Wednesday dawns grey and cold, with rain drooling from the sky in a steady stream that does not bode well for my first wine road event.

By the time I’ve finished my first cup of coffee, the driveway has gone from soggy to imitating a small mountain stream, and I curse myself for putting off the gravel delivery until later in the month. The chance an oversize tour bus toting drunk San Franciscans will get stuck in the mud outside my tasting room is increasing with every passing second, and the sober expression on Bart’s usually sunny face as he lays out sandbags in an attempt to divert the worst of the runoff isn’t encouraging.

But the show must go on.

The Wine and Wonder event is the biggest of the season and a chance to put Haverford Estates on the map. Everything has to be perfect, or as perfect as I can make it, considering the miserable weather and the fact that I’ve been down in the dumps since Monday night.

He hasn’t texted.

He hasn’t called.

He hasn’t so much as paused to glance my way while out and about on his property.

And I’ve been watching. Boy, have I been watching. I’ve been following Dylan’s movements like a chocoholic tracking the last dark chocolate truffle at the party, making sure I’m in my garden when he’s doing chores, peering at him from under my straw hat, waiting for a sign that he’s considering all the things I said in my letter. But with every passing day, becoming more than friends, or even picking up where we left off, is looking more and more unlikely.

And that hurts. Concrete block dropped on my heart level of hurt.

I’ve always enjoyed alone time, but it’s torturous to me now. Eating alone, reading after dinner alone, going to bed alone, wishing I hadn’t washed my sheets so that they would still smell like Dylan….

Long story short—I miss him. So much.

My house is haunted with memories of our time together. Hell, the entire town is haunted. I can’t even enjoy a coffee at Barn Roasters without keeping one eye trained on the door, waiting for Dylan to walk in.

But he hasn’t been in for coffee since our argument Saturday night, a major shift in behavior that proves how determined he is to avoid me. He’s willing to give up one of his favorite simple pleasures just so he won’t have to look at my stupid face.

“Your face is not stupid,” I mutter as I brush on eye shadow, hoping the glittery silver color will lift my spirits. “Your heart is stupid for getting so attached to him, and your brain is stupid for coming up with this plan in the first place.”

But at least you make good wine, I tell myself, determined to get my head in the right place for the long weekend ahead. The Wine and Wonder event runs through Sunday, and we’re expecting between three and five hundred visitors, which means I’m on deck to work the tasting room with Denver and Neil to help manage the increased traffic.

And to smooth feathers in case we’re forced to deny someone a tasting.

The more experienced winery owners warned me at the planning meeting that event days can get ugly by two or three o’clock, when people have been tasting since ten in the morning and many haven’t stopped to eat a proper lunch. If someone is visibly inebriated or belligerent, it’s my job to make sure they aren’t served.

Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to playing bad cop. Conflict isn’t my strong suit on a good day, when the person I’m disagreeing with is sober.

Which reminds me…

I shoot off a quick text to Carrie, even though I know she’s on a plane to a writer’s conference and won’t be able to answer—

Emma: Just discovered another layer to my shit sandwich—dealing with drunk people at public events. Wish me luck.

—and head out the door, holding my raincoat over my head as I dash the twenty feet from the house to the entrance to the tasting room.

Inside, blond and ridiculously gorgeous Neil is looking stressed. His usually perfectly-feathered hair sticks up in frizzed waves on one side as he unloads bottles of Pinot Noir behind the wooden bar spanning the length of the stable house turned tasting room.

“Oh thank God.” His shoulders sag in relief as I step inside, hanging my coat on one of the antique hooks on the wall. “You’re here. You’ll fix it.”

“Fix what?” I ask, crossing to the bar.

“The labels on the new cases are wrong.” He plunks a bottle of Pinot on the reclaimed wood between us and jabs a finger at the golden script on the label. “They all say Chardonnay.”

“Oh my God.” I shake my head as I lean in for a closer look. “How did that happen?”

“Mix up at the bottling facility, I’m betting.” Denver cruises in from the stock room with another case of wine in his arms, his dark hair pulled back into a braid instead of his usual smooth ponytail. “The Chardonnay is all labeled Pinot, too. I just checked. They must have popped the wrong stack of labels into the machine.”

I curse softly and chew the edge of my thumb, thinking fast. “And we don’t have any properly labeled bottles?”

“Not here,” Denver says, setting the second mismatched case by my feet. “We might have some in the warehouse, assuming the bottlers didn’t fuck them all up.”

“Surely they didn’t.” I rake a hand through my hair and fist it, knowing I have to make a call and make it quick. We only have an hour before go time.

