When conflict photographer Jackson Swann dies, he leaves behind a conflict of his own making when his three daughters, each born from a different mother and unknown to each other, discover that they’re now part owners of Maison de Madelaine, the family’s Oregon vineyard—a once famous business struggling to recover from a worldwide economic collapse.
After a successful career as a child TV star, a disastrous time as a teen pop star, and now a successful author, Tess is, for the first time in her life, suffering from a serious case of writer’s block and identity crisis.
Charlotte, brought up to be a proper Southern
wife, has given up her own career goals to support her husband while having
spent the past year struggling to conceive a child to create a more perfect
marriage. On the worst day of her life, she discovers her beloved father has
died, she has two sisters she’d never been told about, and her husband has
fallen in love with another woman.
Natalie, daughter of Jack’s long-time mistress, has always known about both half-sisters. Still mourning the loss of her mother, the death of her father a year later is a devastating blow. And she can’t help feeling that both her sisters may resent her for being the daughter their father decided to keep.
As the sisters reluctantly gather at the Maison de Madeleine to deal with their father's final wishes, they become enchanted by the legacy they've inherited, and by their grandmother’s rich stories of life in WWII France and the wounded American soldier who would ultimately influence all their lives.
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Prologue
Aberdeen, Oregon
Conflict photographer Jackson Swann had
traveled to dark and deadly places in the world most people would never see. Nor
want to. Along with dodging bullets and mortars, he’d survived a helicopter
crash in Afghanistan, gotten shot mere inches from his heart in Niger and been
stung by a death-stalker scorpion while embedded with the French Foreign Legion
in Mali.
Some of those who’d worked with him over
the decades had called him reckless. Rash. Dangerous. Over late-night beers or
whatever else passed as liquor in whatever country they’d all swarmed to, other
photographers and foreign journalists would argue about whether that bastard
Jackson Swann had a death wish or merely considered himself invincible.
He did, after all, rush into high-octane
situations no sane person would ever consider, and even when the shit hit the
fan, somehow, he’d come out alive and be on the move again. Chasing the next
war or crisis like a drug addict chasing a high. The truth was that Jack had
never believed himself to be immortal. Still, as he looked out over the
peaceful view of rolling hills, the cherry trees wearing their spring profusion
of pink blossoms, and acres of vineyards, he found it ironic that after having
evaded the Grim Reaper so many times over so many decades, it was an aggressive
and rapidly spreading lung cancer that was going to kill him.
Which was why he was here, sitting on the
terraced patio of Chateau de Madeleine, the towering gray stone house that his
father, Robert Swann, had built for his beloved war bride, Madeleine, to ease
her homesickness. Oregon’s Willamette Valley was a beautiful place. But it was
not Madeleine’s childhood home in France’s Burgundy region where much of her
family still lived.
Family. Jack understood that to many, the
American dream featured a cookie-cutter suburban house, a green lawn you had to
mow every weekend, a white picket fence, happy, well-fed kids, and a mutt who’d
greet him with unrestrained canine glee whenever he returned home from work. It
wasn’t a bad dream. But it wasn’t, and never would be his dream.
How could it be with the survivor’s guilt
that shadowed him like a tribe of moaning ghosts? Although he’d never been all
that introspective, Jack realized that the moral dilemma he’d experienced every
time he’d had to force himself to re-main emotionally removed from the bloody
scenes of chaos and death, he was viewing through the lens of his camera had
left him too broken to feel, or even behave like a normal human being.
Ten years ago, after his strong, robust
father died of a sudden heart attack while fly-fishing, Jack had inherited the
winery with his mother, who’d professed no interest in the day-to-day running
of the family business. After signing over control of the winery to him and
declaring the rambling house too large for one woman, Madeleine Swann had moved
into the guesthouse next to the garden she’d begun her first year in Oregon. A
garden that supplied the vegetables and herbs she used for cooking many of the
French meals she’d grown up with.
His father’s death had left Jack in charge
of two hundred and sixty acres of vineyards and twenty acres of orchards. Not
wanting, nor able, to give up his wanderlust ways to settle down and become a
farmer of grapes and cherries, Jack had hired Gideon Byrne, a recent widower
with a five-year-old daughter, away from a Napa winery to serve as both manager
and vintner.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to call
them?” Gideon, walking toward him, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses,
asked not for the first time over the past weeks.
“The only reason that Tess would want to
see me would be to wave me off to hell.” In the same way he’d never softened
the impact of his photos, Jack never minced words nor romanticized his life.
There would be no dramatic scenes with his three daughters—all now grown women
with lives of their own—hovering over his deathbed.
“Have you considered that she might want to
have an opportunity to talk with you? If for no other reason to ask—”
“Why I deserted her before her second
birthday and never looked back? I’m sure her mother’s told her own version of
the story, and the truth is that the answers are too damn complicated and the
time too long past for that discussion.” It was also too late for redemption.
Jack doubted his eldest daughter would give
a damn even if he could’ve tried to explain. She’d have no way of knowing that
he’d kept track of her all these years, blaming himself when she’d spiraled out
of control so publicly during her late teens and early twenties. Perhaps, if
she’d had a father who came home every night for dinner, she would have had a
more normal, stable life than the Hollywood hurricane her mother had thrown her
into before her third birthday.
Bygones, he reminded himself. Anything he
might say to his firstborn would be too little, too late. Tess had no reason to
travel to Oregon for his sake, but hopefully, once he was gone, curiosity would
get the better of her. His girls should know each other. It was long past time.
