Caterina

by Patricia Paris

  Cat sighed. Her sisters were right. She wasn’t sure about the hot sex yet. Not that she’d be opposed to a good romp with a man who knew how to satisfy a woman who needed satisfying, but she’d have to think through the pros and cons of doing the big deed with Liam before jumping into bed with him.

  She did want to know why they’d gotten off to such a rocky start, though. And why, specifically, he seemed to go cold with her, when he didn’t react the same way with her sisters. He’d defrosted, though, done a turnaround she didn’t understand but much preferred. She was just as curious to know what had brought about his change of attitude toward her. Did it have anything to do with Riley? she wondered.

  “We’re going out Saturday night,” she said without any other preamble.

  Marcella warmed her hands against the sides of her coffee mug. “About time.” She sipped some coffee. “You have my approval by the way.”

  “Mine too,” El and Lucia chimed in unison, then pointed at each other and grinned.

  The kitchen lights flickered off and back on again. Cat glanced up.

  “It appears Rosa sanctions the date also.” Marcella set her cup back down on the table.

  “We’re just going to dinner, so don’t romanticize it too much.” Caterina slid her eyes back up toward the kitchen ceiling. “Hear that, Aunt Rosa? If you really are trying to play matchmaker, I’ll make my own choices, thank you. There’s every chance our date will be a failure that turns out to be the first, last, only. I’d prefer not to get haunted over it if that happens.”

  The kitchen door blew shut with a bang, and all four sisters jumped.

  After a moment, Caterina helped herself to one of the scones and took a bite. “She really needs to work on tempering her rejoinders.”

  “WHERE DO YOU want these tables?” Antonio asked Caterina the next morning. He stood near the entrance to the kitchen where he’d leaned the three ten-foot round tables against the wall. She’d asked him to get them from the storage pantry after stealing him away from Lucia at breakfast, because she could use, as she’d told them, some muscle to make the job go quicker.

  She studied him a moment from where she knelt in front of what had been her mother’s favorite antique hutch, where they stored the event linens. What a beautiful man. In a pair of black jeans and a simple gray sweater, he managed to look both elegant and devastatingly masculine at the same time. It seemed they were surrounded by beautiful men here lately. Antonio, Liam, and this week, they’d had the deliciously gorgeous, if a little dangerous-looking, Damien Roth staying at the inn. Yes, there was certainly a lot of eye candy to feast on at the Bonaveras.

  “I want them in the center of the room, but more toward the entrance from reception.” Caterina pulled out a storage bag that held tablecloths and set it on the hutch, then walked over to where she wanted Antonio to set the tables.

  “Here’s good,” she said, drawing an imaginary triangle for him. “The two tasting stations are going to be more toward the back. That will give us two distinct areas—one set aside for eating and the other for wine tastings.”

  “Are you doing free tastings?”

  “Yes, but they’ll be small pours, two ounces. Samples, really, as opposed to what we’d do for a tasting. Marcella’s going to be featuring six wines, three red and three white. Visitors can choose to sample any three of the six.”

  “I’m assuming they’ll also be able to purchase bottles.”

  “Of course, we’re a winery. We sell wine. Last year, El suggested offering a ten percent discount on single-bottle purchases, fifteen on six or more. We almost never discount our wines because we’re not a large volume producer, but we get a fair number of locals doing the tour who don’t otherwise visit the wineries. She thought if we offered a discount, some of them might be encouraged to buy a couple of bottles and give us a try.”

  “Good idea,” Antonio said as he rolled one of the tables across the floor. “I find it interesting that people will travel miles, even across the country, to visit a place like this, or to see something they’ve read or heard about, and if you ask a group of locals if they’ve been there or done that, a surprising number will say no.”

  “I’m guilty of that on some counts. People come to D.C. from all over the world to visit the Smithsonian museums, and I’ve only been to the Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery of Art. I’ve never even been to the National Zoo, and I love animals.”

