Twenty-nine

Vivian came up for air in the deep end. Through the fog of her goggles, she spotted ridiculously high heels and crimson toenails. Bridget, teetering at the edge of the pool, peered down at her.

“Can I help you?” Vivian said.

“Sorry to interrupt your swim, but Leonard asked me to find you. There’s a meeting at the vineyard office.”

The charms on Bridget’s gold anklet made noise when she moved her feet. How on earth did that not drive her crazy?

“Please tell my husband I’ll be there in five minutes. No, make that ten.”

She waited for Bridget to trot off before pulling herself out of the pool. Why hadn’t Leonard thought to tell her himself? Then she checked her phone and saw she had several missed texts and calls.

She took a quick rinse in the pool house shower and ran a comb through her hair before changing into a linen dress and a pair of ballerina flats, all the while her stomach in knots. She was all but certain she was being summoned for official news about the closing. The day she was dreading—the day she was cast out from her home—was one step closer.

“Oh, hey, Mom. I didn’t know you were out here.” Leah had settled on a lounge chair with her book. Her skin was sun-burnished, her hair still lustrous and dark even as she approached her late forties. Those deep-set Hollander eyes. She looked so very much like Leonard.

Vivian decided right then and there that if she was going to the meeting, so was Leah. Why should Bridget be at the meeting and not her own daughter?

“I need you to throw some clothes on and come with me.”

“Where?”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

Leah tugged shorts and a T-shirt out of her canvas bag, pulled them over her bathing suit, and followed Vivian down the path to the vineyard.

“Your father called a meeting, and I want you there.”

They circumnavigated the veranda—already filling with visitors—and cut through the loading dock behind the oak room. The office door was closed. Vivian knocked once before opening it. Inside, she found the usual suspects: Marty Pritchard, Harold Feld, Leonard, and Asher. Surprisingly, Bridget wasn’t there. Maybe Asher had asked her to sit this one out. Her son might not be the brightest bulb, but he was smart enough to know to keep the family problems within the family—at least until after the wedding.

The wedding. She’d been so preoccupied with thoughts of losing the winery, she’d barely had time to think about it. Or maybe she was just trying to forget.

Leonard looked up when she walked into the room, doing a double take when he saw Leah. Before he could say anything about it, Vivian said, “Leah is part of this family. She has a right to be part of this conversation.” In the past, she never would have made such a move. Maybe rereading Chances had had an effect on her. Whatever the reason, she couldn’t afford to sit on the sidelines any longer.

“Mother,” Asher said.

Leonard started to say something and then stopped, perhaps deciding he was embattled enough; he didn’t need to fight with her. “We have a problem,” he said instead. Marty Pritchard shuffled a few papers. Harold Feld steepled his fingers and looked at him intently. Asher checked his phone.

“Obviously,” Vivian said. “Our estate is for sale.”

“The buyer backed out,” Leonard continued, his jaw tense. The hand gripping his pen was white with the pressure of his grasp.

“The offer fell through?”

“Yes.” Leonard looked stricken, but Vivian couldn’t help but feel relieved. A stay of execution.

“What happened?” Vivian asked.

“They bought the brewery down the road,” Leonard said.

“See, Dad,” Asher said. “I told you we should serve beer—”

“Shut up!” Leonard snapped.

The stress was getting to him. As infuriated as she was by this whole situation, she felt a rush of empathy for her husband. She had not always agreed with him, but she knew he’d always tried his best. It was all she could ask of him.

“So now what?” Vivian asked.

“So we’re back to square one,” said Marty.

“We need to focus on whatever we can do to make this vineyard appealing to buyers. Which we’re already doing,” Leonard said.

“Are we?”

Everyone looked at Leah in surprise.

“Yes, we certainly are,” Leonard said, his voice gravelly and low. It was his “I’m barely keeping my temper under control” voice. “So let’s just keep that tasting room full all summer and focus on having a strong harvest. And in the meantime, considering this setback, I don’t want any talk of the sale around our staff. We don’t want to scare off valuable members of the team when we need them the most. John Beaman is already asking me questions. The last thing we need is to lose our sales rep.”

Did Leonard look pointedly at her when he said this? No, it was Vivian’s imagination.

And yet it was difficult not to think that she had been the one to insist they hire Delphine as their wholesale rep. She was their first female employee at the winery—and it had ended disastrously.

Until Leonard fired Delphine, the baron’s aversion to the United States had kept him on the other side of the Atlantic. After nearly four years without seeing him, she could pretend her attraction to him had never existed. And yet, the morning of his arrival on a bright day in late May, she found herself dressing with particular care. With fumbling fingers and a shiver of guilt, she tied a navy-and-gold equestrian-patterned Hermès scarf around her neck.

Leonard apologized for firing Delphine, explaining that he had tried his best to employ her but it hadn’t worked out.

