A Taste of Merlot (13 page)

B
urrowed deep in his blankets, Mark drifted in the current of a dream. He and Meri were holding hands in the center of a sumptuous showroom, surrounded by shoppers in various stages of the purchasing process . . . some holding be-ringed hands aloft for the stones to catch the light, others bending over polished showcases, still others conversing with helpful sales associates. He had just drawn her in for a kiss—

Ping!
went his phone, inches from his ear.

At the second text notification, he recalled what day it was: Monday, the day he could finally confirm to his aunt that all systems were go for a Merlot St. Pierre launch! He stretched with sleepy satisfaction before fumbling blindly on the bedside table. When his fingers landed on his phone, he sat up, squinting in the early morning light at the tiny lettering.

From Meri.
See attached. I can't do this. I'm sorry.

He opened the link to the Jumbotron video of Merlot and himself kissing at yesterday's game. Rubbing his eyes, he scrolled down to the accompanying text from a top NorCal gossip site. As the story sank in, the trajectory of his sweet dream peaked short of its zenith and fizzled like a dud firecracker.

Mark scrubbed a weary hand across his weekend beard. Merlot was going to be a basket case.

Merlot! The orders! Gloria!

He sprang out of bed to find his feet confused on which direction to go first. To splash his face? Make coffee?

“What do you
mean
, she doesn't like the name St. Pierre?”

Aunt Gloria tossed her gold pen to the desk, rocked back in her chair, and made a valiant attempt at scowling, but her Botoxed brow wouldn't quite go there. All it managed to do was form a bizarre contrast between the tight line of her mouth, the scorn in her eyes, and the incongruently smooth skin above them.

Mark had already braced himself for this reaction. He prepared himself for the ugly work of filling her in on the particulars. It wasn't going to be easy. Gloria wouldn't appreciate Meri's reasoning. If he didn't care for Meri so deeply, he wouldn't appreciate it either.

“You told me this was a done deal! I canceled the Javits trip. Now what do you propose that we do?”

“Like I said. She wants to be known as
Gilty,
not Merlot St. Pierre.”

“ ‘Gilty,' my rosy-red ass. What's she have to feel so guilty about?” She reached for the pen, stroking it between the fingers of both hands. He knew Gloria. This was her cogitating expression. She wasn't even seeing him—she was looking through him. Already calculating a way around this latest snafu.

Mark massaged the back of his aching neck. Even though he and Meri had gone through all this the day before with him taking the opposite side, he'd play devil's advocate on Meri's behalf this morning, against Gloria's justifiable rampage.

“Says she doesn't want to be identified with the wine label. Wants to do this all on her own.”

“Well, that's patently ridiculous. Why didn't you talk some sense into the girl?”

“
Woman,
” he corrected her.

He shivered. That had been no mere girl straddling his lap in that run-down Vallejo co-op. A vision of Meri's sultry, heavy-lidded gaze during the peak of passion in a sepia-lit room popped into his field of consciousness. With some effort, he forced his attention back to the present.

“Try to look at it from her point of view. You've heard about her family scandals. They're enough to embarrass anybody.”

Gloria waved him off with a glittering swoop of her hand. “I know, I know—even better than you. You were still a boy when the papers were full of Lily d'Amboise running off with that South American scoundrel. He was a vintner, too. Visiting the St. Pierre winery on business. They say he stole her away to his own estate, but that was simply to massage St. Pierre's ego. She was a grown woman who made her own decisions. It's not like she was kidnapped. They'd only been missing a day—word was the girls didn't even realize she was gone—when his Ferrari went off that cliff.” Gloria tsked. “So sad. Walked away from those little girls without blinking an eye. But then, everyone said the St. Pierres had an unconventional marriage. Reportedly, Xavier did his fair share of running around, too.”

“Exactly. So although no one debates that the popularity of the wine is wholly justified, you can understand how her parents' behavior would have affected Meri. Naturally, she cares more about her family than she does their business.”

“Yes, well, she can afford to, can't she? Because of
that business
, she and her sisters are set for life.”

