Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,125

always.

“Mom, we need to reach out to as many women who’ve visited this place as possible—even ones who haven’t. I’ll show you our list, and you let me know if I’ve forgotten anyone.”

Sadie looked up from her laptop. “I can think of one person we should invite. Not because she’ll buy the wine but because she should be here.”

“Who?” Leah said.

“Mateo’s mother. This ceremony was her idea in the first place.”

“Maria Eugenia? Oh, she left for Guatemala a long time ago,” Vivian said. “She didn’t like it here.”

“She didn’t like it here because there was no place for her. Just like there wasn’t a place for my mother,” Sadie said. “I think we should invite her and offer to fly her in for it. To thank her. If we’re really truly looking to make female contribution a thing around here.”

Leah knew Sadie was right. And from the look on Vivian’s face, she did, too. For too long, they’d all been second-class citizens, going back to the day when Leonard fired their one female employee: Delphine. What had been her great sin? Hooking up with a wine buyer or two from their restaurant accounts? Her father never would have fired a man for that—at least, not back in the eighties. It had been the usual, old-fashioned double standard.

She didn’t share this thought with the group. This invitation was one she would pursue privately; the connection to the baron would freak out Vivian, and understandably so. But the truth was, Delphine had also been a victim of Henri de Villard. He’d cast her out of her home just as Leonard had cast her out of Hollander Estates. All that was missing was the scarlet letter.

Sadie was right: if they were going to create a new era at Hollander Estates, it was time to correct the mistakes of the past.

* * *

The library was at its most majestic at night. When sun-filled, the room had a charm, an allure that suggested hours of reading curled up in a chair. But at night, the space beckoned discovery. It promised there was magic to be found among the stacks.

And there had been; Sadie’s inspiration for her thesis had been discovered there. She tapped her pen on the table, looking up at the winding narrow stairs that led to the second-level shelves.

The room was also one of the few places at the vineyard that didn’t remind her, with every rustling tree and warm breeze and sunset, of Mateo. It took all of her willpower and self-respect not to seek him out. She’d caught a few glimpses of him from afar, and every time she was useless for a solid few hours afterward.

She flipped through her dog-eared, Post-it-noted copy of Scruples, trailing her finger along the highlighted passages she was using as support text in her paper. She skimmed over a section she wasn’t using but one that jumped off the page given her current state of mind: She was no Emma Bovary, no Anna Karenina, no Camille—no spineless, adoring, passive creature who would let a man take away her reason for living by taking away his love.

Damn right, Sadie thought. Still, the sooner she got back to campus, the better. Why torture herself? She gave her mother some help, now it was time to go. The thing was, she felt oddly torn between the two places. Before now, missing classes for any reason was unthinkable. But the vineyard felt more real and urgent than her life at school. She wanted to be a writer, and to be a writer she had to experience things. The creative juice she needed would not be found in the pages of a book—at least, not all of it.

“Sadie.”

She jumped at the voice behind her. Mateo’s voice. Incredulous, she turned around. He stood in the doorway, dressed in his usual jeans and a T-shirt, tan and achingly beautiful.

He walked toward her, and it seemed to happen in slow motion.

She stood up. “What are you doing here?”

“Your mother told me this was where I might find you.”

Sadie processed this: He’d asked her mother about her? Did he specifically track Leah down, or did they just happen to run into each other? It didn’t matter. Either way, she and Mateo were talking for the first time since the night she’d stood in the pouring rain, only to have him blame her for her grandfather’s mistakes. And yes, she had made a slightly obnoxious comment about being published in The New Yorker. Clearly not