At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [94]
He smiled as he looked at it. The sketch was quick and amateurish, but he wouldn’t have cared if it had been done in crayon. “Well, what do you know about that? The princess of the vines is actual royalty after all.”
She struck a pose and an affected accent. “Perhaps not royalty, my dear man, but definitely of the peerage.”
He laughed and tucked the sketch into his pocket. “I would be foolish indeed then, to turn down such a commission—if, of course, you’re sure your ancestors won’t mind. Can you do a full color sketch for the printer?”
Because of course he would not deny her anything.
He showed the sketch to his mother that night after supper, and told her of their plans for the new label, but she did not seem much impressed—either by the design, or by their guest’s lighthearted claim to highborn ancestry. She tossed the little paper away, which was a shame, because Andrew would have liked to have kept it.
He thought he was living the best time of his life. The Shiraz was going to put Blackwell Farms on the wine-making map. He was going to be elected a District Court judge. And every day he came home to that beautiful face, sometimes smeared with paint, sometimes deep in concentration, and always making him feel he could spend hours simply gazing at it.
He planned a party in the winery for the end of the month, to show off the new mural, promote the winery, and honor the artist. His mother loved the idea, and so did Ida Mae, and the two of them buzzed around the house like hummingbirds in a field of poppies. Emmy started the much smaller murals in the living room, and when they were finished, she would go. He could not, of course, let her go. He began to fantasize about taking her to Paris, after the election, of course, and staying there for a month or so, just the two of them in a little hotel on the Rue Sancerre, where the morning sun came through the windows and painted the room gold, and then he began to fantasize about what she would say if he were to ask her, and he tried to imagine how he would ask her. He thought it would be at the party, when the paintings were finished. He would take her off alone, and he would tell her his plans, and he would watch her eyes light up with delight, and he would live on her joy the way other people lived on food and wine.
It happened one afternoon when he came in to find her stretched out in an awkward position in one of the alcoves. There were canvas drop cloths on the floor and paints all around, and she had snagged her hair on a rough board while prepping the area for the first coat of paint and could not get free. So he crawled in with her and tried to unwind the curl and as he did her hair ribbon came loose and her hair tumbled around her face and then she was free and she came up laughing with her breath spilling into his pores and her lips almost brushing his and he stole a kiss with her face held hot between his hands, sweet and hot, the two of them tangled together on the floor in a moment of shameless rapture, and when they broke apart his mother was just leaving the room.
Emmy was embarrassed, but he was amused, until the following day when she told him that she had a job waiting for her in Boston—wasn’t that exciting?—and she wouldn’t meet his eyes when she said it. He grasped her hands and the words rushed out of him before he could stop them: “Come with me to Paris instead.”
There was a flare of something in her eyes—Anger? Hope? Desperation?—which was replaced almost immediately with another expression, one he had never seen before, something cool and calculating and distant. “And