Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,127

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’s Tapestry, 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