Jameson watched as Luna turned her head to meet his gaze. “I blame the margaritas.”
He laughed.
Chef divided a look between them. “What am I missing?”
“Nothing,” Luna said. “Nothing at all. I’ll catch up with you later to fill you in.”
Chef saluted her, set Fred down in a patch of sun, and then vanished back inside the café.
“So what was that?” Jameson asked Luna.
“Oh.” She looked at the café. “I don’t want them to worry.”
“I meant the lie.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You omitted the fact that you’re the other owner, which is the same as lying. Why?”
She blew out a breath. “You sure ask a lot of questions. Guys never ask questions.”
He doubted she knew how revealing a statement that was. “Then you’ve been with the wrong guys,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell your staff about the will?”
“Look, you might not know this about Silas, but he was a . . .”
“Hard-ass?” he supplied.
“Yes. And I was the go-between between him and the crew. They’re all worried we’re going to get shut down or sold, and I’m just trying to give them some peace of mind. If they worry, they won’t be able to concentrate on their jobs.”
“Even if getting sold is entirely possible?”
She looked away, and he knew she was doing enough worrying for everyone.
“Look, I get it,” he said. “You’re trying to protect them. But this isn’t your family or your friends, it’s work.” He paused. “Luna Always Right Wright.”
“You know why they call me that? Because it’s true.” She met his gaze. “And they are my family.”
She might consider them her family and friends, but he couldn’t imagine they felt the same. Not when, at the end of the day, she was now their boss. “I get that you’re all close,” he said, trying not to step on any of Luna’s mental land mines. “But—”
“You know what? Let’s just get back to our tour,” she said. “We can start at the orchards, where, as you know, we sell a bunch of trees every year and make a lot of our annual profits.”
When Jameson opened his mouth, she quickly continued. “Honestly, there’s no context if you don’t see the place first, and the magic of it all.”
“Luna, there’s no magic in math.”
“Fine.” She tossed up her hands. “Have it your way.” She led him past the café and away from the Square to a building, muttering something about men and tunnel vision as she gestured him inside. He could’ve said that she had tunnel vision as well, but decided to keep that to himself as he liked breathing.
She walked them through a very cluttered front room and down a hallway, where she pushed open a door. The room was small, the desk large. Or at least he assumed that was a desk straining beneath piles of paperwork, though it was actually hard to tell. Even the windowsill had stuff stacked on it. The only thing that didn’t was the chair in front of her desk, presumably for guests, although it was currently occupied by a baby goat wearing baby Yoda pajamas.
“Dammit Ziggy,” Luna said.
“Dammit who?”
“The goat. His name is Dammit Ziggy.” She said this with an utterly straight face, then turned to the tiny thing, hands on hips. “You need to stop breaking out of your pen or no treats for you. Do you understand?”
Ziggy—er, Dammit Ziggy—tipped his little head back and bleated to the ceiling in protest.
It was official. He’d entered the circus. He examined the room while Luna scooped up the goat, who set his little head on her shoulder.
Trying not to be moved by that, Jameson looked around. Besides the overabundance of paperwork, there was a horse bridle on a small credenza, next to a deflated Santa and every single one of his reindeer, all against a wall. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
Ignoring that, Luna gestured him to the now empty chair. He eyed the seat, which was covered in goat hair and possibly, hopefully, dust and not poop pellets.
“It’s just dirt.” She swiped at the seat a few times. “There. No longer as dirty as the sidewalk. Or the ass of your pants.”
His gaze met hers.
She laughed, a light musical sound that drifted over him, and a warmth spread through his belly at the sound. Even if he knew she was enjoying this. A lot. “You looked at my ass?” he asked.
“Just as you looked at mine.”
Not knowing what to do with that, he sat.
She did the same, in the chair behind the desk, Dammit Ziggy in her lap. Hard to believe he was envious of a goat, but there it was.
“Here,” Luna said, and pushed a big fat ledger across the desk to him. His fingers touched hers. Their eyes locked and he saw his own interest and a good amount of heat reflected back at him as the odd connection between them fluttered into a full-blown gale-force wind.
