Chapter 13
SADIE
The ranch hand is at the door before either of us has caught our breath: Camille Ashford is idling at the Beaumont gate, and she isn't leaving until somebody comes out to talk to her.
Rhett is already reaching for his keys.
"Come with me," he says, and it isn't a question.
Fifteen minutes later I am standing at the kitchen window of the Beaumont house watching him stride out toward the drive to meet her, and something about the calm, deliberate way he moves makes me realize exactly how dangerous this man can be when someone threatens what is his.
He does not hurry. He does not look back at me either, but I know he feels me watching. His shoulders are set in a line I have not seen on him before, easy and lethal at the same time, like a man who already knows how this conversation ends and is only walking out there to make it official.
My hands are not quite steady from the kiss.
I press them flat against the cool tile of the counter and make myself breathe.
Fifteen minutes ago his mouth was on mine and every rule I had about keeping this professional went up in smoke.
A bottle of Iron Oak Cabernet sits open on the counter beside me, decanted for dinner hours from now, already breathing before its time. I know exactly how that feels.
Now there is a silver sedan sitting at the end of the drive, exactly where the ranch hand said it would be, and Rosa is hovering by the door like she is not sure whether to bring out sweet tea or a shotgun.
"Should we call someone?" Rosa asks, wiping her hands on her apron for the third time in a minute.
"He's fine," I say, and I mean it, and that surprises me.
Rosa gives me a look I don't have a name for. Not quite pity, not quite approval. "Mr. Beaumont doesn't stroll out to a fight unless he already knows he's going to win it." She says it quiet, like she's known him his whole life, because she has. "You might want to remember that."
I don't tell her I noticed the same thing.
I step out onto the porch instead of staying hidden behind glass.
If Rhett is going to stand in his own drive and deal with whatever this is, I am not going to watch it like a woman with something to hide.
Watching my own family lose ground taught me that much.
You do not hide behind the curtains while your life gets decided in the yard.
The morning is warm, that thick Hill Country heat that settles in before nine and doesn't lift until dark. Dust hangs low over the drive where Camille's car rolled in. Somewhere past the barn, a horse nickers, oblivious to the fact that everything out here is about to shift.
Camille Ashford gets out of her car slow, unbothered, like she's the one who called this meeting and everyone else is just catching up.
She is polished in a way that makes my jeans and boots feel like a costume, blond hair pulled back tight, a smile already fixed in place before Rhett is close enough to need one.
Rhett stops a careful distance away, close enough to make his point, far enough that no one watching would mistake this for friendly. Every part of him is controlled. I have never seen a man hold that much stillness in his hands before.
I have spent my whole career learning to read what's underneath a surface.
A wine can be gorgeous in the glass and still turn on you a second after it hits your tongue.
Camille Ashford's smile works the same way, all upfront polish and no finish, the kind of flat, oaky cover you reach for when there's a flaw underneath you don't want anyone tasting. I do not trust her for one more second.
"Mr. Beaumont." Her voice carries in the still morning air. "I was hoping we could talk without lawyers this time."
"You had your chance to talk without lawyers." Rhett stops a few feet from her, hands loose at his sides. "You filed against my land instead, and Marcus sent you exactly the answer you earned."
"A misunderstanding. Water rights inquiries are routine.
" She tilts her head, and her eyes flick past him, find me on the porch, then come back to Rhett like I am a detail she has already priced in.
"Though I'll admit, the timing does raise questions.
A struggling winery. A CEO who's suddenly very distracted.
" Her mouth curves wider. "Those are the kind of variables that make a deal easier to close. "
The word variable lands wrong in my chest. Like Collins Cellars is a line item. Like I am one too.
My grandfather built that winery with his own hands. I did not come home to watch it get reduced to a number on someone else's spreadsheet, and I sure did not come home to become one myself.
"Say what you came here to say," Rhett says.
"I came to see if you'd reconsider selling before this gets complicated for everyone." Camille's gaze drifts to the vineyard rows behind him, unhurried, cataloging. "Land like this attracts attention eventually. Better to control the sale than fight the interest."
"There's nothing to reconsider." Rhett's voice doesn't rise, but something in it goes flat and final, a sound I feel in my back teeth. "And there's nothing complicated about my answer."
He turns, just enough that I know the next words are for me, but he says them loud, pitched to carry across the drive to the two ranch hands stacking feed near the barn, to Camille standing right there in her tailored blazer.
