It Was Only a Kiss

ONE

Jessica

I seem to be missing one of my Shun knives. A boning and filleting knife. If you do not return it I’ll be forced to ask you to replace it as I bought it during our trip to the States. They retail for around 200 US dollars.

Grant

Jess Sherwood dropped her head as the e-mail on her screen winged its way to the deleted folder. Grant was smoking something very green and very strong if he thought that she had any intention of paying him another cent. Who had supported him and his extravagant lifestyle when he’d lost his job and while he’d struggled to get his fledgling catering business off the ground?

And, while she’d dished out the money and the sympathy, every day when she’d left for work he’d found something else to do. Or perhaps she should say someone else to do...the blonde living in the simplex opposite them.

Jerk.

The door to her office opened and Jess watched Ally enter, her iPad in her hand. Jess counted her blessings that her stunningly efficient office manager was also her best and most trusted friend.

‘What’s the matter?’ Ally asked, dropping into the chair opposite Jess.

Jess waved at her computer. ‘Grant. Again. Looking for something called a Shun knife. Um...what’s a Shun knife?’

Ally, well acquainted with Jess’s lack of culinary skills, smiled. ‘It’s a brand of expensive kitchen knives. Nice.’

‘Well, if I find it in my kitchen it’s yours,’ Jess said glumly.

‘What else is the matter?’ Ally placed her iPad on the desk.

Jess waved at her computer. ‘Grant’s trying to yank my chain.’

Ally’s bold red lips quirked. ‘Judging by the scowl on your face, I’d say “mission accomplished”.’

Jess wrinkled her nose. ‘He’s the larva that grows on the dung of...’

‘Yeah, yeah—heard it all before. It was over months ago, so why are you still so PO-ed?’

Jess rested her elbows on her desk and shoved her fingers into her hair, considering Ally’s question. It had been a year since Grant had lost his high-powered job as brand manager for a well-known clothing chain, and six months since she’d caught him in their bed with what’s-her-name with the stupid Donald Duck tattoo on her butt...

Since she’d been on top when Jess had walked into the bedroom the image was indelibly printed on her mind.

Okay, so the incident had also catapulted her back to that dreadful period in her teens when— No, she wasn’t going to think about that. It was enough to remember that she now knew the pain infidelity caused—first- and second-hand.

She was now wholly convinced that any woman who handed over emotional control to another person in the name of love had to be fiercely brave or terminally nuts.

She was neither.

‘Well?’ When Jess didn’t speak, Ally shook her head. ‘We’ve shared everything from pregnancy scares—yours—to one-night stands—mine—and everything in between, so talk to me, Jessica Rabbit.’

Jess managed a smile at her old nickname. ‘I’m angry, sure, but at myself as well as him. I’m livid that he managed to slip his affair under my radar—that I wasn’t astute enough to realise that he was parking his shoes under someone else’s bed.’

Ally stood up, walked over to the credenza and shoved two cups under the spout of Jess’s beloved coffee machine. After doctoring them both, Ally handed Jess her cup, put her back to the window and perched her bottom on the sill.

‘I spoke to Nick on my way to work.’ Jess couldn’t help the smile that drifted across her face. It was wonderfully good to have an open, relaxed relationship with her brother again, after years of him operating on the periphery of her life. ‘He’s so damn happy with Clem, and I know that they have something special. The last of my brothers—all of whom sowed enough wild oats to cover Africa—has settled down.’

‘And you’re wafting in the wind?’ Ally placed her hands on the windowsill behind her. ‘And that bothers you because it’s something your brothers have got right and you haven’t. Love is not a contest, Jess. Do you know what your problem is?’ Ally continued.

‘No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me,’ Jess grumbled. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what she had to say...Ally seldom pulled her punches.

‘You raised the topic,’ Ally pointed out. ‘Do you want me to tell you what you want to hear or the truth?’

