A Vineyard Thanksgiving (The Vineyard Sunset Series Book 4)

by Katie Winters

  “Ha. And he’s sucked all her blood,” Lola joked alongside her sister.

  Charlotte rolled her eyes and tilted her head back to reveal her neck. “No bite marks on me, unfortunately,” she said.

  “Okay. My guess, next,” Lola said. “You’ve just learned that all this time, Aunt Kerry has been a spy working for the government. She had to make a run for it.”

  Charlotte giggled. “Mom isn’t a spy. At least, I don’t think she is. This would explain how she always knew what me and my siblings were up to when we were younger, though.”

  “See! There’s always more to this than meets the eye,” Lola said.

  Charlotte lifted her glass of merlot and cheered the other two. She then puffed out her cheeks and said, “I think I’m about to agree to the hardest project of my life.”

  “What?” Lola demanded, her eyes wide with this news.

  “Oh my gosh. You’re the one who’s the spy?” Christine asked. “Spill the details, girl.”

  “No. I just received a call from Ursula Pennington’s personal assistant. Apparently, she’s just gotten engaged...”

  “To Chris Evans?” Christine asked.

  “No,” Charlotte said.

  “Oh. It must be Bradley Cooper. She was linked up with him for a while,” Lola said.

  “Neither. Apparently, they’ve only been seeing one another for a little while, and the whole thing is spontaneous,” Charlotte said. “Orion Thompson?”

  Christine and Lola turned their eyes toward one another, considering the name.

  “A basketball player?” Charlotte said.

  “I think Tommy has mentioned him, maybe,” Lola said.

  “Zach, too,” Christine said.

  “Well, in any case. The women in our family were never particularly sporty,” Charlotte confessed.

  Christine pulled up a photograph of the two young lovers, Orion and Ursula, and flashed the image around for all to see. Ursula was a classic blonde bombshell, very Marilyn Monroe, with large breasts, large blue eyes, and bright red lipstick. Beside her in the photograph was Orion himself, who was maybe seven feet tall, towering over her five-foot-four frame.

  “They’re hot,” Lola breathed.

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “Looking at them makes me want to faint all over again.”

  “Have you told them you will do it?” Christine asked.

  “Not yet. I said I would say one way or the other by the end of the day,” Charlotte affirmed.

  “Oh my gosh. Just do it!” Christine said.

  Charlotte furrowed her brow. “It’s just that, since it’s autumn, a lot of the people I would ordinarily hire for something like this have left the island. I don’t have the resources I normally do for other weddings. And beyond that, this particular wedding is three weeks away. It’s almost impossible.”

  Lola snapped her fingers. “You should hold it at the Quarry Estate in Edgartown.”

  Charlotte arched her brow. The Quarry Estate had been built in 1888 and was one of the most sought-after wedding venues on the island. Ordinarily, her clients couldn’t afford anything like it; it was the lap of luxury, of artistry, teeming with history.

  “Let me call them now to see if they have the date free,” Lola announced.

  Before Charlotte could stop her, Lola was on her phone with the people who owned the Quarry Estate. “November 27. That Saturday. Yes. You have it free?” Lola’s eyes bugged out with excitement. “Okay. We need to book it. It’s perfect.” She then glanced up toward Charlotte and whispered, “And probably Friday as well, right?”

  Charlotte’s stomach clenched with panic. Was this Lola, pushing her into yet another situation? Before she knew what she had done, she nodded.

  “Sure. It has the two wings. One side for wedding and reception—the side with that gorgeous view of the water, and the other side for the rehearsal dinner,” Christine said, nodding with finality.

  “We’re going to need it for both nights. That’s right,” Lola said brightly. “We’ll put down the deposit shortly. Thanks so much, Josh. Yep. Talk soon.”

