Stifling that energy, he went to make dinner for himself and Le Dog, noting that there wasn’t much left. He’d have to go to town soon, or they’d starve. He’d finished up dinner and was thinking about heading to bed when the sound of an engine reached him, struggling up the drive.
It’s her.Excitement bubbled up, and he leaped down the stairs, nearly stumbling at the bottom. Pulling up his pants, he opened the front door, started to run out on the porch, and stopped short.
The woman who stepped out of the car was not Abby Merkley. She wasn’t pale and soft-looking, with long, burgundy hair. This woman was all sharp angles, plucked and perfumed, with razor-thin bones and an imperial nose. Starlet sunglasses perched atop her polished hair, and she wore a slick silver coat over skin-tight jeans. Who in their right mind wore stiletto boots in the country, on a vineyard?
A second, different wave of hope rose in his chest, though, as she made her way up to the cabin, heels crunching on the remnants of two-week-old snow.They want me back, yelled the voice in his head. Pathetic voice, quickly tamped down, especially as nobody else emerged from the car. Not Olivier orMaman, the ones who mattered most.
Luc swallowed his disappointment and ignored the tightening in his chest.
“I was just heading out, Céline,” he lied, grabbing his keys from the hook by the door as if his ex traveled from France to see him every day. “What do you want?”
“T’as vu comme tu me parles, Luc?”
“Yes, well,” he responded in French. “I’m sorry I’m curt. Your visit is a bit of a surprise.”
“Can we talk?”
The last thing he wanted was this woman in his house—his space—but with that constant presence up the hill, he had no choice.
“Come in,” he finally said.
“What the hell are you doing here, Luc?”
“What do you mean?”
“You go from one of the most prestigiousterroirsin the world to”—she waved dismissively at the cabin’s rustic interior, Le Dog, even him—“tothis.” Trust a Frenchwoman to express such scorn in a single, innocuous syllable. “There’s nothing wrong with being the peasant in the family. The earth, the life’s blood. Without you, the wine is nothing. Nothing. But this…”
“Yes, well, here everything is mine.”
“So? You’re selling the grapes.”
He hesitated, oddly nervous at the idea of outing himself. “I’m making wine.”
She stopped in the process of removing her coat, eyes wide. “Really? How is it?”
“Young,” he said. “But good. Interesting.”
“Are you selling it?”
“Not yet.”
She laughed, taking off her coat and handing it to him. “No surprise there. Do you even own anything besides work clothes?”
“It’s different here,” he said, irritated at her immediate assumptions. “You sell to individuals. Tastings and wine clubs and—”
“And you plan to do that? Luc”—she leaned in and put a hand on his arm, sweet and condescending—“you don’t like people, remember? You love your vines and animals. No time for anything as base as us humans.”
Luc looked down at the coat in his hands. Her signature perfume wafted up. He hung it up and turned back to her. “What are you doing here, Céline?”
“Don’t you listen to my messages?”
“No.”
She made a longpffftsound through pouty, red lips, making Luc feel sick with the excess of it. Too much. Too much everything. “Things are not going well at home.”
“Home?”
“Our home, Luc. Your family home.”
