Love You Truly (Buttercup Hill #3)

Chapter 21

Dash

Maybe I should be stressed out. Ordinarily, sex makes things complicated. It’s why I stopped hooking up with women and stopped dating at all, for that matter.

The questions about where things are going and the fear I’ll hurt someone because I don’t have deep emotional feelings that accompany sex…those are all good reasons to keep my dick in my pants and say good night with a kiss.

Oddly, I don’t feel any of those concerns here.

It’s been six days since Mallory and I had the best sex of my life, and I can’t get her out of my head. Thankfully, we agreed that we can be real friends who are fake-engaged and have white-hot sex when we want to—which is pretty much all the time.

Nothing complicated about that. Fight me if you disagree.

We’re walking through the fallow fields at Autumn Lake and imagining vineyards as far as the eye can see. “I can ask Archer, but I think cabernet grapes would do best on this side. They’re hearty, and this soil is perfect, so you can pretty much take your pick.”

“No, I was thinking about planting cab on this side too.” She smiles. “Brilliant minds.”

“I still can’t believe your parents have been sitting on all this land, knowing its value to the winemakers around here and just…”

“Growing weeds? Yeah, they’re unreliable wanderers,” Mallory says, walking past several sheep that graze on a combination of grass, weeds, and wildflowers.

I’m struck by how different Autumn Lake is from Buttercup Hill. Our property is manicured and planned from end to end. After he inherited the business from our grandfather, our dad devised a master plan for every inch of the space. I wasn’t even born when he started developing the expanded acreage into our cabernet vineyard.

All I remember is growing up running among the vines and eating the sweet grapes until my hands and face were stained purple. Part of that was probably due to my general cluelessness, but I also got used to a huge number of trucks and workers on the property all the time. Something was always happening somewhere. Progress all the time.

By the time I reached high school, Buttercup Hill looked much the way it does today, with a café, a high-end restaurant, and inn on the property, with the old barn serving as a sort of headquarters. Now it’s the one place every guest wants to see. Display cases in the lobby show older iterations of wine labels and a photo history of the property.

Eventually, our dad began building houses on the perimeter of the property, and now each of us lives on-site. Looking at the vast fields surrounding us, I can picture it developed with vineyards and buildings because that’s all I know.

“Why unreliable?” I ask, swiping a bright orange California poppy from where it spikes up from the surrounding grass.

Mallory wears low work boots, a green flannel shirt over a tee, and jeans. She couldn’t look more natural walking among the fields here. It’s easy to picture her the way I remember my dad as he strode around with me in tow, pointing out where he planned to start the food garden and assessing the sunlight and soil to decide where the grapes would grow best.

“They don’t have a great sense of time. They leave when they find an interesting opportunity, and it doesn’t matter what’s happening around them. It’s why they never did much with this property. Running it requires actually being here to make decisions about it. Even if they had a staff of people doing it for them, they’d need to have a plan. They’re not planners.”

“Maybe there’s something reliable about that. Unreliability can be its own little paradigm.”

She turns toward me, shielding her eyes from the sun over my shoulder. “You’re a philosopher now?”

I move so I’m blocking the sun from her face and lower her hand, intertwining our fingers.

“Would it bother you if I was?” I can’t resist and kiss the tip of her nose.

“No, but I want you to understand what it was like here all these years. It wasn’t all cute and sweet with sheep running around. It was disorganized and barely functional with sheep running around.”

I look at our surroundings. They’re not manicured like Buttercup Hill but don’t look disastrous. “How do you see this place five years from now?”

I don’t know what I expected—a vague idea of a few vineyards and flowers? But Mallory’s eyes blaze with a fire I haven’t seen yet. She spins in a circle, taking in the entirety of the place, or at least what she can see of it from here.

“I have drawings. Want to see them?”

“Yes. But first, let’s finish talking about your family. Does it bother you that they wandered unreliably?”

She laughs. “I mean, kind of.” She extends her arms in both directions. “Look at the opportunity they had right here to do something really cool. And they were more interested in farming potatoes in little Irish country towns than taking advantage of the potential here.”

“Maybe some people are better at farming other people’s land. ‘Potential’ can be a daunting concept.”

“Not to me.”

“I can tell.”

She shakes her head. “Literally been waiting my whole life to do something with this place.”

“Almost your birthday. You’ve waited long enough.” I squeeze her hand. “Let’s go see your plans.”

I don’t know why it surprises me that Mallory has mapped out the entirety of Autumn Lake down to the square inch. It’s exactly what my father did, and it makes sense when planning something of the magnitude of two hundred acres.

“Why do you look so shocked?” Mallory eyes me warily.

Rubbing my chin, I try to find the right words. “It’s just a lot of work. When did you have time to do all this? Are you an architect in addition to getting a business degree?”

She smiles. “I hired someone to do the actual plans, but we worked together for the past year on it.”

I bend closer to take in the smaller details. Most of the space is mapped as vineyards, which makes sense because Mallory wants to sell grapes. But there’s also an expanded wine-making operation, two new houses and a café.

“These are houses.” I point at the buildings on the set of plans.

“Yes.”

“Who’s going to live in them?” I ask.

“Seasonal workers if they need a place to live. I want to be sure people who work here can afford to live in the area. It’s getting more expensive, and it’s hard.”

It makes me think about Graham living with his mom on the outskirts of town. Housing was affordable then, but Mallory is right. There’s no way seasonal workers could afford to live there now.

I love that she’s thinking about her employees’ well-being before she’s even hired them. I consider our own employees and realize I don’t even know where half of them live.

“What?” she asks, creases clouding her brow.

“I’m such an asshole. I should know where our employees live since I was the one who hired them. For all I know, they’re commuting from two counties away.”

Scrubbing a hand over my face, I feel my last bit of self-worth slip away. I’m not even good at my job. I’m just a pretty boy who thinks he understands people. But how can I when I don’t ask them basic questions?

Mallory pulls my hand away. “Hey. Don’t do that to yourself. You’re not an asshole.”

I cock an eyebrow at her.

“Okay, not because of that. And not even for the reasons you think.” She moves closer and leans against me, but I’m stiff and unwelcoming. It takes me a moment with her this close before I feel my frustration slip away enough for me to wrap an arm around her.

“What reasons do I think?”

She twists in my arms to see my face when she speaks. “You think you’re not smart enough. You think you’re just a pretty face who was handed the job no one else wanted because you’re a flirt and that’s handy when it comes to hiring people.”

I swallow hard because I feel myself readying the long list of reasons I don’t deserve any of what I’ve been given in life. It comes so easily to rattle off the worst of my traits. But she doesn’t give me a chance.

“You think that all anyone sees when they look at you is a guy who’s perfect for a good time and useless when it comes to anything real.” She looks deep into my eyes, and I watch the tiny flecks of gold dance in hers.

“Well, I’m here to tell you, Dashiell Corbett, that they couldn’t be more wrong, so get those ideas out of your head. There’s so much more to you. That’s how I see it.” She smiles. “And we’ve already established that I’m the most brilliant woman in the world, so…”

Even if I can’t wipe away a decade of negative opinions of myself with her sweet words, they warm me nonetheless, mainly because they’re her words. Because she’s quickly becoming the only person whose opinion matters to me.