Wish You Would

by Grace Conley

  Text copyright ©2017 by the Author.

  This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Marina Adair. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original St. Helena Vineyard Series remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Marina Adair, or their affiliates or licensors.

  For more information on Kindle Worlds: http://www.amazon.com/kindleworlds

  Wish You Would

  By Grace Conley

  Dear Readers,

  Welcome to the St. Helena Vineyard’s Kindle World, where romance is waiting to be uncorked and authors from around the globe are invited to share their own stories of love and happily ever after. Set in the heart of wine country, this quaint town and its cast of quirky characters were the inspiration behind my St Helena Vineyard series, and the Hallmark Channel movie, AUTUMN IN THE VINEYARD. I want to thank these incredible authors for spending time in St. Helena, and all of you readers who are adventurous enough to take the journey with us.

  I hope you enjoy your time here as much as we have.

  Warmly,

  Marina Adair

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Marina Adair for creating the funny, sexy, charming world of the St. Helena Vineyard series and for deciding to share all the fun in a Kindle Worlds project.

  To my lovely author friends from SVRWA, too many of you to name individually here. What a wonderful group!

  Thank you to Lisa Messegee of The Write Designer for the gorgeous book cover, Cheers to Deb McKnaught, Heatherly Belle, and Lori Mack for your friendship and support.

  And finally, to my amazing husband, Larry – your love and encouragement keep me going. We had our own vineyard wedding, and it still feels likes yesterday, my sweetheart.

  XOXO, Grace

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter One

  “I feel the earth - move - under my feet,” Presley Trask sang the classic song as she lugged packing crates through the front customer space of the old brick building and back into the kitchen, careful not to bump into ladders or temporary bracing.

  “Well, I guess I’m here to shake things up,” she joked to herself, unpacking a crate of shiny metal cocktail shakers and queuing them up on the counter to wash and put away inside the vintage glass-doored cabinets in the spacious kitchen of the soon-to-be hottest champagne bar in Napa County.

  Presley was working on a quiet Saturday afternoon, since the team from Tanner Construction that her friend Chiara DeLuca and Chiara’s Great Aunt Chi Chi had hired to retrofit the place in time for next month’s opening was off.

  Presley’s eyes moved involuntarily to the cream-colored vellum invitation she’d tacked to the corkboard. Next Saturday night, she’d be the special guest of Ryo Wines at St. Helena’s Summer Wine Showdown, where Chiara and Chi Chi both insisted magical things happened annually.

  At least, magic happens if your name is DeLuca, Presley thought.

  Case in point:

  Geno DeLuca and Chi Chi Ryo met at the Summer Wine Showdown.

  Their son married his wife at it.

  And their grandson Marco DeLuca got engaged to his wife Lexi at it.

  Too bad I’m not a DeLuca! I just won’t be shaking things up THAT way.

  Those were magical things along the lines of meeting-the-love-of-your-life magic. Luckily, this year’s announcement was still amazing news, and had absolutely nothing to do with the L word.

  Because otherwise, Presley and the Trask Curse might cross dangerous lines with the famed DeLuca good fortune.

  And Presley just couldn’t bear life if she knew she’d passed on the particular hell that women of her family had borne for generations over to another family, especially one that had shown her so much kindness this past year.

  Presley lowered her head in resignation, and sneezed when a bit of construction dust tickled her nose. She wondered again if unpacking right now was a great idea.

  She was unlucky in love, plain and simple. Trask women just could not keep their men, they died young and in tragic, awful ways. It was in her genes. And she wouldn’t wish that on anyone else, not for the world.

  Presley smiled sadly to herself as she wiped up more of the construction dust that kicked up every day, on every imaginable surface in the old historic building at the end of Main Street. She knew it would just kick up again, until the retrofitting was done, but she just had to help Coupe shine.

  Absent the love of her life, this was her chance at a new lease on life. One she’d be flying solo in, but she figured she’d make friends. Work. Volunteer. Be a part of the community. Like all the Trask women before her had done, in order to survive.

  She looked up, seeing the opportunity within the walls of the building that construction expert Hard Hammer Tanner had accidentally called “decrepit” before he caught himself and started using smoother words like “charming” and “completely viable” with Chi Chi.

  Presley sneezed from the dust again and crinkled her nose up to avoid more, holding a moment before throwing herself into more commando cleaning. The new venture from the DeLuca family, which she had to pinch herself every time she realized she was a part of, was that Chi Chi’s woman-owned Ryo Wines was launching their first-ever champagne.

  And part and parcel to that, Ryo was launching a new side business. A champagne bar.

  This was really something Presley could get her happy on about.

  “Coupe. Like the old-fashioned champagne glasses from the 1920’s,” her friend Chiara’s Great Aunt Chi Chi had proclaimed when she offered Presley a permanent job – as manager of the new bar.

  “Unlike The Spigot, where locals go for beer, Coupe will be for locals and tourists alike. Elegant locals and tourists, to toast their very special life events. With Ryo’s new signature champagne as the featured beverage, among other well-regarded local sparkling wines.”

