Chapter 30
THIRTY
ISLA
It’s seven o’clock in the morning, and the house feels wrong.
Lately, Jack’s been the first one up. He’s obnoxiously cheerful about it, too, clattering around making eggs and waffles. Today, the guest room door is closed. No shower running or country playlist leaking under the crack.
I stare at the closed door for a full ten seconds, holding my mug.
“Coward,” I mutter to myself and set the coffee down.
I knock once, then twist the knob and push his door open.
The curtains are half-drawn. Morning light slants across the bed, catching on the rumpled tangle of sheets and the broad stretch of Jack’s back. He’s on his side, one arm flung over the edge of the mattress.
He’s also very clearly hard.
The sheet is doing its best, but physics isn’t on its side. My brain short-circuits for a second, which is ridiculous because I’ve had his cock in my mouth, and still my first instinct is to freeze like a teenager who walked in on a crime scene.
Jack shifts, mumbling something into the pillow. The movement draws my attention to the muscles along his broad shoulders. His boxers have ridden down enough to show the dip at the base of his spine.
Oh no. This was a mistake.
I should back out, close the door, and pretend this never happened. That would be the mature thing to do. Instead, my mouth gets ahead of me.
“You know we have a lot of work to do today, right?”
He turns his head, squinting at me with one eye open. “Good morning to you, too.”
“Good morning.” I keep my gaze firmly on his face. I do not look down. I’m very proud of myself. “You’re late.”
“Late?” He pushes up on his elbows, the sheet slipping lower. I hear my own pulse in my ears. “It’s seven. That’s on time for normal humans.”
“You’re not normal humans. You’re Jack. You’re usually outside bothering my trees by six.”
“Your trees like my attention,” he says. Then he follows my line of sight, realizes what the sheet is doing, and huffs out a laugh. “Ah. That explains the tone.”
“It does not,” I say quickly. “I came in here for purely professional reasons.”
“Uh-huh.” He stretches, unapologetic, and the flimsy sheet shifts again. “And professionally, what is your assessment, boss?”
Heat crawls up my neck. “Professionally, my assessment is that you should put pants on. We have to prune the north rows and cover the irrigation valves before the site visit, and all of that goes faster if I’m not . . . distracted.”
“Distracted, huh?” He grins, slow and smug. “By what, exactly?”
I narrow my eyes and cross my arms. “By your refusal to respect call time.”
“Sure, my time management. That’s the problem here.”
He rolls to his side and sits up. The sheet pools low around his hips. I catch a flash of skin and immediately stare very hard at the opposite wall, where someone hung a framed print of pears in the 1970s and never revisited the decision.
Jack swings his legs over the edge of the bed. “If you wanted a repeat of the river,” he says lightly, “you could have just said so. I’m a very approachable husband.”
My brain sparks with a rush of backstage images. The blanket. His hands. The way my name sounded when he said it into my skin.
I drag in a breath. “We have inspectors coming in three days. I’m not giving Stein the satisfaction of walking through a messy orchard because my husband’s dick is overly ambitious.”
He laughs, head tipped back. “I love it when you talk dirty about bureaucracy.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“And yet . . .”
He stands. The sheet finally gives up entirely. He has boxers on, thank God, but they do nothing to help the whole situation. He crosses to me, close enough that I get a full blast of sleep-warm skin and the faint scent of clean soap.
“You barged into my room at seven in the morning and stayed. You could have yelled for me through the door.”
“I wanted you to see my serious face,” I say.
He leans down and kisses my forehead. “Message received. I will be fully clothed and ready to do your bidding in ten minutes.”
“Good.”
“And Isla?”
“Yeah?”
“You can wake me up like this whenever you want. Next time, though—” He taps his temple, grinning wider. “—I’d appreciate if you remembered that my eyes are up here.”
I make a strangled noise, then turn on my heel and march back down the hall.
In the kitchen, I grab my abandoned coffee and take a long sip. The mug hides my smile.
Fifteen minutes later, Jack is outside hauling saws and loppers out to the truck, freshly showered, hair damp, and very annoyingly dressed. He’s wearing a hacked-off tank and too-short shorts. If he showed any more skin, he’d be naked.
I follow him with a stack of laminated maps and a clipboard.
He reaches for them automatically. “Give.”
“I need these.”
“I’m not going to eat them,” he says. “You can still be in charge if I carry things.”
I let him take the maps. “We need a plan before we attack the rows. If I just let you loose with a saw, we’re going to have traumatized trees and a very cranky orchard manager.”
“Noted. No freestyle lumberjacking.” He opens the gate and waits for me to pass through first. “Walk me through it.”
We head down the central path. Buds bead along the branches, some swelling, some already showing the first hint of white. The ground is still damp in spots from last night’s rain, my boots leaving dark prints along the way.
“This is what they’re going to see first,” I say. “We’ll bring them in through the east gate, walk them past the packing shed, then into the lower rows. They’ll want to see the older trees and the new grafts both.”
“So, we focus on the first impression. No broken posts or random equipment. No weird bare patches.”
“Exactly.” I stop beside the first row and gesture. “These need the undergrowth cleared. See the sucker shoots coming up from the base? If they walk in and all they see is chaos at the ground level, they might assume we’re sloppy.”