Dammit Ziggy jumped down from her lap and galloped around the desk. “Bleeeat.”
Jameson eyed the goat. He was tiny, the size of a very small dog, and staring at him with brown eyes with sideways pupils that held a lot of hope.
“He wants in your lap,” Luna said.
“We don’t always get what we want.”
Luna snorted. “No kidding.”
This had him looking at her. She looked right back before rolling her eyes at him.
“Bleeeat!”
“Warning,” she said. “He can out-stubborn a mule. And trust me, we have one, so I know what I’m talking about.”
Jameson sighed—and when the hell he’d started sighing, he had no idea—and patted his thighs. Dammit Ziggy leaped up into his lap, curling into a ball and closing his eyes.
Luna was grinning. “You’re going to be covered in fur, front and back.”
“Like you care.”
She laughed.
Ignoring both the pretty sound and the fact that her eyes lit like stars when she was amused, he opened the ledger. “Talk to me about this.”
“So at the end of the quarter, I mail everything off, ledger and receipts. Silas had someone handle it all on his end, then I’d get the ledger back. On the months we ran out of money, there was a line of credit I could pull from.”
Silas had been the “someone” to handle the farm’s books. It used to be that Jameson had done the books for Silas’s holdings—all except the farm, that is, because for whatever reason, the old man had always wanted to do it himself.
He had a feeling he’d just met the “reason” and her name was Luna.
Oh, the fights he and Silas had over this. Ignoring the memories, good and bad, Jameson took a deep breath and a few minutes to flip through the ledger. There were sticky notes everywhere in neon colors with things on them like Estelle the Emu’s vet bill from swallowing a handful of change and raccoon ate through the electrical in the barn again, requiring an electrician’s visit. Jameson stared at the numbers and rubbed the spot between his eyes, where a headache was forming.
“You okay?” Luna asked.
No. No, he was not okay. The numbers were shit, and they were bleeding money in ways that didn’t need to happen. He let out a careful breath, every analytical bone inside him twitching. “I see you kept up with Silas’s bookkeeping methods.”
She looked at him for a beat. “He called me every other week to talk about the bookkeeping and get up to date. Seemed like he liked what I was doing.” She shrugged. “So I hadn’t planned on changing anything.”
He could hear the wistfulness in her voice and realized he wasn’t the only one who’d lost Silas, even if she’d been kept in the dark about who he’d really been. “What do you know about the state of the books?” he asked.
“I know we’re not a huge moneymaker, but he seemed happy enough. Although I’m not actually sure Silas did happy.”
Something they could agree on.
“The attorney told me about the balloon payment.”
He nodded. “Without any cushion, we’re in a tenuous situation. I’m assuming the attorney didn’t tell you about Silas’s medical condition, and why there was no money to award you in the will.”
She shook her head.
“He had dementia. For an entire year before his death, apparently, though he told no one. Kept it to himself as he made one bad financial decision after another, depleting his cash accounts before wrapping his car around a tree one night.”
“I couldn’t tell from his calls,” she said softly. “Why wouldn’t he have told someone?”
“Probably because he knew he’d have lost some of his freedom that he greatly enjoyed. Like being alone.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she drew a deep inhale. “I’m sorry, for all of it. But it doesn’t change anything that’s going on here. I really hope you’ll get to know the place before you pass judgment.”
He had to laugh. “Oh, I passed judgment the second I saw the Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
“Hey, I lost a storage unit to the botanical gardens this year.”
“Did you also lose a vacuum?” he asked, turning another page on the ledger.
“Just wait until Dammit Ziggy wakes up and gets off your lap. Then you’ll see something that really needs a vacuum.”
He met her gaze. “Can we be serious for a moment?”
“I am being serious. Dammit Ziggy and his two siblings were rejected by their mama. For whatever reason, DZ thinks I’m a good surrogate. So I let him hang out here when he wants to.”
As stupid as it seemed, that reached him. He knew what it was like to be kicked out at a young age. “I understand.”
