The Heir's Enemy

Before dawn on the morning of the Harvest Festival, Alex Devereux is crouched behind the tasting tent's canvas wall with a fifty-five-gallon barrel wedged between his knees and his father's old golden retriever huffing into his ear. He drains Julian Rivas's prize Cabernet into a jug and replaces it with vinegar. Cheap stuff, sharp and thin, the kind you use for cleaning gutters. By nine, the first customer swirls, sips, and goes through surprise, confusion and disgust in about three seconds. Julian takes the glass, sniffs it, and his face goes white. Then he does not explode. He straightens his jacket, tells the room they appear to have a bad barrel, and sends an assistant running for the truck. Which is the problem. Alex needed him to be a monster. Devereux Vineyards runs in terraced rows down to the river. Alex helped letter the welcome banner when he was twelve, paint under his nails, proud that his V matched his mother's, and she told him one day this'll be yours. The Rivas offer landed on Genevieve's desk three months ago, and she has been smiling a smile that does not reach her eyes ever since. Julian has his own inheritance to survive. His father chose the office where the desk faces the window so visitors see the river first and Tomas Rivas second; Julian's desk faces the door. His brother Ricardo died when Julian was twenty-two, heart failure according to the doctors. What Julian eventually says out loud, standing by a spring at dusk, is that he wants to make a wine that tastes like the life his brother was too afraid to live. And lying between the two estates is a strip of land by the creek. A deed of sale from 1880 describes it as bounded on the east by Holloway's Run and on the west by Devereux Rise, wording ambiguous enough that it belongs to neither of them, or to both. Then a second version of that deed turns up, and everything a careful forger would get right is right, except one date that cannot be. An MM vineyard romance about sabotage, inherited silence and land nobody can prove they own, with a father who never slams a door, a sister who refuses to be anyone's spy, and vines planted in alternating rows, three feet apart, staggered, and named for the dead; closed-door.