Page 49 of How to Say I Do
What in thehell was this?
Aftereverything? After Mexico, and what we shared?
After how heleft—
No. This was a coincidence, surely. A cruel one, but I knew life was incomprehensible and capricious at the best of times. Bettancourt wasn’t a completely unusual name. There had to be more than one Noël Bettancourt in New York working in public relations with elite clientele—
No, that was him. There was Noël on Google, his headshot and his profile picture and a hundred candid shots all snagged from celebrity photos and paparazzi pics and the edges of A-list parties. Noël leading Kim Kardashian up the red carpet, Noël guiding Blake Lively down a grand hallway at the Met. Noël snapped on the edges of a club two weeks ago, looking thin and wan with a text overlay that shouted, “Supermodel’s Ex Spotted Out and About.”
There was another photo of Noël, too, him standing alone in the middle of a packed aisle in an opulent ballroom done up to imitate a royal wedding. I recognized that tuxedo.
I’d never searched for him. In all the time that had passed, I’d never looked him up online. It had seemed invasive to try and find him when he’d so resolutely extricated himself from me. Goodbye was goodbye, wasn’t it?
So what the hell wasthis? Out of all the vineyards and all the wineries in the whole world, one of the globe’s most influential celebrities wanted to come to the Gran Cielo Viñedo?
Impossible. It beggared belief.
I sat back in my desk chair and stared at Noël’s email.
I’d been on my way to a big night of glaring at my finances. The least fun part of any business is the bookkeeping, and ranching was no exception. Add a vineyard into a ranch business, and you better be comfortable with chucking money out the door. Sometimes I thought it would be more efficient if I just threw fistfuls of cash from the back of my pickup at the bank because that’s all it felt like I was doing some years.
Lean times were on the horizon again. Every rancher tries to save a few pennies for the bad years, but I had dipped into that fund a handful of times to expand the vineyard. I’d hoped, with the award in Austin, that I’d be able to recoup a few dollars, but, sadly, that didn’t seem to be in the cards.
Maybe if I hadn’t gone to Mexico…
No. Giving Liam and Savannah their dream wedding was worth every rainy day.
As for the other part, well.
Aggravated at all the red I saw on my balance sheets, I’d clicked over to my email, which was crammed with even more exasperations. I’d skimmed over the spam, the web design offers, theBeefupdates, theWine Enthusiastblast, and then I sawhisname, and I’d read his email, and...
Lightheadedness poured into me. My chair, the walls, the lamp puddling soft light across my desk, it all melted into sunlight and the sound of the surf. My mind stuck on two flip-flopping memories, trading spaces like I was flicking pages in a picture book. Noël on the sand the morning after we’d made love, his head tipped back as he smiled. I had the feel of him embedded in my fingertips, still, and his laugh lived inside my bones—
And then, the morning that I’d woken alone, without him, with only his note.
From then until now, Noël had been vapor in my life, good as gone as a magic trick. Better than, even. He’d pulled himself and my heart out of my own life.
That old, familiar ache crawled out from my inner caverns and the hollows inside me that had formed nine years ago. Grief lived there, along with memories that I’d buried. His absence, like my mother’s and father’s, was a constant gnaw in my life. Did Noël ever think about me? Did he regret leaving me? My unanswered questions lingered like ghosts, and they haunted my mind and my soul.
This don’t mean what you want it to mean, Wyatt. It don’t.
But out of all the vineyards and all the wineries in thewhole world, Noël had picked mine. Didn’t that— Wasn’t that—
No. He could have found you any time, but he didn’t. This is a job. Weren’t you just looking at all those negative numbers? This is your rainy day fund coming in. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
But…
Don’t make this into something it’s not. You already did that once.
My fingers curled over my keyboard like spiders shying from the light. I bowed my head, clenched shut my eyes.
Noël and I weren’t anything to each other anymore. And, judging by his email, he didn’t want to acknowledge that, once—a month ago, a month ago—we’d been everything to each other.
Or I thought we’d been everything to each other. There I went with my assumptions again.
What to do? Delete the email? Reply, and give Noël a piece of my mind? Or, better yet, I could call up Liam and let him at this. That would be something to see. Noël wouldn’t dare step foot in Texas ever again, and after that, he’d forget (again) that there were wineries here, or beautiful ranches, or… me.
I could say no. I didn’t need celebrities, or fame, or extravagance. I needed money, sure, but I didn’t need it like that. And I didn’t need to see Noël again.