‘That’s a rhetorical question, right?’ Jess took a deep breath. ‘Okay, I’ll take a brave-girl pill...hit me.’

‘One sentence: you’re so damned scared of being vulnerable that you try to control everything in a relationship.’

Hearing her earlier thought about control so eloquently explained floored Jess. Did her best friend know her or what?

‘Being single suits you and not being in love suits you even better.’

‘Can I change my mind and ask you to tell me what I want to hear?’ Jess protested. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear any more about her romantic failings.

‘To you, being in love means losing control—and to a control freak that is the scariest thing in the world.’

‘I am not a control freak!’ Jess retorted, heat in her voice.

Ally’s mouth dropped open. ‘You big, fat liar! You are all about control. That’s why you choose men you can control.’

‘You are so full of it.’ Jess sulked.

‘You know I’m right,’ Ally retorted.

This was the problem with good friends. They knew you better than you knew yourself, Jess grumbled silently. Deciding that Ally was looking far too smug, she decided to change the subject, vowing to give their conversation some more thought later.

Maybe.

If she felt like digging into her own psyche with a hand drill.

Right now they needed to work. She nodded to the iPad and listened and made notes as Ally updated her on the projects she wasn’t personally involved with. Jess gave her input and instructions and ran through some office-related queries.

They were concentrating on interpreting some tricky data from a survey when Jess’s PA put through a call from Joel Andersen, a much larger competitor whose company owned branches throughout Africa.

He was also one of the few people in the industry she liked and trusted.

Ally started to rise, but Jess shook her head and hit the speaker button. She would tell Ally about the call anyway, so she’d save herself the hassle. She and Joel traded greetings and Jess waited for him to get to the point. Joel, not one to beat around the bush, jumped right in.

‘I was wondering...what did you think about Luke Savage’s e-mail? I presume you’re going to his briefing session for the new marketing strategy he wants to implement for his winery? I thought that if we catch the same flight to Cape Town we could share a car to St Sylve.’

Jess’s heart did a quickstep as she tried to keep up with Joel. She sent a glance at her monitor; she most definitely had not received an e-mail from Luke Savage...

Not knowing what to think, she decided that the only thing she could do was to pump Joel for information. ‘So, what do you think?’

‘About St Sylve? He needs it... I heard that he commissioned market research with Lew Jones and is open to something new and hip. But with two hundred years of Savage wine-making history and tradition, that could backfire.’

She didn’t think so... She hadn’t eight years ago and she didn’t now. It was about time he looked at updating his marketing, Jess grumbled silently. Over the years she’d kept an eye on the vineyard and was saddened by its obviously diminishing market share. The advertising was dry, the labels boring and its promotion stuffy.

And, since she was the only one who’d ever hear it, she sent Luke Savage a silent I-told-you-so.

Jess widened her eyes at Ally, who was frowning in confusion. ‘My PA is just updating my iPad...what time was the briefing again?’ she lied.

‘Ten-thirty on Friday morning at the estate,’ Joel replied.

Bless his heart—he didn’t suspect a thing.

‘So, shall I have my PA look at flights?’

‘Uh...let me come back to you on that. I’ve been out for a day or two and haven’t quite caught up. I have clients in Cape Town to see, so I might fly in earlier,’ Jess fudged, and grimaced at Ally, who was now leaning forward, looking concerned.

‘Well, let me know,’ Joel told her before disconnecting.

Jess scrunched up her face. Damn Luke Savage and his injured pride. Her instinctive reaction was that the St Sylve campaign was hers—it had been hers eight years ago and it was still hers. There was no way she would allow another company to muck it up a second time...

Jess stood and placed her hands on her hips. ‘What do you know about St Sylve wines?’

Ally’s brown furrowed in thought. ‘The vineyard has produced some award-winning wines, but it hasn’t translated that into sales.’