  When Lola placed her phone back on the table, she clasped her hands together, leaned forward, and said, “Don’t think for a minute you’re not going to plan this wedding, just because a few people left the island for the season. You have me. You have Christine—baker extraordinaire. Your sister does flowers for a living and Zach? He’s a world-famous caterer.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes tightly and rubbed at her temples. In what world could she explain that she just didn’t feel up to this? It felt like too much, a weight she couldn’t get out from under.

  “Oh! And I can write a big description of the event for The New York Times,” Lola said. “They always like big, socialite parties, especially ones that take place on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s all a bit sparse now since it’s autumn. They’ll be hungry for this one. Oh, and since it’s so spontaneous—the story will sell for top dollar.”

  “It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard,” Christine affirmed. “Getting married on Martha’s Vineyard in three weeks? But we’re here for you. We can help with anything.”

  “And Audrey is so bored at home right now,” Lola offered. “Normally, she would complain all day long about doing something like this, but I think she’ll jump at the chance to help.”

  “What about Susan?” Charlotte asked.

  “Probably a little too tired yet,” Christine said. “The chemo was a success—thank God—but she’s still grabbing as much sleep as she can.”

  “I’m sure she won’t refuse if you invite her to the wedding, though,” Lola said.

  Charlotte sipped her glass of wine contemplatively. Her heart hammered with fear. “What kind of cake would you make, Christine?” she asked. “The personal assistant said the sky’s the limit in terms of cost. So—the most expensive cake you can dream up. What would it be?”

  Christine lit up as she thought for a moment, twirling her glass of wine. “It goes without saying that it should have many, many tiers on it—at least eight. Sometimes, I like to go more delicate with the design—like, say, if it had a number of edible flowers on it, I would find it interesting to make many of the flowers different types. Oh, but I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. I only have three weeks to make this thing. I don’t want to fall apart, making each unique and individual flower.”

  Slowly, the pieces began to align themselves in Charlotte’s mind. It seemed incredible that anything like this could even fall through without a hitch. It was certainly an investment of her time, her energy—and something that had a high probability of killing her or keeping her distracted.

  But it was an adventure she couldn’t refuse. It was an opportunity of a lifetime.

  “Okay. Okay. If you think we can do this...” She looked at her cousins with a grin from across the table.

  “The Sheridan and Montgomery cousins can do anything together,” Lola insisted. “I don’t want to hear another doubtful phrase out of you over the next three weeks.”

  “Do you think we’ll have to skip Thanksgiving?” Charlotte asked.

  “No way! We’ll just cram the turkey-roasting in with everything else,” Lola said.

  “I can make pumpkin pie in my sleep,” Christine insisted.

  “I’ve seen her do it,” Lola affirmed. “It’s actually really frightening.”

  “And you promise it won’t break us all up,” Charlotte said. The edge of her mouth flickered into a smile.

  “No way. We’ve been through so much worse—and if we fail this wedding, well... I’m sure it’s not the kind of marriage that will last, anyway,” Lola said, giving her a wink.

  “No way. I’ll give them six months regardless of what happens,” Christine said.

  Charlotte full-on laughed. “Rachel is going to kill me. I basically just told her that we wouldn’t have much work for a while. And now, here I am, stuffing us with more work than we know what to do with.”

  Christine poured them each
another glass of wine. Outside, snow began to fall, flickering then building at the bottom of the windowpane. Charlotte’s mind whizzed with images of the now-fast-approaching event. Just before Christine poured that third glass, she lifted her phone and dialed Tobias back.

  After one ring, she heard his voice filter through. “Charlotte! It’s only been a few hours. Have you made your decision?”

  “I have, Tobias. The answer is yes. I’ll be in touch shortly with more details. Let’s get this world-famous celebrity wed.”

  Chapter Four

  The day before Thanksgiving, Everett sat in limbo in the center of LAX. He had his boots up on his carry-on suitcase; his dark hair was a curly, wild mess; his beard was longer than usual, and his thumb was scanning through the weather report for Martha’s Vineyard for the next few days with vague interest.

  Snow. It was going to snow.

  And the temperature planned to drop down to single digits.

