Blame It on the Champagne

Kate gasped, whooped, flung the magazines onto the table and ran out to grab hold of Amber’s arm. Two minutes later all that was left of Amber and Kate were empty coffee cups and plates, a whiff of couture perfume, lipstick on her cheek and a smile on Saskia’s face that only spending breakfast with her two best friends in the world could bring.

They had known each other since high school. Totally different in every way and yet she could not want better pals. They might only have reconnected at a high school reunion that May, but now it felt as though they had never been apart.

Had it only been May? Wow. So much had happened in the past few months. Amber was engaged to Sam and spending most of her time living the dream in India, while Kate was sharing her home with Amber’s stepbrother Heath only a few streets away. They were both so happy… and off to be fitted with sexy lingerie by the most famous bra shop in London.

Suddenly the wedding planning spreadsheet lost its appeal and Saskia sniffed and sat back in her chair. She envied them the luxury of having time to spend comparing fine lingerie, while she was sitting here trying to decide on whether to have background music in the bathrooms. Or not.

Ah. The joys of running your home as a private meeting venue.

A whisper of self-pity flitted into her mind but she instantly pushed it to the back of her brain in disgust.

She had so much to be grateful for. Her friends Kate and Amber were the perfect pretend family who knew her a lot better than her absent parents. And then she had her home, Elwood House the architectural masterpiece which she had shared with her Aunt Margot until last year.

A gentle breeze wafted in from the garden outside the conservatory room and Saskia smiled out at the hardwood planters overflowing with autumn blossoms.

She had spent so many summer evenings with her aunt in this very room, talking and talking about their grand plan to transform Elwood House into a fabulous private dining venue. Her aunt had been the acclaimed wine expert with superb taste in interior design who was happy to leave Saskia to work on the details and business plans. Together they had been a genius team who had started the project together.

It was so sad that her aunt had never seen those plans come to fruition.

Shuffling to her feet, Saskia gathered up the breakfast dishes and loaded the dishwasher. Clasping hold of the marble worktop, she let her arms take the weight and closed her eyes for a second and took a couple of breaths.

The past six months had been harder than she had expected.

A lot harder and much more expensive. But she could not think like that. She had to make her home into a successful business because the alternative was too terrible to think about. A day job in the city would not come close to meeting the running expenses of a house this size.

Elwood House had been the home of the most famous wine merchants in London for over one hundred and fifty years. It was strange to think that she was the last in the line and responsible for preserving the heritage of the house the first of the Elwood clan had built in this smart part of London.

It was her safety net. Her home. Her sanctuary. And her security.

Saskia inhaled deeply and waggled her shoulders to release the tension.

No matter what it took or how many hours she had to work, Elwood House was going to pay for itself.

Patience. That was what she needed. Patience and a lot of new bookings.

She had only been going a few months and it took time to get a private meeting venue like hers off the ground. Reputation spread by word of mouth and she was already attracting repeat clients, but it was a mightily slow process and she had a big gap to fill before the Christmas party season started. Maybe Amber’s wedding would turn things around and she could start the New Year with hope and excitement burning in her heart?

And as for a date for Amber’s wedding? That was so not going to happen. She had served meals and coffee to an awful lot of businessmen over the past few months but she had not the slightest interest in dating any of them. Just the opposite. She had learnt the hard way the cost of giving up your independence and she had no intention of repeating her mother’s mistake any time soon.

Her gaze fell onto one of the wedding magazines that Kate had brought for Amber to look at and a headline on the cover leapt out at her.

Read all about the huge rise in Civil weddings at home. Celebrate your wedding in the intimate and private venue of your own home.

A spark of an idea flashed bright. Civil weddings. Now that was a thought. Amber’s wedding might be the first wedding reception that Elwood House had seen. But it need not be the last… Um… Perhaps there was a market for small private house weddings in a city this size. Not everyone wanted an extravaganza of a huge hotel banqueting suite.

The idea was still rattling around inside her head a few minutes later when the telephone rang. Saskia barely had a chance to pick up the handset and say the words ‘Elwood House,’ before a transatlantic female voice belted out down the line at such a rapid-fire pace that she had to hold the phone away from her ear for a second.

‘Oh, good morning, Angela. Yes, I am still available to talk to Mr Burgess and his team today. Not a problem at all. And there has been a change to the agenda. Right. Have you got the details? Tell me everything.’

Rick Burgess leant his elbows on the solid white railings of Waterloo Bridge and watched the water taxis mooring at the jetty below. The River Thames flowed beneath his feet and wound in wide lazy curves eastwards towards the sea. Stretched out across the horizon in front of him, high-rise marvels of modern architecture reached tall into the sky against the backdrop of landmark ancient cathedrals and majestic stone buildings that made up the city of London.

A fresh breeze wafted up the river and Rick inhaled deeply, his chest rising under his white open-necked shirt and soft black leather biker jacket.

Fresh air.

Just what he needed to clear his head after being cooped up inside an aircraft and then underground trains for the past four hours.

He ran his fingers back through his tousled dark brown hair.

Yesterday he had spent the afternoon talking wine over a plate of antipasti in a sunlit garden on a Tuscan estate with a young Italian couple who had sold everything they had to buy a tiny prestigious vineyard that he knew would be taking the world by storm in time. And today he was in London under a cloudy sky with only patches of blue peeking through to lighten the grey stone buildings.

He knew exactly where he preferred to be and it certainly was not here!

It was on mornings like this that it hit more powerfully than ever that it should be his older brother Tom who should be getting ready to go into a crucial sales meeting with one of the most prestigious private dining venues in London. Not him.

Tom had been the businessman. The IT genius who had transformed a small chain of family wine shops into Burgess Wine, the largest online wine merchant on the West Coast of America.

Rick shook his head and chuckled. He had a pretty good idea of what Tom would’ve said about the crazy enterprise he was just about to launch in this city and the language would not be fit for his parents to hear.

Tom had been a conservative businessman to the core. He would never have taken a risk with a group of independent young winemakers making tiny amounts of wine on family estates across Europe.

Not all of the wine was remarkable yet. But some of it was amazing.

It was going to have to be if he had any chance at all of redeeming himself in the eyes of the media. As far as the wine trade press were concerned, Rick had certainly never earned his place on the board of directors of Burgess Wine. Far from it.

To them, Rick Burgess would always be every bit the renegade who had walked away from a job with the family wine business to become a professional extreme sports personality. What did he know about the modern wine trade?

And they were right.

If Tom was still alive his business ambitions would have stayed in the world he knew—professional sports and adventure tourism. They had always been his passion and still were.

But Tom was dead. And there was nothing he could do to bring him back.

Just like he couldn’t change that fact that his parents were both in their sixties and needed him to take Tom’s place and work for Burgess Wine.

It had never been his decision or his choice. But as they said, there was nobody else. Burgess Wine was a family business and he had just been promoted to the son and heir whether he wanted the job or not.

Mostly not.

He didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. And they still didn’t completely trust him not to mess things up or run back to his old life.

Emotional blackmail only went so far.

This was probably why they’d set up this sales meeting with an important client he had never met. Of course they would deny it if he questioned them, but he had been long enough in the sports world to recognise a challenge when he was presented with one.

This sales pitch was just one more way they were asking him to prove that he could pull off his crazy idea to open a flagship wine store for Burgess Wine in London.

Which in his book was even more of a reason why he had to make the wine world take him seriously. And fast. Even if he did detest every second of these types of business meetings.