Chapter 17 Jack
SEVENTEEN
JACK
I’ve been living on a high for the entire first week of May.
My crew and I are out in Litchfield, tearing down and rebuilding a wraparound porch for a client with oddly specific and highly improbable requests. He keeps changing his mind about the railing design, insisting the finish needs to look “weathered, but intentional.”
It’s the kind of job that leaves my shoulders screaming and my hands permanently coated in sawdust. Normally, I’d be grumpy about it.
Instead, I’ve been floating.
Isla and I still haven’t heard back about any of the grants yet. She’s been biting her nails, pacing the kitchen, and reorganizing the jams, salves, and wines into color-coded rows.
The cabinets have been catalogued twice. The pantry once. The fridge labels are new, too. That’s stress management, Winslow style.
But the shining, ridiculous upside of this otherwise hectic stretch of life is the fact that I heard my fake wife come with my name on her lips.
And isn’t that something?
I haven’t talked about it because acknowledging it too directly feels dangerous. Like it might pop the bubble. But it’s been there, humming beneath my skin while I haul lumber and nod through client complaints.
I heard her—clearly enough that there was no mistaking it.
My brain has been an absolute menace ever since.
The morning after the guest room acoustic incident, she was sheepish. She wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. She busied herself with paperwork we’d already filed. She said my name like it was a normal word and not something she’d definitely said in a very different tone less than twenty-four hours prior.
I clocked it immediately.
She was wondering if I’d heard her and was trying her very best to hide it.
So, I gave her nothing.
I didn’t smirk or tease. I didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. I filed it away instead, tucked somewhere safe inside me. Because as much as I want to drag it into the light and watch her squirm, I know better than that.
Isla doesn’t respond to pressure. She responds to timing.
And Lord knows, there will come a time. I can be patient.
“Rhodes,” Talia calls, voice carrying over the saws and hammering. “Tell me you did not order the spindles in the wrong thickness.”
I lift my head from the cut list and squint across the half-gutted porch. Talia stands near the stack of lumber, tape measure clipped to her belt, ponytail shoved through the back of a baseball cap.
I wipe my hands on my jeans. “They’re exactly what you told me to order.”
Talia holds up a spindle. Then another.
“This is three-quarters,” she says, glaring at me. “Specs say one inch.”
I glance down. She’s right. Which is annoying, because being right is my favorite hobby.
“Okay,” I say. “That’s on me.”
Nico appears behind her, carrying a bucket of screws and looking entirely too pleased with himself. He hooks a thumb toward my hand.
“That doesn’t quite live up to the picture you showed us of Isla’s ring.”
I glance down at my finger. I’m wearing a black silicone band today. It’s practical, cheap, and impossible to snag on anything, which is the entire reason I bought it.
“This is my work ring.”
We ordered the real bands online, hers slim and gold, mine heavier and plain, but no way in hell am I wearing metal around power tools. I like my fingers where they are.
Talia’s eyes flick to the ring, then to my face. “Still weird that you’re married now.”
“It’s not weird,” I say.
Nico makes a noise in his throat. “It’s a little weird. Jack Rhodes has a wife, and she’s not just a blow-up doll in overalls.”
I huff. “Yeah, and you have a tattoo of a cartoon frog doing yoga on your ass.”
“That frog speaks to my soul,” Nico says, dead serious.
Talia tilts her head. “How’s living at the orchard?”
“It’s . . . busy,” I say. “We haven’t had much time to savor the domestic bliss. We’ve both been a little on guard.”
“You? On guard?” Nico repeats.
“You have no idea.”
I shut that thought down fast, because the last thing I need is to start picturing Isla, soft and unguarded in the middle of the night, while I was one room over, trying very hard to act like a respectful fake husband.
“I know you just said you’re busy,” Nico says, “so it’s probably not the best time to ask, but I was wondering if you could be a decent human and fill in for my Saturday shift.”
I stare at him. “For what?”
“Mateo’s got a birthday thing. His mom wants the whole family there.”
Mateo is Nico’s kid. He’s four years old and already better at negotiating than most adults. Normally, I’d say yes. We cover for each other often, but this weekend, I promised Isla I’d help gut the storage shed and flag what’s salvageable.
My business falls on me first, Nico second. I trust him, but I’ve never handed over the reins to anyone else.
I sigh. “Talia, are you good to run the crew Saturday if Nico’s out?”
Her brows lift. “You’re asking me?”
“I’m delegating.”
She studies me for a beat, then nods once. “Yeah. I can run it.”
“Seriously?” Nico asks, directing the disbelief at me. “You just got married, and you’re doing dad favors already.”
“It’s not a dad favor,” I grumble. “It’s a boss favor.”
Talia snorts. “Next thing you know, he’s gonna start leaving early for parent–teacher conferences.”
“Back to work,” I say, lifting my drill like a weapon.
Talia laughs and turns away, mercifully.
“If you need any advice,” Nico says, smug, “I’m basically a marriage expert.”
“Didn’t you and Marni divorce when Mateo was still in diapers?”
“It means I know what not to do,” he says. “Which is arguably more useful.”
I shake my head. “Go build something.”
He grins and wanders off, humming to himself.
I get back to work, my body falling into the old, reliable motions. The burn in my muscles, the weight of the drill, the steady noise of the jobsite should be enough to drown everything else out.
It isn’t.
My mind keeps circling back to Isla. To the sounds she made when she stopped holding herself in. To the way she said my name like it meant something different in the dark.
The memory stays under my skin, beating there.
