A Wedding on Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  Her eyes took on a teasing spark. “And this was before or after the boss’s daughter?”

  “After.” He took a thoughtful sip of his wine. “I think.”

  “Well, that explains how you knew my dress was Prada. Were you in love?”

  He smiled and tilted his glass to her in a brief salute. “Everyone falls in love in Italy.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “No clue.”

  “You’re a pig.”

  “Oh, I remember now.” He pretended thoughtfulness. “That’s what she said too, right before she broke up with me.”

  Lori laughed, and he smiled back. They drank more wine, and the silence between them rested easy. She glanced down at her glass, and then at him, almost shyly. “Can I tell you something?”

  He inclined his head curiously.

  “I used to have a giant crush on you,” she admitted.

  “Oh yeah?” He looked mildly surprised, and hugely pleased. “When?”

  “I don’t know. When I was a little kid.” She gave a small awkward shrug. “I thought that whole Clark Kent thing you had going on was crazy sexy.”

  He grinned and pushed at the bridge of his glasses. “Is that right?”

  “Clark Kent,” she told him sternly, “not Superman. You do know the difference, don’t you?”

  “Yep.” He took off his glasses and began to polish them importantly. “Spandex.”

  That made her giggle, and her eyes danced in the candlelight. He replaced his glasses and came around to her chair. “Hold that smile,” he said. He took out his cell phone, bent low so that his head was close to hers, and stretched out his arm to snap a photo with the fountain in the background. “There,” he said, typing out a message as he returned to his chair. “‘Lori says hi.’” He sent the photo to his mom.

  She took a sip of her wine and set down her glass, looking at him speculatively. “So what’s the deal, Kevin? I know you didn’t fly all the way over here just to take me to dinner. Which was delicious, by the way. Thanks.”

  He returned his phone to his pocket. “I told Mom I was going to Rome for a job interview. She figured since Tuscany was practically across the street, I should stop by.”

  Another girl would have let that slide right by. Lori caught it like a Venus fly trap. “Did you? Have a job interview, I mean.”

  He picked up his wine glass, leaned back in his chair, and regarded her with absolutely no expression for a time. Then he said, “No.”

  Her brows quirked together curiously. “Anyway, what happened to your job at the law firm?”

  There was a moment of debate, but not too long. For some reason, while lying to his mother had been difficult but not impossible, lying to Lori just seemed pointless. He sipped his wine, watching her. “I managed a couple of big trust funds for the firm,” he said. “One of them, I happened to know, was plumped up mostly by money that was obtained in questionable ways … mostly by taking little old ladies’ life savings and investing in bad bonds. Not anything that was provable, you understand, but it irked me just the same, especially when one of the little old ladies in question came to me for help with an IRS problem. She was about to lose everything—her house, her bakery business, her car, and even her future income—for a $75,000 debt. She’d worked all her life, was barely getting by as it was, and wouldn’t you know she’d invested over a hundred grand with this dude and his bad bonds five years ago. If she hadn’t she would have been able to pay her tax bill before it got that high. Usually I can negotiate these things out, but she’d had some bad legal advice before she even got to me, piling up a ton of debt in attorney’s fees, and everything I tried fell through. Finally it came down to the wire one Friday afternoon. Her assets were frozen, my hands were tied, and she was going to jail unless she paid that bill in full by five o’clock. So I transferred the funds from the other client’s trust fund account to pay the IRS.”

  Lori’s eyes were big. “God, Kevin.”

  He toyed with the stem of his glass, his eyes falling briefly. “It was stupid. I don’t know what got into me.” He frowned abruptly and said, “Actually I do.”

  He looked at her. “When I first got into law I was just like every other bright-eyed kid, ready to go out and defend the downtrodden, fight for the right, all that crap. What I found out is that practicing law is mostly about trying to figure out how to get around it, or to figure out how people who are rich enough to pay you can get away with breaking it. And that most of the time what’s right and what’s legal don’t have a lot to do with each other. It doesn’t take long for the lines to blur. And it’s not just that, you know.” The frown deepened. “I think that after all those years, doing the right thing for a change, instead of the legal one, actually felt like vindication. Like it was restoring the balance, somehow.”

  He shrugged and took a sip of his wine. “Anyway, like I said, it was stupid. Of course, first thing Monday morning I cashed in some stocks and replaced the money in the client’s account. I went to my boss and told him what I’d done.”

  She looked horrified. “You told him?”

  “I had to. This is serious business. Besides …” He shrugged. “It would have been picked up on the next internal audit anyway.”

  Lori shook her head. “You make a terrible criminal.” And she thought about that for a minute. “But I guess if you have to be bad at only one thing in your whole life, that would be the one to pick. So the client was mad?”

  “Don’t know. I was escorted out by security within the hour.”

  “They fired you?”

  “And disbarred me.”

  “What?” Her eyes went wide. “Disbarred? But—but that means you’re not even a lawyer anymore! How can they do that?”

  “They had no choice. What I did was criminal, and that’s frowned upon in the law profession.” The faint imitation of a smile that touched his lips did not reach his eyes. “Kevin the Wonder Boy, huh?”

