Page 117 of Blush
“I’ve always wanted to have sex in a library.” And by “always,” she meant suddenly—right in that moment.
“Very funny,” he said.
“I’m serious.”
“Someone could walk in,” Mateo said.
“They won’t,” Sadie said. But just to be safe, she grabbed his hand and led him up the narrow winding stairs to the second level. Sadie’s eyes immediately went to the shelf where she’d found the books, all now returned to their spots:Lace.Scruples.Chances. If she hadn’t read those novels, would she be standing there with Mateo? Would she have figured out a thesis? She didn’t know. But she suspected her life would look very different without the words written by those bold women so long ago.
“Here?” he said, looking at the floor space between the banister and the bookshelves.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I’ve got a lot to learn about you, Sadie Bailey. I’ve never seen this side before.” He started kissing her again. “But I like it.”
They fell to the ground, and she laughed, feeling a thrill as if on the dip of a roller coaster. Mateo slipped his hand under her T-shirt, and her heart beat wildly.
Mateo kissed her neck, sighing with pleasure, pulled her T-shirt over her head. Sadie marveled at the curve of his jaw, his long dark lashes on his cheeks, the lock of hair falling across his forehead. As his hand moved between her thighs, she luxuriated in their surroundings, wondering if there had ever been a better use of a library. It was hot. It was forbidden.
It was just like something out of a trashy novel.
Fifty-eight
A winemaker’s true genius reveals itself the moment he or she calls for harvest to begin.
Leah had grown up watching her father make that decision at the end of every summer, like a magician, reading the grapes for that moment. For the first time since her girlhood, she’d spent the past few weeks with him as he walked the vineyard acres, tasting the grapes, examining the skin thickness, the berry texture, all of his senses exquisitely tuned to the fruit.
If they picked too early, the tannins would be bitter. If they waited too long, the sugar levels could get too high, leaving them with “flabby” wine. While Leonard had made a few bad business decisions, mistiming a harvest had never been one of them.
He finally made the call in late September. They would begin, as always, with the Chardonnay.
Sadie arrived from school the night before and was up at dawn to work side by side with Mateo and Javier and the rest of the field crew picking the Chardonnay grapes. Harvesting the grapes was not a high-tech operation; everyone went to work with their handheld clippers and bins. They started as early in the day as possible, when it was still relatively cool. If skins accidentally broke on their way from the field to the winery, they could begin to ferment if conditions were too hot.
When the grapes were transported from the sorting table—where the team pulled out damaged grapes or leaves—to the crusher-destemmer machine, Leah and Vivian focused on final preparations for the Harvest Circle.
They’d lost count of the RSVPs, but it was somewhere between two hundred and three hundred women. Her parents’ failure to maintain a consistent customer database led to their outreach being disjointed; some customers were reached by phone, some by email, some by snail mail. Regardless of how they managed to reach people, the message had been the same:Come celebrate with us: this wine is for you.
The biggest hurdle had been convincing her father to relinquish his usual place at the ceremony.
“You’re asking me, the head winemaker, not to come to possibly the last Harvest Circle ceremony at my own vineyard? I know that you’re still upset that I didn’t welcome you into a position here when you were younger, but this is just petty...”
“Dad, I’m not upset. It’s not that I don’t want you there. But I need to offer a very specific experience to these customers in order to get the results we need. I’m asking you to trust me.” He had agreed. Maybe it was because the grapes were looking like the best crop in a decade and he wanted desperately to get them to market, maybe it was because his damaged ego wanted to prove the baron wrong, or maybe it was because he actually did trust her. She didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. The important thing was that he wouldn’t stand in the way of her putting the plan into action.
By dusk, the veranda was lit by candles and filled with the backdrop of her mother’s favorite album, Carole King’sTapestry, playing over the sound system. It was as festive and lovely as Leah had ever seen it.
Peternelle’s buffet included late-summer favorites: goat cheese tarts, Brussels sprout salad, corn on the cob, steak skewers, and lettuce wedges with blue cheese. White wine chilled in silver ice buckets, and the air smelled like the fresh-cut asters and chrysanthemums from Vivian’s garden.
But appearances, as the saying went, could be deceiving. None of the guests arriving would ever guess that the entire winery was at stake. The truth was, Leah wouldn’t know until the end of the evening if they had just celebrated a new beginning or bade Hollander Estates a grand farewell.
Vivian stood at the foot of the veranda steps, greeting each guest. Her mother, always elegant, had outdone herself for the occasion, wearing a billowing Alexander McQueen dress in pale pink organza with embroidered flowers. Bridget, off to the side, photographed all the arrivals. The women showed up in waves, in groups and alone, all carrying a little piece of home to contribute to the ceremony. Leah was touched to see many familiar faces: Roya Lout from the cheese shop with her mother and her mother’s book club, women from the wine and cheese classes, Anouk the real estate agent, and many people she’d seen taking selfies with her mother on that very spot during the course of the summer. But one familiar face—both familiar and strange at the same time—stood out from the crowd: Delphine Fabron.
Leah had found her through social media, happily living in Boston with her husband—one of the restaurant wine reps she had gotten fired for sleeping with those many years earlier.
Delphine appeared on the steps of the veranda swathed in a black cashmere cape and wide-legged black pants. She wore high Louboutins, and her formerly gleaming dark hair, now a striking white silver, loose over her shoulders. The only blight on her otherworldly beauty was the creases around her mouth that signified her as a lifelong cigarette smoker. Leah remembered the days when her parents constantly admonished her not to smoke near the oak room, that the cigarettes would “blunt” the wine.
“It does not hurt us in France,” she used to say. Delphine, the rebel. Delphine, the first woman to be cast out of the winery. She herself was the second. Now they were reunited.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Leah said, leaning in to accept Delphine’s double-cheek air kiss.
