She went to her meeting, paid absolutely no attention for an hour, and then got in her car and drove home. When she walked into her house, she stood there and looked around. No. She couldn’t be at home alone all night. She had so much to do for the party, but all she would do was think about Luke. She texted Sydney.
MARGOT
Save me a seat at the bar
She texted back right away.
SYDNEY
Someday I’m going to make you make reservations, like a normal person
Margot laughed.
MARGOT
Never. Be there in ten
When she slid onto her seat at the bar, Sydney raised an eyebrow at her.
“Wine kind of night, or cocktail kind of night?”
Margot let out a sigh.
“Cocktail kind of week, more like.”
Sydney poured something or other in a shaker, along with ice, and then strained it all into a coupe glass.
“Here. And food is on its way, I’m sure.” Then she inclined her head slightly to Margot’s right. “Also. I got you a present.”
Margot took a sip of her cocktail—ooh, tart, and very strong, just what she needed—and then shifted her eyes to her right, certain what she would find.
A man. She shook her head.
“Why not?” Sydney asked. “It worked last time. Plus, you need a palate cleanser. You told me that you did!”
Margot picked up one of the arancini that landed in front of her.
“It worked well last time?”
Sydney laughed.
“I guess that depends on your definition of ‘well.’ It absolutely worked well until you got to work the next day, didn’t it?”
Margot just looked at her. Sydney sighed.
“Fine, just throw my present away like that. But haven’t you been saying that this is what you need to get over the last time?”
Sydney walked away without giving Margot a chance to answer.
“I’m not under the last time,” she muttered. At least Sydney hadn’t been able to call her on that lie.
“What was that?”
The man next to her turned to her, a curious, friendly expression on his face.
“Oh.” Shit. “I was just . . . chatting with the bartender.” She sighed. “She’s a friend of mine—she likes to push my buttons in the way that friends do.”
He laughed.
“I get that.” He hesitated, then turned to her all the way. “I’m Matt.”
She swore she could hear Sydney cackle. She held back a sigh. Fine.
“I’m Margot.” She’d at least ask this question right off the bat. “What do you do, Matt?”
He smiled at her.
“I’m a lawyer. I live in San Francisco, but I’m in town for a conference. I had to escape the conference hotel, you know how it is.”
A lawyer. Thank goodness. And he was definitely not the lawyer who occasionally did work for Noble—that lawyer was a woman.
“Oh, I know how it is,” she said. “Sometimes you need to get away.”
He laughed.
“Yeah—when you’re at these things, if you go to the hotel bar, you invariably run into a million people from the conference, and it’s just more hours of work. And the networking would probably be better for my career, but tonight I wanted a break from all of that, if you know what I mean.”
Oh, did she.
“I definitely do. I live up here, and almost everyone who lives here is more or less in the industry—we don’t quite all know each other, but there are a lot fewer than six degrees of separation, let’s put it that way.” She nodded in Sydney’s direction. “As you saw. If I want to take a break from work, I have to leave the state.”
He laughed. She did like a man who laughed at her jokes.
“Surely, not the whole state? Can’t you just go down to San Francisco?”
She took a sip of her cocktail and shook her head.
“I love the Bay Area, don’t get me wrong, but that’s work, too—I own a winery up here, so I spend a lot of time down there or in L.A. marketing our wines. Which is great, and we’ve been successful at that. But that’s why I have to get out of California for a true break. No restaurant is safe.”
His eyes opened wide when she said she owned a winery. She used to lie about that, or sort of minimize her role there to men. Say she was an executive at a winery, or she worked in sales at a winery, or sometimes just she worked at a winery. All of those things were true, but not the truth. And eventually, she’d gotten sick of it. If men were scared off by that, so be it.
They usually were.