  Presley happy-danced as she cleaned, thinking of how amazing Chi Chi and Chiara were.

  A woman-owned-and-run champagne bar. Housed in a building on the National Historic Register, which was currently being lovingly restored to its original 1902 grandeur, Coupe would be the most elegant champagne bar in Northern California.

  She started singing again, beat boxing and drumming with a couple shakers.

  Without warning, Presley was thrown off her feet, her backside hitting the floor with a thump.

  “Ooohh!” she cried out, the wind knocked completely out of her. After the first moment, which was just shock, the rumble continued. She was afraid now.

  Very, very afraid.

  The building groaned and shook. Presley did a quick roll and crab-walked to clutch on to the nearest door frame, trying to get herself out through the rear loading zone. The whole room presently stacked with building supplies, but it was closer than the front, and not blocked, so getting out that way was her safest bet.

  The door frame IS where you’re supposed to take cover during an earthquake, right?

  Through the kitchen pass-through window, she saw a piece of Tanner Construction’s temporary bracing out front fail and come crashing down, plaster and bricks showering to the floor.

  She squeezed her eyes shut at the sight, then forced them back open, gazing wildly around for safe shelter. The building gave another giant groan and kicked up a thunderous snapping noise.

  At the exact same moment that Presley launched herself out of the doorway and under the large
metal prep table, another chunk of the historic Goodwin building came raining down, this time at the back of the structure. Both her possible escape paths were now blocked.

  “Help!” yelled Presley. She covered her eyes with a hand and coughed into the crook of her elbow, trying not to let plaster and brick fragments get in her eyes or breathe them.

  “This cannot be happening!” she yelled. “Crap!”

  She squeezed her eyes shut again. And just like that, in under twenty seconds, it was over.

  She stayed on her hands and knees under the prep table for the longest minute of her life. Mother Earth was protesting Presley’s good fortune. She just knew it.

  She wasn’t having any of it.

  “Oh, go ahead!” she yelled again, tempting Fate. “Knock yourself out, Earth! I’m here to stay and I’m not leaving!”

  Presley was spitting mad, and wouldn’t let one little earthquake stop her. Too much in life already had, and she was just plain tired of it.

  She jumped up from beneath the table, to be thrown right back down on her hands and knees again as an aftershock hit.

  Presley could hear people down the street pouring out of the Napa Grand, which was hosting a wedding reception that afternoon. Cries started ringing out up and down the block, neighbors coming out of buildings, calling out and checking on one another.

  “Hello!” yelled Presley. No one knew she was here today.

  A lone brick fell out in the front area, thudding into some fallen plaster that exploded out into a thousand pieces. Presley had left her phone out front on the future cash register counter. She hadn’t contacted the phone company to have the line hooked up yet.

  “Oh, no, this is SO not allowed,” she said vehemently. Coupe could not afford to shutter this close to opening. They were on a tight schedule with only six weeks until launch. Seismic retrofitting was well underway, and immediately after that finished in the timeline, craftsmen were coming in to re-furbish the floors and install new booths.

  She caught a glance at herself in one of the glass-fronted cabinets that hadn’t broken, her penny red hair a golden mess. Her ex-boyfriend, Luke, the love of her life that she’d run from last year, always called her his Irish pixie.

  There hadn’t been an earthquake while she lived down in Oceanside with Luke, and she’d only experienced minor ones at home in Oregon.

  Presley resolved not to be afraid. She couldn’t afford to; she had to think carefully and quickly, and get herself out of this building.

  A random thought floated through her mind. If she were one of the Irish faeries her Gram used to go on about, she’d skate over the rubble and slam the door good and loud, so more of the building would crash in.

  She wondered how early it was in life that people had tagged her as wild, capricious. It was just a label, and one she rejected now, although running from the man she loved still qualified her as Miss Not Exactly Reliable in Life.

  Or as Gram Trask called her growing up, Wild Child.

  She aimed to fix that, and had the color-coded planner with stickers to prove it. And more importantly than that, she had the determination and the heart to remake her life.

  Presley felt a pang of self-doubt zing through her. There was too much exploding around her, even for this reformed wild child. The failure rate for new restaurants in Northern California was high – it was make it or break it. And she still dreamed at night of her ex-boyfriend, Luke, and what they lost.

  A baby. And themselves, in the blink of an eye.

  Presley yanked her sweatshirt off and used it to breathe through, trying hard not to hyperventilate.

  “I will not be a statistic,” she yelled into the fabric, looking wildly around for what to do.

  She proclaimed to the broken cabinet doors, to the scattered cocktail shakers, “I WILL NOT.”

  The building groaned and shuddered, uncertain if it wanted to stay upright or not.

  Presley thought back. She’d been in St. Helena for exactly one year. One year of crying and clawing and trying to re-shape her life.

  She’d gotten serious with her boyfriend, an adorable lug of an ex-Marine called Luke Baudouin. They met in yoga class. She corrected his moves, and he got sassy and talked back.

