“Oh right.” He frowned. “Are you coming?”
Megan shook her head. “Sunday’s my day off.”
“Not to work, just to eat.” He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “You know, and hang out. Maybe… play horseshoes?”
Megan couldn’t stop the corner of her mouth from twitching. “I am not using my telekinesis to help you win at horseshoes.”
Since she and her two best friends had gained psychic powers a little over two years ago, there was a select group of people who’d discovered their secret. The fact that her friend Toni’s cousin had been let in on that little fact was a direct result of a life-threatening situation and hadn’t exactly been Megan’s idea. Still, Nico had kept his mouth shut even if he did try to nudge her into cheating at horseshoes for him.
“Oh, come on.” Nico spread his muscular arms wide. “You used it to, like, stop a murderer from blowing up my wine caves. You can’t use it to help a friend win a bet or two?”
She opened the door with a slight frown creasing her forehead. “You really don’t see the difference between those two situations?”
“I mean… a little.” He walked halfway to the door, hooking his thumbs in his well-worn denim jeans. “Kind of? It’s for a good cause.”
“You should still be thanking me for saving the wine caves. Goodbye, Nico.” She walked out and let the door swing shut behind her.
As she rounded the corner of the main office, she nearly walked into Henry, Nico’s winemaker and Toni’s boyfriend. “Oh hey! Sorry about that.”
“No worries. Did you talk to Nico about the wine-barrel thing?”
She looked up. Megan barely came up to Henry’s shoulder, so she was talking to his chest. “He’s going to ask you to modify a barrel rack so Ashley can get her picture spot.”
“Perfect. I have a great idea on how we can make it so you can decorate the rack too. Maybe put a banner or paint the front with that black chalkboard paint to personalize it.”
“Oh, good thinking!” She patted his shoulder. “You’re good at this. You sure you want to keep making wine?”
The top of his cheeks turned a little rosy. “Oh, I’ve just had a few ideas over the years. You know, in case I ever get married. I’d want to have the reception at a winery, you know? So… yeah. Just have some ideas.”
Megan wanted to pinch his cheeks, which was a weird impulse to have for a man in his midthirties who was expecting his first child with one of her best friends in the world. She let Henry continue to his boss’s office, then pulled out her phone and called Toni.
Toni answered the phone with the clamor of heavy machinery, air compressors, and shouting men in the background. “Wine Friday?”
“Aren’t you something like eight months pregnant?” Megan went to her tiny office at the back of the warehouse, grabbed her purse, and headed for her car. The meeting with Nico was the last thing she’d had to do at the winery. “You can’t have wine.”
“I’ll just sniff your glasses,” Toni said. “Call Katherine. I’m sure she doesn’t have anything going on. She and Baxter are hermits.”
“True.” And it was likely that Toni was right. “Let me check with my oldest and Katherine. If Trina’s busy and Katherine’s free, I’ll come down, pick you up, and we can chill at the beach for a little while. Adam and Cami are at Rodney’s this weekend.”
“And Trina didn’t want to join?”
“Ha. I’ll call you.”
Toni was well aware that Megan’s nineteen-year-old daughter, having recently graduated from high school and under no further legal obligation to visit her father, would have nothing to do with him at all unless her younger brother and sister begged her.
Her oldest had stayed on the coast after high school to take a gap year and do an internship at the local marine-research institute, but Megan suspected it was more to help her younger siblings through their parents’ divorce.
Still, if you had to pick a place to spend a gap year, Trina’s new hometown wasn’t a bad place to be.
Moonstone Cove was a tiny city in Central California, a spot nestled in the curve of the rocky coast that crawled into the sunbaked hills of Central California where grapes dominated the landscape, producing some of the best wines in the state. There was a state college at Moonstone Cove where Katherine and her husband Baxter both taught and an oceanic research institute at the tip of North Beach. There were golf courses and a thriving agricultural community, and many of the members liked having very fancy parties.
And Megan was there to plan them.
She quickly called her daughter. “Hey, honey! What do you have going on tonight?”
“Hey, Mama. I’m probably just gonna stay in; I’m pretty whipped. We were cleaning the boat today.”
“How fun and glamorous the yachting life must be.”
“Research vessels are the most glamorous ever,” Trina said. “Especially the barnacles.”
Megan smiled. “I was going to head over to Katherine’s with Toni. You good for dinner?”
“I already grabbed a burrito on the way home. I’m gonna eat and fall asleep in about five minutes.”
“Sounds like a full night. Love you, baby girl.”
“Love you too.”
She’d thought about returning to Atlanta as her oldest would be doing for college in the fall, but Megan had decided that running back to Georgia felt too much like letting Rodney win. Plus Adam and Cami had taken to life in California like ducks to water. They’d quickly made friends and settled into a smaller school. Cami was learning to surf, and Adam was happy to be playing on the high school’s basketball team, which he’d never been competitive enough to make back at their mammoth school in Atlanta.
Despite his easygoing demeanor, Adam was the one she worried about most. He was seventeen and would be graduating soon but seemed to have no idea what he wanted to do despite having amazing grades and good extracurricular activities. Trina had been headed toward studying biology since middle school, and at fifteen, Cami was shaping up to be Megan’s dreamy and artistic child. She was already looking at art schools in Northern California.
But Adam?
Her boy had no idea what he wanted to do.
Added to that, Adam had been a boy who adored his father. Seeing Rodney cheat on Megan so publicly and in such a small community had soured their relationship, and Megan wasn’t sure what she could do to help or if she was supposed to help at all. A part of her was glad that Adam was in her corner even though she knew that her son needed to resolve things with his father.
It was a horrible place for a young man to be, trying to reconcile a parent’s bad actions with the person his heart still loved.
Thinking about motherhood made her think about Toni again, which reminded her that she needed to call Katherine. She used her voice command to call the most awesome physicist she knew.
“Hello?” Katherine’s distracted voice came over the line. “Megan?”
“Wine Friday?” It was all she needed to say.
“Oh, thank God.” Katherine let out a long breath. “Yes. I had office hours today. Freshman are so needy.”