Chapter Fourteen
For a man who owned a winery, David figured he’d seriously underutilized alcohol in the past. In the week after Sarah left, he did what he could to remedy that oversight.
“Pissing the profits away,” Phil had joked when he’d come over one night to find David already deep into a bottle of red, uninterested in going into town to visit the pub.
David figured he was fine where he was. No people around to annoy him, razz him about being so cut up over a woman. He didn’t doubt the few blokes he called mates and even plenty of those he didn’t would know about the American sweetheart who’d spent a weekend out at Windy Valley. Phil owned the butcher shop, and despite being a burly hulk of a man he gossiped better than a little old lady.
No, David figured he should stick where he was, with the silent vines standing sentinel outside and the dogs snoring peacefully beside him. So Sarah was gone and she wasn’t coming back. Fine. He didn’t need her. He didn’t need anybody.
Some guy called, claiming to represent Shelton Holdings, a conglomerate that owned several upscale hotels in Australian capital cities. He wanted to order some product to stock in their restaurants as part of a campaign to showcase boutique winemaking. At first David thought it was a joke, something Phil arranged to get some kind of reaction out of him besides numb disinterest. But after a while it dawned on him that the guy on the phone was serious.
And David smelled a rat.
“It’s her, I know it,” he raged to Kerri after he hung up. “Shelton Holdings, Harrington Enterprises. These rich people all know each other. She must have put the guy up to it.”
Kerri shrugged. “So what?”
“She can’t do something like that,” David spat. “Manipulate my life from afar. Who does she think she is?”
“A woman who cares about what happens to you?”
“Don’t be smart.”
“I’m not.” Kerri merely arched an unimpressed brow at his snappy tone. “If she really did arrange this, she cares a lot more about you than you do for yourself right now.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means stomping around here barking orders half the time and getting drunk by yourself the rest is no way to live. And if you’re saying you told this guy from Shelton to piss off, I’ll begin fearing for your sanity.”
A tingling sensation attacked the base of David’s spine, moving upward until he grew downright uncomfortable. Kerri’s description of how he’d been behaving the last week was not pretty but he had to face the fact it was accurate. He was miserable but it wasn’t fair of him to spread it around. “I didn’t tell him to piss off,” he mumbled. “I said I’d get back to him.”
The relief in Kerri’s sigh made David feel worse. This wasn’t even her winery but she cared deeply about what happened to it—to him.
“Why don’t you let me handle it?” Kerri suggested. “I know what this place can produce as well as you and I’m in more of a mood to schmooze.”
Weakened by his sense of remorse, David agreed. “Yeah, okay.”
Kerri studied him, her expression softening. “Call her, David.”
He shook his head. “I already played all my cards. There’s nothing more I can say.”
“If she did arrange this Shelton deal, it must be because she’s thinking about you.”
“I thought you didn’t like her.”
“I never said that. She was the one who didn’t trust me. Thought I had designs on you or something, which I did find rather insulting.”
“I know. She had some history, that’s all. Infidelity, that sort of thing.” Infidelity, betrayal, a father who meddled far too much in her life as far as David was concerned. When it came to relationships, Sarah had sure been up against it. Thinking clearly about it for the first time since last week, David understood Sarah’s position.
Which didn’t make her refusal to take a risk on him hurt any less.
“I didn’t know that,” Kerri said. “I might have tried harder to set her straight, let her know I’ve only ever thought of you like a brother.”
David stopped pacing and turned to stare at Kerri. “Really?”
“Well, yeah.” Her cheeks turned pink and she busied herself wiping down the bar counter that didn’t need wiping. “I never had a brother and I kinda think of you that way.”
David managed to muster a smile. “I never had a sister and I kinda think of you that way too.”
For a moment, the sharing made things a tad awkward. Then they grinned at each other.
Kerri laughed. “Now we’ve got that settled, it’s time you stopped being such a sook and got back to work.”
Sook. David wondered if that was a word Sarah would know. She’d probably tell him the term was wuss. He smiled, picturing it. Then he frowned because smiling hurt, especially when he was smiling about Sarah.
