Chapter 19
SADIE
Forty miles out, I stop pretending. I hit the blinker, take the next exit, and point my truck back toward the one place I swore I wasn't going tonight.
Thirty miles back, the exit sign for Red Oak Ridge had disappeared in my rearview mirror, and I'd told myself I needed air. I'd told myself a drive would clear my head before I did something reckless with a man who kisses like he's been waiting a long time to do it right.
Instead I just drove straight into the middle of the reckless thing.
The radio plays something twangy and sad, the kind of song made for exactly this kind of drive.
I turn it off. The quiet is worse. In the quiet, all I have is Rhett's voice at the edge of the lake, rough at the edges the way it gets when he's forcing himself to say something out loud, telling me things he said he'd never told his own brothers.
"My silence made me just as guilty as his."
I grip the wheel tighter.
I have spent the better part of an hour building a very solid case for staying away from Rhett Beaumont.
It goes something like this. He is a Beaumont.
His family has hurt mine before, quietly, thoroughly, in ways that took years to survive.
Trusting a man because he finally says the right words at the right lake does not undo history.
That's the argument. It's a good one. I believe every word of it right up until I picture him standing at the water's edge, telling me the truth without me asking for it.
Nobody made him say any of that.
He could have kept his mouth shut. Beaumonts are good at that, I remind myself, and something in my chest argues back before I can stop it. Rhett stopped being good at that. That's the whole problem.
I pass a gas station, a church, a stretch of fence line I don't recognize.
My phone sits face down on the passenger seat, exactly where I put it after I left without a word to anyone.
No text to my mother. No text to Rhett. Just my keys and my truck and the sudden, desperate need to put distance between myself and a man who looks at me like I'm something worth keeping.
Running. That's what this is, and I know it.
There's a voicemail I still haven't listened to, sitting at the bottom of my phone from a number I don't recognize, an area code somewhere out past the Willamette Valley.
I already know what it is. A director of wine at a resort out there, a callback on the job my old certification instructor passed my name along for three days ago, and I've let it go straight to voicemail every time it rings like ignoring it might make the offer disappear on its own.
It would be so easy. Pack up, drive west, let Red Oak Ridge become somewhere I visit instead of somewhere I stay.
I could do it. That's the part that scares me.
I've built a career out of trusting my own palate.
Ten seconds with a glass and I can tell you the vintage, the barrel, whether the winemaker rushed the fermentation or let it take its time.
I can pick apart a blend down to the percentage points without blinking.
It's the one thing in my life I've never doubted.
So why can't I just taste this and know what it is.
With Rhett, every pass gives me something different.
Sharp at first, all guard and old grievance, then something softer underneath that I only catch if I stay with it.
A wine like that would drive me crazy in a blind tasting.
I'd want three more pours before I called it, and even then I wouldn't trust myself to get it right.
Maybe because wine doesn't have years of history behind it, breaking your heart quietly, from a distance, while your family loses everything and nobody in that big white house says a word to stop it.
Maybe because wine doesn't stand at the edge of a private lake and hand you the truth like it costs him something to say it, and mean every syllable.
I press my palm flat against the wheel, like that will steady something other than my hands.
My mother waits up even though she'd never admit it, pretending she isn't watching for headlights, a habit she's kept alone every night since my father passed.
I think about the way she didn't warn me about the Beaumont name before that dinner, how she just told me I looked happy.
She saw something in me before I let myself see it.
Camille Ashford's voice comes back too, smooth as glass and twice as sharp, at the Cork and Spur. Enjoy the season while it lasts. I think about the cut irrigation line, the filing against my family's land, all of it stacking up like a story I've read before and know how it ends.
Except Rhett isn't the villain in this version. He never was.
He fought his own father for me. He fought Harrison in front of me and didn't back down. He stood at that gate and told Camille Ashford I was under Beaumont protection, loud enough that half the ranch heard it, and he meant every word.
A man protecting his interests doesn't hand you the worst parts of himself at a lake nobody else has seen in years.
I left for California the same way I'm driving right now, telling myself it was about the certification and had nothing to do with how much easier it is to build a career somewhere nobody remembers what happened to my family.
I catch myself smiling at the windshield and hate how easy it comes.
Twenty miles pass like that, an argument with no winner, my resolve to stay away from Rhett Beaumont losing ground with every mile marker. By mile thirty-five I'm not arguing anymore. I'm just driving, foot steady, waiting to see which version of myself wins.
The truck already knows the answer before I do. It always has, apparently, ever since a runaway colt and a stranger in the road changed the whole direction of my life without asking permission.