As are you and I, Aunt Gloria. Don't forget.
But Mark and his aunt had enjoyed all the advantages of a strong family legacy, minus the negatives that Meri endured. Granddad had led a quiet, law-abiding life. If he ever had crossed the line, it had gone unreported in the pre-social media era.

Gloria dipped her eyes, sending her hawk-sharp glare through Mark. “You're right about one thing.” She drove her point home with the jab of the pen toward his nose. “Merlot St. Pierre is not a girl. She's a woman. And if she wants to be a
business
woman, she'd better get over being hurt by Mommy and Daddy and start making some smart decisions.”

She wheeled her chair smoothly back into her desk. “Get Little Miz Gilty on the phone.”

Mark froze. An old-fashioned tongue-lashing from Gloria would only make things worse. He gulped and shook his head. “Won't do any good. I've been trying all morning.”

Gloria looked at him askance. “She won't even answer your phone calls?” She paused, frowning. “Why am I getting the feeling there's more going on here than you've told me?”

Mark braced himself. “For starters, because I didn't tell her I knew her real identity until after I slept with her.”

“Then, she found out you only signed her POs because she's a St. Pierre.”

Gloria had risen from her seat. Now she was leaning over her desk, knuckles white against its edge, head thrust forward chicken-like from her neck.

“
Slept
, not sleeping.” He cringed at how that came out. “It's not what you think. I've been . . . seeing her.”

Gloria snorted. “For how long?”

Silently he counted backward, hoping if he thought hard enough he might be able to tack on a day he'd forgotten about. “Five days,” he said sheepishly.

Gloria fell into her seat with a clatter, shaking her head and fanning herself.

“It's not about business. I—have feelings for her.”

She eyed him skeptically. “And you know this after five days?”

He had known three months ago, when he'd first laid eyes on that bracelet, that he shared something indescribably profound with its creator.

She opened her mouth to speak before biting her tongue, but not before Mark read her mind. If Merlot weren't from a famous wine family, Gloria would be chewing him out yet again for his supposed poor judgment. Now all she said was, “I hope you're going to use your head this time.”

He couldn't expect the ice queen to understand. No wonder her own children had wanted nothing to do with the company if it meant having her for a boss.

“It doesn't matter, and anyway, it's between me and Merlot. We met, and there were—sparks. Mutual sparks.” Rubbing his damp palms against his cords, he turned away, circled her rug and returned to face her again. “We acted on it—for better or worse. But I dialed it back. This whole thing about her name came out and spooked her. Since then, I've been spending time with her as friends, getting to know each other.”

“In the hopes that she'd come around to our way of thinking?”

Mark nodded awkwardly. Let Gloria believe whatever she wanted. He knew what his true motives were—or lack of them.

“It was all good, until this came out, this morning.” He handed her his iPad opened to the stadium picture and story.

She snatched it from his hand, read, and sniffed. “Relationships are what make the world go around. It might not be fair, but there it is. Ironic, Merlot hasn't figured that out yet. Most people would use a famous name to their advantage.”

“Yeah, well. I think she has figured it out, but she's fighting it. It doesn't strike her as fair. She has integrity. Believes in merit.”

“Merit! Merlot St. Pierre's work has plenty of merit or I wouldn't even be having this conversation. I'd be on the phone with one of our solid, dependable vendors, or that other girl—
woman
—I liked at the co-op. What was it that she calls her line? Something Spanish—and we could
finally
put spring to bed, instead of sitting here at this late date with a good chunk of your budget still uncommitted and an untried designer who's pitching a hissy over acknowledging who her daddy is.”

But there was something his aunt was leaving out. And that was that Harrington's wouldn't survive another year with either its old vendors, or a debut collection of skulls. It could only stay afloat by making major bank.

Mark watched with growing apprehension the knotty veins on the backs of Gloria's hands bulging and relaxing with her thought processes.

Finally, she let out a weary sigh. “Well, there's only one thing to do, like it or not. I tried to give you some leeway, but we're out of options. At this point, we'll have to go with the skulls.” She slapped the iPad onto the desk.