It had taken a bit longer than Jess had thought, but her predictions about St Sylve had come true...and she felt sad. This was one of the few occasions when she would have been happy to be wrong...wished she was wrong. St Sylve was a Franschoek institution—one of the very few vineyards owned by the same family of French settlers who’d made their home in the valley in the early nineteenth century. She’d loved the three months she’d spent at the vineyard—had been entranced by the buildings, so typical of the architecture of the Cape Colony in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its whitewashed outer walls decorated with ornate gables and thatched roofs.

Apart from the main residence and guest house, the property still had its original cellar, a slave bell, stables and service buildings.

It also had Luke Savage, current owner, who’d fired her and kicked her off his property after kissing her senseless.

Jess quickly recounted her history with Luke to Ally, who was equally entertained and horrified. ‘He fired you?’

‘I deserved it. At twenty-two I thought I was God’s gift to the world,’ Jess replied.

Learning that she wasn’t had been painful, but necessary. While she hadn’t been wrong about the marketing of St Sylve—as she’d suspected, the campaign had been a dismal failure—she’d been arrogant, impulsive and rude, approaching him the way she had.

Jess paced the area in front of her desk. ‘As much as I hate to admit it, I owe Luke Savage a debt of gratitude for a major life lesson. I needed my wings clipped and to learn that being first in class, being able to regurgitate facts and figures from a textbook, means diddly-squat in the business world.’

Jess put her hands on her waist and looked at the ceiling. Then she sent Ally a rueful look. ‘We had this massive shouting match and then he kissed me. He was a dynamite kisser. A master of the art.’ She blew air into her cheeks. ‘The best ever.’

‘Ooh.’ Ally wiggled her bottom.

‘I don’t even know if I can call what happened between us kissing...it was too over-the-top outrageous to be labelled a simple kiss.’

But then Luke Savage had been anything but simple. Jess sighed. He’d been one long, tall slurp of gorgeousness: bold, deep green eyes, chocolate-cake-coloured hair, tanned skin. The list went on... Broad shoulders, slim hips and long, long legs...

‘Jess? Hello?’

Jess snapped her head up. ‘Sorry—mind wandering.’

‘He sounds delicious, but the question is...what are you going to do about St Sylve? Are you going to go to the briefing session?’

‘Without an invitation?’ Jess looked at the ceiling. ‘I’m tempted. I wish I could demand to implement a strategy for him.’ Images flashed through her head of possible advertisements. Her creative juices were flowing and she hadn’t even seen the brief yet. She really wanted to get stuck into dreaming up a new campaign for St Sylve.

But Luke was still the only man who’d ever short-circuited her brain when he kissed her...and if she was being sensible that was a really good reason not to work for him. She didn’t think she’d be very effective, constantly drooling over her keyboard.

‘Phone the guy and ask him!’ Ally demanded, and Jess managed a smile.

‘Not an option. We didn’t get off on the right foot.’ Jess held up her hand at Ally’s protest.

Why did her stomach feel all fluttery, thinking about him? It had been so long ago...but the thought of seeing him again made her jittery and...hot.

She didn’t want to get involved. She liked being single. She wanted to play on the edges of the circle and keep it all on the surface.

Why did even the thought of Luke feel like a threat to that?

Jess shook her head, utterly bewildered. Where on earth had that left-of-centre thought barrelled in from? Sometimes she worried herself, she really did...

* * *

Luke Savage sat on one of the shabby couches on the wide veranda of his home, propped his battered boots on an equally battered oak table and heaved a sigh. He lifted his beer bottle to his lips and let the icy liquid slide down his dusty throat.

He opened his eyes and watched as the sun dipped behind the imposing Simonsberg Mountain—one of a couple of peaks that loomed over the farm. As the sun dropped, so did the temperature, so he pulled on his leather-and-wool bomber jacket.

‘I take it you saw the monthly financials for St Sylve?’ Kendall said eventually.

‘We’re still not breaking even.’ Luke sat up and placed his forearms on his thighs, let his beer bottle dangle from his fingers. ‘I can’t keep ploughing money into this vineyard. At some stage it has got to become self-sustaining,’ Luke added when his two closest friends said nothing.

