He ended the marriage on the crush pad at four in the morning.
Six days into harvest, with fourteen tons of cabernet coming in behind him, Gideon Bessonet told his wife he was marrying the estate's chief financial officer and that the lawyers had had the papers since March. Then he went back up to the house. He had an eight o'clock.
Beatriz Aceves took off her apron, handed over the pad, and drove up the ridge in the dark.
For nine years she had made every wine that came out of the Bessonet caves, and for nine years the tech sheets had said winemaking team. She signed the settlement in eleven minutes — the release, the non-disparagement, the clause surrendering every formula and method and blend she had ever built. Nobody in that room said the word land.
Because nobody in that family had ever thought to ask about the nine acres on Bell Ridge.
Her mother bought them in 1979 with fifteen years of saved wages, and everybody told her it was worthless dirt. In 1994 two people shook hands in a truck and agreed the estate would farm them, and neither of them wrote down a single word. Every bottle of the wine that made the Bessonet name — nine vintages, nine hundred cases a year, three hundred and twenty dollars a bottle — has come off ground that family does not own, has no contract for, and has never paid one dollar of tax on.
Bea has known since she was nineteen. She has never once made trouble about it.
Four years later a fund puts four hundred million dollars on the table for the estate, and a routine consent letter goes out to twelve neighbors and easement holders, and eleven of them sign it without reading it.
She is the twelfth.
And the man whose money is on that table — the one she met at her ex-husband's wedding, because his investment obliged him to be there too — is the only person in the valley who already knows what she is holding.
He is also the only one who will not lift a finger to help her use it.
A low-spice, closed-door romance with no explicit sexual content and a guaranteed happily ever after.
Genre: Romance
Six days into harvest, with fourteen tons of cabernet coming in behind him, Gideon Bessonet told his wife he was marrying the estate's chief financial officer and that the lawyers had had the papers since March. Then he went back up to the house. He had an eight o'clock.
Beatriz Aceves took off her apron, handed over the pad, and drove up the ridge in the dark.
For nine years she had made every wine that came out of the Bessonet caves, and for nine years the tech sheets had said winemaking team. She signed the settlement in eleven minutes — the release, the non-disparagement, the clause surrendering every formula and method and blend she had ever built. Nobody in that room said the word land.
Because nobody in that family had ever thought to ask about the nine acres on Bell Ridge.
Her mother bought them in 1979 with fifteen years of saved wages, and everybody told her it was worthless dirt. In 1994 two people shook hands in a truck and agreed the estate would farm them, and neither of them wrote down a single word. Every bottle of the wine that made the Bessonet name — nine vintages, nine hundred cases a year, three hundred and twenty dollars a bottle — has come off ground that family does not own, has no contract for, and has never paid one dollar of tax on.
Bea has known since she was nineteen. She has never once made trouble about it.
Four years later a fund puts four hundred million dollars on the table for the estate, and a routine consent letter goes out to twelve neighbors and easement holders, and eleven of them sign it without reading it.
She is the twelfth.
And the man whose money is on that table — the one she met at her ex-husband's wedding, because his investment obliged him to be there too — is the only person in the valley who already knows what she is holding.
He is also the only one who will not lift a finger to help her use it.
A low-spice, closed-door romance with no explicit sexual content and a guaranteed happily ever after.
Genre: Romance
Used availability for Maggie Calloway's Nothing He Ever Owned