“I need a man in that position, as you can surely understand,” Leonard said. The baron had responded convivially, and both Vivian and Leonard felt a crisis had been averted. Together, she and Leonard took the baron on a tour of the vineyard. She was relieved to find herself feeling calm and professional. Until the baron turned to her and said, “I’d like to see your stables.”

“What?” She thought for a moment that she’d heard him wrong.

“Back when you visited the château, you mentioned you had horse stables.”

She couldn’t believe he recalled the offhand comment.

“Did I? Well then, I must have also mentioned we don’t have horses,” she said, touching the scarf around her neck.

Leonard, who was uncharacteristically insecure while hosting the baron, jumped on their guest’s show of enthusiasm.

“Well, we might someday,” he said, just as Peternelle appeared to tell Leonard the tasting room manager needed him. “Vivian, why don’t you two go take a look at the grounds and then meet me back at the winery.”

The baron was silent for their walk to the rear of the house. He was taller, broader, more kinetically present than she had remembered. She suspected it was the change in scenery, the relatively humble Long Island estate rather than the sweeping backdrop of Bordeaux. They strolled with half a foot between them, and yet she felt like they were touching.

“It’s a shame Natasha couldn’t make the trip,” she said, desperate to normalize her breathing. Willing herself to forget the way she’d imagined his hands on her body.

“Natasha and I are no longer together,” he said. He stopped walking, looking at her in a way that felt searing, like he could see through her clothes. And then it rushed back, the old attraction, as fierce and unwelcome as it had been four years earlier.

“Oh.” She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Why did she have such a reaction to this man? She didn’t know him and probably wouldn’t like him if she did. Whatever pull she felt toward him was clearly just chemical, a trick of the body. And yet she was thirty-seven years old and had never experienced anything like it.

Inside the stable, he politely admired the stone masonry and woodwork. Still, she knew he had to be underwhelmed by the modesty of it all. They had spent very little of their renovation budget on building the stables, and now she wished they had been able to be more ambitious. But the simple, barnlike structure did have a lovely brick interior with stalls of southern yellow pine.

“We really built this on a whim,” she said, turning to face him. “I can’t imagine when I’ll have time for horses again. And my daughter shows no interest—”

He touched her elbow and, in a movement that took her by surprise even as it seemed to happen in slow motion, kissed her. She felt enveloped by that faint tobacco scent she’d first experienced in France, and the warmth of his mouth sent waves of pleasure through her entire body. Her response kissing him back—immediate, ardent, instinctive—encouraged him to pull her close, to press his body against hers in a way that gave a thrilling suggestion of what lay beyond the kiss. She wanted him more than she’d ever wanted anything physically in her life. Everything else was forgotten: The vineyard. Delphine. Leonard. The kids. Even, in a sense, her very self. There was only, in that moment, need. His touch thrilled her and scared her in its absolute authority over her senses. He untied her scarf, his fingers brushing her neck as the whisper of silk fell to the ground. Then he kissed her collarbone and unbuttoned her dress, his hands on her body as no one but Leonard had ever touched her.

It had been so long since she had been anything other than a dutiful wife, a grape farmer, a mother. And maybe she’d never been what she was under the soft pressure of the baron’s lips—just a woman in the heat of a moment that would burn bright, then disappear, like the flash of a camera. What was so wrong in that? She could almost convince herself that there wasn’t anything wrong with it. She wanted so badly to allow herself this. But then they were down on the ground, their naked bodies entwined but not yet one. She looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the stable Leonard had built for her, despite the impracticality of having horses at the vineyard. The thought was like a splash of cold water. Her husband loved her. She loved him.

Vivian pulled away from the baron.

“I’m sorry. I can’t,” she said.

“Can’t? We are,” he said.

She stood up, pulling her dress in front of herself.

“You and my husband are business partners.”

“Maybe not,” the baron said. “He just fired my niece.”

“What? You just said you understood—that you would have done the same thing.”

“My mind could change. Besides, this whole venture had been to please Natasha. Clearly, that’s no longer a priority. So now I have to wonder: What’s in it for me?”

He couldn’t be serious. “Is that a threat?”

The baron’s steely gaze was all the answer she needed. She dressed quickly and fled the stable. She hoped that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.

Now, sitting in the crisis meeting, she felt a crushing sense of culpability.

“So what can we do?” Vivian said, her mouth dry.

“It’s all hands on deck,” said Leonard. “And that includes Sadie. I want that granddaughter of mine to help out around here. There’s too much work to be done to have her drifting around with her nose in a book all summer.” He turned to Leah. “You were in the field at her age.”

Yes, Vivian thought. And a year later, you cast her out.

But Leonard was not entirely to blame. She couldn’t help but wonder if they would be in a different situation today if that afternoon in the stables hadn’t happened.

She’d never know.