She choked a bit, but recovered, swallowing quickly and downing a gulp from her own glass. “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever been so flattered in my life.”
He laughed. “I meant it as a compliment. I like that you’re stubborn,” he told her, and before she could protest, he added, “My mom was born in Chile, but her family moved to California when she was only five years old. They spoke Spanish at home, though, and visited here often. When my mom was twenty-four, she came here for a graduate school project—her focus was agricultural engineering—and ended up working on my grandparents’ vineyard, where she met my dad. He followed her to California, where my sisters and I were born and raised, spoke only Spanish to us at home, and the rest is history.”
She sat back. “Wow. I hadn’t expected that. I mean, with a name like Komarov…”
Bruno shrugged. “There are a surprising number of Russians here that go back several generations. But my mother’s family is mixed. Some European, some indigenous, and even some African.”
“Is that why you come back? To visit your family?”
He nodded. “Something like that. But we also have businesses here, and my grandparents are quite elderly now. I help them run the vineyard, and manage the shipments to our warehouse in California.”
“Your warehouse? You produce that much wine?”
Lily was clearly impressed, and he felt flattered by her curiosity. For the first time, he felt like he was with a woman who was genuinely interested in the workings of his life, as opposed to how secure his financial status was, or whether he could make even more money than he already had. He could tell, just from the way her whole face was engaged in the conversation, that she would have shown just as much interest if he had told her that he was a welder or a rodeo clown.
Not that he was “with” Lily…
But you are, at least for now, a little voice in his mind said.
“Not from Santa Lucía,” he replied, thinking of the lovely, rambling house that his great-grandparents had built over a hundred years ago. “But we also have holdings in Napa Valley, and we import some foods and soft goods from Chile and Argentina into the United States. The warehouse holds all of that.”
“Wow, that’s more like an empire than a company.” She leaned forward and took up her utensils again, cutting into her potatoes, then paused with her knife hovering above her plate and cocked her head at him. “I’m kind of curious, though, Komarov. All that you have now…is it all that you’ve wanted?” She looked at him earnestly. “I mean, do you ever feel like you’ve had to sacrifice anything big to be where you are?”
He blinked. She wasn’t being arch or insulting. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised, given her own success, but the question was unexpected, just the same. The women he’d dated only cared about the material things he had, not the intangible things he’d had to give up. Leave it to this woman to break apart one more thing he’d taken for granted.
She was an amazing wom—
Wait a second.
“Komarov? Did you just call me by my last name?” He knew he was probably overreacting at the moment, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. He wanted—no, needed—to hear his name on her lips. Not Komarov. Bruno.
But she only looked at him with a half-smile playing on her lips. “It’s how I think of you. Besides, I don’t think we’ve known each other long enough to be on a first name basis.”
Lily was flirting with him. He liked Flirty Lily.
She took a sip of her wine to hide her smile, but he wasn’t fooled. “You told me to call you Lily, back in the elevator,” he reminded her.
“I was just trying to level the playing field. Didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable being a guest in my hotel room.”
He put a hand to his heart. “You are all that is generous,” he teased her back.
She waved her hand in the air. “More evidence that we don’t know each other that well,” she replied. But before he could protest, she cocked an eyebrow at him and said, “So? You didn’t answer my question.”
He toyed with his wineglass, tipping it back and forth by the stem, watching the color of the liquid change as it moved. Funny, that she was the first person to ask him such a thing when he had just been thinking of what his work had cost him.
“You don’t have to—”
“Recently, I’ve been—”
They both spoke at the same time, breaking the silence that he had allowed to stretch for too long.
He smiled. You don’t have to answer was what she was going to say. But he wanted to. He spoke quickly, before she could offer it again.