He crouches, runs a hand over the low tangle of thin, pale shoots. “Tell me what you want gone.”
“The straight, vertical ones that are trying to pretend they are new trees,” I say. “They steal energy from the main trunk. If you cut them clean and close, the tree can put more into fruit and canopy.”
“So, we’re giving the tree a better chance to show off.”
“Look at you, learning.”
He glances up at me from that squat, mouth curving. “I pay attention when you talk about the trees. You get this look on your face.”
“What kind of look?”
“It’s my favorite one of yours. It’s sorta like you’re talking about a person you love who also annoys the shit out of you.”
I open my mouth to argue, then close it again. He’s talking about himself, and we don’t need to open up the can of worms right now. We’ve got work to do.
He grins, victorious, and stands. “Hand me the loppers.”
For the next hour, we move down the row, working side by side. I take the smaller shoots with my pruning shears. He handles the thicker ones, the ones that have been left too long because I didn’t have time or backup.
Jack listens when I point, asks before he cuts if he isn’t sure, and when he slices through a stubborn sucker, he makes a low, satisfied sound.
The rhythm settles over us. We clip, toss the cuttings into the bin, step forward, and repeat. Robins chatter overhead. Somewhere down by the creek, a frog starts croaking.
“You know,” Jack says after a while, “I think these committee folks are gonna be easier to impress than you’d think.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Look at what you pulled off without their money. This place is a miracle, and that’s not because of the magic. It’s because of you.”
My throat tightens. I clear it. “Flattery won’t get you out of hauling brush.”
“That’s okay. Flattery has gotten me plenty of worthwhile things already.”
I snort. “Name one that isn’t sex related.”
“You married me, didn’t you?”
“That wasn’t flattery. That was a mutually beneficial business arrangement.”
He laughs. “Keep telling yourself that, freckles.”
We finish the first row and move to the next. The sun climbs higher. I shrug out of my jacket and tie it around my waist. Jack lifts his tank to wipe away sweat, revealing a bare, glistening strip of his waist and chest. I promptly look away.
We tackle a patch where the ground dips and stays damp longer than it should. The grass here grows thick and mottled. I rake it back to check for rot at the base of the trees.
Jack clears branches and moves the bin without being asked.
He fits here so perfectly, doesn’t he?
At one point, he straightens, wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist, and looks down the long line of trunks and budding branches.
“I get why you couldn’t ever walk away from this place,” he says quietly.
“Even before I understood what Mirabelle is, what it does. Just looking at it like this, it’s . . . a lot. It’s everything.”
The rows stretch in gentle curves, catching the dwindling light. It’s not the prettiest time of year yet, not the riots of blossom or the heavy-limbed fullness of harvest, but there’s a charge in the air. That held-breath feeling before something bursts open.
“It is everything, isn’t it? And it’s mine,” I say. “Ours, I guess. Now.”
After years of hoarding them to myself, I suddenly want to hand over the keys to my property, to my entire life. Jack is technically my husband, he’s the reason I have this grant in the first place, and he’s shown up for me and Mirabelle in ways no one ever has before.
I think he’s earned the title by now.
“Ours?”
I swallow thickly. “I assume you’re deeply turned on by the idea of co-stewardship.”
He barks a laugh. “Wildly.”
We take a break around midmorning. I grab water bottles from the cooler and hand him one. He tilts his head back to drink, and I catch a smear of dirt along his jaw. Without thinking, I step in and wipe it off with my thumb.
His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there.
“You had a smudge,” I say.
“Occupational hazard.”
My hand is still on his face. I should move it. Instead, I let my fingers curve just enough to feel the rasp of his stubble. “Jack.”
“Yeah?”
“I know I’ve been thanking you a lot lately. But I just want you to know that I see you. That I like you here, that I want you here for more than just your ability to lift the heavy things and fix the broken ones.”
He steps close enough that my back bumps the fence post. His hands bracket my waist, careful, giving me plenty of time to step away if I want. I don’t move an inch.
“The thing about roots,” he says, “is that they do better when they’re tangled up with other ones. Stronger network. More stability. You know. Science.”
I tilt my head. “You read that off a fertilizer bag?”
“Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe I just really like the idea of my roots tangled up with yours.”
I slide my hands up his chest, feeling the sweat-damp cotton and the solid reassurance of muscle underneath. Before I can overthink it, I lean in and kiss him.
Our mouths slot together with ease. It’s like we’ve been heading for this particular spot under this particular tree since the day he rolled into town with his ridiculous truck and his too-bright grin.
His fingers tighten on my waist. One hand slides up my back, resting between my shoulder blades, steadying me. He nudges my mouth open, and I let him, chasing the slow slide of his lips, the teasing flick of his tongue.
I fist a hand in the front of his shirt to keep my balance, and he laughs into the kiss, low and pleased. I think this might be the best idea either of us has ever had. Kissing in the rows after a day of hard work.
When we pull back, he asks, “Think the committee will hold it against us if we’re still making out when they pull up?”
“Yes,” I say. “Absolutely.”
“Then we better get it out of our system now.”
He kisses me again. I lose track of the morning, the to-do list, every thought except this perfect tangle of him and me—of us—here together on my family’s land.