  She loved him immediately, and as hard as she could. They moved in together, played house. She made him dinner, he made her crazy. To Presley, it felt like they were unstoppable.

  Then, she had a miscarriage. She’d only just figured out they were pregnant, showing him the stick a few days before. They hadn’t told anyone yet, savoring their private secret, celebrating. He was working long-distance with his dad on a project for veterans, and talked about introducing her to him.

  Then it turned out the project for veterans caught the interest – the BIG interest – of a television network, for him and his dad to go do. She lost the baby, and freaked out. In the middle of everything, she thought back to her Gram.

  “Trask women are cursed,” she’d say. “Love while you can, and while you’re young. Because I lost my Martin young, and your mama lost your father young. All I know in life, is surviving alone.”

  The loss of the baby threw her. She was worried she’d somehow invoked the curse, that she’d lose Luke, too.

  In a flurry of post-loss hormones, Presley ran away. She knew she wasn’t thinking straight, but had it in her head she should leave before she’d lose him outright.

  At least she’d still know he was in the world. She ran North to Oregon first, back home to a small town outside Portland, but just for a few weeks. She couldn’t stay with Gram permanently, it was too weird and sad. She finally got through to her best friend, Chiara DeLuca, who’d relocated to St. Helena, back down in California.

  St. Helena, which Luke had talked about growing up in. A bucolic small vineyard town, where everybody knew everyone else and neighbors were actually neighborly. She didn’t worry about seeing him, because to her knowledge, he was avoiding his parents and never went home.

  Another thought entered her head as she settled in the town and got to figure out exactly how common the last name Baudouin was. I’ll hear of him again some day. Some day, in some distant future, she’d hear that he married, had a kid or two.

  And perversely, since she wanted more than anything for him to be happy, even at her own expense, she decided she liked that idea. She’d know that he was alive and thriving, and that she hadn’t managed to bring down the Trask Curse on him.

  That stupid earthquake is just dandy, she thought.

  “Hello!” she called out, hoping someone on the street would hear her. Her arms were shaking uncontrollably. Presley was used to being the Wild Child, but she was not used to losing control of her environment as an absolute.

  For a darkly scary moment, she figured she’d just seen a flash of what life must have been like sometimes for Luke during his military service. In an instant, the quaint old building she was helping build into a business, her future, had become a war zone.

  She shook her arms out, frustrated. Trask women might be cursed, but they were also determined. Their determination came from a gut instinct, the need to survive. They might all have lost out in love, but they survived in life, raised their children and got by. They had gumption, and Presley figured, she came from good stock even if it was cursed.

  One, okay two puny little earthquakes couldn’t keep her down.

  She waited, figured she could move around a little bit.

  “Oh, no,” she said in dismay, when she finally noticed the normally dark corner of the room was sunlit – from above. By the hole in the ceiling, which meant a whole chunk of her new apartment above the bar had lost some chunk of the roof.

  The dust settled around the remains of Presley’s epic disaster afternoon.

  She sighed, opened the one cabinet that still had an operational door, and pulled out a bottle of Ryo Wines brand-new champagne.

  Her stomach growled, signaling a need for lunch. She popped the cork, looked around, and absent any
glasses, downed a big gulp.

  Surely, they’ll go building to building looking for people, she thought. She heard her cell phone go off, tried to reach it through the pass through and failed. She trudged back to the back of the kitchen, grabbed a mop, and just managed to press the button on the phone, activating the voice command.

  “Call Chiara DeLuca,” she barked at the phone.

  “Calling Chiara,” the cell phone voice said politely.

  The building groaned again as her call went though.

  “Where are you?” her friend demanded immediately. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m at Coupe. And boy, Chiara, it’s a disaster. The exit doors are all blocked.” She further described the crumbling building, all the beautiful historical elements that got damaged. Angry tears rolled down her face.

  Chiara cut her off. “Stop panicking. Hang tight for me, Pres. I’m on this. I’ll find someone to help you help, fast.”

  “Don’t hang up!”

  “I’ve got to, Pres. I’ll call you back. Help is on the way!”

  A few minutes later, there was a rapid-fire clanking and crashing out front as someone forced their way through the rubble.

  Sunlight shone around the man as he managed to force open the massive old oak front door.

  A sight for Presley’s sore eyes. Luke Baudouin. Marine. Rescuer. All around nice guy.

  And the ex-boyfriend she’d run away from a year ago.

  He stopped and looked at her, his dress uniform now covered in dirt from throwing a pathway through the rubble.

  Luke smiled a slow smile, his mouth settling in his trademark sexy smirk. He took in everything at a glance.

  Wrecked building.

  Open champagne bottle.

  Mussed-up girl in t-shirt that read “Save Water. Drink Champagne.”

  “I hear you need rescuing, Bubbles,” he drawled, his easy demeanor not reaching his eyes.

  “Well, not by you,” she shot back. She needed to keep him away from her, for his sake.