However, I needed to remember who I was dealing with. He was going to help his parents, and roll on out of here back to his life in San Francisco. It wouldn’t matter if we were friends or not because in a few days, he’d be gone. And who knew when I’d see him again.
I opened my calendar and sighed. My bridezilla was coming today for an in-person meeting. I was not looking forward to spending an afternoon with Miss Victoria Jones. And to make matters worse, I’d started my period. My lower back and hips ached something fierce.
When it came to the bridezilla, my only consolation was that she was marrying a man named Victor Cockburn. Not only was her husband-to-be’s first name only two letters different from her own, his last name was Cockburn. Cock. Burn. It sounded like something he should see a doctor about.
So while Miss Victoria was micromanaging me to death, I amused myself by making up new versions of her impending last name. Burningcock. Cockdisease. Redcock. Cockrash. Not that I’d be anything less than totally professional on the outside. But what went on in my head was none of her business.
She was late—because of course she was—and she brought her maid-of-honor, Heather. They weren’t related, but they looked, and dressed, so much alike, I had a hard time telling them apart. Big blond hair. Bright pink manicures. Leggings with tan Uggs. They were a couple of pumpkin spice nightmares. I plastered on a smile and led them to one of the meeting rooms upstairs.
“Can I get you ladies anything?” I asked.
“No, we’re doing a juice cleanse,” Victoria said.
I wondered how her bestie felt about that. Heather nodded, but her enthusiasm seemed forced.
“Water, then?” I asked.
“Is it filtered?” Victoria asked.
I opened the mini-fridge and pulled out two waters. “Bottled.”
Victoria put her giant wedding binder on the table and set her water next to it. We all took a seat, and Victoria flipped through the thick pages. She had magazine clippings, print-outs, notes—both handwritten and typed—samples, and who knew what else in that binder of hers. The first time she’d met with me, I’d asked her if she’d been working on the binder since she was little. I’d meant it as a friendly joke, but she’d looked at me with a straight face and said she’d started it when she was five.
Okay, then.
“So, I have some changes to the décor to make sure everything matches my vision.” Victoria flipped through a few more pages. “Here. I need it to look like this.”
I took a second to peruse the photos she’d laid out. Her ceremony was supposed to be outdoors, in our main garden area. The photos were all indoor venues.
“Why don’t you tell me which parts of this are the most important to you,” I said. “Because there’s a lot here we can replicate, but some won’t translate to an outdoor space.”
“This is what I want,” she said, gesturing to the entire page.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, these pictures have a lot of lights hanging from the ceiling to create that overhead twinkle effect. We don’t have a ceiling outside.”
“I’m sure you can figure something out,” she said. “Can’t you build a structure to drape the lights from?”
Build a structure? For fuck’s sake. Cocksting. Smokingcock. Victoria Cockpain. “I don’t think new trellises are in the budget, I’m afraid.”
She took a deep breath, like she was trying very hard to control herself. “How many more disappointments am I going to have this week?”
Heather made a sympathetic cooing noise. “Oh sweetie, I know, you’re dealing with so much.”
I was very practiced at keeping my thoughts from showing in my expression when I was with clients. So I kept my face carefully pleasant, even though my uterus was wreaking havoc on my lower half and my bridezilla’s dramatics made me want to bang my head against the table.
I also knew it was usually best to keep quiet and let the bride realize I wasn’t going to jump through hoops to appease her. I’d make her happy to the best of my ability, within the budget she—or in this case, her parents—had set. Outside of that, there wasn’t anything I could do. I’d had to learn early to set boundaries with some of my brides, or they’d demand the moon and throw a tantrum when they realized it wouldn’t fit through the door.
“Well, what can you do with lights outside?” Victoria asked with a roll of her eyes.
“We can light up the garden for you,” I said. “We’ll put twinkle lights in the trees and shrubs. And if you decide to use a trellis or arch for the ceremony, we can use lights on that, too.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing,” she said.
Better than nothing. God, how did this girl find someone to fucking marry her? I felt sorry for Victor and his burning cock.
“All right, twinkle lights in the garden,” I said.
The rest of the meeting was more of the same. About half her ideas were things that would work for an indoor wedding, and the other half were for outdoors. It was like she hadn’t really decided on what she wanted. Or she’d just gone crazy on Pinterest and hadn’t paid attention to the details—just pinned pretty pictures and brought them to me to demand I replicate them.
The more she talked, the more I thought it was probably the latter. Victoria wanted what she wanted, and that was that.
By the time we finished, my face hurt from keeping my expression neutral, and my cramps were reaching the point where all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry. I walked Victoria and Heather out to the lobby and said a polite goodbye, then went upstairs to my office. I wished I could call it a day, but I had a group coming for a breakfast tomorrow. I needed to get the second tasting room rearranged.
