”

He looked taken aback, as though he’d expected her to say something else.

“Very nice.” To emphasize her point, she took another drink.

He gave the wine in his glass a gentle swirl. “Does the Whiskey Sour have a wine list?”

“Not a list, exactly, but I do stock two kinds of wine.”

“What are they?”

“Red and white.”

His laugh was even sexier than his smile. “Seriously?”

Completely serious. “I really want to reinvent the place as a cocktail lounge, but right now most of my patrons are beer drinkers. A couple of my friends—Nicola and Paige, who is one of the other bridesmaids—drink wine, so I keep a few bottles on hand.”

“Tasting a wine should be like a first kiss. You need to take your time and give it all your attention.”

He tipped his glass slightly to one side. “Did you notice the color of this one?”

Other than it being red, she had not. She focused on the glass for a moment and wondered if she’d ever find out what a first kiss with him would be like. She looked up at him and realized he was waiting for her answer. She managed to shake her head.

He tipped his glass slightly to one side. “If the light was better, you’d see it’s not red. It’s a deep shade of garnet.”

All she saw was a pair of dark blue eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It’s well aged.” He straightened his glass.

“No offense, but doesn’t wine tasting strike you as being kind of pompous? I mean, they’re pretty much all the same.”

His only response was a stunned expression, but he recovered quickly. “Tell me something about yourself.”

“Uh, what would you like to know?”

“Something I wouldn’t expect to hear.”

Would her wanting to explore the whole kissing thing be unexpected? Probably not. “I used to be a high school teacher and I have a brown belt in karate.”

“Really? I guess that’s one way to keep students in line.”

She smiled at that. She wasn’t cut out to be a teacher, but fortunately she’d never had to rely on the martial arts for classroom management. It had come in handy with a couple of her mother’s boyfriends, though. One in particular.

Snap out of it, she told herself. She usually didn’t dwell on the past, so why did it keep shoving its way into her thoughts tonight? Maybe it was being around Rory’s family, or maybe it was the unexpected attention from a handsome stranger who avoided answering questions about himself, but had no trouble wheedling information out of her.

Michael swirled the contents of his glass, but he was studying her intently. “So before you taste the wine, you have to smell it.” He held it out to her. “Inhale slowly, and really think about the scent.”

In her book, there weren’t many things more pretentious than wine tasting, but she played along and took a sniff. “It sort of smells like cherries.”

He smelled it. “You’re right. Ripe cherries, and just a hint of spice.”

Her insides went wobbly. “Your turn. To tell me something unexpected about you, I mean.”

He hesitated, as though trying to think of something that might interest her. “I’m restoring a 1954 Morgan.”

Michael’s hands didn’t look anything like the mechanics’ hands she often saw wrapped around beer mugs at the Whiskey Sour. “Are you actually doing the work yourself, or are you having it restored?”

“A little of both. You know something about cars?”

She cupped both hands around her glass. “A little. My grandfather had an old MGB. I used to help him work on it from time to time, and a lot of his friends are…were…mechanics. Some of them are still regulars at the bar.”

“You should hold your glass by the stem,” he said. “That way you don’t transfer the warmth from your hands to the contents of the glass.”

“Oh.” She adjusted her hands accordingly.

“I rebuilt the engine myself. With my brother, actually. We’ve been working on it together. It’s a nice change of pace from…what I usually do.”

Okay. Maybe the brother was a mechanic.

“Now you should taste the wine again,” he said, but he reached for her hand and stopped her before she could raise the glass to her lips. “Let it slide over your tongue and around the inside of your mouth before you swallow it.” His voice had taken on a sinfully deep tone and she swore it was reverberating through his hand and up her arm. “Try it.”

She took a sip and so did he. She watched his mouth, and didn’t swallow until he did.

“What do you think?”

She was at a loss for words, and that almost never happened.

“Peppery, just a hint of oak,” he said. “Full-bodied.”

“Yes. You took the words right out of my mouth.”

He smiled at her. “Can you still taste it?”

She thought about that for a second or two, and nodded.

“That’s one of the best characteristics of this particular wine. It has a long, warm finish.”

Holy crap. She should ask about his car, or his brother or what kind of business he was in. Instead she took another slow, careful sip of wine, imagined she was being kissed, and contemplated everything implied by a long, warm finish.

Michael Morgan followed his real estate agent out of the shabby building she’d just shown him in the South of Market district and waited on the sidewalk while she locked the door. The large windows overlooking the street had been boarded up with plywood, and that had been covered with several coats of paint in an unsuccessful attempt to keep graffiti under control. Even the big for-sale sign had been tagged so many times, it was almost unreadable. It was the third place he’d seen and the least disastrous, which wasn’t saying much.

“It definitely needs work,” the agent said. “I do think it has potential, though. Nice high ceilings and all that exposed brick. And there’s already lots of new development nearby.” She had helped him find the two previous locations for his new wine bars—the first at Fisherman’s Wharf and the second on Nob Hill—and she now had a good sense of what he wanted.