Once upon a time, not so long ago, that argument would have been a whole lot more convincing.
‘Do you really think there’s any doubt now?’
She turned away, her hand sweeping over bottle bases like they were her children. ‘We’ll disgorge and dosage in bigger lots, that’s all. Freight over several dozen at a time. But still, the plan will be to keep the wine on lees as long as possible. I’m not into factory-scale production. That’s not the way we operate, and I’m guessing it’s not the reason why Chatsfield Hotels picked us as their chosen supplier.’
She turned around a beat later, her eyes showing that she’d met his challenge head-on and faced it down. Her turquoise eyes gleamed in the light of the fire. ‘And now we’d better get this show on the road.’
Holly took one side of the room, Franco the other. They worked quickly without rushing, turning bottles a quarter turn to shift the lees in the neck of the bottle so it didn’t get stuck in the microscopic ridges in the glass, and with the pot-bellied stove crackling away and pumping out heat, soon it didn’t feel cold in the room at all.
They made a pretty good team, she thought, aware of the fluid movements of the man on the other side of the room moving to the rhythmic sounds of glass bumping against wood.
He’d stripped off his jacket and his shirt hugged his broad shoulders as he reached up to the highest bottles, the fabric pulling tight down his back to the belted moleskins he looked so good in.
If he made a move on her tonight, would she take it?
Should she?
He glanced over his shoulder and caught her spying on him. He smiled. ‘Checking up on me?’
She smiled back. ‘Yes.’
He laughed and turned back around, and she smiled at the bottles on the wall and had to remember to breathe.
What was she thinking?
He was a Chatsfield.
And yes, he was that, but he was also as good-looking as sin and he’d be gone in a few short weeks and it wasn’t like she really had to like him.
And when it all came down to it, she didn’t really dislike him. Not any more. Otherwise she couldn’t even begin to consider the germ of the idea that had been spinning in her mind all day. Sure, she hated the way he’d turned up, expecting them all to fall at his feet and hand over all that he’d expected, but he was more than that. He’d proven it in the couple of weeks since with a work ethic she never would have believed possible.
As for what was in it for her, well, if he was interested, it might even help her out with something that had been worrying her for a while.
He seemed interested …
And then they ran out of bottles and she checked the temperature in the freezer and declared it cold enough to freeze the neck of the bottles and they started the real work, placing bottles neck-down into the freezing liquid.
She’d planned the workspace to suit herself. There was no automated production line like you’d find in a factory set up for big volume processing. This was a boutique enterprise and the boutique label meant that the disgorging, dosaging, corking and caging functions were all wedged between the freezer and a bar topped by a single massive slab of timber.
Working by herself had never presented any problems.
Working with Franco was a different matter.
He seemed to be everywhere in the small space, his long arms never far away or his big feet taking up the floor, and there was no way that two bodies sharing the task wouldn’t brush, contact or otherwise collide with each other along the way.
For a woman hovering on the cusp of one of the most important decisions in her life, it was proof positive that she hadn’t lost her ability to make a decision based on sound, sensible criteria. Not when a brush of fabric against fabric, or skin against skin, sent her senses humming and her skin tingling all the way to her bones. Not when the touches seemed not always to be accidental—and they were the most shimmying, tingly contacts of all, when she would look up and see him watching her and feel the heat all the way down to her toes.
Somehow some part of her stayed focused enough to concentrate on the job. Somehow they managed to establish a routine. He passed her the bottle from the freezer, the lees trapped in the frozen neck of the bottle, and she flipped the crown seal releasing the frozen plug of lees into the keg-shaped disgorging booth, before dosaging the wine with the sweet liqueur. After which Franco corked it and twisted on the muselet, the metal cage that held down the cork under pressure. They had to work quickly. The tricky bit was not letting the pressurised contents shoot out after the crown seal blew off or after the wine had been dosaged, but Holly was a pro at this job and she didn’t lose a drop.