A Price Worth Paying - By Trish Morey Page 0,36
who will be your attendant?’
Simone blinked. ‘Do I really need one?’
The planner looked askance at Alesander. ‘Who have you chosen as your best man?’
‘A friend from Madrid. Matteo Cachon.’
Simone’s ears pricked up. The name sounded vaguely familiar.
‘Not the football player?’ asked the woman, and Simone realised where she’d heard it. On the evening news. Matteo Cachon had just been signed in a massive deal that made him Spain’s most valuable football player. In the same report came the news he’d just dumped his long-term girlfriend, so he was also Spain’s most eligible bachelor.
He nodded. ‘Sí. He’s an old friend from university. We don’t see each other much these days but it fits in his schedule and he’s agreed.’
‘I have an idea about an attendant,’ Simone said, and when the wedding planner looked expectantly back at her, pen poised, added, ‘I’ll ask her and get back to you.’
Meanwhile Felipe was the happiest she’d ever seen him. He seemed to have dropped twenty years overnight. He even seemed to have more energy, demanding to be taken into town to be fitted out with a brand new suit, his first new suit since his marriage to Maria more than fifty years before.
It made it all worthwhile, even after the visit to his doctor, who’d taken her aside while Felipe was getting dressed to warn that while Felipe was feeling happier, she shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking he was getting better. There would be no getting better.
She’d thanked the doctor and swallowed back on a bubble of disappointment. Deep down inside she’d known that to be true, that there would be no sudden miracle or remission. She just hadn’t wanted to give that knowledge oxygen.
But the doctor’s warning made up her mind. She would stop this Cold War approach to Alesander. She would stop trying to make herself hate him and instead try to make this marriage look as happy for Felipe as she possibly could, although she hated the changed terms.
Because she would not let Felipe down.
The grapes tested perfectly one crisp day early in October and from then on it was madness. Swarms of workers filled the Esquivel vineyards, filling boxes with bunches of grapes, boxes emptied into a tractor drawn behind a trailer to be taken straight to the press.
Simone worked in Felipe’s vineyard as part of a team sent by Alesander, wearing oversized gloves and with a pair of thin-bladed snippers, perfectly designed for separating the bunches from the vines. If you knew what you were doing. In no time she knew she was the slowest person on the team. But she was determined to catch on, filling box after box with bunches of grapes.
Felipe sat on the vine-covered terrace and kept an eye on the progress, muttering to himself.
They took a break halfway through the morning, sitting amidst the vines, talking and laughing amongst themselves while they shared the most magnificent view on earth, and Simone felt privileged to experience this; to be part of something so utterly unique that she would never share in again. It made her sorry that she would ever have to leave.
And then they were back at work and there was no time for regret, only time for the grapes.
Alesander turned up at lunch time, with platters of food from a local restaurant, which the pickers shared around a big trestle table set up for the job.
‘Thank you for this,’ she told him near the car when he was leaving, and it didn’t matter this time whether she thought he was being nice or not, or whether she thought he was only doing it because he would soon own these vines, because she appreciated the gesture just the same. ‘Thank you for so much.’
He scooped her into his arms and dipped his head down and kissed her lightly on the lips, to the delight of everyone at the table nearby. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said, and she knew he meant how she’d held herself separate from him while she’d told herself she hated him.
Because, in spite of all her reservations, she’d missed him too.
‘We get married in three days,’ he said.
‘Do you think the harvest will be finished?’
He growled and she felt it reverberate through her bones while his eyes held her hostage. ‘I don’t care. I’m marrying you anyway.’ And then he kissed her again.
It was because they were all watching, she told herself, as she snipped grapes for the next day and a half. He’d only said it because people were