"Sadie Collins is under Beaumont protection now," he says. "In every sense of the word."
The ranch hands go still. One of them looks at the other like he just watched something he'll be telling the story of at supper for a week.
For half a second, something in me bristles. Nobody asked if I wanted to be claimed, out loud, in front of an audience, like I'm a fence line he's decided to defend.
Heat climbs up my neck anyway, and it has nothing to do with embarrassment.
Being claimed out loud, in front of God and the ranch hands and a woman who wants to take everything from both of us, should feel like too much. It should feel like exactly the kind of exposure I swore off six years ago. Instead it feels like something settling into place I didn't know was crooked.
Rhett doesn't look away from Camille when he says it, but his eyes cut to me for half a second, just long enough to ask a question. Just long enough for me to answer it by not looking away either.
Camille's smile does not move. It stays fixed and pleasant, a mask stretched a little too tight over something underneath it. But her eyes go flat, cold in a way that has nothing to do with the morning air.
"How sweet," she says. "I do love a season romance."
"It's not seasonal," Rhett says. "And the next time you want to talk to me, you call my office and schedule it. You don't corner anyone at my gate again."
For the first time, something flickers behind her expression, there and gone too fast to read. She looks at me a second longer than she needs to, like she's deciding something.
"Well." She pulls a pair of sunglasses from her bag, slides them on slow. "I suppose I'll leave you two to your harvest."
She turns for her car. Rhett doesn't move until she's behind the wheel, watching until she's settled like he doesn't trust her back turned to him for even a second. I come down the porch steps without deciding to.
The gravel is warm through the soles of my boots. Rhett doesn't look my way until I'm close enough that he has to.
"Rhett."
He turns, and up close I can see what the calm cost him. There's a muscle working at the corner of his mouth, and his hands aren't as loose as he made them look from a distance.
"I'm fine," he says, before I ask.
"I didn't ask if you were fine." I stop in front of him, close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes. "I asked because you just told two ranch hands and a woman who clearly hates you that I belong to you."
"I said you're protected." His voice is rough at the edges. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
He doesn't answer right away, and that tells me more than any answer would.
"You could have just told her the deal was off the table," I say. "You didn't have to make it personal."
"It's already personal." He says it low, the words dragging like he's pulling them up by the root. "Has been since the road with that colt, if I'm honest with myself."
I don't have a smart answer for that. I want one. It doesn't come.
The air between us goes tight and it isn't about Camille anymore.
He doesn't reach for me. For a second he doesn't even look at me, his eyes landing somewhere over my shoulder like meeting mine right now would undo something he's holding together by will alone.
I remember exactly how his mouth felt on mine an hour ago in my kitchen, the attorney still on speaker between us. My whole body remembers it, and it makes staying mad at him a lot harder than it should be.
"Sadie." My name in his mouth sounds like a warning and a promise at the same time.
Camille's engine starts behind us. Neither of us looks away first.
"We'll talk about this," I say, and I don't mean Camille.
"Yeah." His eyes hold mine. "We will."
The silver sedan rolls past us down the long drive, gravel crunching under the tires.
I don't turn to watch it go. I keep my eyes on Rhett a second longer, on the way the tension hasn't fully left his face, on the way his hand twitches at his side like he wants to reach for me and is making himself wait.
Then the window on the sedan slides down.
"Enjoy the season, sweetheart." Camille's voice floats back to us, honeyed and light, aimed at me alone. "While it lasts."
The car turns onto the county road and disappears past the tree line.
Behind us, the screen door creaks. Rosa steps out onto the porch, drying her hands on her apron again, watching the empty road like she's making sure it stays empty.
"Well," she says, "that woman drinks her coffee black and bitter, I'd bet my life on it."
It startles a laugh out of me I did not know I had left in me. Something eases at the corner of Rhett's mouth, close enough to a smile that I feel it anyway.
I stand there in the drive with the words settling over me slow, like frost creeping in before anyone's ready for it. I don't know what she means. I don't know if it's about the winery, or Rhett, or something else entirely.
But I know a warning when I hear one.
My family lost a legacy once to people who smiled right up until they took everything. I promised myself I would never stand still for that twice.
And some part of me, the part of me that learned the hard way not to trust a Beaumont with anything that mattered, cannot shake the feeling that Camille Ashford knows exactly how this season ends, and she is the only one who does.