  Cat held the table while Antonio pulled open the legs. “I’ve always intended to visit the others. I guess it’s because they’re so close, I figure I can do it whenever, but whenever always seems to get shoved to the back burner.” She glanced up at him and smiled. “Guess I need to find someone to play tourist with and knock out a few more, before I’m an old woman and realize I never appreciated what was in my own backyard when I had the chance.”

  “Do you need any more help setting things up over here?” Caterina’s pulse leaped at the sound of Liam’s voice. She turned and watched him walk toward them, all long legs and sinewy muscle wrapped in a pair of well-worn jeans and a long-sleeved navy Henley that hugged his chest and broad shoulders the way she’d imagined doing.

  Yes, she wanted to get her hands on him. And with the shift that had been taking place between them over the last couple of weeks, the possibility of that fantasy coming to fruition seemed more likely every day.

  “Shouldn’t you be nailing something over at Serendipity?” she asked, adding a tongue-in-cheek smile, in case he thought she was being her old snippy self, and not the new, I’m-kind-of getting-into-you self.

  “We’re waiting on some inspections, so we’re in a temporary lull. I thought I’d stop by to see if anyone here needed help with lifting or moving things around for your big event. You know, guy stuff.” He looked at her feet and grinned. “It might be easier for me to help Antonio with those tables, than it is for you in those stilettos.”

  “You’d be amazed what I can do in stilettos, mister.” She gave her ankle a turn, and his gorgeous blues sparkled. He held her gaze a moment—a grin that told her, I’m kind of getting into you, too, resting comfortably on his gorgeous mouth.

  Antonio cleared his throat. “Well, I wouldn’t mind the help,” he said, his expression one of amusement, and pointed across the room toward the kitchen entrance. “Those two tables need to be set up, and we need to move two of the bars along the sidewall out for the tasting stations.”

  “I’m also going to need four long tables for the food,” Cat added. “And if you could set up eight chairs at each of the round tables, that should suffice. We’re probably not going to need all the seating, but I want to have it just in case. There were over two thousand tickets sold for the event. I know all those people won’t show up here, or at the same time, but we should still have a good-size crowd coming and going throughout the evening.”

  Antonio and Liam exchanged a look that they both seemed to understand without the need for words. Some guy code, she guessed. Caterina arched her brows.

  Liam chuckled. “Just point us in the right direction.”

  She had too much to do to try to decipher the male psyche right now. “The other tables should be in the pantry where you got these, Antonio. And we’ll need four, not two, of the six bars. Two for each station. I want—” She walked to the rear third of the room. “One station here.” She stood on the spot and looked at them to make sure they were paying attention.

  “And the other—” She paced off roughly twenty feet toward the opposite side, her heels clicking briskly against the hardwood floor. “Right here. Set each station up in a V-shape pointing into the room.”

  Liam frowned. “If we do that they won’t come to a point. There’ll be a wide gap where the inner edges of the two bars meet. Why not butt the ends together and do an L?”

  Caterina shook her head. “No. Imagine it’s an open-ended V. I’ve got plans for those gaps. You just set them up the way I told you and let me worry about the rest.”

/>   Antonio nudged Liam with his elbow. “Help me get the other two tables by the door. If she says she has a plan, believe me, she has a plan. And I guarantee it’s been written down, revised at least three times, edited, and printed out in duplicate.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, my friend,” Liam said as he walked away with Antonio. “She’ll probably be giving us each a blueprint to make sure we put everything exactly where she wants it.”

  “I heard that,” Cat said, swallowing back the drool pooling in the back of her throat as she watched them saunter across the floor. Good Lord, those were two gorgeous butts.

  “You think I’m anal,” she accused them and tried to refocus her thoughts. “I’m not anal,” she said in self-defense. “There are going to be a lot of people here tonight. It’s important that there’s a logical flow between the eating area, the food tables, and the tasting stations. If we just set things up without a plan, it would be confusing. There would be no logical flow. People would be milling around helter-skelter, getting in each other’s way all night, spilling things on one another. It could get ugly.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Liam told her. “Why don’t you get some masking tape and put X’s on the floor where you want us to put things? That way we won’t screw it up.”