Luna looked surprised.
“What, you think I’m an uncaring asshole?”
She smiled. “Oh, it’s far too soon for me to pass judgment on you.”
Touché. “What’s with all the Post-it notes? They’re on every page.”
“Notes for the stuff I didn’t know what to do with.”
“Isn’t there a computer? Any digitalization at all? Where’s your—”
“Look.” She drew a deep breath. “Yesterday I learned that my boss wasn’t just my boss, he was also my bio grandfather, and that he left me a piece of this place. I’m . . .” She shook her head. “Shook. It’s hard to think.”
He nodded. “I understand that too. But it’s not just us involved in the bottom line here.”
“Right. The evil coven.”
A smile escaped him. “You mean the group of investors who own the loan?”
“Tomayto, tomahto.”
He didn’t want to be charmed, but he was. “So you understand the situation we’re in. The group expects the balloon payment to come in on time for funding the renovations on this place five years ago. With Silas gone, they’re circling like sharks, waiting to see what happens. They don’t care about staying in with Silas gone. So in sixty days, at the quarter’s end, they’re going to expect us to pay up or they’ll slap a big fat For Sale sign on the front of this place.”
“I’d like to buy them out.”
This did not surprise him in the least. “Do you have an actual plan for that?”
“My plan is what it’s always been. I’m going to do my best.”
Jameson was boggled. “Your best?” He shook his head. “You do realize this isn’t a rec league soccer game where there are no losers and everyone gets a participation award, right?”
Her eyes flashed. “Do you have a better plan?”
“Better than no plan? Yes.” He pulled out his laptop. “We make cuts, for starters. A lot of cuts. Then we go to the bank in town, the one that holds the personal line of credit Silas let you use, and we show them an actual feasible financial plan going forward and hopefully get a loan to pay off the investors.”
“And if they won’t give us a loan?”
“We could sell.”
“That’s going to be a hard no.” She paused. “And what sort of cuts?”
Ignoring her emphatic not-selling stance, he went back to the ledger. “You’ve got fifteen regular employees, and up to fifty seasonal employees.”
“Seasonal is for planting and harvesting times.”
“We’re labor heavy,” he said. “For instance, I could see the orchards from the front of the café, and there were four guys out there. Three were limbing, but one was just standing around looking at his phone.”
“That’s Jeb. He supervises the orchards. It’s a big job. We do crab apples for fall, Christmas trees for winter, and cherry blossoms in spring. How do you know he wasn’t working on his phone? Maybe he was googling something.”
“He looked like he was thumbing through videos and laughing. And I’m pretty sure he had a flask he kept taking sips from.”
“That’s his mom’s special hot chocolate. It’s freezing out there in the mornings and sometimes he needs a nip to keep warm. He rarely speaks, is a total introvert, and hates to be bothered, but he’s a tree whisperer. Stella had a dream he left and all the trees died.”
Jameson just looked at her. He had no idea who Stella was and didn’t care.
“He’s really, really good at his job. I won’t let him go. I won’t let any of them go.”
He scrubbed a hand down his face. “You’ve got the ferocity and courage of a lion, anyone ever tell you that?” He turned back to his laptop. “Okay, so you’ve got six people listed here as farmhands. Besides what we saw in the orchards, what else do they do?”
“Well, there’s the gardens too, and they also handle the rescue animals.”
“Right, which brings me to the division that brings in zero money,” he said, still looking at the ledger. “In fact, the rescues actually cost us.”
She crossed her arms. “We’re not getting rid of the rescue animals.”
He lifted his head and studied her. “What am I missing?”
“Nothing, other than we’re not making cuts.” She looked away. “I know. I get it. We need to make changes, but . . .” She met his gaze again, her own filled with anxiety and worry. “Look, I place loyalty above all else. The employees have all been here forever and are incredibly loyal to me. I can’t repay that by letting some of them go because I somehow messed up in managing the farm by not making enough money.”
