Chapter 21
SADIE
Iam standing in Rhett's kitchen soaked from the storm, his hand still laced through mine, and every wall I've spent years building carefully around this man is about to disappear completely.
The last of the rain patters soft against the windows. Somewhere behind us the wrought iron sconces along the porch cast a dim glow against the dark, rain still ticking off the eaves.
The kitchen light is dim, just the one fixture over the stove, and it throws soft gold across the counters and the rain-streaked windows behind him. My clothes are soaked through, sticking cold to my skin, but I don't feel any of it.
Rhett doesn't let go of my hand.
He just looks at me, like he's giving me one more chance to change my mind.
I don't want a chance to change my mind.
I close the last of the distance myself, my palm flat against his chest, and this time neither of us pulls back.
His mouth finds mine, slow at first, like he's still asking a question I already answered on the drive back here. I answer it again, harder, my fingers curling into his shirt.
He tastes like rain and Iron Oak Cabernet.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, breath ragged, my name a rough murmur against my mouth before he kisses me again.
"I know," I say. "I'm here."
That's all it takes.
His hands find my waist, and I feel the exact moment he stops holding back. He walks me backward until my shoulders meet the edge of the counter, one hand splayed warm against my spine to keep me from feeling the cold marble.
I tug his shirt loose from his waistband, and he lets me.
I built a wall around every soft thing I ever felt for this man, one careful year at a time. Tonight I am taking it apart brick by brick, and I don't feel one ounce of the fear I thought I would.
He smells like rain and warm leather, and underneath it, faint, the dark plum note of the wine still on both our mouths.
His mouth moves along the line of my cheek, then lower, and I tip my head back and let him.
"You're still soaked," he says against my throat, the words more felt than heard.
"Do something about it, then."
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, and whatever he sees on my face decides something for him.
He peels the wet flannel from my shoulders slow, like he's unwrapping something he's waited a long time to get to.
I help him with the buttons of his own shirt, my hands not quite steady, and when it falls open I press my palm flat against his chest, over the place where I can feel his heart working hard.
"All this time," I say, "and you still kiss like you've got something to prove."
"I do."
"What's that?"
"That I'm not going anywhere this time."
Words fail me completely. I pull him back down to me instead.
The rain keeps its soft rhythm against the windows as he lifts me onto the counter's edge, his hands sure on my hips, nothing rushed about the way he touches me even though I can feel exactly how much he wants to rush.
I like that he doesn't. I like that every move he makes asks me first and waits for my answer.
I give it every time.
My legs wrap around him and pull him closer, and he groans against my mouth, a rough sound that goes straight through me. I work the button of his jeans, and he catches my wrist once, just to look at me, just to be sure.
"I'm sure," I tell him, before he can ask.
His hand slides under the hem of my tank top, palm flat and warm against my stomach. I arch into the touch without meaning to.
He pulls it up and over my head. For one long second he just looks at me, like he's memorizing something he waited so long to have.
"Rhett."
"Right here." His mouth drops to my collarbone, then lower still, closing hot over one bare breast.
His tongue circles slow until I'm gasping and pulling at his hair.
He works my jeans open and drags them down over my hips. I kick them off the rest of the way, impatient.
His hand slides back up over my thigh, unhurried, until his fingers find me slick and aching.
I gasp his name into the quiet kitchen, my fingers digging into his shoulders. He doesn't stop, doesn't rush, working slow, deliberate circles that build until my hips are chasing his hand on their own.
"Rhett, please."
"Not yet." His voice is wrecked, low against my ear. "Want to take my time with you."
He picks me up like I weigh nothing. I laugh against his neck, breathless, as he carries me down the hall to his room, the storm chasing us the whole way.
The hallway is dark except for one lamp left on somewhere behind us. I catch a glimpse of framed photographs lining the wall as we pass.
Horses. Harvests. A much younger Rhett standing under the Old Oak with his brothers, all elbows and squinting sun.
I don't get more than a flash of it before he sets me down at the edge of his bed and every thought that isn't him disappears completely.
"You know I could've walked myself down that hall," I tell him, breathless.
"Didn't want to give you the chance to change your mind on the way."
"I wasn't going to."
"Wasn't taking the risk."
The sheets are cool against my back when he lays me down. He takes his time then, more time than I have patience for, his mouth tracing a slow line down my body, over my ribs, my stomach, until he settles between my thighs and licks one slow stripe straight through my center.
I gasp and grip the sheets, hips lifting on instinct. He groans against me like he's been starving for it, and the sound alone nearly undoes me.
He works me with his mouth, unhurried, the flat of his tongue circling my clit in slow, deliberate strokes, two fingers sliding deep to match the rhythm. I say his name like it's the only word I remember.
He doesn't hurry. Every slow drag of his mouth feels like a question he already knows the answer to, and every answer I give him only makes him go slower.
When I finally break, gasping, my whole body drawing tight around the feel of him, he doesn't stop until there's nothing left of the wall I built.
"Rhett."
"Right here."
He moves back up my body, unhurried, his weight settling over me. He lines himself up and sinks into me slow, one deep inch at a time, stretching me open around him until he's fully seated.