Kendall de Villiers shook a head covered in tight black curls. His dark eyes flashed and his normally merry creme-caramel face tightened. ‘We know that your father sucked every bit of operating capital out of this business before he died and left you with a massive overdraft and huge loans. You’ve paid off the lion’s share of those loans—’

‘With money I made on other deals—not from the vineyard bank accounts,’ Luke countered. Kendall knew his businesses inside and out; he was not only his accountant and financial analyst, but a junior partner in his venture capitalist business.

‘The wines we produce are good,’ Owen Black said in his laid-back way.

Luke wasn’t fooled by his dozy, drawling voice. Owen was one of the hardest-working men he’d ever come across. As farm manager, responsible for the vines and the olives, the orchards and the dairy, he got up early and went to bed late. Just as he did.

‘You’ve won some top awards over the last few years, including Wine Maker of the Year,’ Owen continued.

‘It means nothing if we’re not selling the bottles,’ Luke retorted. ‘Our wines aren’t moving—not from the cellar here, and not from the wine shops.’

When both his friends didn’t reply, Luke twisted his lips and said what they were obviously thinking. ‘Because our marketing strategy sucks. It’s boring and old-fashioned and aimed at anyone standing in God’s waiting room.’ Luke leaned back and popped a cushion behind his head. ‘Why didn’t I see it before?’

Because a smart-mouthed girl once told me it was so and I was too full of offended pride to listen to her. And because I had so much else on my plate. I figured I could let it slide for a while... Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The Savage tradition of ‘letting the wine speak for itself’ was being drowned out by the splashy campaigns and eye-catching labels of their competitors. But Luke hadn’t changed it because tradition was everything at St Sylve.

Hadn’t his grandfather and father drummed that into him? Excellence and tradition—that was what Savage men strove for, what St Sylve stood for.

He got the reference to excellence, but tradition was killing him. He had to change something and quickly. Of course, he knew that both his father and his grandfather and every other type of forefather he had would do a collective roll in their graves...but if he didn’t do something drastic to increase sales he’d either have to sell St Sylve or resign himself to using whatever profits he made on other deals to subsidise the estate. At some point he’d like to have a life, instead of working two full-time jobs.

Kendall had returned to the subject of the marketing strategy and Luke tuned in, idly remembering that somewhere he had a copy of the plan Miss Smarty Pants had tossed onto his desk so many years ago. He wondered what he’d done with it. It would be interesting to see what she had to say...

‘Remind me—who is attending?’ Luke asked Kendall.

His friend didn’t need to consult his computer and quickly ran through the names.

‘Not Jess Sherwood Concepts?’ Luke asked.

‘You specifically told me not to,’ Kendall protested.

Luke raised his hand. ‘Just checking.’

Kendall narrowed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Why, I have no idea. Despite being a young company, Jess Sherwood has had some impressive campaigns over the last couple of years.’

‘And you don’t want her?’ Owen asked Luke, puzzled. ‘What’s the problem? Why wouldn’t you invite her to the briefing session?’

Jess Sherwood. He could still recall her big brown eyes and those honey-blonde curls, that gangly body and smooth, creamy skin. The way she’d tasted...strawberry lip gloss and spearmint gum. He could barely remember what his ex-wife looked like, yet he could remember that Jess had three freckles in a triangular cluster just below her right ear.

He would rather eat nails than approach Jess for a new marketing strategy—as good as she was reputed to be. Call him proud, call him stubborn, but she was a sharp thorn in his memory...the hottest and yet strangest sexual encounter of his life.

And, despite being so young, she’d seen the writing on the wall. With all his degrees and experience, his ability to look into the heart of a business and pinpoint the bottlenecks and constraints, he’d been unable to do it for his own vineyard.

Talk about not being able to see the wood for the trees. Or, in his case, the grapes for the vines.