He moved through the rest of the week in a daze, although he could no longer put his ennui down to a perpetual hangover. He missed Sarah. She’d only spent one weekend on his property but she’d left her indelible mark. Buster, recovered well from his brush with death and once again fetching sticks in his spare time, often turned to David in bafflement, silently asking where his new lady friend had gone. The house was still cold at night, even though the first day of spring had come and gone. Yet David couldn’t start a fire because that always reminded him too acutely of the night he and Sarah had slept on the rug in front of the hearth, talking, laughing and making love until sunrise.
She’d left without giving him hope there could ever be more than the perfect weekend they’d shared. David wasn’t sure when or if the hole she’d ripped in his chest would heal over.
Another weekend passed, blessedly full of customers to charm and other things to do around the place. Monday morning, David popped down to the cellar door to do inventory. When he passed through the bar area, a yellow sticky note resting on top a newspaper caught his eye.
The note was from Kerri. Are you sure you’ve played every last card you have?
The paper was folded in three, showing one of the inside pages instead of the front. David recognized it as a popular Melbourne rag, probably left behind by one of their visitors from the city. It was the kind of publication that had a society page and when David lifted Kerri’s note away, the picture underneath was revealed.
What he saw didn’t register at first. Or maybe that was his self-defense mechanism kicking in, saving him from the initial shock with a cotton-wool sensation of numbness. He stared at the photo, his breathing growing shallower by the second as the truth finally began to set in.
She wore black, an elegant gown even more expensive looking than the one she’d worn that first time, the fine black wool dress he could still feel beneath his hands when he closed his eyes at night. The snap had obviously been taken at a formal event, because her companion wore a tuxedo. He also had his arms around her.
David was staring at a picture of another man with his arms around Sarah.
And his lips on hers.
…
The view beyond her office window was gray again. Locals always assured her the overcast conditions never lasted, that Melbourne was a city of four seasons in one day. This afternoon it could well be sunny once more.
But to Sarah the view would appear gray in any case.
“I’m about to head out to lunch if that’s okay. Can I get you anything?”
Sarah turned toward the doorway to see her secretary standing there. The thought of food didn’t appeal and coffee had been doing little lately to relieve her of the dragging sense of exhaustion that accompanied her throughout each day. “No thanks. I’m fine.”
Heather was about to take her leave when, with a hand on the open door, she hesitated. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Sarah, I don’t think that’s true.”
Surprised as much by the woman’s uncharacteristic dissension as by the use of her Christian name, Sarah sat a little straighter and frowned. “Pardon me?”
Visibly taking a breath, the other woman advanced into the office. “You do not seem fine.”
And here Sarah had been hoping she was hiding her malaise so well. Deflated, she let out a breath and sank back against the cool Italian leather of her desk chair. “Am I that transparent?”
“Not to anyone else,” Heather assured her. “But I’ve been working with you pretty closely for months now and in my opinion you’re not acting like yourself.”
“Not myself, huh?” Sarah mused. “I wonder what that really means.”
She’d been trying to figure out exactly who she was and what she wanted out of life incessantly the last fortnight. Was this job, this all-consuming career really all she needed to be happy? In her heart, Sarah knew work wouldn’t be enough. She wouldn’t look back on her life as an old lady and thank her lucky stars she’d chained herself to the office all these years. If she didn’t find love, didn’t have a family and real friends, she would be filled with regret.
As it always did, the idea of love made her think of David. Instinctively, Sarah’s mind careened away from those memories. They filled her with too much painful disappointment.
“If I had my guess, I’d say there was a man involved.” Heather’s suggestion shook Sarah from her inner turmoil. She gave her secretary a sideways glance, to which the other woman squared her shoulders. “I’m prying now, aren’t I?”
“A little, yes.”
“Am I going to get fired for it?”
Sarah couldn’t stifle the twitch of her lips. “Of course not.”
“Well, I might as well stick my foot all the way in my mouth then. Whoever it is, talk it out with him. You’re killing yourself this way—too much work, not enough food, no social life at all. It’s not healthy.”
“I have a social life—of sorts.” Sarah thought of the one evening she’d spent any time with a man since she’d left Windy Valley and cringed inwardly.
Somehow interpreting her thoughts, Heather said, “I’m not sure attending a work-related formal dinner with Richard Abercrombie counts as a social life. Not when it’s obvious you didn’t enjoy yourself last Saturday.”
