Chapter 25
Twenty-five
‘I’m really sorry,’ Joe said, coming over to where Kenzie was pouring herself another glass of wine. It was definitely shaping up as a two-glasses-of-wine kind of evening. ‘It just came out.’
The quick, albeit annoying, pep talk from her sister had helped considerably. ‘It was an accident. We hadn’t really decided when the right time would be,’ Kenzie said, trying to be kind. Although, it had preferably not been in front of the entire family.
‘That’s my husband, Mr Put-his-foot-in-it,’ Floss said dryly, slipping her arm around the big man’s waist.
‘It’s true. I’m always getting myself into trouble.’
‘It all seems to have worked out,’ Kenzie said, looking over at her daughter, sitting with Vera and the two boys as she was obviously explaining how everyone was related. ‘She doesn’t have any cousins back home, so she’ll love that she does now.’
‘I can only imagine how much you’ve had to deal with lately. Ewan explained what happened. Must have been like being sideswiped for both of you,’ Floss said.
‘And then some,’ Kenzie agreed with a small smile.
Dinner was announced, a welcome distraction. Kenzie followed the others into the dining room, where the long timber table had been set with elegant Royal Albert bone china.
‘Poppy, would you like to sit with Cameron and Angus?’ Vera asked, ‘Or would you prefer to sit with Mummy?’
Poppy immediately glanced up hopefully at Kenzie. ‘Can I sit with the boys?’
‘Sure, if you want to.’
She watched her daughter scamper off to the other end of the table, where a slightly lower children’s table had been set up.
‘We only use this dining room for special occasions, and we find the table’s always too high for the children to reach properly,’ Vera said. ‘So they get their own special one.’
It was nice to see how family-orientated they were. Just like her own family, really … without the manor house … and gazillion acres … and money …
Ewan pulled out a seat for her, opposite his sister and brother-in-law. She smiled slightly as she sat down, admiring the dinner set laid out on the table. It was the same as her grandmother’s, a pretty red rose design which brought back a flood of memories and a wave of homesickness.
‘Everything okay?’ Ewan asked quietly from beside her.
‘Yep. Fine. You?’ After all, he’d known he was a father for just over a week, but now he was a daddy.
‘Yeah. Good,’ he said, not quite succeeding in trying to sound casual. The joy was radiating off him.
The marble fireplace mantelpiece dominated the wall behind the head of the table with its intricate carvings.
A large marble statue of a semi-naked woman holding a candlestick held centrestage, and although Kenzie knew next to nothing about art, this particular piece looked extremely old and very expensive.
It was a lot to take in, everything was just so … grand.
Dinner was a pleasant surprise, not something posh and unpronounceable, but a good old-fashioned Sunday roast with all the trimmings. Again, the similarities between this and her own family’s get-togethers were unexpected.
She found Floss and Joe refreshingly easy to talk to, and listening to their banter and gentle teasing made her smile. She occasionally sent a covert glance sideways at Ewan to gauge his reaction and found he looked far more relaxed tonight than he had since they’d arrived.
‘How did you and Joe meet?’ Kenzie asked.
‘Joe was working for one of the clients—a winery in Italy—that my company was doing some advertising for. While my boss was talking to the client in the carpark, I wandered across to a nearby vine and picked a grape. Well, next minute I hear, “Oi! You’re not allowed to eat the grapes!” Then, after scaring the hell out of me, this big, giant Australian walks across and laughs.
I’d been working in England and didn’t speak Italian, so hearing an Australian accent for the first time in about two years made a pretty big impression. ’
‘I thought it was my charm and good looks that made the impression,’ Joe said, looking offended.
‘No, darling,’ she said, lightly patting his hand. ‘It was the accent.’
‘So you were working for an Italian winemaker, Joe?’ Kenzie asked.
‘At that point,’ he said. ‘Before that, I’d been working my way around France, Germany, Spain and New Zealand.’
‘Wow. That must have been an awesome experience.’
‘Sure was. After school, I left for a gap year, and it turned into a ten-year working pilgrimage.’
‘And that’s how I discovered wine,’ Floss said. ‘When you fall in love with a vigneron, it’s very hard to get his attention away from anything that isn’t a vine or a wine.’