  “But …” Lori cast around for the words, her eyes filled with disbelief. “But you put the money back!”

  “Which is why I’m not in jail.”

  “And then you confessed, and your client, the little old lady—you saved her! Doesn’t that count for anything? Most people would say you’re a hero!”

  This time his smile seemed a bit more genuine. “I am also unemployable. It turns out ‘embezzlement’ is one of those red flags they look for on a resume.”

  Lori sagged back against her chair, staring at him, her hand resting on her chest. “Kevin,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

  The genuine distress in her eyes touched him, embarrassed him, and pulled at him in some indefinable way. He couldn’t face it for very long, and he dropped his gaze, lifting his wine glass again. “Anyway, that was nine months ago. Since then I’ve had a lot of time on my hands, so I thought …” He forced a brief light note into his tone. “Why not go see what Lori is up to?”

  Her tone was quiet, still filled with shock and disbelief. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve been living on savings,” he said. “Cashed in my investments, rented out the condo, sold all the furniture … turned in the car before I left. I’m going to have to leave DC anyway; too expensive. And I don’t have as many friends there as I thought I did.”

  “Wow,” she said softly. “Wow.”

  He leaned across the table and refilled her wine glass. “My mom doesn’t know. I’ll have to tell her eventually, but I was hoping to frame it in a happy ending before I did. You know, one of those ‘but it all worked out for the best’ things. So far, happy endings have been a little hard to come by. Like jobs.”

  Lori regarded him solemnly for a long moment. “We are a couple of hot messes, aren’t we?”

  He lifted his glass to her. “Here’s looking at you, babe.”

  She raised her glass back. “And you.”

  They drank.

  The waiter left the check and Kevin reached for his wallet.

  “Kevin �
�” Lori looked worried. “Can you afford this? Not just dinner, but this trip, the hotel … Do you need a place to stay?”

  Her concern was so genuine, and he was so touched, that for a moment he didn’t know what to say. And then he took out a credit card and held it up between his thumb and forefinger before placing it on the table. “I may not have much left,” he assured her, “but my credit is excellent.”

  “Well, in that case …” She pursed her lips thoughtfully, then raised her glass again. “Let’s order dessert.”

  He gave her a single small, incredulous shake of his head, then turned and signaled for the waiter.

  ~*~

  Kevin and Lori joined the crush of people on the street for the traditional after-dinner passeggiata, when the locals left their homes for the relatively cool outdoors to stroll and be seen, to catch up on gossip, perhaps to go for gelato or to window shop. It was a time of gaiety and easy social discourse, friendly, noisy, busy. The two Americans blended in easily, taking their time, smiling at the locals, peering into shop windows. They walked with their fingers linked unself-consciously, absorbed in the sights and sounds of a culture that was not their own.

  “What would you be doing if you were home right now?” Lori asked.

  Kevin glanced at his watch. “Let’s see. It’s four in the afternoon there …probably sitting in my underwear with a bottle of beer watching Ellen.”

  She punched him playfully. “You would not.”

  “Woman, you know nothing about me. What about you?”

  Lori’s expression softened, her eyes focusing on a place he could not see. “I don’t know. Getting all sweaty cleaning the chicken coop, maybe, or walking the vines. Only a few weeks before harvest so you want to be really careful about bugs and disease. Or maybe working down in the winery with Dominic, or …” A smile lit the corners of her lips. “I’ll tell you what I’d really like to be doing—taking orders in the office! And sometimes, if Ida Mae and Aunt Bridget are starting supper and the windows are open, you can smell bread baking and maybe pork chops with that spicy applesauce …”

  He groaned out loud. “Seriously? You’re talking about food after the meal we just had?” And then he looked at her curiously. “So that’s home for you? Ladybug Farm?”

  She seemed surprised at the question, and even more surprised by the answer. “You know something? I think it is.”

  The thoughtful frown on her brow evaporated as she was distracted by something in the distance. “Look,” she said, pointing. “The chocolate shop is open. Can you smell it? They make the most incredible dark chocolate cherry nougat thing, you’ve got to try it.” She tugged at his hand. “Come on!”

  They bought a bag of chocolate and shared it as they strolled around the city. She told him about the time she had decided that Ladybug Farm should go into the wool-production business, but had sheered the sheep a month too early and ended up having to buy sweaters and coats for the whole flock when a late freeze came. He told her about the time he had defended a sheep for trespassing in a mock trial in law school, and they both laughed until they staggered and the locals thought they were drunk. They reminisced about growing up together on Huntington Lane. They talked about their parents, and their school friends, and about the dreams that hadn’t come true and the few that had. They eventually left the crowds behind, lost in their own conversation as they took a winding cobbled path that climbed above the city. They sat on the remnants of a stone wall that dated back to the Romans, and speculated about how it must have been here then while they watched the lights of the city below. They talked about art and architecture, and when Kevin discovered Lori had not yet been to Florence, he decided they should take the train the very next day and see it all. Kevin noted with some surprise that midnight had come and gone hours ago, and they started back down the path.

