Page 53 of How to Say I Do
It also smelled, overwhelmingly and heartbreakingly, like Wyatt.
I took it immediately. Fuck my pride—fashion or personal. I was desperate to feel a tiny piece of him again.
When I shrugged on his jacket, I nearly collapsed. God, that washim. Saddle leather, sunshine, sweat, sweet rain. Roses and turned earth, and, when I closed my eyes, I almost smelled the scent of the sea. Wyatt was messing with something and had his back to me, and he didn’t see how I had shattered—for a moment, only a moment—as I breathed in the inner lapel of his jacket.
Wyatt guided me into the saddle without touching me—Peanut was very snorty about how much I was shaking—and held the reins until I was settled and breathing semi-normally.
Then he left me, crossing the barn to swing up onto his own horse. He let out a whistle and headed for the paddock, and Peanut picked up her hooves and trotted after him. She seemed to completely ignore me, following behind Wyatt as if she could hurry this ride along and get me the hell off of her.
Same, Peanut, same.
Wyatt led us around his ranch, through meadows and prairies thick with wildflowers and shady groves sheltered by silent oaks. We passed pastures filled with cattle—there were the longhorns—and crested a rise that formed a natural division between the vastness of his ranch and the ordered harmony of the vineyards. We followed a hidden creek, turned up a lilac- and daisy-strewn slope, and then meandered up the far side of all those stately rows of trellised grapevines.
Tessa had apparently learned how to ride for a music video, and Tyler was the kind of man for whom this sort of thing came easily. I, on the other hand, nearly sent Peanut into neurosis. My thighs were too tight. I clenched up too often, sat too rigidly, and held the reins all wrong. Wyatt rode at my side, full of rugged cowboy perfection and steadying grace, which was wonderful to look at, but didn’t help calm me down at all. Each time we drew to a stop, he’d lay his hand on Peanut’s withers and hook his thumb around the reins I was holding all wrong.
“If you head down behind that oak—” Wyatt pointed Tessa and Tyler toward an explosion of green trundling at the base of block 6. “There’s a little spot the horses like. There’s some clover growing there they enjoy munching on.”
Those two trotted off with no further encouragement needed, leaving Wyatt and I behind. Traitors. He watched them go, slowly scratching behind Peanut’s ear as I crossed my arms and glared into the distance.
“They’re lovely people,” Wyatt said, once we were alone. “And I’m not so much of a country hick that I don’t know who Tessa Yarborough is.” There was a small slip of a smile, there and gone.
“I never thought you were a hick.”
He kept going like I hadn’t spoken. “I want to thank you for thinking of my ranch. There are a thousand beautiful wineries you could have taken them to, and my place can’t hold a candle to what others can offer. I know that. So considering the Gran Cielo Viñedo… Well, it’s an honor.”
He went quiet, his brow furrowed, his lips pursed, his fingers lost in Peanut’s mane. “But my father’s dream wasn’t to host celebrity weddings or glitzy Hollywood events. He wanted to keep this a family place.” He turned to me, finally. “Youknow, Noël. Youknowwhat this place means to me.”
The look in his eyes. It seized me, stilled me. I couldn’t say a word.
“So I gotta ask you. What is taking this on going to bring to my home?”
CHAPTER15
Noël
There werea million details that needed to be figured out at Wyatt’s ranch: site logistics, venue planning, guest arrangements. Parking. Lighting. Flowers. Menus. Did Wyatt have enough wine on hand to sate an entire A-list party? What about champagne? How many people were we talking about, anyway? How were we going to arrange for tasteful portable toilets?
Logistically, throwing a wedding at a virgin site—and a rural one, no less—was a nightmare. There were reasons we always turned to the same handful of super-luxurious venues.
But Wyatt’s ranch was apparently Tessa and Tyler’s dream come true. I’d planted the idea of the place, and now that they’d seen it, and—more importantly—had fallen equally in love with the ranch and with Wyatt, no other venue would do. They were going to get married at the Gran Cielo Viñedo. They shook on that promise with Wyatt before we left.
“Guess you and I are gonna be working together,” he said to me, after shaking hands with Tessa. His eyes were fixed on a faraway point.
“Guess so,” I said. “I’ll get started on the paperwork.”
And that was that.
Tessa, Tyler, and I boarded her private jet back to New York an hour later. They flew home on waves of Veuve Clicquot, and after three rounds of happy toasts, they drifted into a celebratory unconsciousness an hour out from Teterboro.
I spent the flight with my faux smile screwed on, all the while churning over Wyatt’s question. I hadn’t answered him out there. God, what could I have said?Tessa Yarborough will most likely be bringing me a guest list with a net worth valued higher than a dozen countries’ combined GDP. For the week of the wedding, every eye that follows celebrities will be fixed on your ranch. You’ll be the number-one trending topic on Insta, Twitter, and Snapchat.
None of that was going to reassure him.
I’d fucked up. Suggesting Wyatt’s winery—the mesmerizing place of my dreams, complete with that storybook, swept-away vibe, somewhere enthralling and secret and extraordinary—to Tessa had been a mistake.
I’d need to double the budget for security. Obviously, that was going to be a significant expense in itself, but I’d need to throw a lot more cash at securing Wyatt’s ranch, and not just to keep the photo rights exclusive forElite. There were some retired Secret Service agents that ran executive protection for big billion-dollar CEOs who visited far-flung locales with high-risk quotients. If you were an executive who needed to shake hands with a cartel businessman and pass over a couple suitcases filled with cash, hiring men who’d spent their lives protecting the president were who you wanted. Maybe they’d also be up to the task of fending off the globe’s paparazzi.
As soon as we landed, Harrison started blowing up my phone with questions about how everything went, and if Tessa was pleased, and if she was, when would I get her to sign the multi-million-dollar contract with us. My phone’s calendar was going off with reminders about the radio spot I needed to be prepped for in the morning, a lunch meeting withElite, and a launch party for a Broadway production that had been hyped so severely, aliens two galaxies away were going to be impatiently waiting for the stream.