After checking my email, I went down to the tasting room to make sure it would be ready for tomorrow’s breakfast. The tables were all separated, and I started moving chairs out of the way so I could push them together.
Roland looked in. “Hey, need a hand with that?”
“Um, sure,” I said. “I’m just putting the tables together.”
He came in started scooting chairs back. I glanced at him, wondering what he was doing. At first, he’d barely acknowledged my existence. Now he was suddenly my helper? It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate him lending a hand. I just wasn’t sure why he was doing it.
We got the tables situated and put the chairs back in place. There were a few extras, so I pulled them off to the side of the room near the window.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, breaking the silence.
I glanced over. “Nothing.”
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“That thing you do where you’re hurt but you minimize it,” he said.
“I’m not minimizing anything.”
“The fuck you are,” he said. “You keep wincing. What’s wrong?”
I rolled my eyes. Well, if he really wanted to know… “I got my period. I have cramps. Happy now?”
He grunted, rubbing the back of his neck, and I figured that was the end of it. Saying I got my period had to be one of the top five ways to get a man to shut up.
“Sit down,” he said.
“What?”
“Sit.” He turned a chair around. “Backwards. Straddle it.”
I eyed him with suspicion. “Why?”
“Just do it.”
I sat, facing backward, my legs on either side. Roland pulled another chair close and sat behind me. He dug his thumbs into my lower back and started rubbing.
“Here?” He pressed his thumbs behind my hips.
“Yeah.”
Silently, he rubbed circles on my lower back, hitting just the right spot. God, that felt good. Really good. The aching tension melted away beneath his skilled hands.
He remembered.
He’d always rubbed my back like this when I had cramps. And he still knew exactly how to do it. Knew right where to put pressure—what would make me feel better.
Leaning forward against the cha
ir, I let my body relax. I tried not to worry about the fact that this was Roland giving me a back rub. That maybe I should be a little more cautious about letting him touch me. None of this felt sexual, but it did feel… intimate. A reminder of our shared past. This was the kind of thing couples did—people who didn’t mind being raw and real around each other. Who left the bathroom door open and picked up each other’s dirty socks. Who’d been through the starry-eyed romance phase, and seen each other at their worst.
We’d been there, once. It seemed like such a long time ago.
He stopped rubbing. “There. Better?”
I realized my eyes had closed. I took a deep breath and opened them. “Yeah. Thank you.”
“Sure.”
Shannon poked her head in the door. “Oh, hi, Roland. Zoe, the front desk got a call asking about booking an anniversary party. They’re sending the woman’s contact information to you.”
I quickly stood and smoothed my hair down, feeling like we’d been caught doing something we shouldn’t. “Sure, I’ll call her back.”
“Thanks.” Her eyes moved from me to Roland, then back to me again.
“Is Dad in his office?” Roland asked.
“He should be,” she said.
“I need to talk to him.” Roland didn’t look at me before he walked past his mom and out the door.
Thankfully, Shannon just smiled and left, following Roland out. I didn’t want to answer questions about what we’d been doing in here. The answer, of course, was nothing. He’d stopped to help me move chairs, then given me a back rub. So what? That wasn’t significant.
Except it sort of was.
My cramps felt better, but there was another ache growing inside of me. An ache with two distinct sides. The side that longed for those hands to touch me again, and the side that was afraid to face the pain of what it would do to me if they did.
8
Roland
I left the tasting room, both annoyed and glad that my mom had interrupted. Rubbing Zoe’s back had been like a reflex. I’d done it for her so many times before, I barely thought about it. Not until I was sitting right behind her with my hands on her back. It was crossing a line to touch her like that. I’d need to be more careful.
Pushing thoughts of Zoe out of my mind, I focused on the issue at hand. I’d sent my dad a preliminary plan to get the winery back on track. It lacked detail—there was a lot on the production side that I still needed to review—but it was a start.
I hadn’t seen much of my dad since I’d been here. He was clearly avoiding me, which was just as well. We’d never had a great relationship, not even when I was a kid. Always arguing—butting heads. He’d been critical of everything I did, later claiming he’d been hard on me to build my character. All it had really done was make me feel like nothing I did would ever be good enough for him.
Eventually, I’d stopped seeking his approval.
I found him in his office. “Hey, Dad. Have you looked over the draft plan I sent you?”
“Not yet,” he said, not looking up from his computer screen. “I’ll get to it. Hotel reading.”
“Hotel?” I asked. “Are you going somewhere?”
“Yeah, I’m out of town for the next few days,” he said.
“You know, that’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. “Your travel expenses are really high. That’s one of the places you could cut back.”
He tapped his finger on his desk, finally looking at me. “That’s tough. Travel is part of running this place. I can’t really change that.”