He holds still there a moment, forehead dropped to mine, his breath unsteady against my mouth, like he needs one second to keep from losing himself completely.
He moves slow at first, deep and deliberate, his forearm braced beside my head, watching my face like he's memorizing every sound I make.
I hook my leg higher around his waist, chasing the angle, and the sound that tears out of him is rough and unguarded, nothing controlled about it at all.
"Rhett." I dig my nails into his shoulder blades. "Don't stop."
"Not planning on it."
His pace builds, unhurried turning to something rawer, deeper, both of us chasing the same slow-burning ache neither of us named out loud until tonight. Every roll of his hips drags a sound out of me I don't recognize as my own voice.
The storm outside keeps its own rhythm against the glass.
We match it, then outlast it, slow and unhurried and certain in a way nothing between us has ever been allowed to be.
His hands stay laced with mine more than once, like he needs the reminder that I'm choosing this, choosing him, as much as he's choosing me.
Somewhere between one slow slide of his hand up my ribs and the sound he makes against my collarbone, I understand something I've been refusing to understand for a long time. I never stopped wanting this. I only stopped believing I could have it.
Tonight I let myself have it.
He shifts his hips, finds the angle that makes my whole body go tight, and holds it there, relentless, until I'm right at the edge and shaking with it.
"Let go," he says against my ear. "I've got you."
His pace turns ragged, deep, unrelenting, and the coil low in my body finally snaps. I come apart around him, clenching hard, my whole body shuddering through it while I cry his name into his mouth.
He follows a few thrusts later, groaning long and rough against my throat, his hips stuttering as he spills deep inside me, both of us shaking through the last of it together.
When it's over, when the rain has quieted to almost nothing and we're both wrecked and breathing hard, he pulls me against his side like it's the most natural thing in the world, my head on his chest, his fingers tracing slow lines up and down my spine.
Neither of us says anything for a long time.
I don't need him to.
I trace one finger along the line of his collarbone, slow, memorizing it the way I'd memorize a wine I never wanted to forget. The rain, the shape of him under my hand, the particular quiet of a house that isn't fighting me anymore.
I think about all the versions of tonight I imagined over the years, late at night, alone, refusing to admit I was imagining them at all.
None of them come close to this. None of them felt this steady, this sure, like something built to last instead of something built to burn out fast and leave nothing behind.
I fall asleep to the sound of his heart still working too hard, and the rain finally letting up outside the window.
I wake to soft gray light and the smell of coffee.
The storm has passed. Outside the window, the vineyard rows stretch out clean and dripping, every leaf rinsed to a deep, glossy green, the whole valley washed new.
For a moment I just lie there and take it in, the quiet after, the sheets tangled around us, his arm heavy and warm across my waist. It reminds me of walking into a cellar the morning after a hard rain, that same scrubbed, mineral clarity in the air, like the whole world got a second chance to start over clean.
Rhett shifts beside me, propping himself up on one elbow, his arm sliding free of my waist as he moves. He watches me the way a man watches something he still can't quite believe is real.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
"Sleep all right?"
"Better than I have in years."
Something in his face softens at that, though he doesn't say anything about it. He never does. He just reaches over and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear, the same slow, deliberate way he did at the lake, and for one long moment neither of us moves.
Something moves behind his eyes, like there's a whole sentence sitting right behind his teeth that he isn't ready to say yet.
"Regret any of it?" he asks instead. Quiet. As if the answer matters more than he wants to admit.
"Not one second."
He nods once, something in him settling, some quiet weight he's carried since the porch finally set down.
Then he swings out of bed, pulls on a pair of jeans, and disappears down the hall. I hear cabinets opening, the coffee maker finishing its cycle, his boots quiet on the wood floor.
I sit up against the headboard and pull the sheet around me, listening to the ordinary sounds of a house waking up around us. It feels strange how easy it is. How little either of us has to perform this morning.
He comes back two minutes later with two mugs, and hands me one without asking.
Cream, one sugar. Exactly how I take it.
I don't remember telling him that.
I look up at him, and he just shrugs one shoulder, dismissive, as if he hasn't been paying that kind of attention to me the whole season.
"How did you know that?"
"I pay attention."
I want to ask him since when, and I want to sit here in this bed with this coffee and this man and not think about anything else for the rest of the morning.
He sits back down on the edge of the mattress, close enough that his shoulder presses into mine, and for a few minutes neither of us says anything at all.
Outside, a mockingbird starts up somewhere in the wet vines, working through half a dozen borrowed songs like it can't decide which one it wants to keep.
I take a slow sip of the coffee. It's good, rich and a little sweet, exactly the way I like it, and I let myself have this one quiet, unhurried minute before the rest of the world finds us again.
It doesn't take long.
That's when my phone lights up on the nightstand.
A breaking news push from the Red Oak Ridge community page, the little red banner sharp against the screen.
I set the mug on the nightstand and reach for the phone, still smiling, still half lost in the last twelve hours.
Then I read the headline, and my stomach drops straight through the floor.