  Great

  Everett shoved his phone into his pocket and blinked toward the flight screen. His plane out to Boston was delayed by thirty minutes, then another twenty, and he ached with resentment, mostly toward himself for agreeing to the task-at-hand.

  “Sure. I’ll take photographs of Ursula Pennington’s wedding. Whatever. I don’t have anything planned.” This was what he had said to the editor of Wedding Today, one of the ritziest and most sought-after wedding magazines of the era. Photographing big events—like the Oscars, music festivals, and fancy weddings, was something of his bread and butter. In previous weeks, he had been stationed in LA, hopping from one event to another and sending his photographs out for payment.

  It had been a fine life. The drinks had flowed; beautiful people had turned to him from every direction, hungry for attention in the form of a flashing camera; and he’d had a killer apartment in Silver Lake that friends had told him was a “steal.”

  Still, it had felt so empty, exacerbated by the fact that Everett was in a pretty heavy fight with his mother and brother, who both lived up in Seattle. He dragged out his phone and again read the most recent text from his mother.

  Your father wouldn’t have wanted you so far from home on Thanksgiving.

  Great. So, she wanted to play the guilt card, too. That was rich, especially after what she had said. See, Jeff, his brother, was every-bit the son his father and mother had planned for. Like their father before him, he was an engineer; he had three children; he’d stayed in Seattle, close to family. Everett had never married; he’d hardly even come close to it. He had allowed his photography career to take him all over the world. He’d had some incredible experiences, and he had met the rich and the famous.

  But his mother had insinuated that he didn’t have his life together and that he “wasn’t really happy.”

  The happiness part was the worst of it. After all, in Everett’s mind, was anyone ever actually happy? Why did she have to point that out, as a sort of, “I told you so?” It just didn’t seem fair.

  If he brought such darkness to the Thanksgiving table, then he would just avoid it altogether.

  “Thank you, Ursula Pennington,” he said.

  The outlandishly pricey wedding between Ursula Pennington and one of the best basketball players, Orion Thompson, had been announced only two weeks prior. The fact that it was to be held on Martha’s Vineyard at the end of November was the strangest bit of all. People had questions—and Everett? He had a high price for the photos he planned to take.

  The woman he had half-dated in Los Angeles the previous month or so had been a bit annoyed at the prospect of his departure. “Why don’t you take me with you?” she had asked. “I work in PR. It would be good for me to see what this is like, especially if it turns into the disaster everyone thinks it will be.”

  “I might be back after. I don’t know,” he had told her, hating the fact that he couldn’t commit to yet another woman, to yet another city.

  What was wrong with him? Why was he so different than his family? Why couldn’t he find solid ground?

  Finally, it was boarding time. Everett stood and waded through the staggering line until he found his seat toward the back of the plane. He stuffed his carry-on in the upper compartment, then leaned back and glanced out the window. The California sun beamed down, never fading.

  Now, he was headed toward the snow.

  As he waited for the plane to crank up and fly out across the country, Everett thought again of Ursula and Orion, these celebrity millionaires who probably hadn’t sat in the likes of Economy Class in a number of years. He imagined that, for them, deciding to marry one another had been a bit more like, “Well, you’re rich, and I’m rich. Let’s join our rich celebrity forces together, eat caviar and drink champagne for the rest of our days? Or at least as long as it takes for us to get bored with one another and marry the next hot celebrity who comes along.”

  When you didn’t have problems, Everett knew that you had to create problems out of thin air.

  Up in the air, Everett grabbed his camera from its bag and swiped through a number of the photos he had taken at the celebrity birthday party he’d attended three days before. There were some good shots in there, ones that the “people” would pay to see. He marked the ones he wanted to edit, trashed the bad ones, and then stopped short at the one near the back when apparently he had been a little drunk and snapped a photo of himself in the mirror of the mansion in Beverly Hills.

  The man in the photo was now forty-four years old.