  “Shut up, Liam.”

  He looked over his shoulder, giving her a sexy grin—one far too playful for Cat to get annoyed with him. She stuck her tongue out anyway, which only made him laugh.

  Looking away to hide her grin, she marched to the hutch for the bag of linens she’d taken out earlier and took it over to the table she and Antonio had been setting up when Liam arrived.

  She pulled out a large, round tablecloth and snapped it open. Spreading it over the table, she smoothed it here and there and then circled the table to make sure it hung evenly all the way around. Next, she went into the kitchen to get everything she needed to assemble the centerpieces Lucia had designed the day before and shown Cat how to arrange.

  When she returned to the solarium, Liam and Antonio had the other two round tables in place. She made three more trips to the kitchen for supplies. Once she had everything, she covered the two remaining tables and got to work putting together the centerpieces.

  Lucia had such a design flair, Caterina thought, as she put one of the three large, round, cut glass mirrors in the middle of each of the tables. She placed a small Christmas tree in the center of each one. Using boxwood cuttings that she’d collected from around the property, Lucia had made the trees by sticking several cuttings into foam that she’d secured inside white ceramic containers and then clipping them into the shape of a perfect little tree. Silver glass balls, no bigger than kumquats, decorated each tree, with green moss hiding the foam inside the containers.

  Around the base of each container, Cat placed snips of boxwood and cedar the way Luch had shown her. Next, she laid on their sides two frosted wineglasses that her sister had embellished with strands of silver stars twining up the stems, overlapping one on top of the other, so they crisscrossed. She did this on three sides of the tree, and between each set of glasses, she arranged three of the large pinecones Luch had decorated with spray snow and silver glitter. Around the wineglasses and pinecones, Cat interspersed votive candles in clear, cut glass crystal holders that, when lit, would make everything sparkle and glow as it all reflected in the mirrors.

  Taking her cell from the waistband of her skirt, she pulled up the picture of the arrangement Lucia had put together the day before to use as a sample for the design. Looking between the picture and the arrangement she’d just put together, Caterina nodded with satisfaction that she’d replicated it correctly.

  “Wow,” she heard Liam say from somewhere behind her. He stood about ten feet away, balancing two folding tables against his legs. “How did you turn a rough wooden table into that so quickly?”

  “Do you think it looks okay?” She nibbled the corner of her thumbnail. “I’m going to drape evergreen garlands on the front of the food tables, but I think it would be too much for these. And they would get in the way when people are eating. Lucia had a great idea for the backs of the chair covers—simple but pretty—and that should be enough.”

  Liam looked impressed. “It looks amazing. Like a picture in one of those elegant decorating magazines.”

  Cat caught her lip between her teeth, then smiled. “It does look elegant, doesn’t it? And tonight, with the lights just dimmed and the candles lit, everything will sparkle.”

  “It’s obvious that you and your sisters have put a lot of work into this. Everything looks festive, both inside and out.” He carried the folding tables over and leaned them against the side of one of the round tables, then came to stand next to her, admiring her handiwork more closely. “Are you nervous?”

  She gave a slight nod. “Yes, a bit. With Serendipity opening next fall, Lucia and I want people to walk away with a sense of what the boutique hotel and restaurant will be like. The tastes and comforts they can look forward to, whether dining in the restaurant, staying as a guest, or both. We want to give them a sample of the quality they can expect.”

  Liam took her hands, warming her feelings for him further with the gentleness in his touch. “I’m sure the food is going to knock their socks off. Knowing what a stickler you are, how could it be anything less than perfect?”

  “You think I expect too much.”

  “No, I think you expect a lot because you have high standards. There’s nothing wrong with that, sweetheart.” He reached up and wove his fingers through her hair.

