A Man Like Winter
742 Words
The first time Anindya heard his voice, it wasn’t speaking to her.
It came from behind the old chapel, sharp and low like a blade being drawn—measured, clipped, and laced with cold authority. She paused mid-step, the basket on her hip full of grapes still warm from the sun. The voice didn’t yell, didn’t tremble. But it sliced through the vineyard like frost through ripe vines.
“Why is the harvest delayed?”
Maximilian Raffaele Beaumont.
Even his name sounded like winter.
She didn’t turn to look. She didn’t need to. Every worker in the field felt the shift in air when he walked by. He wore silence like a suit—impeccable, pressed, and dangerous. Anindya had seen men like him in Jakarta once, stepping out of black sedans in front of five-star hotels. But here, in this land of olives and sunlight, his presence felt out of place. Like thunder in a sunlit church.
He didn’t notice her. Or so she thought.
Until the second time.
⸻
She was pruning a low-hanging vine in the oldest part of the field, where the earth smelled of age and memory. Her hair had come loose, strands clinging to her neck with sweat, her blouse slightly torn at the sleeve. She worked quietly, lost in rhythm, her thoughts drifting far from Italy—to the sounds of her mother humming in the kitchen, the scent of lemongrass and coconut rice.
Then she felt it.
A pause in the wind.
A shift behind her.
She turned.
He stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets, jacket thrown over one arm. He wasn’t speaking. He wasn’t moving. Just watching her.
Not in the way men sometimes watched her—with hunger or arrogance. No, this was different. His gaze wasn’t possessive. It was puzzled. Like she had disrupted a pattern in his mind, and he was trying to place her.
Anindya straightened slowly, wiped her brow with the back of her hand, and returned his gaze.
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
Then, softly—too softly for anyone else to hear—he asked,
“Do you always work alone?”
She blinked. His Italian was perfect. His accent wrapped in old Florence, not Milan. She hesitated, then nodded.
“I prefer it.”
He tilted his head slightly, as if testing the truth in her voice.
“You’re not from here,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“And neither are you,” she replied.
His mouth almost twitched. Almost. Then he looked away, as if her answer had both satisfied and irritated him.
Without another word, he turned and walked on—leaving her there among the vines, her heart oddly still and unshaken.
⸻
Later, that same evening, she asked her grandmother about him.
Nonna Rosa was folding laundry, the scent of lavender clinging to every sheet.
“Maximilian?” she said, as if tasting something bitter. “He is the son of the devil and the wine god.”
Anindya raised an eyebrow.
“He was born too beautiful, too brilliant, and too cold for his own good. His father was my husband’s friend once. But Maximilian? He does not know how to love. Only how to leave.”
“And yet he’s here,” Anindya murmured.
Nonna Rosa’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. Which is why you will stay far away from him.”
Anindya said nothing. But that night, as she lay in bed with the window open to the sound of crickets and soft wind, she thought of his eyes—not cold, as the others said, but quiet. Like snow.
⸻
Maximilian, meanwhile, could not stop thinking about her.
He didn’t know why.
She hadn’t tried to impress him. She hadn’t lowered her gaze or smiled like the other women did. She simply met him—barefaced, sweat-streaked, proud. And then turned away as if he were no more important than the sun.
That night, as he stood in his father’s study reading old vineyard ledgers by candlelight, his mind wandered.
He thought of her hands—rough but careful. Her voice—low and steady. The way she looked at him—not with contempt or awe, but with indifference. And somehow, that indifference unsettled him more than desire ever had.
He was used to women trying to melt him.
He had never met one who let him stay cold.
- Writer