A sour taste flooded Mark's mouth, and his jaw clenched. He racked his brain in one final effort to save his partnership with Meri.

“What about the ad campaign?”

She hesitated. “We'll let it stand. It's vague enough to apply to any new vendor, thanks to your suggestion that we withhold names.”

Gloria's laser vision bore down on him mercilessly, willing him to turn around, march down to his office, and fire off the POs to Rainn.

“Time's a-wasting,” she said, twirling her pen.

Somehow, he managed to lift one foot, followed by the other.

He might be the founder's grandson, but he wasn't the majority shareholder. That was Gloria, even though lately she was off somewhere with her dull-witted CFO more often than she was in her plush office.

But Mark had had enough.

Dutifully, he fired off the hated e-mail to Rainn, then picked up his phone and punched in his lawyer's number.

“Yeah, Mark,” said DeVon, his jovial game-day voice exchanged for the businesslike tone befitting the youngest partner at Jones, Goldberg and Sokolov.

“I need your help,” said Mark.

“Name it, brother.”

“We need to figure out how I can mount a coup d'état.”

M
eri dressed for work, praying fervently she wouldn't run into Rainn at the co-op today, of all days. She needed to put some space between now and the next time she endured Rainn's gloating.

And now her concern over her student film getting out had escalated. Meri herself had never seen the footage, and she never wanted to. Being in it was enough. No, taking her clothes off for a movie was
more
than enough.

Over on her dresser, her phone rang.
Mark.
She tossed the phone onto her bed without answering and pulled a random skirt out of the closet.

When Austin had asked her to help them out with their final project during her junior year, it had sounded harmless enough—even flattering, for an introvert like Meri who didn't get many invitations. Maman had been an actress, hadn't she? In fact, Maman's role as an actress had defined her more than her role as a mother. As a girl, Meri had been convinced that whatever Maman was doing down there in that place called Hollywood, it must be very important.

Still, with hindsight, acting in that project had been a shortsighted whim, even by Meri's standards. The script was nothing more than a vague outline, with most of the action improvised on the spot, but what did Meri know of filmmaking? She was usually hunkered down in Gates's jewelry department.

Dylan had eagerly taken Austin's direction. What guy was going to pass up the chance to make out with a willing girl, no strings? And admittedly, after the fourth take or so, Meri had gotten into the spirit of the thing, too, her imagination taking all kinds of wrong turns. But when the filming was done and Meri had skulked back to her dorm with a chill that she couldn't shake even with her clothes back on, she had already begun to feel deflated. Maman had forsaken her family for weeks on end for
that
?

Aaaaaaaaagh!
She slipped into her shoes, reliving Austin's words:
“Video lives on forever.”
That film wasn't going away. The potential would always exist for it to pop up when it could wreak the most havoc. For instance, if she were ever so foolish as to market a line of jewelry under her famous last name.

Meri's breath stopped, remembering. Rainn knew about Meri's background. Not that the name Lily d'Amboise came up every day—her Gates classmates didn't much care about an actress who'd died a decade ago—but Rainn knew.
What if Rainn got hold of that film and put it on YouTube or something?
She might even be able to sell it, make a little cash on the side. Meri imagined the headline: D
AUGHTER
OF
L
ILY
D'
A
MBOISE
M
AKES
S
CREEN
D
EBUT
. The media would have a field day. It might even get back to the foreign press. She'd heard Maman was still very much a legend in Europe. Weak-kneed, she braced herself against the doorframe and tried to swallow, but couldn't. She'd be forced to go undercover for real if that ever happened, chop off her hair and move—where? There was nowhere to hide from the Internet. She'd never survive the humiliation, to say nothing of watching her sisters suffer because of something she'd done.

Her cell buzzed. Mark again. Why wouldn't he leave her alone? He'd gotten what he wanted.