By the time I make it back to Blue Willow, my body is wrecked, but my brain is still running hot, which feels like some kind of cosmic joke.
Blue-collar work is supposed to knock you out. Hard labor, honest sweat, a long drive home on back roads with the windows cracked. Usually, when my muscles ache, my thoughts ease up with them.
Tonight, I’ve spent the whole drive replaying my own name in my head.
Jack. Oh God, Jack.
When I finally pull into Mirabelle and kill the engine, I sit there with my forehead pressed to the steering wheel. After a full thirty seconds of silent self-loathing, I grab my bag and tell myself to get over it.
The back door to Isla’s cottage sticks like a motherfucker. I have to shoulder it open, which means the frame is swelling again from the damp. I need to fix it. But I have a feeling that if I pulled out my toolbox and started planing the edge right now, she’d murder me.
“Jack!” Isla calls from the living room.
The sound of it does something weird to my chest. Lately, she’s existed in shades of tense and tired. This is different. She sounds bright.
She appears in the doorway with a piece of paper in her hand. She looks flushed and animated and unfairly beautiful. There’s a light in her face I haven’t seen in days.
Something must have gone right.
“We got it,” she says, breathless. Then she immediately corrects herself. “Not got it got it. But we got something.”
“What does that mean, Winslow?”
She waves the paper at me. “The emergency stabilization grant.”
The one she called hell. The one she made me stop calling perfect.
“The suspiciously well-aimed one,” she says, parroting my sarcasm back to me.
Her mouth twitches because she knows exactly what she’s doing, which is trying to let herself enjoy it without fully unclenching.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “What happened?”
“We got a letter that says we’re finalists.”
Finalists. It lands in my chest and stays there, pulling a sound from me that’s somewhere between a laugh and a stunned exhale.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.” She’s smiling fully now, like she’s been holding it back for hours and finally lost the fight. “They want updated estimates and one more letter verifying the matching-funds structure. They called it a final review phase. They said we’ll have an answer in two weeks.”
My throat goes tight. I set my bag on the floor and cross the kitchen in three strides.
I wrap my arms around her. A full-on bear hug.
She makes a startled sound, then laughs, and her hands come up to my shoulders. At first, she’s stiff out of habit, but then her body softens, the tension giving way to something soft.
“You did it,” I tell her into her hair.
“We did it.”
I pull back enough to see her face, and something in her expression makes my brain go careful. Her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes are bright. There’s that unsteady line to her mouth. She’s trying very hard not to let this become a moment.
I lift her anyway because I’m a fool and because my body is already moving. Joy, I think, has a way of making a man reckless.
She laughs, hands clutching my shirt, and I spin her once, then again. For one clean heartbeat, it feels simple. It feels like we’re ordinary married people with ordinary married-people problems.
“Jack,” she says, laughing. “Jack, put me down.”
I do, but I don’t step away.
Her feet hit the floor, and she stays close, breathing fast, her hands still on me.
And then I become aware of everything I don’t need to be aware of.
The warmth of her through my shirt. The faint mix of citrus soap and plum wine on her skin. The pulse fluttering at her throat. The way her gaze drops to my mouth and lifts again.
I reach up and catch the loose strand of dark hair that’s fallen across her cheek, brushing it back with my knuckles. It’s barely a touch at all.
Her spine goes ramrod straight.
And just like that, I know I’m standing on the thinnest line there is.
Will you let me kiss you again? This time, will you let it be real?
She swallows, her lips parting a little, and my whole brain goes hot and blank in the same way it did in the middle of the night, hearing my name through the wall in a voice that didn’t sound anything like restraint.
Then she blinks hard, like she’s dropped back into herself. She steps away so fast it nearly knocks the air out of me. “I have to get ready,” she says briskly. “I have a shift.”
Of course she does.
“Luxe,” she adds, as if I might somehow have forgotten.
I school my face into something normal. Try to act like I’m not standing here with my hand still half lifted between us. “When do you leave?”
“In twenty minutes. I have to change, and I have to, um, make sure everything’s lined up.”
Everything, meaning her life. Everything, meaning the armor she puts on before she walks out the door.
She sets the letter on the table and smooths it flat with her palm. “Read it,” she says. “So you know I’m not making it up.”
“I believe you.”
Her mouth twitches. “Still.”
Then she’s gone, striding toward her bedroom with that purposeful, don’t-follow-me energy she wears. A door opens. A drawer shuts. The faint burst of pop music starts up, muffled through the wall.
I stay where I am, alone in the kitchen with a piece of paper that suddenly feels like the difference between drowning and breathing. When I pick it up, I read every line slowly.
The language is cautious, full of phrases like “final award pending verification of submitted estimates and confirmation of adequate funds.”
A door has cracked open. And with it comes the real possibility of Isla getting everything she’s been clawing toward for years. And then, maybe, leaving me behind.
This is what she wanted. What I signed up for.
So why does it feel like I’m already bracing for the loss?
I brace myself on the counter, staring at the wood grain like it might explain what I’m supposed to do with the way my chest is still humming. Upstairs, Isla’s footsteps cross the floor. The sound of running water starts, then stops. A hair dryer whirs briefly.
She’s getting ready to leave, and I’m trying to be the kind of man who lets her go. It would be a lot easier if my body weren’t still remembering what it felt like to have her pressed up against me.
My fingers flex, replaying the shape of her soft waist beneath my hands.
That annoys me because I’ve always been good at keeping things casual. Casual is my brand. It’s how I’ve moved through life without getting pinned down by anything heavy. It’s how I’ve kept my options open all this time.
But God, I don’t want my options open. Not anymore.