Chapter 7
RHETT
Iam lying awake at two in the morning replaying the sound of Sadie's laugh at dinner like it is the only thing worth remembering from the entire day.
Not the deal. Not the harvest schedule. Not the fence line I paid to fix without telling her why.
Just that laugh. Quick and surprised, like it caught her off guard as much as it caught me.
And the way she reached across the table for the bread basket the same second I did, her fingers brushing mine, both of us leaving our hands there a moment too long before either one of us pulled back.
Half a second. That is all it took.
The ceiling fan turns slow circles above the bed. I have counted the blades more times tonight than I want to admit.
I give up on sleep somewhere around two thirty and go stand at the window instead. The vineyard rows run pale and quiet under the moon. Rows I have walked ten thousand times. Not once have they kept me up like this.
This is the first time Sadie Collins has sat at my family's table in years. Since the courthouse hallway. Since I stood there and said nothing while my father told the whole county the Collins name didn't deserve defending.
I press my palm flat against the window glass. Moonlight lies flat and blue across the glass, catching a faint fog where my breath hits the glass. The pane stings cold under my palm.
This house taught me how to go quiet a long time before the Collins name ever came up. My mother died when I was young enough that grief just felt like how the house always was. I learned to carry things alone before I ever had a reason that made sense.
I drag my palm off the glass and press it flat against my chest instead.
I was thirty-two. Old enough to know better. Young enough to still believe my father's word was the only law that mattered on this ranch.
He told us plain. No Beaumont speaks up for the Collins family. Not in public, not in private, not to a reporter, not to a judge.
I drag a hand down the back of my neck. The words are still exact in my head, word for word. We protect our own name. Nobody else's.
I remember standing there with my mouth shut and my hands in my pockets while a family that used to sit at our table lost everything they had.
Three weeks later, Sadie was gone. Off chasing a sommelier certification a thousand miles from Red Oak Ridge. No goodbye. No forwarding address anybody would share.
I push off the window frame and pace to the foot of the bed and back. Just her parents still working the same rows without her, and a silence that has followed me around ever since, like a debt I never paid down.
I stop at the glass again. Both hands braced on the sill this time.
I bought the land under that silence. Every acre, filed under an LLC with my name nowhere on it.
I press my knuckles against the cold window glass.
So no developer could carve her family's vineyard into waterfront lots while she built a life somewhere else.
I told myself that was enough. That doing right by the dirt made up for what I never did right by the girl.
Her house sits dark somewhere past the ridge, too far to see from here. I turn that way anyway, out of habit.
I know it was never enough. It was just quieter guilt. The kind you can live with because nobody makes you look at it.
I go back to bed because there is nowhere else to go.
Sleep takes me somewhere I do not ask it to.
We are in the barrel room. Not tonight's barrel room, empty and locked up for the night. This one is warm, low lit, the air thick with oak and last year's Cabernet. Sadie stands in front of me with a wine thief in her hand, showing me how to draw a sample without spilling a drop.
Steady, she says. You're holding it like you're afraid of it.
Her hand covers mine on the glass. Just that. Her palm warm over my knuckles, guiding the angle, and every nerve in my arm goes electric like she flipped a switch I did not know I had.
She does not move her hand once the angle is right. Neither do I.
We stand like that longer than any wine sample calls for, her palm still resting over mine, her breathing gone shallow and unhurried at the same time. Close enough now that I can smell her, warm skin and grape must and something underneath that is only her.
The space between us closes an inch at a time. Neither one of us decides to move. It just happens, the way water finds the low ground.
I turn my hand under hers. Just enough that our fingers lace instead of stack.
She does not pull away.
She looks up at me the way she used to, before everything broke between our families. No guard up. No distance standing between us.
Nothing waiting outside that door matters at all, not with her this close, the heat coming off her skin the only thing I can think about.
You've been waiting for this, she says. Not a question.
I do not answer her. I bring her hand to my mouth instead, press my lips to the inside of her wrist where her pulse beats fast against my mouth.