  The little street was lined with houses that were decorated with painted doors and bright shutters, and pots of fragrant herbs and flowers climbed the stone steps that led to them. There was darkness behind most of those windows as families slept the peaceful sleep of those who worked and played hard. Streetlights were few and far between, but the sky still held the remnants of a Tuscan day that was so saturated with light darkness never really fell, and the air smelled like lavender. Kevin kept his hand on her waist, because it was late and the street was uneven and it seemed like a gentlemanly thing to do, but also because he liked the way it felt. And Lori leaned close to him, simply because it was good to be close to him. It almost seemed, in fact, as though there had never been a time when she was not close to him, and there never would be.

  Her voice was drowsy and comfortable as she said, “Thanks for coming all this way to rescue me, Kevin, even if I didn’t need rescuing. You always were a perfect big brother.”

  One of her curls tickled the back of his hand, and he caught it with his forefinger, twirling it absently. It felt like silk. “I never thought of myself as your big brother.”

  “Well …” She glanced up at him coyly, a flash of starlight in a midnight sky. “To tell the truth, neither did I. But you would have made a great one.”

  Kevin smiled at her. Her skin was like porcelain in the shadowy purple light. “Now can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  He said, “I used to have a crush on you, too.”

  She stopped and turned to face him, her face alight with astonished delight. “You did not!”

  “The summer I came home from my junior year in college,” he admitted, “and you had just turned sixteen, you about drove me wild.”

  She laughed out loud, her eyes bubbling with pleasure. “What do you know about that?”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “What do you know?”

  She looped her arm through his and started walking again. After a moment she said thoughtfully, “Why do you suppose we never got together, Kev?”

  “Aside from the fact that you were a brat?”

  “And you were a prick.”

  “And for most of my life you were jailbait …”

  “Well,” she admitted, “there’s that.”

  “Not to mention the fact that every time I saw you, you were dating some football player twice my size.”

  She said in a voice that was oddly soft, almost shy, “I would have dropped them all in a heartbeat for you.”

  He stopped walking. She turned to him, placing her hands lightly on his chest, looking up at him. “I’m not jailbait any more, Kevin,” she said.

  “No,” he replied huskily. He was surprised to note that he could hardly hear his own voice over the thunder of his heart. He put his hands on her waist; he drew her close. “You’re not.”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck. He bent his head to hers. They sank into the kiss like sea creatures too long out of the water, like birds first discovering the joy of flight, like wandering orbs suddenly and gratefully pulled into each other’s gravitational path. And afterward neither would be able to explain why they had waited so long.

  ~*~

  Chapter Six

  Folly

  Long before there had been a Ladybug Farm Winery, Blackwell Farms had been shipping its award-winning wine all over the country. And long before that, at least according to Ida Mae, whose degree of reliability about such things varied widely, the cellar beneath the barn had been a speakeasy and a moonshine distillery. Even now, on particularly damp days, an imaginative person might catch a whiff of corn whiskey seeping up through the stone floor, its faintly pungent aroma wafting like a ghost beneath the rich fruity smell of fermenting grapes.

  None of the farm’s current owners had even known there was a cellar beneath the barn until the original building burned down. There, beneath an almost-buried trapdoor, they had discovered the old Blackwell Farms winery, all of its equipment from the sixties still intact and, for the most part, still functioning. Even though it had taken over a year to crystallize, the dream of Ladybug Farm Winery had been born that day when the three of them desc
ended that narrow set of stairs and explored the dusty old winery by flashlight.

  That cellar was now a brightly lit, clean and sanitized space whose walls were lined with casks of wine, stainless steel sinks, cupboards, and bottling equipment. There was a raised oak table in the center and a rack of glasses overhead, although the only tasting that went on in this room was done by the owners. The public tasting room, when it opened next spring, would be in The Tasting Table restaurant a few dozen steps away. Twin steel doors opened at the far end of the room directly onto the vineyard, so that wagons filled with grapes—and trucks filled with crush—could back up to the doors and empty their cargo directly into the winery. The big room was alive with the breath of fluorescent lights and the heartbeat of pumps.

  The barn had been rebuilt over the winery and sectioned off, with part of it for domestic use and another part for the winery office. Although they could no longer keep animals there—except for Rebel, who could always find a way to be wherever he was not wanted, and the kitten, who seemed convinced there were mice to be found and who was no doubt right—they still used the big space for storage and workshop projects. They had wanted to move the winery office to the restaurant, which was much nicer, but Dominic insisted on staying close to the wine. So they built walls, added electrical outlets, a telephone, and Internet connections, and turned one corner of the barn into the operations office for Ladybug Farm Winery.

  Lindsay could not, of course, be satisfied with a utilitarian space filled with file cabinets and steel shelves, so she had given it her own decorative flare by whitewashing the plank walls and hanging an oversized painting of a cluster of grapes over the desk, adding framed photos of Dominic’s father and Judge Blackwell during the days of the original winery to the shelves, and bringing down a patterned carpet from the house for the floor. There was a sturdy oak table in the center of the room, just big enough to accommodate five or six chairs, and it was here that the partners in the winery gathered to have their meetings.