CHAPTER 31
Wine, Chocolate, and Forever—Lainie
One week later, the vineyard was full of people.
The watch beat against her chest—steady, matched to the ley line's pulse through her shoes—and Lainie stood at the barn doors watching cars roll down the private road.
A steady line of them, sunlight catching windshields, gravel crunching under tires.
February was getting ready to roll into March.
The air was warm. Too warm for the season.
The ley line's doing, and she'd stopped apologizing for it.
The barn had a new roof. Kalen and Charlie and Ash had spent four days on it—Kalen lifting beams, Charlie directing because he'd built the original, and Ash offering opinions about structural angles until Bruno told him to pick up a hammer or stop talking.
Ash picked up a hammer. The rafters were solid.
The lights strung across them were Glitter's contribution, and if Lainie looked close—which she did, twice—she could see tiny handprints pressed into the plastic casings where the pixie had gripped each bulb.
The pool was clean. The windows were replaced.
The paving stone fissure ran from the tree line to the garden, still cracked, still threaded with root growth that had turned woody and green in the week since the battle.
Charlie called it a design feature. Lainie called it the vineyard doing whatever it wanted, which was more or less the same thing.
The vines were still blooming. White flowers on every row.
Fruit on canes that should have been bare.
The Tempranillo and the Mourvèdre and the Grüner Veltliner growing where nothing had been planted.
Charlie had given up fighting it and started marketing it.
"Experimental heritage plantings," he told the first couple through the tasting room door, and Lainie, overhearing from the dessert table, pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.
She'd conjured the chocolate fountain that morning while setting up the dessert station, the timepiece responding before the thought finished forming.
Dark chocolate, cascading, the smell of it cutting through the wine and the flowers and the February air.
A crowd gathered around it within twenty minutes of the doors opening.
She moved through the party the way a host moves—checking on Charlie's wine inventory, greeting guests whose names she half-remembered from the original Valentine's Day list, adjusting a flower arrangement that had tipped in the breeze.
The watch beat against her chest. Steady.
The ley line's pulse through her feet matched.
She'd worn shoes today—low heels, black, the kind that said vineyard owner and not woman who talks to wells—and the pulse came through anyway.
Bitsy had taken one look at the arriving crowd and retreated under the dessert table, where she now sat with her chin on her paws, guarding the chocolate fountain from below.
The Bougie Bitches arrived at three.
All five of them. Karen in front, glass of red in hand before she'd cleared the barn doors. Alaina behind her in a dress that cost more than the catering. Nandita already scanning the appetizer table. Sheena with her dark curls and Picku beside her, arms linked.
Karen stopped in the doorway and took in the vineyard—the impossible blooming, the patched barn, the lights in the rafters, the chocolate fountain, the vine rows loaded with fruit that had no business existing in February.
"I'm not even going to ask."
"Good." Lainie crossed to meet them. "Because the answer involves a ley line, a three-hundred-year-old archivist, and a talking cat."
"I said I'm not asking." Karen's eyes moved to Lainie's face. Held there. Two seconds on the gold in her irises. "They look good. Moving on."
Alaina did not move on. She stepped forward, tilted her head, and stared.
"Can you do that to mine?"
"No."
"Shame. It would go with my earrings." She turned a full circle, taking in the barn, the vineyard, the crowd. "This is the best party I've ever thrown that I didn't plan."
Nandita leaned past both of them. "Does the gold affect your depth perception? Because I need to know if you can see the appetizer table from here."
"I can see it."
"Then let's go."
Picku said nothing about the eyes. She pressed her palm to Lainie's cheek—warm, brief—and her expression said what her mouth didn't. Sheena pulled Lainie into a hug, quick and tight, her dark curls brushing Lainie's jaw.
Then she stepped back, locked her arm through Karen's, and turned to face the group.
"We leave no bougie bitch behind. Especially not ones who save the world."
Karen lifted her glass. The others followed.
Five women who had known Lainie since college, who had watched her disappear into a marriage and come back out the other side with gold eyes and a vineyard and a dragon, and who were now drinking wine and eating chocolate and asking no questions they didn't want answered.