“What makes you say that? Everyone else seems to think I enjoyed myself immensely.”
“Yes, I saw that picture in the paper.” She added shrewdly, “You looked more like you were trying to fight him off than being swept away by passion.”
The description was so accurate that Sarah’s lips twisted with chagrin. “Dear lord, it was awful. He was awful. He knew that photographer was there and grabbed me before I had a chance to avoid it. All he wanted was a photo of himself with me in the paper.”
“Lovely,” Heather drawled.
“Unfortunately all too often the way my ‘dates’ go.” Realizing she sounded as if she were about to throw a pity party for which she was the guest of honor, Sarah physically shook herself. “Never mind. I didn’t like him anyway. He was so full of himself and smarmy, not at all like…”
Sarah covered her mouth. Not even that god-awful, uninvited smooch from that leech Abercrombie had erased the memory of David’s lips on hers. She thought about him all the time, day and night. She’d find herself daydreaming in the middle of meetings, wishing things could be different. She’d come to accept she didn’t like her apartment with its austere furnishings and tomblike atmosphere. Not even the view of the city beyond her window—myriad colored lights twinkling on the gentle bends of the Yarra River—could fill her nights with even a modicum of joy.
She’d always taken a certain comfort in the constant movement and noise that came from living an urban life. It had given her the false impression she was never truly on her own and in the past had enabled her to ignore the loneliness that gaped inside like a dark chasm. But the activity around her no longer had that effect. Now she felt separate from it all, no longer a part of her surroundings. As though she’d left a piece of herself somewhere.
Windy Valley.
“What’s keeping you from being with him?”
The question turned Sarah’s attention back to her assistant. She opened her mouth to verbalize all the sensible reasons she had for keeping herself apart from the man, the life she yearned for. She hadn’t known him that long, the financial gap between them would cause problems, people would think bad things about him. But the words didn’t come. None of them seemed…enough. Not enough motivation to keep going on this way, drifting from day to day without any hope that things would change or improve.
She stared at Heather, dumbstruck.
Heather smiled. “You’re Sarah Harrington, you know. You can have anything you want.”
Anything I want.
David had said much the same thing to her. Sarah hadn’t believed him. Despite being the only daughter in a wealthy family, she hadn’t been raised with a sense of entitlement. She’d been raised to believe in duty. It was her duty to carry on the legacy her father had started, to be part of the company that fed and clothed her and sent her to an Ivy League college.
She’d performed that duty now for over a decade. Perhaps it was time she started living for herself.
The phone rang and Heather reached to answer it. Sarah stood and walked to the window, gazing out at the city. To the north beyond those buildings was Windy Valley. And David.
Only an hour away. Why in hell wasn’t she driving out there to see him every chance she got? She could fit him in around her job—if she even wanted to keep doing her job, that was. And he didn’t even get the papers delivered out there. What on earth did he care what a faceless journalist said about him in some second-rate rag?
As for her father…
“Sarah, it’s Mr. Harrington for you.”
A laugh burst out of her. What timing. Her father calling her from the other side of the world right at this moment, when she was considering…
“Should I put it on speaker for you?”
Heather’s tentative question made Sarah realize she hadn’t moved away from the window. She hadn’t shifted her gaze from the horizon. “You do that. Then please, go to lunch.” She turned around and smiled at her secretary. She was probably beaming. “And thank you.”
Heather shrugged, the bemused smile on her face indicating she wasn’t quite sure what she’d done. Then she pushed a button on the phone, hung up the receiver and slipped out of the room.
“Sarah? What the devil is going on down there?” Her father’s first demand vibrated through the office. “I hear there’s a delay with the opening of the new Harry’s Nook. Unacceptable. I sent you down there to make sure the schedule stayed tight. How could you let a pencil pusher from the local council have any impact on…”
Sarah found herself tuning her father out. Experience had taught her the best way to deal with his drill-sergeant voice was to remain silent and let him rant. She waited for him to take a breath then jumped in. “There will be no delay, I’m handling the council. A couple of T’s to cross, I’s to dot, that’s all. The opening is still on schedule.”
“That’s not what I hear from Bilson.”
“Edward Bilson always overreacts. He doesn’t trust my leadership because I’m a woman.”