She makes a sound low in her throat that undoes something in me I have spent years keeping locked down.
Her free hand finds my chest. Presses flat over my heart like she can feel exactly how hard it is working just from standing this close.
I move my mouth up the inside of her arm, slow, her skin giving under mine, and she says my name again, quieter this time, almost a whisper.
Rhett.
Her fingers curl into my shirt. Pull me closer instead of pushing me back.
I get my hand into her hair, tilt her face up to mine, and for one long second neither of us moves at all. Just breathing the same air, her mouth close enough that I can feel its warmth against mine.
Say it, she whispers. Say you want this.
"I want you," I say against her mouth. "More than I know what to do with."
She kisses me like she has been waiting on those words. Slow at first, then not slow at all, her hands sliding up into my hair, mine finding the small of her back and pulling her flush against me. The wine thief clatters to the floor somewhere behind us and neither of us stops to notice.
I back her into the edge of the barrel rack, careful of her head, my mouth trailing from hers down the line of her throat while her breath goes ragged against my ear.
Her hands work the buttons of my shirt like she has done it a hundred times before, and every inch of skin she uncovers she touches like she is memorizing it.
My shirt hits the floor somewhere behind us. Her palms flatten against my chest, dragging down, learning the shape of me the way she learned the wine.
I get my hands under the hem of her shirt, skin to skin along her spine, and she arches into my palms like she has been waiting years for exactly this much room to want something.
I find the clasp of her bra one-handed, patient, my mouth still working the line of her throat.
Rhett, she says again, breathless now, my name the only word either of us has left.
I do not get the chance to hear what comes after it.
I wake up before I find out what she does next.
Sheets tangled around my legs, heart going like I ran the East Vineyard fence line twice, want sitting low and heavy in my gut with nowhere to go.
I lie there a long minute, staring at the ceiling fan, still half in that barrel room. My hand is fisted in the sheet like it is still holding onto her.
I make myself let go of it. Waiting for the want to fade the way it always does. It does not fade fast enough.
I drag a hand down my face and swear low into the dark. My whole body still feels like it is standing in that barrel room, waiting on an answer I never got to give.
I have no right to want her like this. Not with a secret about her land still sitting behind my teeth.
Not with her still looking at me across the dinner table like she is deciding whether I am the same man who let her down or somebody worth trusting again.
Wanting her anyway does not feel like a choice. It feels like something that was always going to happen the second she climbed out of that truck on Ranch Road 12.
I get up before the sun does. Coffee first, boots on, out to the porch to watch the sky turn from black to gray over the vines. This is usually the part of the day that clears my head.
It does not clear this morning.
My phone rings just as the first gray light hits the East Vineyard rows. A number I do not recognize, area code I do not place.
I almost let it go to voicemail. Something makes me pick up instead.
"Rhett Beaumont."
"Mr. Beaumont, good morning. My name is Camille Ashford.
" Her voice is smooth, practiced, the kind of calm that sounds rehearsed even at six in the morning.
"I'm a water rights consultant. I'm reaching out about some questions I have regarding the property line between Beaumont Vineyards and a few of your neighboring parcels. "
I go still on the porch steps, coffee halfway to my mouth.
"I wasn't aware I had a meeting scheduled with a water rights consultant."
"You don't," she says, and there is something under the words I do not like, something patient and sharp at the same time. "Not yet. I was hoping we could set one up. I think you'll find the conversation worth your time, Mr. Beaumont."
The sun is barely up and the hair on the back of my neck is already standing at attention.
"I'll have my office reach out," I say, and end the call before she can answer.
I stand there a long moment, coffee forgotten in my hand, the vineyard waking up pale and quiet in front of me, gray light sliding down the rows like nothing in the world is wrong.
Something is wrong. I do not know what yet. But a stranger calling before sunrise asking about property lines, the same week Collins Cellars is drowning in debt and Sadie Collins is back in my house every day, does not feel like a coincidence.
It feels like the first crack in something I thought I had buried deep enough to stay buried.