But Meri hadn't. And now the wholesale shopping season was over. She'd begun to see that she'd never reach her goals by selling a piece of jewelry here and there off the Web, and she couldn't find another retailer until next year—if then. Her only hope was to find someone else willing to take a chance on a fledgling designer next season. She would spend the winter months building up her line based on Mark's earlier advice, in hopes that by spring she would have completed all the pieces in her Entwined Collection to take to the trade shows in place of the amateurish bricolage she'd laid out on a wrinkled napkin for Mark that day at the diner. Even if she got lucky and found a buyer in the spring, the soonest her work would make it to the shelves would be fall. That meant she'd never repay Papa on schedule.

Her phone buzzed again, and this time she shut off the ringer and left it off.

 

Compared with the weekends, the co-op was quiet the first three days of the following week. As Meri's fingers braided gold wire into ropes, her fertile imagination worked against her, spiraling her paranoia ever higher.

Her business deal with Mark was ruined now, but she still held onto a thin veneer of self-respect as long as none of her loved ones had seen her movie.

On Wednesday, Meri almost jumped off her stool when Mark burst through the door of her atelier like Superman.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Hello to you, too,” she replied, her calm voice contradicting her quaking insides. She got up to dig through a tiny drawer of cabochons, but her fingers were all thumbs. She was really going to have to do something about the lack of good light in here, as soon as she started making some money. Which might be years from now. If ever.

“I've been calling and texting you for three days!”

She closed the drawer, sighing, and turned to face him with a carefully blank expression.

“Well, here I am. What do you want?”

“To talk to you! To see how you're doing! To . . . to,” he sputtered, unable to find his tongue. He took a step closer. “Jeezus, Meri!” He steamed, head cocked. “Why didn't you answer your phone?”

He seemed genuinely hurt. If he cried, she was done for. Self-preservation made her spin away.

He reached for her arm, turning her back around.

“Answer me, please?”

It was a perfectly reasonable question, so why was she so lost for words? The pleading look in his eyes filled her with remorse. Why
hadn't
she answered his calls? Had she simply needed time to think, or was it her old pattern of isolating herself to avoid the pain of rejection?

Unexpectedly, he pulled her into his warm, solid chest. When she knew her face was hidden, that's when the dam broke. Three days and nights worth of tears, fears, and misgivings gushed forth.

 

Mark closed his eyes and held Meri, letting her blubber in one, long, incoherent stream about her poor business sense, her regret for letting him down, the need to find a new retailer, and on and on . . . concerns that ran the gamut from the legitimate to the ridiculous. Part of him was concerned for her, another part was just so damn glad to have her back in his arms that he stopped trying to decipher her words. When her torrent ebbed to a sputter, he allowed himself a small smile of relief. Because at the end of the day, nothing she'd done would cause her business irreparable harm. Somehow, he'd see to that.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop right there.” He pushed her back to examine her tear-stained face. Her sobs came to a halt with a sloppy sniff. Mark's thumbs weren't enough to wipe the water from her cheeks, but he tried. “Now. Run that by me again.”

“Which part?” And even she couldn't control a little hiccup of laughter at the absurdity of trying to fish one bit from the gibberish she'd been spouting non-stop since he'd unexpectedly blown in on her.

“That part about me and Rainn.”

She met his gaze and Mark worried that his mere mention of the raven-haired enchantress was enough to start the water works all over again.

“Are you . . . are you and Rainn getting close?”

He threw back his head and laughed aloud in spite of himself.

“Well, there's one problem you can scratch off your list. Witchy women aren't my type.”
Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it.

“Listen up.”
My sensitive, beautiful Merlot.
“You've had a setback, that's all. You're still the same, incredibly talented artist you were before—well, you know. You'd have a fantastic career ahead of you even if you didn't have me to give you advice.”
Even if I don't have it all worked out, just yet.

He reached under her chin with an index finger and tipped it up to look into her spring-green eyes.

“And forget about there being any ‘me and Rainn.' Trust me. Because the only woman I'm interested in is the one I'm looking at.”

He bent to kiss away the residue of all those needless tears.

“Are you hungry?”