‘And she turned out to be even better at this whole thing than I am—go figure,’ Joe said with a grin.
‘We haven’t heard the way you two originally met,’ Callum said from the head of the table, having sat silently throughout the majority of the conversation so far.
Kenzie slowly chewed the mouthful of roast pork she’d just put in her mouth, hoping the delay would give Ewan time to come up with a good, clean lie.
‘We met at a nightclub in Surfers Paradise,’ he said.
Okay, so we’re going with the sordid truth. She struggled to keep the dismay from her face.
‘Where many a budding romance starts,’ Floss put in helpfully.
Kenzie swallowed her bite. ‘I’m afraid it wasn’t as interesting as your story,’ she said, looking at Floss and Joe.
‘Everyone’s story is interesting,’ Vera said from her seat near the children.
‘And how long were you and my son together before you … lost track of one another,’ Callum asked.
Why the fuck was he interrogating her? ‘Not very long, actually. I thought he was a backpacker on his way home. Turns out, home wasn’t Scotland, as I’d thought,’ she said, hoping Ewan had suddenly developed telepathic powers and was picking up on what she was threatening to do to him if he didn’t step in.
‘Then another chance meeting, years later,’ Ewan said. Not unhelpful, but certainly not enough.
‘It was fate,’ Floss said with a happy sigh.
‘The property is very impressive,’ Kenzie said, hoping to steer the conversation away from the direction it had been heading. ‘Ewan took us for a bit of a drive around yesterday.’
‘Built from the ground up,’ Callum told her. ‘When we bought it, it had been run into the ground.’
‘You’ve done an amazing job, making it what it is today, then,’ Kenzie said, and she wasn’t just saying it to feed Callum’s ego as a peace offering. It was a massive venture and she’d been awestruck with the scale of the operation.
‘It’s the biggest station in the district,’ Callum said, leaning back in his chair. ‘The only other industry around here that employs more staff locally are the mines.’
‘How many do you employ?’ she asked.
‘Somewhere around the hundred mark,’ Callum said. ‘Plus seasonal workers,’ he added with a shrug.
It was quite difficult to get her head around the scope of the operation. The sheer size of the property was difficult enough to comprehend, but the number of people it took to run it was also a lot to digest.
The meal continued, with Ewan and Joe talking about the latest vintage, and Floss and Kenzie talking about impossible clients and swapping stories of near-disasters.
Vera chimed in occasionally but was mainly happy to watch her grandchildren.
Callum, on the other hand, drank and observed the table with disinterest.
‘Dessert,’ Vera announced as Peggy came into the room. ‘Kenzie, you are in for a treat. Peggy’s made her famous apple pie just for you and Poppy.’
The pie looked delicious, as did everything this woman baked, and Kenzie wondered if she was going to fit into any of her clothes in a few more days if she kept eating like this.
Later, Kenzie sat back and groaned. ‘That was the best apple pie I think I’ve ever tasted,’ she told Peggy after coffee was served and everyone had begun drifting from the table.
‘I’m glad you liked it,’ she said.
‘Do you live in?’ she asked, wondering at the hours the woman worked. She was there first thing in the morning and still late at night, cleaning up after meals.
‘Yep, got a cottage just out the back. It used to be the big house kitchen way back when. It’s old as the hills,’ she added. ‘Do you have family out here?’
‘Not anymore. My husband used to work for the Campbells when they first bought the place. We were here with the last owners and they kept us on. Errol was killed in an accident not long after they took over, but I stayed on. I’m part of the furniture now.’ She chuckled.
Kenzie liked the laid-back nature of the woman.
Nothing seemed to faze her, and she didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by her employers—speaking her mind and joking with them.
Even Callum didn’t seem to bother her. Earlier, she’d heard Peggy giving him a lecture about his boots leaving mud on the floor she’d just mopped, and—even more interestingly—Callum had apologised and looked duly chastised.
With farewells said to Floss and her family, Kenzie herded a tired Poppy upstairs. It had been another exhausting day and she couldn’t wait to climb into her own bed and close her eyes.