15. Gemma
GEMMA
After dessert, when Bas announced that he was going to walk me to the cottage, we were met with jokes about how they wouldn’t wait up for him.
“Thanks for being a good sport,” he said, holding onto my hand as we made our way down the driveway. “I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable by asking you to stay.”
“They’re really great, and no, you didn’t.”
In the house I grew up in, dinner was whatever was in the cupboard, eaten standing up or in front of the television, and nobody told stories at the table, because there weren’t any anybody wanted to tell.
I’d spent an evening with people who interrupted each other from the first course to the last, and every single interruption was affectionate.
I wasn’t jealous or even envious. I’d been around other families when I was growing up that were polar opposites of mine, even ones that had less money than we did.
I’d learned to want that for myself someday but not to waste time wishing for something now that could never be.
Everyone had sad or difficult things they experienced throughout their lives, and what mattered was having the resilience to live through them and make the most of the days ahead.
As I’d once read in a book, “there isn’t a future in the past.” That stuck with me.
What I felt now was happiness. For Bas and for his family. For the love they shared and the respect they had for each other.
Whether or not my brothers loved me in that obligatory way siblings did, I doubted I’d ever know.
Ten years separated me and my oldest sibling, Bert.
Tobias and I were eight years apart, and Karl was six years older than me.
What they experienced, what they remembered, was a different life than the one I lived.
The biggest part of that was our father.
I couldn’t recall a single thing about him.
Not even what he looked like, because every photo there’d ever been of him in our house was destroyed.
The girl who lived across the street was the one who’d told me about the abuse her parents witnessed before I was born and after.
According to them, my father would come home drunk and take out what he considered his miserable life on the three boys and my mother.
Whether he ever laid a hand on me, I didn’t know, but if he had, I was sure it wasn’t something I would have forgotten.
“What are you thinking about?” Bas asked when we reached the bottom porch step.
“How nice your brothers and sisters are. How much fun I had tonight, even through the emotional parts.” I kept my hold on his hand and pulled him up to the door with me. “If you aren’t staying, I still need a kiss good night.”
“Not staying? Why wouldn’t I?”
“I thought maybe you’d want to spend more time with your family.”
“Over you? Never.”
I smiled and shook my head. “You don’t have to say that, Bas.”
His eyes opened wide, and he cupped my cheek. “Even if it’s true?”
What he said warmed me right through. Then I remembered the agreement.
A year of acting like we were in a relationship, and then what?
This thing between us was temporary. How could it be anything but?
He was my landlord, my employer, and the sponsor of the one event my future depended on, and I was sleeping with him.
My plans hadn’t changed, and they weren’t going to.
I intended to return to San Francisco, maybe not to the firm I worked for before, but to one of the big agencies, walking in the front door with my name attached to the biggest first-year fundraiser this state had seen and not one person able to pretend they hadn’t heard about it.
There was only one problem with that plan, and it was a big one.
I was in love with Sebastian Whitmore. Not falling.
Not on my way. My heart belonged to the man in front of me, whose father’s contract I’d shoved in his face in a muddy vineyard in January, and who had made me promise a year spent by his side before he’d agree to help me.
“Why do I feel like there’s more you aren’t saying?”
He was right, and I doubted he could guess, let alone fathom, what it was.
“It’s been a long day…”
Bas snaked his arm around my waist and pulled me close to him like he did so often. “If you don’t want me to stay, you say so. I’ll pout, I might even be a little heartbroken, but I won’t force you to let me sleep with you.”
He was only half teasing.
“The way I see it is, you stay here with me, in a bed we both fit in, or I follow you back to the big house, and we share a bed you don’t fit in on your own.”
“So I can stay?”
I shook my head and smiled. “Bas, will you please, please, please stay here with me tonight? If you don’t, I won’t get any sleep, and tomorrow, I have to finalize the second-biggest event I’ll put on this year.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Oh my God, you’re impossible. Bas, will you please—”
The kiss he gave me both shut me up and had me ready to rip off his clothes before we even reached the bedroom.
He broke it first and rested his forehead against mine. “Gemma, I want to make love to you tonight.”
“I want that too.”
We didn’t rush. We took our time, savoring each other’s bodies.
It was no less passionate than it had been the morning after the frost, or in the shower, or in the supply closet, but it was different.
Was it that I’d finally allowed myself to admit I was in love with him?
Was I telling him with my body the words I couldn’t say?
Afterward, he pulled a blanket over us, and I fell asleep with my head on his chest, listening to him breathe and wishing I could make time stand still so our year together never ended.
The following morning, I heard him get up, but pretended I was still asleep.
I wasn’t ready to talk about my feelings about yesterday or last night and doubted he’d be ready to hear them anyway.
Once I heard the front door close, I waited long enough for him to be at least halfway to his house before I got up, showered, and went to the event center.
When I arrived, Camille and her team were waiting in their vehicles.
