“Hold on, hold on. Yes, there’s something mineral to it. Like eating dirt.”
“You’ve eaten dirt?”
“Yes!” She laughed, her golden eyes ablaze with humor. “Haven’t you?”
“No, I…” It came to him—a memory, lost in the gnarled vines of his past. “Maybe? Once? Or once that I recall. I was in the vineyard, with Olivier, my half brother. We were… Oh, I don’t know. I must have been five or six, and he was older. I rememberGrandpèrealways talking about the importance ofterroir. The…” At her curious expression, he fumbled the words. “The place. Like here, this mountain and earth, the sun and weather. It’s all theterroir. My family’s is Bordeaux, one of the world’s most important regions. Everything about it is unique: the earth, the plants, the seasons, even the landscape itself. Olivier decided if I truly wanted to understand it, I should eat it.”
“How was it?”
“Honestly? I don’t remember the actual moment I put it in my mouth, but I remember the sensation.”
She cocked her head, listening closely.
Luc continued, enjoying her concentrated attention. “That mineral thing you speak of, it was that, only I remember that it fed a craving in me. In my body, my blood.” Looking up, he realized he’d lost her. “It’s…silly, I know.”
“No. No, I think I get it, because I don’t taste it as much here.” She reached for the other glass, which he handed over with something like intimacy, and took another sip. Her lips were already stained from his wine, and he couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop wondering how his grapes would taste on her skin.
“Taste what?” he mumbled, brain hazy, before forcing himself to stop. He’d die before he took advantage of this woman. With a deep inhale, he stepped back, blinking hard and pretending he didn’t see the way her eyes skipped all over him.
“I don’t taste the dirt as much in this one.”
Needing to clear his head, he turned back to the tasting room. “Come with me,” he said, picking everything up and setting it on the bar before taking a few steps away from her. He needed space or he’d do something stupid.
“Why won’t you open this up, Luc? To outside people?”
“It’s not for me.”
“What isn’t?”
“You know. People.” He almost smiled. “I don’t like them and they…generally don’t like me.”
Instead of smiling, Abby looked sad.
“I like you. I think you’re lovely.”
His hands tingled. His face heated, and he looked away. “Yes?”
She nodded. “Yes. You’re so…good. To me.” Why did that disappoint him?
“I’m not good, Abby.”
“You are,” she said with a wobbly nod. “I’m the bad one.”
“You’rebad?” He could almost laugh. “How?”
“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered, looking devastated.
He shook his head in disagreement, slowly like the air’d gone thick, like he’d bathed in syrup or in themoût—the must. That dense mix of juice and skins and seeds and stems that gives the wine its color, its body.
“I’m sorry that you’re unhappy here.”
“No. It’s not that. I’m here to work.” She looked distressed. “I didn’t come here for me. I’m not supposed to be doing all these new things.”
“What new things?” he asked, frantic at the notion that she’d never come back.
“Things like drinking coffee or eating ham and butter sandwiches. Like today. I came here to work, and instead, I’m tasting wine.” With her accent, the word came out almost as a long and fluidwaaaa, so much better than the tiny, pathetic, one-syllabledvinof his native tongue.
But her expression was angry or frustrated, and Luc wanted to make that go away. “This wasn’t at all the plan. This and all the other things I shouldn’t have done.”
