Chapter 24 Isla
TWENTY-FOUR
ISLA
The back door sticks when I shoulder it open, which is irritating, but at least the kitchen smells divine.
Garlic and butter are going on the stove. The little under-cabinet lights are on, turning everything warm and gold. The table is set, and some quiet Paul Simon song is drifting through the room.
Jack is here, too, of course, standing in the middle of my kitchen with both hands braced on the back of a chair.
I stop short.
The weight on my chest has been lighter today. I haven’t been relaxed, exactly. That would be asking for too much.
Still, I had fun. Winnie and I laughed for hours without once circling back to the hard stuff. Budgets. Contracts. Fatigue. All the usual things waiting to crush the air out of a perfectly decent afternoon.
I’d almost forgotten I could have a day that felt like that.
And now, here’s Jack, right in the middle of my space, shifting the whole balance of it without even moving. He looks grounded and wound tight at the same time, like a man trying very hard not to alarm me.
Which, unfortunately for him, is not helping in the slightest.
“Why are you standing all weird?” I ask.
He blinks. “Weird how?”
“Like you’re about to tell me someone died.”
“No one died,” he says quickly.
I narrow my eyes. “You cooked, though?”
His shoulders lift and drop. “Yes.”
My gaze flicks past him to the pot on the stove and the matching fancy crockery set around the table. The sight is so absurdly domestic it hits me directly in the sternum.
“Rhodes,” I say, wary. “This is a lot more than just scrambled eggs and toast.”
“Don’t think too much into it. It’s just food.”
“It’s not just food.” With Jack, effort is never only effort. Not here. Not now. Not when everything in my life feels balanced on the thinnest possible edge. “You made this into a whole . . . thing.”
This is nice. This is really nice.
I set the paper bag on the counter, and he doesn’t rush to explain himself or downplay it. He only stands there, quiet in that maddening way of his, as though he hasn’t just rearranged the entire mood of my kitchen.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“My day?” I tip my head. “Why?”
“Because you look like maybe you had a good one. And because I want to know.”
He may be acting strange, but I’m still carrying the warmth of the afternoon in my body, and I can’t stop the small curve of my mouth. So I let out a breath through my nose and give in.
“It was productive. Winnie bullied me into buying pink ribbon for the jam jars, and she helped me make a new sign for the booth because ours looks like it was assembled during a windstorm.”
He snorts. “It was assembled during a windstorm.”
“I know,” I say, and it’s absurd how pleased I am that he remembers. “That’s why it looks like that.”
It would be easy to stay there, to keep deflecting and let the moment pass in a lighter shape. But I don’t want him to think I miss it when life hands me something rare and gentle.
“It was a good time,” I say more quietly. “A really good one.”
Something in his face softens. “I’m glad.”
Then I take in the rest of it. The table. The food. The kitchen, cleaned and put right before I ever walked through the door. It all carries the unmistakable feeling of being cared for, and that puts me on edge almost as much as it warms me.
“Is there a reason you did all this,” I ask, “or were you simply overcome with guilt about breaking my bottle of rosewater toner in the guest bathroom?”
His brows lift. “You saw that?”
“Of course I saw it.”
“I’ll buy you a new one.” He gestures toward the table. “But there is something else we need to talk about. You should sit.”
My eyes narrow. “That’s ominous.”
“Please,” he says, steady now. “Sit.”
I hesitate, then pull out a chair and lower myself into it without taking my eyes off him. My brain, unhelpfully, offers up the image of him confessing his undying love over pasta. It’s absurd and humiliating. It does absolutely nothing to stop my pulse from jumping.
He reaches for a thick envelope on the table and slides it toward me.
“This came,” he says. “Addressed to me. To us, really.”
The return address is from the grant committee, and my mind immediately leaps to the worst version of things. A mistake or withdrawal. A rejection somehow triggered by one wrong line in the paperwork.
With my heart lodged somewhere near my throat, I open it and start reading.
At first, nothing looks obviously wrong. There are no red marks or strange notes in the margin. No language blunt enough to declare disaster.
Final review. Verification. Documentation.
Then I hit the section on agricultural assessment and sampling.
I go back and read it again, slower this time, forcing myself not to race ahead of the page.
