Chapter 22
RHETT
Iam reading the filing over Sadie's shoulder, coffee going cold in one hand, my boots already loud against the floorboards, and I realize this is not sabotage born of small town spite. Someone wants this land badly enough to make it official.
Her laptop sits propped against her knees, the glow too bright for this early. She scrolls without rushing, the sheet pooled at her waist. Neither of us says a word for a long minute.
"Ashford Water Holdings," she reads out loud. "Formal land assessment request. Full acreage. Both properties."
"Both." I take the laptop from her hands and read it again myself, like the words might change the second time. They don't. "Not just the land under Collins Cellars. Mine too."
Sadie pulls the sheet higher, sitting straighter against the headboard. "That's not a coincidence anymore."
"No." I set the laptop down and scrub a hand over my face. "That's a woman who did her homework before she ever approached either of us."
"What would anyone want with land nobody's touched in decades?" Sadie pulls her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. "It's not oil. Somebody would've found it by now. It's not development, not out here, not with the water restrictions."
She's running through it the same way she'd break down a strange vintage, component by component. Soil. Water. Elevation. Whatever's really at stake out here, she's going to be the one who spots it first.
"I don't know." And I hate saying it, because I'm supposed to know.
I'm supposed to be three steps ahead of every threat that comes near this family, near her family. Right now I'm exactly where I was the morning the irrigation line got cut. Standing over evidence with no answer.
Sadie watches me think. She's always been able to do that, read the gears turning behind my face like she's got a window straight into them.
"You've got that look," she says.
"What look."
"The one where you're three moves into a fight that already started."
I almost smile. Almost. "Somebody wants this land enough to file paperwork on both families at once. That's not a fight I get to sit out."
She reaches over and takes my hand, laces her fingers through mine like it's the easiest thing in the world. Maybe for her it is now. I'm still getting used to the fact that I get to have this.
"We'll figure it out," she says. "Together this time."
I bring her knuckles to my mouth and don't answer. There isn't a version of my answer that doesn't sound like a vow, and I'm not ready to hand her one of those yet. Not out loud.
By midafternoon I've got Marcus on the phone twice and no new information either time. The assessment request is legitimate, filed correctly, impossible to block outright. All he can do is slow it down and dig for who's really funding Ashford Water Holdings behind Camille's name on the paperwork.
Sadie texts around two. Leak in the barrel room. Bad one. Can you look before we lose a whole row of Cab.
I'm in my truck before I text her back.
Collins Cellars looks calm when I pull in.
The tasting room is busy enough that nobody clocks me walking around back. Sadie's mother is out front leading a group through the reserve list, her voice carrying warm and practiced through the open door.
She doesn't see me cross the gravel toward the barrel room.
Sadie's waiting at the door, sleeves pushed up, a headlamp pushed back off her forehead like she's already been in there working the problem herself.
Her phone buzzes in her back pocket, the same string of digits I've caught her ignoring twice this week. She silences it without looking and waves me toward the barrel room.
"Third barrel from the end," she says. "Started this morning. I caught maybe two gallons before I texted you."
The barrel room is cool and dim, the kind of hush that swallows sound whole. Rows of oak stretch back into shadow, the air thick with must and old wine and something underneath that's just her.
I crouch at the barrel, find the seam along the stave where the wood's pulled loose from age. Not sabotage this time, just years doing what years do. I press my thumb against it and feel the give.
"Stave's cracked clean through," I say. "You'll need to rack it tonight before you lose the rest."
"I figured." She's close behind me, close enough I can feel the warmth coming off her in the cold room. "I just wanted an excuse to get you alone for five minutes."
I look up at her. She's not smiling exactly, but there's something in her face, steady and sure in a way I haven't seen from her since before she left the first time.
The door swings shut behind us on its own weight. The sound of the tasting room out front goes muffled and far away.
I get to my feet, in no rush. She doesn't step back.
"Your mother's twenty feet away," I say, low.
"My mother's selling a case of Legacy Red to a bus tour from Austin." Sadie's eyes don't leave mine. "We've got time."
I should walk out that door before her mother catches us. I know that the way I know my own name.
Instead my hand finds her waist. Hers comes up flat against my chest, right over where my heart's doing something it has no business doing this fast for a woman I've already had once.