“Okay,” I say, breath rushing out. “Here’s what we’ll do—Neil, go ahead and get two tasting stations set up with the mismatched bottles, and add in the Sauvignon Blanc so we’ll have at least one offering that is what it says it is. Denver, get the truck keys from Bart and head to the warehouse. They open at ten. I’ll call Misty and tell her to be expecting you. Hopefully she can get you what you need ASAP, then you can load up fast and be back here before noon.”

“And if the bottles at the warehouse are all mixed up, too?” he asks, backing toward the door.

“Don’t put that out into the universe, Denver. They’re going to be fine.” I point a stern finger his way, only for my elbow to sag with doubt as he arches a skeptical brow. “But if they’re wrong, too, stop by the craft store and get some silver permanent markers to write on the bottles, and we’ll improvise.”

Denver claps his hands together. “Got it, boss.”

“And what about the cheese puff pastries?” Neil asks.

“What about them?” I glance down at my watch. “They were supposed to go into the oven at nine. Tell me you put them in, Neil.”

“I did put them in, but they’re not going to cook as long as the power’s out in the stock room and kitchen.”

“What?” I screech, my pitch high enough to make poor Neil wince. “When did this happen?”

“About thirty minutes ago,” he says. “I’m sorry. I thought Bart told you.”

I sigh. “He’s been trying to keep the driveway from washing away. I’m sure he just forgot. Let me run the pastries into the house and put them on in there. Then we can load them into the cupcake carrier and ferry them back and forth to keep them dry.”

It’s a solid plan, but some days it doesn’t matter if you have a solid plan. The powers that be are out to get you, and all your puny human efforts to thwart fate simply make them laugh.

Laugh and then laugh some more when you hurry off the porch with the last load of pastries and slip in a patch of mud, going down hard, smearing the back of your gray linen pants with clay caked an inch deep.

I groan, cringing as I stand and my backside still feels like I’m sitting in an inch of freezing rainwater. But at least the cupcake carrier full of pastries landed right side up on the porch.

Thanking the universe for small miracles, and waddling to avoid disrupting the mud caked on the inside of my thighs, I make my way inside in time to see Neil turn bright red and press a fist to his mouth.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, eyes wide.

“Mushrooms,” he wheezes, hand coming to clutch his throat. “You said they were cheese pastries. You didn’t say anything about mushrooms. I’m allergic to mushrooms.”

“Shit, what do I do? Call 911?” Launching into motion, I hurry around the bar toward the phone, but Neil is already circling around the other way.

“No, I just need Benadryl. I usually have some with me, but I forgot my man purse at Steve’s last night after I left early because we were fighting about dumb shit.” He coughs, then violently clears his throat. “If I die, I’m going to come back and haunt his ass for killing me by insisting we can’t go to the same ski lodge two years in a row. Do you think Bart can drive me to the pharmacy?”

“Just head into my master bath,” I say, pointing urgently toward the house. “I have Benadryl in the medicine cabinet. Pills and liquid for when I need the allergy pain to stop faster.”

“Bless you,” Neil croaks, clearly relieved. “I’ll be back as soon as I don’t feel like I’m going to pass out or swell up. You’ve got this, boss. Don’t worry. Just take your time and move methodically down the line. They shouldn’t be rabid for a pour this early in the day.”

Before I can ask him what he’s talking about, he hurries outside, the door swinging wide behind him to reveal a giant bus parking in my one and only bus parking spot and shutting off its engine.

“Shit,” I curse, pulse hammering with anxiety as I grab a roll of paper towels from near the washing machine and swipe at the mess on my backside.

I have just enough time to realize that my swiping is making things worse—and causing a very poo-esque earthworm smell to rise from my damp slacks—when the first tasters push through the door. Plastering what I’m sure is a hysterical grin on my face, I shove the dirty towels in the trash, wash my hands as fast as humanly possible, say a prayer that no one will notice my messy bottom or unpleasant odor, and start lining up glasses and handing out tasting menus.

I’ve got the first fifteen or sixteen folks set up, and have managed to flip on my favorite tasting playlist—good music trumps bad smells, right?—and am feeling like I might squeak through this without crashing and burning when a familiar laugh sounds from near the door.

It’s still so familiar, even though I didn’t hear much of it in our final months together, when my fiancé was so busy sneaking around and sticking his penis into other people that the stress of juggling his romantic entanglements affected his sense of humor.

But you don’t forget a booming, Santa-Claus belly laugh like Jeremy’s.

It’s him, no doubt in my mind. I know it instantly, even before I turn, time slowing to a horror-movie crawl as I pull six-foot-two Jeremy and his much shorter friend into focus.