Her enthusiasm and easy charm spread a warmth through him that he couldn’t afford, and he let out a breath. “It’s not your fault.” And it wasn’t. It was Silas’s.
She shrugged like she didn’t believe him but didn’t feel like arguing. “Also, on the subject of the rescue animals, our guests love them. They like that a lot of them wander around and can be petted and fed.”
He nodded. “But it’s also both an insurance and a legal nightmare. Insurance is a huge hit to our bottom line, a lot of which could be cut if we didn’t have them wandering free.”
“Not all of them are allowed to wander. Just the ones we’re one hundred percent positive are no danger to anyone.” She stared at him, steely eyed. Who knew those pretty blue eyes could turn to ice? “Rescuing neglected, abused, and abandoned farm animals is the best thing we do here,” she said. “If you want a way to negate the costs of that, then let’s do an annual calendar. And while we’re doing that, we can also let people sponsor an animal, meaning they cover the cost of their care, and in return they get their name on a plaque in front of their pen.”
He thought about it. “Genius,” he said. “And while we’re on this, I want to be clear. I’m not disputing that the rescue animals aren’t a worthy cause. I’m simply asking why you need so many farmhands, all of whom seem to set their own hours and work just enough hours to get benefits, but not quite full-time. We could lose a few and have everyone up their hours to full-time status, and still save money. And while we’re on that, do we pay Milo to do social media? Because his last tweet reads . . .” He accessed his phone. “‘Why do cows have hooves instead of feet?—because they lactose.’”
She grinned.
He just looked at her.
“Come on,” she said. “Yes, it’s an old joke, but it’s still funny.”
“What it is, if we’re paying him, is expensive.”
She didn’t say anything, which was usually his tactic. It was possible he’d underestimated her a little bit.
After a beat, she said, “I assume you’re drawing a salary now that you’re taking on Silas’s job of handling the books.” She smiled his own corporate raider smile at him. “I’d be happy to merge your job into mine and handle everything. We’d save your salary.”
Okay, so he’d underestimated her a lot . . .
Her cell rang. She pulled it from her pocket and stared at it with a frown. “Hello?” she answered suspiciously. There was a pause while she listened. “Who gave you my phone number? Oh, right. Chef . . . Yeah, sorry, now’s not a great time, but it’s sweet that you called. Thank you and goodbye.”
“Evan, I presume?” Jameson grinned. “Smooth. The poor guy never even got his spiel out before you hung up on him.”
“I’m not big on spiels.”
“You’re also not big on suits, apparently. At least without Hawaiian margaritas.”
She looked him over without giving a single sign of her thoughts. “I think you’ve got something stuck to your loafer, or whatever those shoes are called besides expensive.”
Jameson looked down. “Shit.”
“Exactly.”
Dammit Ziggy yawned and stood up in his lap, nearly ensuring Jameson’s family jewels never got to the “family” part.
Apparently taking mercy on him, Luna came around the desk and scooped up a very satisfied-looking DZ. “Look, why don’t you let me do what I do best and run this place, and you do what you apparently do best, and . . . wait. What is it that you do best exactly?”
Dammit Ziggy leaped from Luna’s arms back to Jameson’s lap. He grimaced. “I find vulnerabilities in companies and exploit them,” he said, having to crane his neck to the side so the goat couldn’t nibble his ear.
“Wow, you’ve got a terrible job,” she said. “How about you find our vulnerabilities and fix them. You know, use your powers for good instead of evil.”
He acknowledged that with a slight bow of his head. “I’m certainly willing to try.” But only because Silas had asked, not wanting her to get taken advantage of, even if he had a feeling Luna could take care of herself.
She smiled at him and he was pretty sure the ice encasing his heart cracked just a little. “Okay then,” she said. “So I’ll leave you to it. Partner.”
“Wait,” he said as she moved to the door. “You’re going to take the goat, right?”
Luna shut the door behind her. He could’ve sworn he heard her chortling to herself as she walked away.
From his lap, Dammit Ziggy sighed in pleasure and closed his eyes. Well, at least someone here liked him . . .