  “I’ve got pretty high standards too. You and I might not always agree over the issues, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect you for the way you stand your ground. In fact, I’m starting to realize I kind of get a kick out of it.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He angled his head down, covered her mouth with his, surprising her at how comfortable he seemed to be getting with this kissing her thing.

  Cat let the heat flow through her, melted into the deliciousness of his lips moving over hers, the little shivers beginning to tremble along her skin as he moved his hands up and down her back.

  He dipped his tongue into her mouth, and she heard herself moan, then he did. She wished they weren’t standing in the middle of the solarium because her body felt all loose and warm and a bit slutty, but her mind knew anyone could walk in at any moment.

  On the peripheral, she heard something clicking and pulled back from the heat of their kiss.

  Glancing around, she saw Eliana and Damien standing just inside the doorway of the solarium.

  Amusement danced in her sister’s eyes. “A little afternoon delight? Well, don’t let us interrupt. I just came in to check on the setup for this evening’s tastings, and Damien’s been getting some photos for his feature.”

  Caterina backed away from Liam, ran her palms down her sweater, the sides of her skirt. Liam stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, nodded toward Damien and El.

  “Oh,” Eliana said, clasping Damien’s wrist and pulling him over to where Cat and Liam stood.

  “Damien, this is Liam. He’s the contractor for Serendipity.” El looked at Liam with a beaming smile, appearing to be in an especially good mood and, if Caterina wasn’t mistaken, enjoying the company of their newest guest.

  “Damien’s a photojournalist,” Eliana told Liam. “He’s doing a feature on holiday traditions in Loudoun County, and he’s including the tour. He’s staying here through the weekend, and hopefully, will use some photos from around the guesthouse and winery. It would be good exposure for us.”

  Damien reached out and shook Liam’s hand. “Nice to meet you. Eliana has told me a little bit about the plans for Serendipity. Great name by the way. It sounds like it’s going to be quite a place. I hope I get a chance to see it when it’s completed.”

  “Thanks. Same here. I don’t think I’ve ever met a photojournalist; sounds like an interesting job.” Liam studied Damie
n a moment. “You look familiar. Have we met someplace before?”

  Damien looked thoughtful, then shook his head. “No…don’t think so. I’m on the road a lot, but it’s possible our paths crossed somewhere.”

  “This table looks gorgeous!” Eliana exclaimed, drawing everyone’s eyes to the centerpiece. “I can’t wait to see everything when it’s all done.” She turned to Damien. “You need to come back in here when we get back from lunch to get some pictures, before the guests arrive tonight and the tables are cluttered with dirty dishes.”

  Caterina studied her sister a moment. When she’d gone up to her room for the evening last night, Eliana and Damien had been in the library, sharing a bottle of wine and a cheese platter. Cat hadn’t thought too much of it, a light flirtation they’d both seemed to be enjoying. Harmless.

  And here they were, together again, by chance or divine, she didn’t know, and going to lunch. That was a lot of together time packed into two days when they’d just met. El wasn’t one to fall hard and fast for men, but neither had Lucia been, and look what had happened when Antonio walked into her life. And although El had always been more carefree and flirtatious than the rest of them, something in the way she looked at Damien made Cat’s antennae hum.

  Should she be concerned that her sister might be falling for someone they knew nothing about? Damien seemed like a nice guy, and Caterina understood why El would be attracted to him physically, but did something about him attract Eliana in some way other men didn’t? If so, she and her sisters might need to find time to get to know the man a little better.

  Damien would be checking out Sunday morning. He and El would no doubt go their separate ways. She was probably spinning her mental wheels worrying about something that would resolve itself in a few more days.

  Looking at Damien, Caterina said, “I wouldn’t mind getting copies of any good shots you might get of the table setups. Even if you don’t plan to use them, I can put them in my idea book.”

  She angled her head as a thought occurred to her and frowned. “You didn’t…umm, get a picture of me and Liam…when—” She darted a glance at Liam who, from the way his mouth had curled, guessed the drift of her question and found it amusing.