“Good Lord, that much?” Megan didn’t think Henry’s vines were worth two hundred billion, but she knew what kind of numbers most wineries put out. It was an expensive business, and promotion took up a very large part of the budget because attracting new customers was so vital.
She’d done a little research—as much as she could—and had found no other California wineries selling Poulsard wine. If Dusi Heritage became the only place bottling it, that would be a huge promotional opportunity, even if the market for the wine itself was niche.
“Henry says he would have given their new vines over a fifty percent chance of succeeding. Which seems low to me, but I don’t know grapevines.”
“I don’t know about grapevines specifically, but I suspect that for an experimental vine, that’s very good.”
Megan must have been missing something. As far as she was concerned, you didn’t take risks with your money for a fifty percent chance of success. She might not have the funding for her own business yet, but she’d drawn up a detailed business plan for the day that she did.
Fifty percent? Oh no. When her business took off, she’d have every reason to count on it with far more than fifty percent confidence.
“How do you go about finding a vine thief?” Megan asked. “That’s got to be a complicated case.”
“It’s really more of a kidnapping than a theft.”
“What do you mean?” Megan saw Nico waving at her. “Hey, Katherine, let me call you back. Nico’s asking for me.”
“Okay.”
Megan’s phone went dead. Katherine wasn’t one for the polite, Southern “long goodbye,” and that afternoon she was grateful for it. She walked to Nico, resisting the urge to give the man a hug. Lord, he looked like he needed it.
She walked over and held out her hands. “What can I do? Do you want to do some kind of press release? Do I need to clear things from your schedule? Or help Danielle with anything? Do you need any help with the kids so you can be free to—”
“Let’s go to your office.” He pointed with his chin. “You still have that coffee maker in there?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I don’t think I could handle break-room coffee right now.”
“You look like you could use a shot of bourbon in that too.”
“I wouldn’t turn it down.” Nico pulled the door open and waited for Megan to walk through. “Don’t suppose you have a bottle?”
She looked over her shoulder. “You asking as my boss or a friend?”
“Megan, you work in a winery. You really think I frown on drinking at work?” He shrugged. “Within reason.”
They walked into her office, and Nico shut the door behind him before he collapsed into one of the upholstered chairs on the other side of her desk and dragged both his hands down either side of his face.
“Three years of work. Gone.”
Megan walked behind her desk, reached down, and pulled a bottle of Savannah 88 Bourbon & Honey from her bottom desk drawer. She set it on her desk and grabbed two coffee cups from the table behind her.
“Bourbon and honey?” Nico was clearly suspicious.
“Bourbon and honey, honey.” Megan poured two fingers in the bottom of a coffee mug. “I had to mail order this bottle, so say thank you, Ms. Alston.”
The corner of his mouth turned up, and it was the first time she’d seen his expression soften that day. “Thank you, Ms. Alston.”
“You’re so very welcome!” She grabbed her favorite coffee cup. It was a gentle spring pink and in fancy gold calligraphy it said Southern Women: Burying the Bodies and Baking the Casseroles.
She saw Nico struggling to read it, but she held her mug out to clink his. “To finding the rat bastards who stole your grapevines.”
“I’ll toast to that.” He took a sip. “Okay, that’s way better than it ought to be.”
Megan sipped her bourbon and rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you’ve bought into the ridiculous ‘if it doesn’t sear your throat, it’s not real bourbon’ crap. Good bourbon should be smooth as silk going down. It pairs perfectly with honey.”
He raised his mug. “I bow to your superior bourbon knowledge.”
“As you should.” She took another sip and reminded herself to order another bottle from Savannah Bourbon. Or have her daddy ship one. “What do you think are the chances they’ll be able to find who did it?”
“Probably not good.” He shook his head. “We’ve got cameras all over the place, but because the old greenhouse is up at the house, we’ve got nothing. I think Drew took castings and pictures of the tire tracks. That’s about the only lead he has.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Okay, I don’t know where we’re talking about.”
“Where we were growing the vines,” Nico said. “It’s not on the farm, it’s behind my house. My grandmother used to grow orchids. She was an absolute pro at them, used to give them as gifts to everyone. She even has one named after her. She was pretty well known for it. My grandfather built her a greenhouse at the back of the garden with all the bells and whistles. Retractable roof, lots of shelving, even a sheltered area for hardening off plants.”
“What does that mean?”
“You can’t just throw a plant that’s been started indoors into the outdoors. You need to gradually get them used to the environment. That’s where we were with the vines. There’s a section of the greenhouse that can be opened up to expose the plants to the elements.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It was going so damn well.”
“If it was open like you said, could anyone walking by have seen—?”
“No.” He shook his head. “When I say an elaborate greenhouse, I mean elaborate. It has an interior courtyard. From the outside, it’s all obscured. The vines were in the middle. You’d really have to be sneaking around my house to…” His eyes went wide. “Sneaking around.”
“What?”
“Beth has a new boyfriend.”
Beth was Nico’s daughter, and she was inches away from graduating high school. “And? That’s pretty normal for a girl her—”
“The kid is Charles Baur’s son.”
“Baur? Like Baur Cellars?”
Nico nodded. “What if Justin Baur saw the vines while he was sneaking around my house?”
“Why would he be sneaking around your house? Haven’t you invited this boy in and said hello?”
Nico shot her a dirty look. “He’s dating my daughter; I don’t like him.”
“As the mother of a teenage boy, I resent that whole macho nonsense about overprotective fathers. It’s ridiculous and insulting to your daughter and to this young man.”
“I have a teenage boy too. And I was a teenage boy.” He took another sip of whiskey. “Therefore, I do not like any teenage boy dating my daughter. I’m not going to clean my shotgun on the coffee table when he comes over, but I don’t have to like him.”
Megan rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I very much doubt that if he’s sneaking around your house, he’s thinking about grapevines. He’s probably thinking about Beth.”