"Sadie."
"Don't," she says. "Don't talk us out of this."
So I don't.
I kiss her slow, no rush to it, nothing like the storm that broke us open the first time. This time it's quiet. This time it's a choice we're both making with clear heads and closed doors and twenty feet of distance between us and anyone who might notice we're gone.
Her hands find the buttons of my shirt, unhurried, working them loose one at a time while I back her against the cool curve of a barrel. She sighs into my mouth when my palm slides up under the hem of her shirt, flattening against the bare skin of her ribs.
"We can't take long," she breathes.
"We won't." I find the clasp of her jeans, watch her eyes go dark as I work the clasp loose.
I peel her shirt over her head and drop it somewhere in the shadows. I take a second just to look at her, dark hair loose around her shoulders, skin pale gold in the little light coming through the high window.
She reaches back and unhooks her own bra before I can. Lets it fall, bold and unbothered by the cold room, by the risk of it, by any of it.
"Rhett." My name sounds different in her mouth down here, low and a little wrecked already.
I lift her onto the sturdy edge of the crush table pushed against the wall and settle myself between her knees. I kiss a line down her throat while her hands work my belt loose.
I catch her wrist once, just to slow her down, and she huffs a laugh against my ear that turns into something else entirely when my fingers slide into her underwear and find her slick, already aching for it.
I circle her clit, feel her hips buck against my hand. Then I push two fingers deep and curl them right, learning exactly what she likes without her having to tell me twice.
"You're going to make me loud," she warns, breathless.
"Then keep it quiet." I drag my mouth back up to hers, muffle the sound she makes as I work her steady, my fingers keeping their rhythm. Her hips rock forward to meet my hand like she can't help it. "I like watching you try."
She gets my jeans open, wraps her hand around my cock with a confidence that nearly undoes me right there. Slow deliberate strokes from base to tip, her thumb dragging over the head on every pass, have me pressing my forehead to hers just to breathe through it.
"Now," she says. "Please."
I don't make her ask twice.
I ease into her slow, watch her mouth fall open on a silent gasp, feel her nails bite into my shoulders as she adjusts around me. For a second neither of us moves, just breathing each other in, foreheads together, her legs locking around my waist to pull me deeper.
"You okay," I ask against her mouth.
"Don't stop." Her hips roll against mine, an answer better than words. "Rhett, don't you dare stop."
So I don't.
I move in her slow at first, deep strokes that have her biting down on her own lip to stay silent. One hand fists in my hair, the other braces flat against the table behind her.
I find her mouth again to swallow the sound when she can't hold it back anymore, drink down every gasp like it belongs to me now.
"Right there," she breathes. "God, right there."
I angle deeper, feel her whole body go tight around me, her breath stuttering against my throat. I keep the rhythm slow, deliberate, each thrust dragging out long and full until she's clenching around me in long, helpless waves.
I watch her fall apart one broken gasp at a time instead of all at once, memorizing every hitch in her breathing like I mean to keep it.
When she comes it's quiet, the way she promised. A long shudder runs through her whole body as she buries her face against my neck to muffle the sound, her nails dragging hard down my back.
I follow her a few strokes later, low and controlled, my forehead dropping to her shoulder as I go still inside her. Both of us breathe hard in the cool, dim room, wine and oak and her everywhere I turn.
For a long minute neither of us moves. Her fingers trace lazy lines along my spine. My mouth finds her temple, her hair, the soft skin below her ear, unwilling yet to let go of any part of this.
"That," she says finally, voice wrecked and warm, "was not part of the leak repair."
"No." I pull back enough to look at her, her eyes soft and open in a way I've spent six years trying to forget I ever saw. "Worth the detour."
She laughs, soft, and reaches for her shirt. I catch her hand first, press one more kiss to her knuckles, unwilling to rush the end of this the way I refused to rush the middle.
Out front, her mother's voice carries faintly through the walls, still selling wine to strangers who have no idea what's happening twenty feet away.
Somewhere past all of it, an assessment filing sits on a desk with both our family names on it.
A woman with a flat smile and sharp eyes is circling closer than either of us wants to admit.
But right here, right now, with Sadie's heartbeat slowing under my palm, I let myself have this first. The rest can wait until we're dressed.