No text ahead. No warning. If I stop to think about what I'm going to say when I get there, I'll lose my nerve completely, and I have already lost enough nerve for one night.
The sky starts changing somewhere past the county line.
West Texas storms don't build slow. One minute the horizon is clear, all that endless blue fading to slate at the edges, and the next the whole sky turns the color of a bruise, clouds stacking up dark and fast like something decided all at once to be angry.
Wind picks up hard enough to rock the truck.
Dust lifts off the shoulder in long ribbons and streaks sideways across the road.
I turn on my headlights though it isn't dark yet, not really. It just feels that way, the light gone strange and green at the edges.
My hands are steady on the wheel. That surprises me more than the storm does.
Part of me wants to turn back, wait it out at a gas station, be sensible about the whole thing. But Rhett's voice cuts through instead, cracking on the one sentence he clearly needed years to say out loud, and I know sensible left the building somewhere around mile marker thirty.
The wind shoves the truck sideways hard enough that I correct the wheel without thinking.
Tumbleweeds skitter across both lanes, caught up in a gust that bends the mesquite along the fence line nearly flat.
Somewhere behind the clouds the sun is still up, and for a few strange minutes the whole sky goes the deep purple-black of a storm cell shot through with a hard, silver light, like it hasn't decided yet whether to be beautiful or dangerous.
I know that feeling.
It reminds me of a vintage I tasted once studying in France, a wine that shouldn't have worked on paper.
Too much tannin. A finish that should have turned rough instead of long.
My instructor called it a wine that refused to apologize for itself, and I remember thinking no wine should be able to get away with that. This one did.
I've spent every day since I came home to Red Oak Ridge asking myself the same question about Rhett Beaumont. Beautiful, or dangerous. Turns out he can be both at once, and I'm done pretending that isn't exactly what I want.
The land opens up the closer I get to the ranch, vineyard rows blurring past on either side of the road, vines bending hard in the wind.
Somewhere out there the crew is racing to secure equipment before the rain hits.
I picture Rhett out there with them, sleeves pushed up, giving orders in that clipped voice he uses when he isn't going to waste a single word on panic.
That image alone is enough to press the gas a little harder.
The first lightning cracks somewhere to the west, far off still, a long white seam splitting the sky open. Thunder follows a few seconds later, low and rolling, the kind that settles into your chest before it fades.
My phone stays face down on the seat. I don't reach for it. Whatever I have to say to Rhett Beaumont, it isn't going to fit into a text message, and it definitely isn't going to happen through a screen.
The land opens up wider here, the vines running out toward the horizon in long dark rows, and even now, even with everything churning in my chest, I notice how the light moves across them. Old habit. I've spent my whole life reading a vineyard the way other people read a room.
This one, at least, I know by heart. I grew up running these rows barefoot beside a boy who used to catch me every time I fell.
The wrought iron gate comes into view just as the first drops hit my windshield, fat and heavy, the kind that mean business. One drop. Then five. Then the sky opens up all at once, rain hammering the hood so hard I can barely hear myself think.
The wipers can't keep pace with it anymore. I ease down to a crawl, gravel spitting under the tires, the headlights catching sheets of rain slanting sideways through the beam, the wind shouldering hard against the driver's side door.
My pulse won't slow down, not for a woman who settled this forty miles back. I flex my fingers around the wheel, one slow breath in, one slow breath out. Whatever's waiting on that porch, I'm not turning this truck around again tonight.
The gate swings into view through the downpour. I roll through it slow, tires hissing against the wet gravel, and that's the moment I spot him.
Rhett's out there, standing on the porch.
No hat. No jacket. Just standing there watching the storm while the rain hammers everything around him, watching my headlights sweep across the drive, watching me the way a man watches something he already knows is coming home.
I don't know how long he's been out there. I don't know how he knew to be standing on that porch at the exact moment I turned the truck around and decided I wasn't done with this.
The rain never reaches him, held back by the deep overhang, though he stands close enough to the edge that the wind keeps throwing a fine mist across his shirt. His hands hang loose at his sides. No phone. No hat pulled low the way he wears it every other day of his life like armor.
Just him, watching the storm, waiting on me.
I cut the engine and sit there for one long second with the rain drumming against the roof, my hands still on the wheel, my whole body caught somewhere between the woman who ran and the one who turned around without letting herself think twice.
Rhett doesn't move toward the truck.
He just waits.
Like he already knows exactly what I'm about to do, and he's not going anywhere until I do it.