Taste （Cloverleigh Farms, #7）
Melanie Harlow
ONE
GIANNI
I didn’t have to go through the tasting room at Abelard Vineyards to get to the kitchen—in fact, it was out of my way—but I never missed an opportunity to mess with Ellie Fournier.
Sure, she was the boss’s daughter and our moms had been best friends forever, but I’d been pushing her buttons since we were six years old and didn’t see any reason to stop just because we were now adults and co-workers.
If anything, it was even more fun now that the restaurant her parents had hired me to open at their winery was up and running. Since she was in charge of the wine list and worked the floor as sommelier, she had to put up with me every single day.
Believe me, I made the most of it.
And I always got a rise out of her. You’d think she’d just ignore me by now, but no—she consistently gave me the satisfaction of a scowl, a dirty look, a barb hurled in my direction. But I couldn’t help myself. There was just something so irresistible about getting under her skin—I was a kid in a candy store around Ellie Fournier.
I took the steps down to the lower level and found her in the usual spot behind the tasting room’s long wooden bar, inspecting wineglasses with a critical eye, lifting them up to the light to ensure they were each perfectly clean. It was Monday morning, which meant the tasting room and restaurant were closed. Although I loved a crowd, the quiet was kind of nice. Even in January, weekends here were jam-packed. Etoile, with only eight tables, was booked out every Friday and Saturday night for months. We had phenomenal reviews for everything from the food to the wine to the setting to the service. I’d like to take all the credit—and sometimes around Ellie, I did, just to bug her—but the truth was, much of it had to be shared with her.
She was fucking dynamite on the floor every night. Smart and energetic and approachable, with an innate talent for pairing food and wine. And she never came off as stuffy or snobby like a lot of sommeliers did—she was genuinely friendly and welcoming to everyone.
Except me.
“Morning, princess,” I called as I approached the bar. Since it wasn’t technically a workday, I was surprised to see her wearing charcoal dress pants and a black blouse that tied in a bow at the neck. I swear she had that blouse in every color of the rainbow—she never wore anything low-cut. Her long, reddish-brown hair was neatly pulled back into a ponytail, the way it always was on the job.
“Could you please not call me that?” She frowned at a smudge on the glass in her hand and set it aside. “I’m not a princess.”
“But you were.” When we were kids, Ellie used to compete in pageants, and I never got tired of teasing her about them. “And old habits are hard to break.”
“Try, please.”
I could tell from her tone and expression she was already in a mood. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Boy trouble? Need me to bust some kneecaps?”
She rolled her light brown eyes. “If you must know, it’s the weather forecast.”
“What about it?”
“They’re predicting a ton of snow later tonight.” She picked up a white linen napkin and rubbed the rim of a glass. “Like a solid ten inches.”
“Really?”
“Yes. They’re calling it the blizzard of the century.” She put the glass in a quilted storage box. “How have you not heard about it? It’s all over the news.”
“I never watch the news.”
“Why not?”
“Do you ever feel good after watching the news?”
She thought for a second. “I guess not.”
“That’s because it’s all bullshit created to scare you into watching more news, so they can solve the problems they made up in the first place.”
One of her brows peaked. “Says the guy who starred on a reality TV cooking show called Lick My Plate. Talk about bullshit.”
“Hey, I’m not saying Lick My Plate wasn’t bullshit, but at least it wasn’t pretending to be anything but entertainment.” I took a sip of my coffee. “And I was very entertaining. My tagline was ‘too hot to handle.’ And whenever I was onscreen, they played that old song called ‘Fever.’”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, turning away with a shrug. “I never saw it.”
“Really? Because your mom told me you guys never missed an episode.”
She picked up another glass and held it to the light. “I may have been in the room when it was on a couple times.”