  He was handsome, sure—he had always been, with that dark black inky hair and the beard, the broad shoulders and his cobalt blue eyes. But he looked sadder than he remembered himself looking before, as though when he looked at himself in the mirror, he revealed the inner darkness of his soul.

  There, as the plane hovered somewhere over the top of Kansas, he shivered.

  Maybe he should have returned to Seattle, made peace with his mother and brother.

  Maybe he should have kicked a football around with his nephews, helped his mom bake a pie, exchange stories of his father with his brother.

  Maybe he had made a huge mistake.

  But no. He was already half-way to Boston. Martha’s Vineyard—and all that snow—awaited him. He couldn’t look back now.

  Chapter Five

  The day before Thanksgiving, Charlotte sat in a heap in the back of Claire’s flower shop. Claire sat across from her; Abby, Gail, and Rachel sat frozen in fear on either side. Before them was a mountain of flowers: roses, lily of the valley, hydrangeas, calla lilies, ranunculus—the list went on and on. The goal of the afternoon was to assimilate them together into several mock-ups for the final bouquet, which they would then decide upon together.

  “And if Ursula hates them?” Claire asked breathlessly.

  “Then I guess we’ll be back on the chopping block,” Charlotte said. “But she sent all these examples. She explained that this is her style. We just have to match them and then add a bit of flair to make them, you know...”

  “Unique,” Claire interjected.

  “Exactly.” Charlotte beamed at her sister.

  “So simple,” Claire said. She rubbed her eyes, clearly exhausted. Charlotte couldn’t blame her. They had been hard at work—back-breaking work—for the previous three weeks. Now, with only three days left till the wedding, it felt as though they were at the tail-end of a marathon. Charlotte had made this comparison exactly once, to which Claire had said, “Yeah, as if you would ever run a marathon.” Naturally, this hadn’t helped.

  Claire began to pair up various flowers, her brow furrowed. Charlotte shot up and headed toward her massive book of plans, in which she’d jotted necessary things to remember, phone numbers, people to call, the timeline of events. She had it all in her phone, as well, but she tended to like to have things physically in front of her. Rachel teased her for this.

  “When does the bride get here again?” Claire called.

  “Just after three on Friday,” Charlotte said.

&nbs
p; “And when is Christine making the pies?”

  Charlotte thought for a moment. “I think that’s happening now.”

  “Maybe if you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have told you that I would have stayed away from the pies, for the sake of the dress I’m wearing to this big event,” Claire said. “Not now. No way. Let me stress eat some pumpkin pie all day tomorrow because we need a break.”

  Charlotte was grateful they had plotted and schemed so hard that they’d allowed themselves Thanksgiving Day off. She needed a day to sit with her mother over a glass of wine. She needed a day to spend with her older sister, Kelli, who she had never felt quite as close with. She wanted to laugh with her brother, Steven, the oldest one of all, along with his beautiful wife, Laura, and their two children, who were no longer children—Jonathon and Isabella. Naturally, when the Montgomery family got together, there was always that aching hole, where Andrew was meant to be.

  But Andrew had long-since told them he wasn’t coming back. Charlotte knew better than not to take people at their word.

  The Sheridan sisters came back. Why not Andrew, too?

  Those were thoughts she had to shove into the back part of her mind.

  “The second we wake up Friday morning, it’s going to be go-go-go again,” Claire affirmed. “We have to stay focused.”

  “Ursula is insane,” Abby said suddenly. She lifted her phone up and gestured with it. “She’s posting all these photos of her and her friends on her bachelorette trip to Sicily.”

  “Sicily. Wow,” Charlotte breathed. “Let me see.”

  Abby jumped up from her side of the flower collection and passed Charlotte the phone. There she was: this woman Charlotte had met only over the phone, stationed in a bikini in the sun alongside the sea. Her skin was bronzed from the sun and she was beautiful and thin. She had popped her knee out to one side like a model for the photograph. Around her were a collection of other sinfully beautiful women, maybe her bridesmaids?

  “How many bridesmaids did she say she has?” Claire asked, glancing at the photo.