Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 79209 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 396(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79209 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 396(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
I walked into his office, and it was the first time I’d directly interacted with him since I’d returned to the winery.
He was on the phone with someone, his back to me as he stared out the window. “Tuesday won’t work. Thursday is better. I’ll send you the details.” He hung up without giving the other person a chance to say anything. When he turned back to his desk, he didn’t seem surprised to see me there, like he’d managed to hear me walk inside and focus on his conversation at the same time.
There was this awkwardness between us, and an awkwardness that would probably always be there.
He sat behind his desk. “You have something for me, Frankie?”
“I have a lot of things for you.” My family had been calling me Frankie my entire life, and now that Wolfe called me Francesca, it was weird to hear the nickname again. I felt like it didn’t fit me at all. I used to dislike my name because it was too long, but when Wolfe said it…it was just perfect.
I approached his desk with my folder. “We’ve got a lot of outstanding orders, which means we have a lot of product just sitting in the warehouse. If we don’t get it moved, we’re going to run out of storage space—and lose customers.”
He nodded.
“I’ll talk to Roman and get that organized. Then I’ll meet with Jeremy tomorrow about the vineyard expansion. The fertilizer we ordered a couple weeks ago is supposed to be here this week, and it has a short shelf life.”
“Alright.”
“As for the guns, you have a few outstanding payments.”
“I do?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Rossi was supposed to pay his deposit before his shipment was delivered, but that never took place.”
He gave a quiet sigh.
“You could spin it. Say it was a gesture of trust.”
“I don’t trust anybody,” he said coldly.
“I met with the new distributor from Hungary. We won’t be able to meet that demand unless the harvest from the expansion is a success. I’m concerned about the soil there. It might be our land, but it’s acres away and on the other side of the hill, so I’m having a specialist come out and do a couple tests.”
“What will that matter?”
“Because if it’s not viable, we can save ourselves headaches and refunds by knowing now,” I said. “There are a few other outstanding balances, and Thomason said they’ve had some issues in America, so their next shipment is going to be delayed between one and two weeks.”
He gave another sigh in frustration. “Fucking idiots.”
“I don’t think it’s their issue, but a customs problem. They’ve had some changes in the States.”
“I don’t give a damn whose problem it is.”
“They’re loyal enough to be our exclusive distributor, so it would be stupid to give them shit. They could easily turn around and sell it to our competitors, but because Mary is your third cousin and family is family…no matter how diluted the blood is, they keep their word to us. So don’t you dare give them shit.”
My father released another irritated sigh. “You were gone for a little more than a week, and it immediately turned to chaos.”
“I’ve been doing it a long time.”
“Leo couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Well, he can’t read,” I teased.
My father didn’t laugh, just continued to look at me with that stare he used to give me, like he was proud of me. It lasted for a couple seconds before he rose to his feet. “I’ll handle Rossi. Give me a list of names from the remaining outstanding balances. I’ll send the crew.”
I already had it written down on a piece of paper, and I pulled it out of the folder and placed it on the desk. “It’s all right here.” I closed the folder and walked out without expecting anything further from him. When I reached the doorway, he said my name.
“Frankie.”
I turned back to look at him.
“Good work.”
It may have only been a week, but since our production was constant, it required continued oversight. Without anyone monitoring the process, it could quickly get out of hand. That led me to the warehouse where we stored the barrels of wine and the bottles. Most of the barrels were purely decorative, and private estates ordered them to place on their property for aesthetic reasons. The majority of our product was bottled in our production warehouse on-site before it was moved to storage. We outsourced our deliveries to a trucking company that carried the wine across the sea on the ferry before heading north up the mainland.
I went to each location in the warehouse and did my rounds, keeping up with our current productivity and storage to make sure nothing was missing. Leo wasn’t involved in any of these aspects. He was mostly a foot soldier, doing my father’s bidding with Andre and Salvatore. He was good at that, but he really had no experience actually running anything.