“Well, something has to change,” I said. “I can’t make money appear out of nowhere. You have to cut your expenses, or dramatically increase your revenue. I have some ideas about that, too, but the expenses have to be addressed.”
“It’s not like I’m flying first class and staying in high-end hotels,” he said. “If we have to cut expenses, we should start looking at the rest of our overhead. Salaries, for starters.”
I took a deep breath. Why did business owners always want to start by cutting staff? “If you’re overstaffed, that’s one thing. But you don’t have that many employees. I don’t think that’s the problem. If you start laying people off, morale is going to suffer. And people are going to assume those rumors about Salishan are true.”
“What rumors?”
“Apparently people are saying Salishan is in trouble,” I said. “Although I guess they aren’t really rumors if they’re true.”
His face reddened, and the vein in his forehead stuck out. “What people? Who’s saying we’re in trouble?”
“People in town. Chase and Cooper mentioned it.”
“Damn it.” He scrubbed his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair and leaned back.
I didn’t understand why he was so upset. Since when did he care what people around town said? “A little town gossip is the least of your troubles.”
“Reputation is everything,” he said. “Especially in this day and age. What people say about a place can make or break it faster than you could imagine.”
“Sure, but we’re not talking about a scathing review in a wine magazine,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter.” He closed his laptop and stood. “I have to get moving or I’ll be late.”
“Dad, I really need you to review that draft,” I said. “And I have a lot more questions for you. There are some things in the books that don’t add up.”
He grabbed his things and draped his coat over his arm. “It will have to wait until I get back.”
I stepped aside as he brushed past me and out the door. I took another deep breath—I was doing that a lot lately—and clenched my fists, feeling my fingernails dig into my palms.
Why the fuck was I doing this? He didn’t want my help. He was going to fight me at every turn, either by opposing my suggestions or blowing them off. It was like he’d rather fail than admit I might be right.
Voices carried from outside his office. My mom was talking to him. I couldn’t make out what she said, but there was no mistaking the frustration in her voice. I heard a few sharp words from him, then his heavy footsteps walking away.
A moment later, Mom appeared in the doorway. Her hair was pulled back and her face was calm. But I knew her. She always tried to hide her stress from us kids. When I was younger, I hadn’t been able to see through her façade. I could now—could see the undercurrent of frustration just below the surface of her smile.
This was why I was here. For her.
“Hey, Mom.” I opened my arms and she stepped into my embrace.
She squeezed and patted my back. “I guess he’ll be back Friday.”
“Why does he travel so much?” I asked. He always had, my whole life. I’d never understood why running a winery caused him to be out of town so often.
“A lot of reasons,” she said. “Sometimes he visits other vineyards. We source some of our grapes elsewhere for more variety, and he likes to check up on their operations. He has meetings with our distributors. He likes to meet with people in person.”
“It’s expensive,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Unfortunately, he doesn’t listen to me when it comes to the business.”
Another thing I’d never understood. My mom had grown up here. She’d lived and breathed this place her entire life, but Dad had always kept her out of the business side of things.
“Well, someone’s going to have to start making him listen,” I said.
She smiled at me, but it was a dispirited, tired smile. “Have I thanked you lately for being here?”
“You have.” I put my arm around her shoulders and kissed her head. “I’m working on it.”
The problem was, it was becoming increasingly clear that my dad was doing a shit job of running this place. He blamed everything from a dry season a few years ago to increased labor costs to changes in the economy. But from what I was seeing as I pored over the last ten years of financial records, the problem was him.
How was I supposed to tell my mom that she needed to fire my dad?
“I’m supposed to meet a friend for dinner,” she said. “But the fridge at the house is full if you want to go over there and get yourself something.”
She was such a mom, still trying to take care of me. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”
Mom left, and I walked back to the cottage. It was dinnertime, but I wasn’t hungry. I had too much on my mind. My dad. The winery. I wanted to make sure they were secure before I went home, but it was so fucking complicated.
I sat down on the bed and pulled out my phone. Almost on a whim, I called Farrah.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” I said. “Did I catch you at a bad time? I know it’s late there.”
“I’m working, but I’m in my hotel room,” she said. “What’s going on?”
I paused, not sure what I wanted to say. It was odd, feeling like I needed to talk to her about everything. I dealt with stress at work all the time, but I never vented to her about it.
“Things are just a lot worse here than I thought they’d be,” I said.
“I thought Dimension was having a great year,” she said.
“No, I’m talking about my family’s winery,” I said.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Aren’t you finished with that already? Didn’t they just need a short-term loan or something?”
“That’s what I mean,” I said. “I thought it would be simple, but the books are a mess and—”
“Roland, hold on a second.”
The line went silent except for what sounded like the click of her fingernails on her keyboard.
“These numbers are bullshit,” she said, although I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me, or herself. “I’m going to have to get them to run them again.”
Beach Reads Box Set Page 102