stood within arm’s reach. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, trying and failing to mask how she’d caught him unaware.
“The drainage system you’ve set up to feed the new vines will spoil them,” she continued, running her hand over the hard canes. “The roots are like children. You can’t pamper them or they’ll get lazy.”
He straightened to look at her, noting with relief the change in her appearance from the night before. She’d found some proper clothes, though they struck him as oddly out of style. The bodice had the distinct pigeon-breasted fullness the women in the city now seemed to shun, and the black wool skirt dragged the ground without so much as a peek at her ankles. But her hair was an attractive improvement, cascading around her face and down her shoulders in a tumult of soft waves rather than the frenzy it’d been when he first saw her. He was glad she hadn’t pinned her tresses up in a pompadour. And, thank God, she now smelled of lavender soap.
He cleared his throat, feeling the need to assert himself. “The vines require all the extra care they can get in these uncertain conditions. I’m not losing another field to drought this spring.”
“You have to let them find their own way in hard times. They’ll be stronger for it.”
He pointed the clippers at her. “If they survive.”
“They will.” She knelt down beside the base of a vine and swept the snow away. Scooping up a handful of wet earth, she rubbed it between her palms, then held the soil to her nose. She closed her eyes, as if remembering a pleasant dream. It smelled, he knew, of flint, oak, chalk, and fire.
“At least the soil isn’t the problem,” she said, opening her amber catlike eyes again. “The calcium and lime components are still intact.” She looked up at him in a most disarming way, as though she could penetrate his heart and mind with a look. “I wanted to apologize for yesterday,” she said. “To come home and find the old place had been sold . . . it caught me by surprise. I may have said some things to you that weren’t fair. I’m sorry.”
The way she stuttered through her apology suggested she wasn’t in the habit of being wrong. He nodded, more than willing to let the matter go. “And I’m sorry you didn’t receive word earlier. I did try to find Madame’s relatives at the time of the sale, but there were no records of anyone alive. If I’d known she had a granddaughter, I would have written you at the time to let you know she was welcome to stay and not to worry.”
“She’s not really my grandmother. Not by blood anyway.”
“Oh? I just assumed.”
“I’ve always called her Grand-Mère, but she’s more of a mentor.” Elena snapped off a dried grapevine and passed the broken end under her nose before tying a purple string around it. The move struck him as a nervous gesture a child might do with their hands. “I was brought to live at the vineyard when I was five. As an apprentice to Madame Gardin and her husband, Joseph, after my parents died.”
“You were sent here to learn the wine business as a child?”
“Among other things.”
He had a hard time imagining the woman standing before him as ever having been a child. There was a flinty edge to her that defied any sense of innocence. “But you are like a granddaughter to her. I can see that.”
“We have a strong bond.” She tossed the vine in the brouette and watched the string catch fire. “That’s why I returned. The vineyard is the only home I’ve ever known.”
Jean-Paul glanced over his shoulder at the house. He knew better than to ask anything as personal as where she’d disappeared to all these years. Yet he was put in an uncomfortable position to have this stranger, so intimately familiar with the land, suddenly return out of nowhere and call the vineyard home. Certainly he’d had no problem letting the old woman stay on at the house after the sale. He didn’t want to be accused of throwing Madame Gardin out in the street in her old age when she had nowhere else to go. But what was he to do with this woman? She was trouble. He knew so the minute he laid eyes on her in the kitchen and felt the heat rise in his temples. And yet if she had grown up