The tasting room filled. Charlie ran flights—three wines per tray, with a rotation between the new varietals and the originals.
He'd printed tasting cards with descriptions that were half-wine-speak and half-fiction: the Tempranillo was listed as "sourced from an experimental root-grafting program," which was not technically a lie if you considered the ley line a root-grafting program.
The band played something warm and mid-tempo. The chocolate fountain drew a line. A woman Lainie didn't recognize told her the vineyard was "the most gorgeous venue I've seen in central Florida," and Lainie accepted the compliment without deflecting, which was a new skill she was still breaking in.
She stepped back.
Toward the edge of the party rather than away from it. The place where the crowd thinned and the view opened up, and she could see the whole of it at once.
Brennon at the far end of the tasting bar, coaching Hadlee on how to pour without spilling.
"Tilt. More. There."
His hands correcting her grip on the bottle the way he corrected a student's form in the dojang—patient, specific, no wasted motion. Hadlee's round eyes fixed on the glass, her concentration total. Wine hit the rim. Brennon adjusted her angle. The pour came clean.
Jenna under one of the long tables, cross-legged on the ground, Glitter perched on her knee. The pixie's wings caught the warm twinkling from the rafters. Jenna's fingers were brown with chocolate. She broke off a piece from something she'd smuggled from the dessert station and held it up.
"Stop licking it. Eat it."
Glitter took it in both hands and ate with the focus of a creature who had discovered her life's purpose.
At the appetizer table, Nandita set down her third plate and reached for a bruschetta. Picku appeared at her elbow.
"That's plate three."
"I'm aware." Nandita took a bite. "I came to eat. I'm eating."
Ash and Frost at the tasting bar. Arguing rather than drinking. Ash held a glass of the Tempranillo and jabbed a finger at it.
"The tannins are too tight."
"They're Tempranillo." Frost didn't look up from his own glass. "They're supposed to be tight."
"That doesn't make them good."
"It makes you wrong."
Bruno stood beside them, coffee in hand—never wine, always coffee, even at a wine party—and watched the argument with the loose posture of a man who had no stake in tannins but found the entertainment worth the price of admission.
Sawyer. On the tasting bar—on it rather than beside it.
Marmalade fur groomed, the flat patch from the crystal gone after a week of brushing he'd pretended to hate.
He sat with the posture of a cat who owned the establishment, accepting scratches from strangers who reached for him the way people reach for any cat sitting where a cat shouldn't be.
A woman with a wine glass turned to Charlie.
"Is this your cat?"
"He's everybody's cat."
Sawyer's tail flicked. Once. The insult landed. Sawyer filed it.
And Charlie.
Charlie near the fireplace, wine glass in one hand, the other hanging at his side.
The band was playing something slow, and Charlie was moving.
Swaying, more than dancing exactly. His eyes closed.
His feet tracing a pattern on the flagstone that followed no rhythm the band was offering, because the rhythm he was following wasn't in the room.
It was in his memory. In the shape of a woman who had dreamed this vineyard with him, who had picked out the fireplace stone and planned the tasting room layout and died before any of it came true.
An ache pressed against Lainie's ribs. She didn't look away.
Charlie was dancing with Sue. And Charlie was holding the absence of her in his arms and moving to music only he could hear.
Lainie pressed her hand flat against the watch.
Karen appeared at her elbow. Wine glass. Direct eyes. The two of them stood at the edge and looked at the party.
"Good wine."
"Charlie's doing."
"Good party."
"That too."
Karen took a sip. "You know what this is? This is a woman who bought a falling-apart vineyard with magic money, survived a magical war, grew grapes that don't exist, and threw a party anyway." She looked at Lainie. "That's not Charlie. That's not the watch. That's you."
Lainie's throat went tight.
"Also, you're out of the Mourvèdre. Charlie's rationing the last two bottles and getting territorial about it."
"I'll conjure more."
"Please do."
Karen squeezed her arm once. Quick. Then she was gone, back into the crowd, back to Alaina and Sheena and the appetizer table where Nandita was not slowing down.