"I wouldn't have it any other way." He presses his lips to my forehead.
Tomorrow we'll fly home to Texas where everything I've built is waiting. But tonight belongs to us.
Chapter 18
Charlie
Sunny already has the restaurant pulled up on her phone by the time I finish buttoning my shirt. I told her she could pick, and from the look on her face while she scrolls, she's been planning this particular choice for longer than the last twenty minutes.
"Harvest and Ember," she announces, showing me the screen. "I walked past it every Saturday on my way to the dress shop. It was way out of my price range."
"A dress shop?"
"Don't look so surprised. I had student loans and rent and exactly four hundred dollars a month left over after both. I worked at the shop in my downtime." She tucks her phone into her small bag.
I finish the buttons and reach for my jacket. "I'm just picturing you folding silk skirts."
"I was excellent at it." She tilts her chin. "I was also fantastic at upselling shoes and scarves. It's not that different from talking customers into a case instead of a bottle."
"You're good at persuading people to spend money."
She smirks at me. "That’s a skill, Hayden."
"No argument from me, Sunshine." I hold the door open, waving her through, and follow her out.
The walk to Harvest and Ember takes ten minutes along streets that wind between boutiques and galleries already lit against the darkening sky. Sonoma in the evening is beautiful, softer than Austin, older than Fredericksburg, and it carries the faint smell of damp earth and crushed grapes. I watch Sunny's face as we walk, the way her expression shifts from the sweet openness she wore in the hotel room back into something more composed.
She squeezes my hand, and I press back.
Harvest and Ember sits in a converted farmhouse on the edge of the plaza, stone-faced and low-lit, with a wisteria-covered trellis arching over the entrance and a hand-lettered chalkboard menu in the window. Inside, the space is exactly what the name promises—rough-hewn timber, candlelight on iron fixtures, long communal tables alongside intimate corner booths. The air smells of wood smoke and roasting herbs, and every surface looks deliberately imperfect.
"I've wanted to come here for so long," she comments wistfully. "I used to tell my roommate that one day I’d be able to afford a meal here every day of the week. And Bethany would tell me that one day she'd be rich enough to pay for both of us."
The hostess seats us in a corner booth with enough candles between us that I can watch every shift in Sunny's expression. She takes the wine list with both hands and digs into it, her brow furrowed and her lower lip caught between her teeth.
"Tell me about the internship," I say while she works.
She doesn't glance up, but one side of her mouth curves. "Where should I start?"
"Wherever you want."
She sets the list down and folds her hands on top of it. "I was twenty-one when I was accepted at Beaumont Crest. Evanpicked me out of forty applications because I'd sent him a three-page analysis of his latest chardonnay vintage along with my resume. He told me later he almost didn't read it because it was so presumptuous." She pauses. "He offered me the position the same afternoon."
I chuckle. "Presumptuous and right."
"That was Evan's exact phrase, actually." The warmth in her smile is unmistakable. "The first week, I was convinced he hated me. He made me re-barrel three tanks because my technique was sloppy—his words, not mine—and then made me write up a full explanation of every decision I'd made and where I'd gone wrong." She shakes her head. "I cried myself to sleep that night, decided he was a tyrant, and showed up the next morning an hour early with corrected notes."
"He didn’t scare you off, though."
"No. He had this way of looking at you over the rim of his glasses when you'd done something well and then going straight back to whatever he was doing. The first time I got that look, I drove home grinning so hard my face hurt."
I smile as the image of a younger Sunny hits me. Early in her career, chasing the approval from a mentor who doled it out in glances. I can picture her driving away with that grin, and I want to know more.
"Where did you live?"
"About two miles outside of town. Bethany and I found a place that was generously described by the landlord as a cottage and was in practice a converted storage unit with a hot plate and one window that faced a fence." She glances at the candle between us. "We loved it, actually. We'd sit on the little concrete step out front after our shifts and eat whatever we'd scraped together and argue about wine and terrible movies."
Sunny says it like it was nothing, but the warmth in her voice tells me it was everything. These are the parts of her that nobody at the winery gets to see.
