Chapter 27
RHETT
Iam watching Camille Ashford disappear into the crowd before I can reach her, and the unease settling in my chest tells me tonight's victory is not the end of this.
One second she's at the edge of the tent, patient as a woman who already knows how this ends. The next she's gone.
Swallowed by string lights and champagne and half of Red Oak Ridge celebrating a harvest she tried to take from us.
Ten minutes ago I stood in front of this entire valley and said Sadie's name out loud, meant every word of it, and let the whole crowd hear it. I should be riding that.
Instead there's a cold thread pulling tight in my chest, the same one I felt the morning I found the irrigation line cut clean through.
Camille doesn't walk away from a losing hand. She'll find out real fast I don't walk away from a fight either.
I start after her anyway.
I don't get three steps before Sadie's hand closes around my arm.
"Let her go," she says. "Tonight isn't hers."
I look down at her, at the flush still high in her cheeks from what I just said in front of the entire valley, and the tension in my shoulders eases even as the rest of me stays on alert.
"She left something," Sadie says. She pulls a card from the small clutch at her wrist. Plain white. Cottonwood Basin Holdings. Underneath it, a title. Resource Development.
I turn it over. Nothing on the back.
"You recognize the name?" she asks.
"No." I hand it back to her. "Don't recognize it."
"Me neither." She tucks it away like it might bite her if she holds it too long. "It was sitting by her wine glass. Like she wanted someone to find it."
"Camille doesn't get careless." I glance toward the crowd where she vanished. "If she left it, she meant for us to find it."
Sadie doesn't argue that. Neither of us has an answer for what Cottonwood Basin Holdings is, or why a woman circling both our families' land would leave a name behind at the one night we finally won something.
"Whatever it is," I say, "it can wait until morning."
She studies me for a second, weighing whether to let it go.
"It's not over," she says. Not a question.
"No." I take her hand, thread my fingers through hers. "It's not. But I'm not giving Camille Ashford one more minute of tonight."
The tightness eases out of her shoulders. She nods, and for once she doesn't argue with me either.
We're halfway back toward the tent when Beck finds us, three glasses of Beaumont Reserve balanced between his hands like he's been carrying them across the whole property looking for us.
"There you are." He hands one to each of us, keeps the third. "No toast. No audience. Just this."
"Beck—"
"Don't ruin it by making it weird." He lifts his glass before I can argue. "I've watched you run this ranch for a decade without breaking a sweat. First time I've ever seen you look like you needed something."
"Careful." I take the glass anyway.
"I'm serious." For once there's nothing performing about him, no showman's polish, just my brother looking at the two of us like he's been waiting years to see it. "To the wine finally worth the wait."
We drink. Sadie laughs, quiet and surprised, and Beck claps my shoulder once before he disappears back into the party, already back to his usual breezy self.
I don't let go of her hand.
"Come with me," I say. "There's somewhere I want to take you tonight that isn't the lake."
She doesn't ask where. She just walks with me, past the edge of the tent lights, out into the dark where the grass turns cool underfoot and the noise of the Gala fades to something distant and warm behind us.
The Old Oak stands at the top of the rise, black against the sky, its branches wide enough to have shaded four generations of Beaumonts and every secret we ever thought was ours alone.
From here the Gala looks like something out of a postcard, gold light spilling across the vineyard, the whole valley lit up in celebration.
I stop under the lowest branch, the one with our initials still carved into the bark from a summer neither of us has ever talked about out loud.
For a second neither of us says anything. The music from the tent is a faint hum somewhere behind us.
Her hand is still in mine, and I can feel her pulse where my thumb rests against her wrist, quick and steady at once.
None of it feels like protection anymore, standing here. Just time I don't get back.
"Rhett." She says my name like a question.
"I need to say something," I tell her, "and I need to say it right here, where I've never brought anyone else."
She goes still. I trace my thumb over the old carving in the bark, our initials worn smooth by years of weather, and let myself take one more second before I say it.
"I'm in love with you." The words leave me steady, no hedge in them, no careful walking back. "Since the road, with the colt. That's the easy answer."
She opens her mouth. I shake my head, not finished.
"The true one starts a lot earlier than that."
"There's something else you need to hear tonight," I say.
Her hand tightens in mine. She doesn't pull away, just waits.
"The land under Collins Cellars. It's not owned by some stranger who got lucky at auction.
" I make myself keep going before I lose the nerve.
"I bought it. Years ago. Through a company with nothing tying it back to my name, so no developer could ever turn it into lake houses after your family lost the winery. "
She doesn't say anything. The quiet stretches long enough that I lose track of the music behind us.
"I've been paying to protect ground I never told you I owned," I say. "I told myself I was waiting for the right time. Truth is I was just scared of this exact moment."
"How long." Her voice is careful now, testing the shape of it.
"Since before you left. Before any of this." I hold her eyes. "I should have told you the day you walked back into my study with your terms on a legal pad. I didn't. That's on me, not you."
"There's more," I say. "About what really happened back then. Not just my silence."
She goes very still.
"The irrigation damage was real," I say. "Your family's system did fail, and it did hurt our vines. Nobody lied about that part."
"But it wasn't only your family's system. It was the easement, the shared water line between our two properties, and neither side had repaired it in years. My father needed somebody to blame that wasn't a Beaumont. Your family didn't have the money or the standing to argue back."
"So he let the town believe it was all Collins negligence." Her hand goes rigid in mine. "And you knew. Standing in that courthouse, you knew it wasn't the whole truth."