“You’re here early,” I said when they got out as I was unlocking the main entrance.
“Long day ahead. We were hoping to get an early start.”
I got it. I was a nervous wreck when the wedding I was planning was the second of the day at a venue. I spent the entire morning anxious that the other party wouldn’t leave when they were scheduled to and that I wouldn’t have enough time to get everything set up for my bride and groom.
Since I had a full schedule of things that required my attention, I told them I’d be in my office if they needed me.
Around noon, Bas knocked on my closed door.
I motioned him inside.
“Hey, am I interrupting you?” he asked.
“It’s always my favorite part of the day when you do.”
He pulled me from my chair and kissed me. “I’d say good morning, but I’m a little late for that.”
“How has yours been?” I asked.
“I was ambushed.”
My eyes opened wide, and we both sat down. “What happened?”
“They were all waiting for me in the kitchen when I came in the front door.”
“And?”
“They’re cleaning out Mom and Dad’s room today. More than that if they have time. Arlow made a point of telling me they weren’t asking my permission. They only needed to know if I wanted to help.”
“Since you’re here, I’m guessing you said you didn’t.”
“What I told them was I’d be grateful for the rest of my life if they did it without me. I think they were more relieved than I was when I gave them carte blanche to take anything they wanted.”
“Anything?”
“I told them what I’d already set aside, and if we needed to negotiate on any of it, I was willing to do so.”
As much as I wanted to ask what he’d kept, it really wasn’t my business.
“So, here I am. Is there anything I can do to help you? Tell me where you want me.”
“Remember yesterday, when I told you to go out and play?”
He nodded. “Gotcha. If you change your mind, I won’t be far. My plan is to decide on which wines to serve, then change my mind a dozen times before I start bringing it up.”
Less than fifteen minutes later, I heard another knock and looked up to see not only Camille but the other two team leaders were with her.
I stood and opened the door. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Camille assured me, “but do you have a few minutes for us to run something by you?”
“Of course.” I led them into the meeting room.
“We’ve been talking,” Thalia, the florist on the After Dark team, began.
“And we have an idea,” continued Wallace, also a florist and from the Grand Cru team.
“Go on,” I said.
Camille set a drawing on the table. “Here’s our thought.
Rather than having an abrupt delineation between the sections, we make it more of a transition.
Say the guests walk in through the Grove.
It doesn’t matter which they enter through because the idea is that there are pathways that lead from one to another.
Instead of feeling abrupt, it’s more like walking through different parts of a secret garden. ”
I studied her drawing, intrigued.
“It means adjusting the floor layout a bit,” Wallace added. “We drew out shapes in such a way that we all have the same amount of space without it being so uniform.”
“So it’s equal or at least close?”
“Yes,” he responded.
“And you’re all in agreement?”
“Completely,” said Thalia. “All we need is your approval.”
“What about the tables?”
Camille flipped her drawing over. “We worked that out too. The ten-footers all stay except they’d be staggered rather than in rows.”
I studied the placement and the measurements she’d included. There was plenty of space for guests to move around, and if anything, they’d all have a better view of the stage than before.
“Egress?” I asked.
“We walked it already. Aisle widths, exits, it all clears.”
“You have a lot of work to do, so I won’t keep you.”
“You approve?” Camille asked.
“Wholeheartedly.”
Their smiles were broad when they left the meeting room, but nowhere near as broad as they would be when they heard my decision about the winners for the ball.
Izzy’s call came late in the afternoon.
“My list is finally done. I had to threaten that if I didn’t have their responses by the end of the day, they’d hear from Edna Whelan.”
“Is that scary?”
She chuckled. “It is if you’re on her bad side.”
I thought about my one and only encounter with the woman and found her to be warm and gracious. That she could be otherwise wasn’t that much of a surprise.
“Anyway, I just emailed it over.”
We ended the call, and I opened the spreadsheet, filled with dread about who one of the companies would be sending.
I scrolled, not reading names so much as looking for one.
The list ran long. Every winery I’d wanted, most of the restaurants, both men Bas had warned me never came to anything, and the whole vintners’ association with wives were listed. Alex had forwarded her regrets from Paso and asked for photographs.
If I had to guess, I’d say she didn’t want to steal the limelight, which she likely would, simply because the woman was bigger than life. I appreciated her consideration, especially since Kick would be here to represent the Paso Robles event.
I got to the end, then slowly went through it again, bottom to top. The name I dreaded seeing wasn’t there. To be sure, I did a search that came up empty. I put my head down on my desk as all the tension I hadn’t realized I’d been holding onto released.
He wouldn’t be here. Not in the room, not on the property, and not standing at the bar, talking to Bas Whitmore while my attention was on them instead of where it should be.
“Hey, is everything okay?”
I sat up and looked into Bas’ eyes. “Never better.”
“I like the sound of that. So, wanna come out and see the miracles your teams have worked?”
“Good?” I asked.
“Not even close. Way, way, way beyond it.”