“He tells me you’ve been disappearing from work. Canceling meetings.”
Sarah bit back a curse. She’d been aware of Edward Bilson’s attempts to undermine her with her father for a while but hearing how she’d basically been tattled on made her see red. “I canceled two meetings, one weekend.” The best, most romantic weekend of her life. Hell. Wasn’t she entitled to a little romance? A burst of rebellion shot through her like adrenaline. “I spent the weekend with a man, Dad. And I don’t regret a single second of it.”
“Sarah!”
Sarah almost laughed. It took a lot to shock the tough-nut Victor Harrington. “It’s called having a life, something I’ve denied myself too long.”
The pause after her pronouncement thrummed with tension. At length, Victor began, “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Sarah, but I don’t like—”
“Be quiet for a second, Dad. I need to talk to you—to really talk to you. Promise me you’ll hear me out.”
Another long pause. Then her father’s gruff response. “All right. You’ve got two minutes.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. Only her father would seek to time his own daughter’s big life confessions. “It might take five—or even ten. You’ll survive it, just listen.”
Now that she finally had the stage, Sarah wasn’t exactly sure what to say. She sat on the window ledge, forming her thoughts for several seconds that dragged interminably. When she heard the outer door to her office suite open, she thought it was Heather returning for something she’d forgotten. She wondered if she ought to pick up the phone receiver after all. Before she could reach the desk, the door to her office burst open.
She blinked, yet the scene before her didn’t change. David stood in the opening. He wore a dark suit, its shape emphasizing the breadth of his shoulders and narrowness of his hips. He carried a rolled-up newspaper in one hand. His dark gaze landed on her for a drawn-out moment, his intense focus making Sarah’s heart stop.
Then a scowl drew his eyebrows together. He began striding toward her.
Heart hammering, Sarah gaped. On the other side of the world, her father sat silently waiting for her to continue speaking. Too shocked by David’s sudden appearance, she couldn’t utter a single word to either of them.
“Is this what you want, Sarah?” He brandished the newspaper. With a glance, Sarah noted that it was folded with the picture of her and Richard Abercrombie facing outward. She returned her attention to David’s thunderous expression. “You want a guy who can put on a suit and perform for the cameras? You should have said so. I used to do the business thing, I haven’t forgotten how to kiss corporate butt. And I scrub up all right in a suit.”
He held his arms wide, a gesture compelling her to take in his appearance from head to toe. The Australians had such an endearing way of understating things. Scrub up all right indeed. He was beyond devastating in that dark jacket, his crisp white shirt offsetting the sleek blue tie beautifully. The civilized outfit didn’t entirely conceal the wealth of primal masculine strength in his physique. He was, in a word, incredible.
“I can take you to any damn dinner or cocktail party or charity-auction wankfest you want. Unless you really want this guy.” He waved the paper at her again before slamming it down on her desk. “Tell me, would you rather have him kiss you—or would you rather have this?”
Before she could guess what he intended, David grasped her shoulders and yanked her toward him so her breasts crushed to the solid wall of his chest. Then he took her mouth, his kiss savage, dominating. Sarah’s response was instinctual—a moan of surrender coupled with the immediate parting of her lips so he could delve past them with his tongue. Need, sheer sexual need, mingled with a powerful sense of rightness, of belonging. This was right. He was right.
David was The One.
All too quickly, he wrenched his mouth from hers. Still grasping her shoulders, he stared into her face. “Did his kiss make you respond like that?”
Breathless, Sarah could only shake her head.
“You don’t want him.” The statement was full of snarling satisfaction. “You want me. You want someone who makes you come alive, someone who makes your toes curl when he kisses you, who makes love to you so thoroughly you forget everything else. I can handle anything your life throws at me, Sarah. Your status, your father—who frankly sounds like a bastard who should get a friggin’ clue and butt out of your life—your money—”
“Ah, David.” Finally locating her voice, Sarah tried to interrupt his diatribe.
But David pushed on. Relentless. Determined. “I don’t want to hear your excuses anymore, Sarah. You pushed me away not because you didn’t think we could work out our differences. You did it because you were afraid. Afraid you were wrong about me, that your instinct to trust me is wrong. It isn’t, lady. I will never hurt you like those other men did. I would never take money over you. I will sign any bloody document to that effect, that your overbearing father and his legal cronies want to draw up—”
Uh-oh. “David, really. Stop.”