Owen placed his bottle on the coffee table and frowned. ‘What’s your beef with Jess Sherwood?’

‘Jess interned at St Sylve the summer I inherited this place. I was in the midst of getting divorced from Satan’s sister and I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want the responsibility of the vineyard, I was working all hours, and I was...’

‘Miserable?’ Kendall supplied when he hesitated. ‘Depressed, angry, shirty, despondent?’

Hell, he’d been entitled to lick his wounds. He’d always wanted to be part of a family, and had thought that Mercia was what he needed to realise that dream. And she’d promised exactly what he’d wanted to hear...family, roots, stability... What was important to him had seemed to be what was important to her. She’d done an excellent job of camouflaging her true agenda until they were hitched, and when he’d woken up three months later he’d found himself legally bound to a freedom-seeking, greedy, money-guzzling shrew. Over the next two years he’d come to the dawning realisation that he’d been well and truly screwed.

Again. And not in a good way. It still burned that he’d been stupid enough to be so comprehensively manipulated.

As a result he’d made the decision never to get involved in a serious relationship or to allow a woman to clean him out financially and emotionally again. While he’d been grateful to see the back of her, watching his lifelong dream of being part of a family fade had stung. A lot.

Luke narrowed his eyes at Kendall. ‘Do you want to hear about Jess Sherwood or not?’ he demanded. ‘She was as gorgeous as all hell and she knew it. Entitled, privileged, unbelievably annoying. I had barely been introduced to her and had only seen her around a time or two. Then she just barged into my office and proceeded to lecture me on my marketing department. She called them a herd of dinosaurs and threw all those marketing terms at my head. Told me what I was doing wrong and how to fix it.’

‘So you kicked her off the premises?’ Kendall grinned at Luke’s nod.

Owen grinned too. ‘She sounds like a pistol.’

‘Jess Sherwood is such a madam that she’ll gloat about being right, rub my face in the fact that St Sylve needs her—I need her. I just don’t want to have to cope with her.’

Especially if she’s still as sexy as she was. Luke didn’t tell them that he’d kissed her stupid and been kissed back.

‘So I don’t want to deal with her. Big personality clash.’

‘It was a long time ago,’ Owen pointed out. ‘You should at least have asked her to the briefing session to see what she says.’

‘No. I can’t work with her. So what’s the point of her quoting?’ Luke stated, knowing that he said it because if she was still anywhere as hot as she’d been when she was younger he’d have a hard time keeping his tongue from hitting the floor every time she walked into the room. His attraction to her memory was still, crazily, that strong.

It wasn’t like him. He had a calm, satisfying...arrangement with the owner of a wine store in the city. When either of them needed company, or sex, or a date to a function, the other was their ‘go-to’ person. No fuss, no expectation, no emotion—no imagining wild sex on his office desk in the afternoon sunlight...

Luke leaned forward and sent his friends a serious look. ‘Look, this isn’t about a business I’ve picked up and intend to flog. It’s about St Sylve—about getting it back to where it was as the premier vineyard in the country. It’s hard enough dealing with the situation my father left me, let alone her.’

Over the years he’d tried to distance himself emotionally from the estate and the winery, but he still couldn’t manage to treat the multi-generational enterprise he’d inherited like any other arbitrary business.

It was his birthright—both his joy and his burden. His pleasure and his pain. A source of pride and an even bigger source of resentment. He loved and hated it with equal fervour.

‘I think you’re making a big mistake,’ Kendall insisted. ‘She’s a professional...’

‘End of discussion,’ Luke said genially, but he made sure that his friends heard the finality in his voice. He valued their opinions, but the decision rested with him. Jess Sherwood was the type of woman who upset apple carts, turned things on their heads, inside out. While he reluctantly accepted that she was probably exactly what St Sylve the business needed, it would be detrimental to him, to his calm and ordered life.

Just this once he was putting himself first...surely at thirty-six he was entitled to do that once in a while?