Limited grafting trials may be conducted under supervision for assessment of viability and long-term sustainability. Following viability, samples may then be preserved for replication trials and/or distributed among approved partners.
Grafting trials.
My fingers go numb around the paper.
That means they intend to take living material from the orchard, like cuttings or tissue. Pieces of Mirabelle itself. Enough to try to reproduce what grows here somewhere else, with none of the land beneath it. None of the history and none of the cost.
I turn the page.
There’s a list of names—donors, partner organizations, and affiliated stakeholders.
I read through them until everything inside me goes still.
A sick, twisted sense of recognition curls up my spine. It’s the same feeling I get when I look up from the rows and realize a storm is coming in too fast, when the air turns heavy, and the birds go quiet all at once.
I stare at the partner list, reread it, make sure my brain isn’t inventing letters.
“Roland,” I say flatly. “Roland Stein.”
Jack’s brows knit. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”
I look up, and I can tell by his face that he’s already bracing himself to hate the man on my behalf.
I push back from the table so hard the chair scrapes. “He’s a regular at the fucking club. What the hell?”
I start pacing, frantic.
Roland Stein. The regular who sits in booth ten. He always tips well when I supply him with information. He’s been asking me questions in that casual, curious voice of his, like he’s just making conversation and not taking inventory.
Do you offer tours of your farm?
It’s old, isn’t it? Been around for generations?
Other patrons ask questions, too. People like the idea of a farm girl gone wild. People like the idea of me being two different things at once.
I’d even felt a foolish flash of pride when he asked. Like, would you look at that, Mirabelle matters beyond Blue Willow. Look at that, the orchard draws people in, and more than that, my work is worth asking about, even if it’s mere pleasantry.
Now I can see it, clean and ugly. Roland wasn’t merely curious. He was collecting data.
And I gave it to him because I’m apparently still capable of being that damn naive.
“He said something strange the other night,” I say, thoughts racing ahead of my mouth. “About the number of trees on the land. He’s asked me questions about the orchard before, but I thought it was just . . . I don’t know, rich-guy small talk.”
“When?”
“A couple times.” I press my palms to my forehead. “He asked about the spring market. About whether I sell cuttings or ever propagate.”
Jack swears under his breath.
My stomach turns. “Jesus Christ.”
Suddenly, it’s not just me being at risk. It’s the orchard. It’s Roland watching me on that stage and asking about my land in the same breath, like my legacy is something he can also buy access to.
Humiliation burns hot behind my ribs, followed by anger so sharp it makes my hands shake.
“He’s on the partner list for verification.
That means he’s been inside the process all along, while I’ve been filling out forms and begging contractors for estimates and acting like we’re lucky to even be considered. ”
His jaw flexes. “We obviously aren’t accepting the grant.”
I let out a laugh that isn’t even close to funny.
“You don’t understand,” I say shakily. “If something like this is in the grant language, it’s already a fight.
I signed the initial paperwork. And Roland knows about the orchard’s unique value, and he’s seeking to exploit it.
We need to find out exactly what he knows and how. ”
I stop pacing.
Jack is watching me, trying to hold himself still. I wish he’d grab me, swear he’d burn the whole state of Connecticut down for me, but he’s waiting, I think, to see what I can handle for myself.
That sort of restraint is what gets under my skin the most. Which is inconvenient, because it makes me want to lean into him at the exact moment I want to tear the walls of this cottage down.
I drag in a breath and force myself into clarity. “Okay.” It’s strange how steady I sound because I feel like I’m cracking apart inside. “Okay. We are not signing anything. Not a single page. Not until we know exactly what this gives him access to.”
“Of course not.”
“And,” I add, staring at the partner list again, “we need someone who knows contracts. Someone who knows about shady deals, who knows how to rip out a clause without collapsing the whole thing.”
I think of a face I don’t want to think about. A man who has always been too smooth and too wealthy and too eager to get his hands on other people’s properties.
“We need Beau. He has big-shot lawyers,” I say, as if that justifies it.
“And he knows development. He knows funding structures. He knows how people hide greed in polite language. I don’t trust that he has altruistic motives, but I trust he knows the value of keeping Blue Willow’s magic out of the wrong hands. ”
Jack’s eyes go dark. “You want to call Langford?”