“I won’t touch a cent of your money. All I want is you.” His gaze was so intense, the passion in his eyes hit Sarah like a jolt of pure espresso. He meant every word. All he wanted was her. Just her, Sarah. Not the money, not the prestige of the Harrington name.
And she wanted him. Only David.
Sarah reached a hand up and caressed his cheek. It was smooth and he smelled like woodsy cologne. Even in a fury like he had been, he’d taken the time to shave and put on a suit, to prove to her he could adapt to her life. That he could take a place in it.
But Sarah didn’t want that. She wanted the both of them to make a new life together.
She let out a shaky sigh and touched her cheek to his. “Oh, David.”
“Sarah.” He drew her close so she fit snugly against his solid frame. “Give us a chance. I can spend some time here in the city, you can come to Windy Valley whenever you can. We’ll talk and laugh and make love by the fire all night. I’ll whisper sweet, dirty things in your ear until you beg me to—”
The sound of a throat being loudly cleared cut off the rest of David’s sentence. He drew back, his brow furrowing. “What was that?”
Her father drawled, “That was the overbearing bastard.”
At David’s confounded look, Sarah pointed to the phone on her desk, wincing. “I was on speakerphone with my dad when you came in.”
Sarah might have laughed at the pure mortification on David’s face if she didn’t feel so bad for him. His face actually flushed red.
From the desk, her father’s disembodied voice, laced with displeasure, growled, “Is this what you wanted me to hear, Sarah?”
She showed David a bemused smile. “Not exactly.”
David’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “So he heard all that?”
“I heard enough,” came Victor’s gruff reply.
“Oh shit,” David groaned. “I feel like I’m in a particularly upsetting episode of Charlie’s Angels.”
“What I want to know,” Victor went on, “is if you meant everything you said.”
Pushing out a sigh that visibly rid him of his embarrassment, David stared deep into Sarah’s eyes. He cupped her face with a tender hand. “I meant every word. Sarah is the love of my life and I’ll do whatever it takes to be with her.”
“Then I guess I should set my legal cronies on to drawing up that contract you spoke of.”
“No!” Extracting herself from David’s embrace, Sarah shot toward the desk and spoke directly into the speaker. All the better for her father to hear every last word she had to say. “David was right, Dad. You meddle far too much in my life. I’m making decisions for myself this time, and I choose David.”
“You do?”
Sarah turned to meet David’s questioning expression. She smiled, knowing he must be able to see the glisten of tears. David had called her the love of his life. She’d never thought she’d be so lucky. “I do. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed Windy Valley. I want to go back.”
“Now wait just a second, Sarah—”
“Dad, please.” Sarah spoke to her father but she never took her eyes off David. “It’s time I tried to make myself happy. David makes me happy, and I love him.”
Her father spoke on, about mistakes she’d made in the past and the need for caution. Sarah only half listened. She could barely hear anything over the thundering of her heart as David walked toward her. Slowly, steadily, as if they had all the time in the world now. The wetness of tears made tracks on her cheeks, ruining her makeup no doubt. She did nothing to wipe them away.
Gripping the solidity of the desk behind her so the weakness in her knees wouldn’t have her falling in a heap at David’s feet, Sarah waited for a pause in her father’s lecture. Then she suggested, “Offer him money, Dad.”
“What?”
Her focus still fixed on David, she said, “Offer him…a million dollars.”
His lips quirking, David stuck up his thumb and lifted it. Sarah took the hint. “No, offer him five million.”
Finally standing in front of her once more, David lifted a hand to brush a strand of hair behind her ear. He was smiling so lovingly Sarah didn’t want to take her attention off him for a second. His eyes were as soft as velvet. “Come on, love, let’s go for broke. Make it a cool ten.”
A laugh bubbled up from her chest until Sarah found herself giggling like a schoolgirl. “Offer him ten million dollars. He won’t take it.”
David shook his head. “Don’t want it.”
Sarah beamed. “He wants me.”
He growled. “Bloody oath, I do.”
