the years stolen from her, and if that meant a few uncomfortable compromises along the way, so might it be.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jean-Paul reached the southern slope of the vineyard as the first rays of light spilled onto the hillside. He enjoyed working in the crisp morning air with the sun shining on his back and his lungs breathing in the autumn scents of woodsmoke, the leaf decay in the undergrowth, and a whiff of musky fox from a nearby den. So different from how he’d spent the last ten years of his life stowed away in a corner office in the city, buried up to his nose in books and legal papers.
The law had its merits but had never been his choice. From the time he was a boy he’d been told he must attend university to fulfill some perceived duty owed to his family lineage. The Martels, after all, practiced the law. They mingled with powerful and beautiful people in top hats at the Palais Opéra. They ate foie gras and caviar at Maurice’s, drank fine wine at the Moulin â Farine, and spent their summers vacationing along the sunny coast in bourgeois comfort, with the Chanceaux Valley at their backs.
They also succumbed to early deaths. The heart had a tendency to harden off after being forced to survive inside a life two sizes too small, deprived of the oxygen of dreams. At least that’s where Jean-Paul’s reasoning had led him. The death of his father convinced him he had to make a change before his heart shrank any further. And so he’d escaped to the country, where a man could walk among the dormant vines in solitude and give his dreams a chance to breathe in the open air.
But damn the grapes. And goddamn the wine.
When he first read the news that Château Renard was for sale, he could hardly believe his luck—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of the valley’s history and be part of a renowned winemaking legacy. Certainly he’d heard the rumors that the old woman wasn’t functioning at her peak anymore, but making wine was a secret aspiration he’d harbored since his first taste of the vineyard’s pinot noir a decade earlier. Such musky, sensuous flavors of plum, cherry, and the perfect underlay of oak and flint. He would re-create that bouquet or die trying.
But something always went wrong. For three years he’d blamed himself whenever he caught someone tipping their head slightly to the side, as if controlling the urge to wince in disappointment at the way the latest Renard pinot hurried over the tongue, vanishing as a jammy afterthought. Yet he also suspected the old woman knew more about what had gone wrong with the vintages than she’d let on when she sold him the place. He’d hoped his invitation to let her continue living at the house would provoke her into sharing what she knew about the trouble so he could fix it, but she’d merely shrugged and blamed the disappointing harvests on jinxes and bad luck.
The entire valley was obsessed with witches and their so-called influence in the vineyards. He knew most of the big vineyards employed a witch to infuse her brand of magic into the wine as a sort of signature. It was outright charlatanism. An old-world custom bound up in superstition that the locals used to sell their wine to impressionable tourists. But he’d read enough books to know a good wine didn’t require the aura of magic to make it taste amazing. His research told him the winemaking process should be no more difficult than getting the pH levels in the soil balanced, harvesting the grapes at peak sweetness, and allowing the fermentation to do its job. Alas, none of that had worked since he’d taken over, but he still held out hope that things could be turned around. If only the damn weather would cooperate.
He stoked the coals in the brouette, then took out his clippers to finish pruning the last row of young vines. Knowing he had the ability to shape the next year’s growth by trimming the canes back gave him a sense of optimism. It was one of the small things he thought he was doing right. He relished the feeling as he stood alone, master of his fate on a brisk morning.
“You’re too accommodating.”
He turned with a start to find the Boureanu woman standing behind him. How did she do that? Twice now he’d not known she was there until she