I want more. I can’t wait for tomorrow night.
A flicker of a smile moves over Samuel’s lips. They’re full and very pink against his dark reddish-brown scruff. “Course not. But when it’s big, and you know what you’re doing with it, it can be fucking magical.”
If only he knew how far from the truth that misnomer is.
I want to take his dirty pun and run with it. Show him I can be just as dirty, if not more so. Quicker and wittier too.
But considering this is my first day on the job, I decide to rein in that impulse. I often think about what my hugely successful older sister, Lindsey, would do. Right now, she’d definitely continue being the consummate professional she is.
“You know what’s magical? When you can blow a guest’s mind with a wine they’ve never heard of at a price point that doesn’t bankrupt them. When you tell them about the woman who grew the grapes and the four-year-old daughter who’s following in her footsteps, and the footsteps of her grandmother, and her great-grandfather. When you serve just the right bottle to just the right table and make it a night they’ll remember forever. Not because the wine cost so much, or because they get to brag about the label to their friends the next day at brunch, but because it made them think. It made them remember. Hope. Appreciate. It made them feel something.”
Beau smiles. “She’s good.”
Samuel just stares at me. I can’t read his eyes now. The weight of his undivided attention is intense and uncomfortable, but I stand my ground. If I’ve mastered one thing besides wine over the past decade, it’s resilience.
I hold up the binder. “I think this list needs to say something other than ‘rich people eat here.’ Let’s tell a story. Let’s honor small producers, the winemakers who are taking risks and doing the hard work of making interesting wines. Let’s make wine approachable for everyone by taking the snobbery out of it. Let’s make people think, talk, and linger the way Chef Katie’s food does. Let’s do the hard work, Samuel.”
Samuel is still staring. A muscle in his jaw tics.
His intensity finally gets to be too much, and I look away. Glancing at Beau, I find the vote of confidence I need in his big, genuinely gleeful smile.
“I love it,” he says.
“I don’t,” Samuel growls.
“I’m not saying you don’t have something special here,” I reply. “Or the beginnings of it, anyway. I’m just saying you’ve got a binder full of boring, unapproachable BSD wines.”
He arches a brow. “BSD?”
“Big swinging dick. Trophy wines.”
Beau lets out a bark of laughter. “If that doesn’t describe you to a T, brother…”
Samuel, however, doesn’t think it’s very funny. In fact, he looks downright murderous.
“I’m outta here,” Samuel says.
Beau slams the flat of his clipboard into his brother’s chest. “No, you’re not. You’re going to show Emma to her cottage, remember? Maybe give her a tour of the grounds on your way there. Emma, follow Samuel to the main house in your car. A valet will park it there for the remainder of your stay. Every residence has a golf cart, as they’re a more convenient way of getting around the resort.”
Samuel glances at me. Glances at his brother.
“No tour. I don’t have time,” he says at last. “Let’s go, Miss Crawford.”
I thought The Barn Door was peak magical-and-romantic-setting-straight-out-of-a-movie, but I was wrong.
As I climb out of Samuel’s golf cart, my breath catches. A beautifully carved wooden gate with lush green vines crowding the stone posts on either end marks the beginning of a meandering pebbled pathway. At the end of the pathway is a storybook “cottage”—really, a decent-sized house—with cedar shake siding painted a smart shade of gray-black. Smoke curls from one of the massive stone chimneys (yes, there are several), and I can just glimpse an A-frame screened-in porch at the back of the house.
The cozy smells of burning wood and pine trees hang heavy in the air.
Not to mention the 360-degree views of the Blue Ridge mountains. It’s a clear day, so I can see for miles in every direction: swaths of bright green mountains beneath a flawless Carolina blue sky. The colors are so vibrant and the light so ardent, it makes my eyes water to take it all in.
My heart twists with longing. This is it. Or could be, anyway.
The good life.
The life I was told over and over again didn’t exist for someone like me. An artist (of sorts), making a good living off her passion. Her art.
How wonderful it would be to prove the world wrong.
While my career path may be somewhat unconventional, my hopes and dreams aren’t. I want to own a home. I want to work at a job I love that also provides the stability I crave: a good salary, benefits that include health insurance and a retirement plan, and hours that aren’t insane. I began my career as a cellar rat at twenty-one, and I’ve been working restaurant hours (at an hourly wage) in the ten years since. The combination of seventy-hour weeks and night and weekend shifts has left me burned to a crisp.
Never thought I’d say this, but I’d love a regular old nine-to-five job. And being director of Blue Mountain’s wine and beverage program affords me exactly that. Not at first, granted. I have to learn the ropes here at the restaurant, which means I’ll be on the floor more often than not. But Beau promised I’d eventually get that sweet eight-or-nine-hour workday.
Climbing out of the golf cart, Samuel glances up the hill and lets out one of his aggrieved sighs.
“What is it now?” I ask, meeting his eyes over the roof of the cart. “I had some pointers for your wine list. But I’m legit blown away by your resort. Y’all are clearly the experts there.”
He grabs my tote bag and jacket from the back seat. “It’s nothing,” he grumbles, and starts walking toward the cottage.
“I can carry that.” I scurry to catch up to him, our footsteps crunching on the pea gravel.
“I got it,” he says, keeping his eyes trained on his feet.
“Really, I—”
“I said I got it.”
I roll my lips between my teeth. “Thanks.”
I put the key into the lock on the front door—no key cards at Blue Mountain; they use old-fashioned brass ones with gorgeous silk tassels attached to them—and Samuel and I reach for the knob at the same time. The back of my hand collides with his palm, and we immediately pull back, like we’ve singed each other.
“Sorry,” we blurt in tandem.
“You always in the habit of not letting people help you?” he asks.
“It’s not that I don’t let anyone help. It’s that I don’t expect it. Or need it.”
He’s looking at me like that again—like he doesn’t know what to make of me.
This time, I let him open the door for me. Samuel may be a jackass, but apparently he’s a jackass with manners. I’d say the combination intrigued me, but that seems like a bad precedent to set.
I devour things that intrigue me. Wine. Books. Men.
Samuel isn’t available for me to devour. Not in the naked sense, anyway.
Still, my nipples prick to life as Samuel’s gaze follows me inside. The heat of it pins a circle to my back as warmth seeps through my blazer and into my skin.