"I knew enough to ask questions. I didn't ask them." The admission costs me something to say out loud, more than the land ever did. "I'm not telling you this to make it smaller than it was. Your family still lost everything. I just need you to know the fault was never only yours to carry."
She looks past me toward the Old Oak's trunk, toward the initials neither of us have ever explained to anyone. When she looks back, her eyes are wet, but she isn't stepping away.
"That's the ground my grandfather planted on," she says, quiet. "You've been standing guard over it this whole time. And you knew the truth about what really happened to us, this whole time too."
"I didn't buy the land so you'd owe me anything. I couldn't stand the thought of it becoming somebody's lake house. And I didn't stay quiet about the truth to protect myself. I just couldn't stand watching this town keep believing the wrong story."
"I know." She says it like she's surprised at how easily she believes it. "I know that now."
A short laugh escapes her, more breath than sound. "So the mystery landlord who fixed my fence line all those years was you. I really wish I'd tipped better."
"You would've tipped in wine, and I would've taken it." I catch the corner of her mouth curving, and the last of the tightness in my chest finally lets go.
"I've spent years managing everything," I say. "The land, the ranch, my father's name. I told myself if I kept enough of it under control, none of it could hurt anyone again."
"Then you came back, and I stopped wanting to manage anything. I just wanted you."
The Gala hums behind us, distant and golden. Up here it's just the two of us and a tree old enough to remember every version of who we used to be.
"I want to renegotiate the partnership," I say. "Not for one season. Permanent. Collins Cellars folded into Beaumont, not swallowed by it. A true blend, the way we've already started making one without ever calling it that."
She doesn't answer right away. Her hand tightens around mine, and for a second I can't tell if it's the good kind of tight or the kind that means I've moved too fast.
"Permanent," she repeats, like she's testing the weight of the word.
"Permanent," I say again. "Your name on the label right next to mine. Not a favor. Not a season. For as long as you'll have it there."
"Rhett." Her voice catches on my name this time. "What scares me isn't you."
I wait.
"It's the version where I trust someone with everything I built, and it costs me all of it. The way it did once before." Her hand tightens in mine.
"I watched my family lose their name, their land, their whole story, because they trusted the wrong people to protect it. I swore I'd never hand anyone that kind of power over me again. Not even you."
"My father didn't live to see any of it come back," she says. "I'm not losing what's left of him to anyone else's hands. Not even yours."
"I know."
"But you bought the ground under my family's winery before I ever forgave you for anything," she says. "You blocked Ashford's filing before I let you back in."
"You've been proving it for weeks. I just wasn't ready to see it."
I don't say anything. I let her get there on her own.
"I love you too," she says.
The words land somewhere under my ribs, warmer than anything the Gala lights could throw this far up the hill. It's the first full breath I've felt in her presence since the day I watched her drive out of Red Oak Ridge with everything she had left in the back of a truck.
I reach for her face, tilt her chin up. My thumb traces the line of her cheek, slow, deliberate, and I feel her breath catch under my touch.
"Say it again," I tell her, voice low.
"I love you." Her hand slides up my chest, fists in my shirt, and pulls me closer instead of pushing away.
She goes up on her toes to meet me halfway, and for one long second the whole valley below us stops mattering, the Gala, the wine, Camille Ashford and whatever she left behind at that table.
There's just Sadie, close enough that I can feel her breath before our mouths ever touch, the smell of her perfume mixed with woodsmoke drifting up from the fire pits below.
My hand slides from her cheek to the back of her neck, drawing her in, and her fingers curl tighter into the front of my shirt like she's as ready for this as I am.
Every inch of space left between us feels like it's costing us both something.
I'm half a second from kissing her when a voice cuts through the dark behind us.
"Well," Evelyn says, "it's about time."
I turn. My whole family is standing at the bottom of the rise, Evelyn in front, cane in one hand and a look on her face like she has been waiting a decade for this exact moment.
Beck is grinning like he planned it. Knox is holding up a bottle with a hand-lettered label that reads Collins x Beaumont, First Blend like he's presenting a trophy at the state fair.
"We were just walking by," Knox says, not even trying to sound convincing.
"With a bottle you clearly went and fetched from the cellar," I say.
"Details." Knox holds it higher, like that settles the matter.
Evelyn makes her way up the last few feet of the rise slower than she used to, but there's nothing slow about the way she looks between the two of us. "I have been waiting on this since you were both still climbing this tree instead of standing under it."
Sadie laughs, presses her face into my shoulder, and I feel the sound of it move through both of us at once.
"Somebody open that," Beck says, nodding at Knox's bottle. "First blend deserves better than sitting there getting warm in your hand."
Knox works the cork loose right there under the branches, and it comes free with a soft pop that sends the whole family into another round of laughing that has nothing to do with the wine.
Evelyn is the first to taste it, holding the glass up to catch what little moonlight makes it through the branches. She doesn't say anything for a long moment, just closes her eyes like she's listening to something the rest of us can't hear.
"Well," she finally says, "your grandfather would have liked this one."
Sadie lifts her own glass next, turns it once toward what little light makes it through the branches, and takes her time before she drinks. I watch her read it the way she reads everything, tannin, structure, the long finish, before she finally speaks.
"Firm backbone," she says. "Soft where it needs to be. Nothing about it apologizes for being both." She looks up at me. "It's a good blend."
Beck raises his glass again. Knox does the same. Sadie leans into my side, and I wrap my arm around her right there in front of the family who's been waiting on this longer than I have.
My family, showing up right on cue under the one tree that's kept every secret I ever had.
I wouldn't have it any other way.