Veronica is here, too, even though she’s so pregnant her swollen belly strains the front of her dress, jutting out into the crowd like the bow of a ship cutting smoothly through the water, clearing a path to the bar. She’s wearing ruby-red jeweled barrettes that match the flowers on her dress in her dark brown hair, and her olive skin is glowing like she’s been lit up from the inside.

She was always beautiful, but now she is stunning, vibrant, the creating and incubating of life clearly agreeing with her in every way.

It’s enough to make me want to throw a wine bottle through the window to my right, launch myself through it, and run away through the rain sobbing hysterically.

But I can’t. Denver is off property, Neil is guzzling Benadryl in my bathroom, and Bart is too busy with sandbags to take over for me, even if he weren’t vehemently opposed to talking to strangers.

Nope. There’s no way out of this.

It’s just me, and my soggy mud butt, alone.

And I will have to face this, face him, look up into the brown eyes of the man who betrayed me so completely it took months to stitch together the tattered scraps of my self worth, pour him wine, and pretend everything is fine, even if it kills me.

Now. I have to do it now. There’s not another second to waste if I want to have these people out before the next batch of tasting enthusiasts arrive.

I turn toward the other side of the bar, chilled bottle of Sauvignon Blanc clutched in hand, feeling like a monster claw is clutching at my throat at the same time.

Not just clutching but squeezing, making my pulse race and my stomach threaten to bring up the biscuit I had for breakfast. I’m still several feet from my destination when black prickles begin to dance at the edge of my vision and my head informs me that it will be floating off my body and will return later, when all of these horrible people are gone.

I realize I’m about to faint, and throw out a hand, leaning against the heavily stocked shelves behind the bar. I close my eyes and pull in a deep breath, willing myself to stay upright.

I can’t faint. I refuse to let Jeremy see me go down, to give him any reason to think I’m still the broken person who sobbed on our couch for hours after learning my fiancé had knocked up another woman. I have to keep going, stay strong, because there is no one here to help and no one to catch me if I fall.

“Hey, what’s going on? Why are you in here all alone on an event day?” another familiar voice asks from so close I can smell his heavenly scent drifting to my nose on the damp breeze blowing through the window.

My eyes fly open to see Dylan ducking under the closed flap at the center of the bar, holding the most beautiful arrangement of flowers I’ve ever seen, and my heart explodes with relief. It doesn’t matter that we fought, or haven’t spoken in days, one look in his eyes and I know that he’s here for me, the way he has been since that night in the woods, proving there are still heroes left in the world.

“Everything has gone to shit,” I whisper softly. “The labels are mixed up, Denver had to run to town, Neil is sick, the power is out in the tasting room kitchen, and I fell on my butt running cheese pastries over from the house.”

Concern flashes across his face. “You okay?”

“Physically, yes. Mentally, been better, and emotionally in the crapper.” I force a smile as I motion over his shoulder with the top of the bottle in my hand. “The tall guy at the end of the bar is my ex. The pregnant woman next to him is the woman he left me for. This will be the first time I’ve spoken to him since the day he called off our engagement, and my head is trying to float off my body to avoid it.”

“Like hell you’re talking to him.” Dylan’s scowl is stormier than the weather outside. He lays the flowers on the bar and pushes up the sleeves of his dark green sweater. “I’ll pour for that side of the bar. You stay on that side and don’t so much as look over your shoulder. That lying, cheating, sack of human garbage doesn’t deserve to see you upset.”

Gratitude swelling inside me like a puff pastry rising in a toasty oven, I press the bottle of white into Dylan’s hand. “Bless you. Thank you. So much.”

“My pleasure, Blondie. But before we pour, I need one thing.”

Before I can promise to give him whatever he wants—no favor is too great in exchange for his life-saving heroism in the face of my evil ex—he wraps his free hand around my waist and pulls me close, fusing his lips to mine.

And then he kisses me in a way I’ve never been kissed before. Not even by him, the best kisser to ever press his mouth to mine.

He kisses me like he’s been lost, and only now that he’s back in my arms is he found. He kisses me like I’m the answer and the question and every magical step of the journey in between. His kiss is a promise, an invitation, a challenge I never expected from him, this man who seems so determined not to make his life any more complicated than it has to be.

And love is complicated. At least, that’s what Jeremy and the other losers I’ve hooked up with through the years taught me to believe.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Maybe, when it’s right, it’s easy, like tasting cheese and eating ice cream and soaking in a perfect sunset.

By the time he pulls away, I don’t feel like I’m going to faint. I don’t feel scared or trapped or exposed. I feel safe, shot through with sparkles, and not at all alone.

“Talk later?” He cups my face in his hand, brushing his thumb gently across my bottom lip. “Once we get these losers out of here?”