“I don’t want to,” I snap, because of course I don’t. “I want to throw Roland into the river and lock Elias’ tree in a vault. But wanting doesn’t get us out of this.”
Jack exhales, slow. He looks at the table, at the dinner he made, at the plates he arranged so neatly for us. Then he looks back at me.
“Tell me what you need, and I’ll do it.”
“I need to understand what the hell Roland thinks he’s doing here and why he thinks I won’t fight back.”
Jack turns, drags a chair back, and sits. His elbows hit the table, head dropping heavily into his hands.
The sight of it steals my breath away.
This man doesn’t fold. He fills space. He jokes, deflects, fixes. He carries other people’s panic. He carries mine. Seeing him like this feels wrong, intimate in a way I hadn’t braced for.
I cross the kitchen and rest my hand on his shoulder.
His muscles flinch beneath my palm, then loosen.
“You’re usually the positive one,” I say softly. “The happy-go-lucky one.”
He huffs a laugh. “You want me to be that guy right now?”
“No.” My fingers curl slightly, holding him in place. “You can break down, too.”
He lifts his head to look at me. His eyes are sharp, but there’s something raw in them that makes my chest ache. “You’d allow me that, huh?”
“I’m not your foreman,” I mutter. “I’m your wife. Allegedly.”
That pulls a real sound out of him, small and reluctant. He drops his hands.
“I guess . . . I thought maybe you didn’t have as much riding on this,” I say. “You’ve always had your own thing. Your crew. Your work.”
His jaw tightens. He stands quickly, the chair scraping. “My whole existence rides on this,” he says gruffly. “On you.”
My throat goes tight.
“I had a plan,” he continues, and there’s frustration in it. “The dinner. You were right. It wasn’t just food. It was me trying to put myself out there. Trying to tell you I want this, you, for real.”
My palms flex, useless, wanting to grab him and also wanting to run. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious. And I’m not gonna be embarrassed for having a crush on my own goddamn wife.”
I let out a laugh despite the tightness in my chest, despite the fear still buzzing under my skin. My life is on fire, and he’s still him, unapologetically so. This is what I wanted but also what I feared the most.
My fake husband has feelings for me. And I’m so deep over my own head here.
“A crush, is it?”
“Way more than a crush. You feel it, too, right?”
My hand slides from his shoulder to his chest, my palm flattening over the wild beat of his heart. It’s pounding hard enough to feel unsteady, alive, and that does something dangerous to me. It makes me brave.
“Yeah,” I say. “I feel it.”
Something shifts in his face then, some locked place giving way all at once. Relief moves through him first, then hope, bright and almost disbelieving. He lifts a hand to my cheek, slow enough that I could stop him if I wanted to.
I don’t. I can’t.
We’ve gone without this for far too long.
I want the comfort of him, the shelter of him, but also this—this sharp and shimmering feeling of being wanted on purpose.
His hands settle at my waist. Then his mouth finds mine.
The kiss lands hot and sure, and the second his lips part, I feel the difference. There’s nothing careful left inside of it. He kisses me like he’s been holding himself back for so long that the restraint has finally split open, and something inside me answers before I can think to be afraid of it.
He tilts his head and deepens it, drawing me into the angle he wants. I go with him immediately, melting and meeting him in the same breath. When his teeth catch my lower lip in a quick, deliberate drag, a bright current shoots through me so fast my knees nearly give.
I fist his shirt to steady myself. He makes this rough, wrecked sound against my mouth, and the hand at my hip tightens hard enough to send the sensation everywhere at once. It flashes low through me, slick and aching and deep enough to feel almost humiliating.
A sound rises in my throat. I swallow it back, but barely.
It feels too hungry for my kitchen. Too raw for a night already split open by bad news and fear and everything else we haven’t figured out how to survive yet. But I’ve spent years being careful, and all that caution has never once spared me anything.
When he pulls back, it’s only by an inch. “Tell me to stop,” he says, his mouth still grazing mine, his voice low and frayed around the edges, “and I will.”
Instead, I rise onto my toes and kiss him again, taking his mouth with all the want I’ve been choking down for months.
After this, there’s no going back to careful.