Then he swooped in and kissed her. Sarah threw her arms around his neck, kissing him back for all she was worth, kissing him and pressing herself to him as if she wanted to become a part of him and believing for the first time that it might actually happen. She could be a part of David and he, in return, would be a part of her.
When another pointed throat clearing emanated from the speakerphone, Sarah forced herself to break away and deal with her father. Knowing at last that she had David’s love and support, she had the confidence to put her thoughts plainly. “By the way, Dad, I think I’m quitting.”
“What?”
“Taking a leave of absence at least—but not until after the opening, I promise.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing to me, girl?”
“I’m sure I’m throwing a wrench in the works but I have to do this. For myself.” She gazed at David and whispered, “For us.”
…
David couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t stuffed everything up for good with his impulsive He-Man act. But unbelievably, Sarah stood before him, her eyes misty with tears and her confessions still thrumming between them like the sweetest music.
She wanted to be with him. She loved him.
But after Sarah managed to end the phone call with her spluttering-in-disbelief father and she turned back to kiss him again, David pressed two fingers to her lips. “Perhaps you shouldn’t quit your job.”
“Why not? I hate it.”
“I don’t want you giving up everything for me. I was wrong before to expect any relationship between us to require you to travel to see me all the time. That’s what this was all about. I can come to you.”
“And give up the winery? No way.”
“I wouldn’t have to give it up. I could hire a manager, maybe come away with you on some of the business trips you go on. All I want is to be with you, Sarah. Under any terms.”
“No, David.” Sarah smiled softly. “You love the vineyard and so do I. You belong there.”
David sighed. She was right. He’d never felt more at home anywhere else than he did at Windy Valley. But his offer had also been genuine. Seeing Sarah in the paper, her lips pressed to those of another man, had made him see sense. Or made him desperate. Either way, he was willing to do anything to ensure his were the only lips she kissed from now on.
He rubbed his hands in circles over her back. “What about you? Where do you belong?”
Sarah tilted her head to the side and gave him that look, the one that told him she’d made up her mind about something and there was no changing it. “I belong with you.”
Then she kissed him and David was lost. He groaned into her mouth and pulled her roughly against him. The adrenaline of the morning still pumped its remnants through his system, mingling with the desire Sarah’s kiss generated. He was so hard he was throbbing. With a little shift of her hips, Sarah let him know she was aware of it too.
Short on oxygen, David released her mouth and buried his face in her neck. “Sarah. God, I need you.”
“Yes,” she replied, her tone silky. “Go lock the door.”
He’d thought he was already as painfully erect as it was possible to be. Apparently not. His voice strained, David said, “I hope you’re really, completely sure about this, lady, because if I lock that door…”
She shoved her fingers through his hair, holding him in place as he nipped her neck. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“You realize your father probably hates me now.”
“No probably about it.” Sarah laughed. “He definitely hates you.”
David groaned and lifted his head. “And I know you spoke to someone at Shelton Holdings and got them interested in me. We’re going to have to talk about that at some point.”
“Oh, that.” Sarah dismissed the issue with a flutter of her fingers. “I made one measly phone call and I thought we were over so I didn’t take your crazy pride into consideration at the time.”
David shook his head but he couldn’t keep this pretense at annoyance alive. “I’m always going to be scrambling to keep up with you, aren’t I?”
“I can’t help that I’m a smart woman who knows what she wants and how to get it.” The determination and desire in her voice imbued the words with layer upon layer of sexual promise. He watched, mesmerized, as her coral-painted lips enunciated her next suggestive words. “Now, go lock the door.”
David could barely speak over the lust that clogged his throat. His voice was hoarse. “You’re using your bossy voice.”
“Get used to it, Genero.” Easing him away from her body with one high heel, Sarah brought her hands to her blouse and started undoing buttons. “You’re in love with a powerful woman. So what are you going to do about it?”
David saw cleavage then a flash of white lace. He swallowed when her flat stomach was revealed, then the dusky-pink circle of her nipple through the bra when she parted the fabric covering her.
She was a powerful woman. Powerfully sexy, smart and dogged when it came down to getting what she wanted. There was every chance regular old Dave Genero from Murrumbungee was in way over his head. So what was he going to do about it?
David did the only sensible thing he could do.
With a grin and some powerful determination of his own, he walked over to Sarah’s office door and flipped the lock.
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