“Charlotte, then,” Gideon pressed. “You and
Blanche are still technically married.”
“Technically being the operative word.” The
decades-long separation from his Southern socialite wife had always suited them
both just fine. According to their prenuptial agreement, Blanche would continue
to live her privileged life in Charleston, without being saddled with a
full-time live-in husband, who’d seldom be around at any rate. Divorce, she’d
informed him, was not an option. And if she had discreet affairs from time to
time, who would blame her? Certainly not him.
“That’s no reason not to give Charlotte an
opportunity to say goodbye. How many times have you seen her since she went to
college? Maybe twice a year?”
“You’re pushing again,” Jack shot back.
Hell, you’d think a guy would be allowed to die in peace without Jiminy Cricket
sitting on his shoulder. “Though of the three of them, Char-lotte will probably
be the most hurt,” he allowed.
His middle daughter had always been a sweet
girl, running into his arms, hair flying behind her like a bright gold flag to
give her daddy some “sugar”—big wet kisses on those rare occasions he’d wind
his way back to Charleston. Or drop by Savannah to take her out to dinner while
she’d been attending The Savannah School of Art and Design.
“The girl doesn’t possess Blanche’s steel
magnolia strength.”
Having grown up with a mother who could find
fault in the smallest of things, Charlotte was a people pleaser, and that part
of her personality would kick into high gear whenever he rolled into the city.
“And, call me a coward, but I’d just as soon not be around when her pretty,
delusional world comes crashing down around her.” He suspected there were those
in his daughter’s rarified social circle who knew the secret that the
Charleston PI he’d kept on retainer hadn’t had any trouble uncovering.
“How about Natalie?” Gideon continued to
press. “She doesn’t have any reason to be pissed at you. But I’ll bet she will
be if you die without a word of warning. Especially after losing her mother
last year.”
“Which is exactly why I don’t want to put
her through this.”
He’d met Josette Seurat, the ebony-haired,
dark-eyed French Jamaican mother of his youngest daughter, when she’d been
singing in a club in the spirited Oberkampf district of Paris’s eleventh
arrondissement. He’d fallen instantly, and by the next morning Jack knew that
not only was the woman he’d spent the night having hot sex with his first true
love, she was also the only woman he’d ever love. Although they’d never
married, they’d become a couple, while still allowing space for each other to
maintain their own individual lives, for twenty-six years. And for all those
years, despite temptation from beautiful women all over the globe, Jack had
remained faithful. He’d never had a single doubt that Josette had, as well.
With Josette having been so full of life,
her sudden death from a brain embolism had hit hard. Although Jack had
immediately flown to Paris from Syria to attend the funeral at a church built
during the reign of Napoleon III, he’d been too deep in his own grief, and
suffering fatigue—which, rather than jet lag, as he’d assumed, had turned out
to be cancer—to provide the emotional support and comfort his third daughter
had deserved.
“Josette’s death is the main reason I’m not
going to drag Natalie here to watch me die. And you might as well quit playing
all the guilt cards because I’m as sure of my decision as I was yesterday. And
the day before that. And every other time over the past weeks you’ve brought it
up. Bad enough you coerced me into making those damn videos. Like I’m some
documentary maker.”
To Jack’s mind, documentary filmmakers were
storytellers who hadn’t bothered to learn to edit. How hard was it to spend
anywhere from two to ten hours telling a story he could capture in one single,
perfectly timed photograph?
“The total length of all three of them is
only twenty minutes,” Gideon said equably.
There were times when Jack considered that
the man had the patience of a saint. Which was probably necessary when you’d
chosen to spend your life watching grapes grow, then waiting years before the
wine you’d made from those grapes was ready to drink. Without Gideon Byrne to
run this place, Jack probably would have sold it off to one of the neighboring
vineyards years ago, with the caveat that his mother would be free to keep the
guesthouse, along with the larger, showier one that carried her name. Had he
done that he would have ended up regretting not having a thriving legacy to
pass on to his daughters.
“The total time works out to less than ten
minutes a daughter. Which doesn’t exactly come close to a Ken Burns series,”
Gideon pointed out.
“I liked Burns’s baseball one,” Jack
admitted reluctantly. “And the one on country music. But hell, it should’ve
been good, given that he took eight years to make it.”
Jack’s first Pulitzer had admittedly been a
stroke of luck, being in the right place at the right time. More care had gone
into achieving the perfect photos for other awards, but while he admired
Burns’s work, he’d never have the patience to spend that much time on a
project. His French mother had claimed he’d been born a pierre roulante—rolling
stone—always needing to be on the move. Which wasn’t conducive to family life,
which is why both his first and second marriages had failed. Because he could
never be the husband either of his very different wives had expected.
“Do you believe in life after death?” he
asked.
Gideon took his time to answer, looking out
over the vineyards. “I like to think so. Having lost Becky too soon, it’d be
nice to believe we’ll connect again, somewhere, somehow.” He shrugged. “On the
other hand, there are days that I think this might be our only shot.”
“Josette came again last night.”
“You must have enjoyed that.”
“I always do.”
Excerpted from The Inheritance by JoAnn
Ross, Copyright ©
2021 by JoAnn Ross. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
About the Author
New York Times
and USA TODAY bestselling author JoAnn Ross has been published in
twenty-seven countries. The author of over 100 novels, JoAnn lives with her husband
and many rescue pets — who pretty much rule the house — in the Pacific
Northwest.
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