“Yes,” I say. “But don’t call them losers. I would like to sell some wine today.”

“Don’t worry, baby. I’m going to sell the shit out your fine-ass wine. I’m a killer salesman when I believe in the product.” He winks before nodding toward the shelves. “And those flowers are for you. I’ve got some really bad poetry I wrote to recite for you, too, but that will have to wait until we’re alone.”

I grin. “Sounds good.”

It sounds better than good, it sounds like a big dream coming true.

With a final squeeze of my hand, Dylan heads toward the opposite side of the room, and I return to my post, pouring Chardonnay for the people who are ready to move on to the next wine. In between pouring and answering questions, I slice the cheese puffs into thirds, arrange them on tasting plates and pass them out to the people on my side of the bar in advance of the Pinot, which pairs beautifully with the rich cheese and earthy mushrooms in the pastry.

Amazingly, I don’t spare Jeremy and Veronica a second thought until it’s time to deliver pastry samples to where Dylan is working the bar like a champ, making small talk about the area and the history of Green Valley wine as he pours.

I clench my jaw, preparing to act surprised, but not displeased, to see them, but when I reach Dylan’s side, the spot where Jeremy and Veronica were standing is empty.

“Cheese puffs to go with the Pinot.” I set the tray on the shelf behind him before adding in a softer voice, “What happened to you know who?”

Dylan shrugs, focus trained on the Pinot he’s uncorking. “I don’t know. The guy glared at me like I kicked his cat and stole his Bible and stomped out. Guess he didn’t care for what we were pouring.”

I grip his arm, fingers digging into his bicep as I whisper, “Thank you. I’m so happy I could just bite you. All over.”

He shoots a heated glance my way. “I’ve noticed that about you. That you like to bite things when you’re happy. Especially when you’re really happy.”

His tone leaves no doubt what he’s talking about, making my cheeks flush.

“But that’s one of the things I love about you,” he adds, the look in his eyes assuring me that, this time, the words aren’t a slip of the tongue.

The warm flush spreads to encompass my entire being. I want to tell him that I feel the same way, that I’m crazy about him and so grateful that he showed up in my tasting room and in my bed and in my life, and that I don’t ever want to fight again.

But before I can say a word, he leans in, kissing my forehead. “Now get out of here and let me pour the Pinot, before I drag you into the stock room, rip off your clothes, and have my way with you. Four days without you did a number on my impulse control.”

“Yes, sir.” Grinning, I give a little salute and hurry back to pour second tastings, fill orders, bag up wine, and run credit cards.

By the time the bus pulls away, we’ve sold twenty-five bottles.

“Amazing start!” Neil breezes back into the tasting room just as two limos are pulling up outside. “Seriously great. Especially for a winery that’s hard to get to on a rainy day. I feel good things in our future today.” He pauses to cast some serious side-eye at the puff pastries. “Assuming you keep those far away from me.”

“Will do,” I say, edging toward the door. “Dylan do you mind sticking around for a few more minutes while I run and change?”

“I’m here for as long as you need me, baby,” he says, making my heart flip-flop all over again.

“Aw, you two,” Neil says, clasping his hands together beneath his chin. “I’m so glad you’re going public! It was such a drag pretending not to know you were coupling up behind the scenes.” He sighs, then claps swiftly before jabbing a finger at Dylan. “Now get those glasses in the dishwasher, friend. We’ve got less than a minute to set up for the next group.”

The people keep coming, wave after wave, until we run out of puff pastries and sell our last case of Sauvignon Blanc. Denver returns at noon with properly labeled bottles—thank God—just as the sky clears and the crowds begin to grow even thicker. Denver, Neil, Dylan, and I are all running at maximum capacity, pouring, cleaning, resetting, selling, and repeating, proving I vastly underestimated my staffing needs. I place a call to a winemaker friend during my late lunch break, securing two of her part-time tasting room employees for the rest of the event weekend, and have just enough time to heave a sigh of relief before I head back into the fray.

By five o’clock, we’re all worn out, but there’s no doubt that, despite the rocky start, our first day was a rousing success.

“You were a life saver.” Denver claps Dylan on the back as we get the last stragglers out the door minutes before five. “Seriously, man. Appreciate the help.”

“My pleasure,” Dylan says, capturing my hand as he backs toward the house. “See you all around.”

Before Neil or Denver can respond, Dylan has turned and practically dragged me onto the porch. I pick up my pace to catch up and he breaks into a jog. By the time we reach the door, we’re both running. We tumble through, laughing as he slams it behind us, and then we come together with twin moans of relief that prove how glad we both are that our suffering is over.

We’re together again. Truly together this time. And just like Neil, I feel good things in the future.

All good things.