Full Bodied (Bred by Men #1)

1. Jade

JADE

Ihad a plan. I was going to take the side entrance, get to the guest room quietly, grab the boxes and have them in the car, then be back on the highway before anyone came home from the south slope.

I've been tweaking my plan since I turned off the freeway.

I know exactly where the boxes are, and I know which door Ryan always leaves unlocked.

I know how these men work and the rhythm of this estate well enough to get in and out quickly.

All so I don't have to see or hear them, because I've been avoiding doing that for eight months, and I'm not going to start now.

I had a plan.

Cormac's truck is in the drive.

I sit in my car and look at it. The truck is always there, I tell myself—he keeps it pulled around front even when he's out working. I know that's not true. I've been coming here for two years and I know the difference between the truck being parked and Cormac being home.

I get out anyway.

I'm three steps from the mudroom door when the front door opens instead.

He's leaning in the frame with one shoulder against the wood and his arms loose, looking at me like he's been waiting.

He probably has been. He's a reliable man, the kind who anticipates your needs and meets them before you ask.

Cormac was like that the entire time I was with Ryan.

He'd have a fresh glass of water poured before I realized I was thirsty.

If I came over while Ryan was at the estate to hang out and watch a movie in the theater room, he'd wash the sheets and make the bed before I even looked at the clock and realized we'd stayed up so late we needed to sleep over.

He's wearing the worn flannel with the sleeves pushed up the way he always pushes his sleeves up, some habit from years of working with his hands. The forearm. The wrist. The broad flat of his palm against the doorframe.

I lose a beat just looking at him.

He's forty-six, and he looks like what he is: somebody who did physical work in his twenties and never stopped.

Shoulders filling out the flannel. Jaw set, unhurried.

Gray at his temples, just enough to clock the years.

The rest of him solid. He runs warm. Sleeves pushed up in October, no jacket on the porch in cool weather, the heat of him meeting me from three feet away the way you can feel a fire across a room.

He had Ryan at twenty-two, Killian at twenty, which means he's been building this estate, this vineyard, this whole life, since before I was born. He looks like all of that.

The smell hits me from three feet away. Oak and something outdoorsy, clean sweat and the faint sweet edge of wine. The smell of this estate, made personal. My mouth goes a little dry.

"Jade."

Low. Certain. His voice comes from the chest, not the throat. The kind that doesn't need volume because it never has to compete for the room. Two syllables and they land somewhere low in my stomach, warm and heavy, settling in.

"Hi," I say. "I just came for the?—"

"Come inside." He's already stepping back. Not a suggestion. Just a description of what happens next.

The table is set for four.

October. Both boys back for harvest—Ryan from his apartment in the city, Killian from his place on the other side of the ridge.

Same six weeks every year, the estate running at full pace for the last push before the pressing.

I've sat at this table for two of those harvests now. Usually I come with Ryan.

I see it the moment I walk into the kitchen—four plates, the good napkins, bread sliced in the basket, and the casserole I can smell from the doorway.

Wine-braised, slow-cooked. The one I've thought about more than I'd like to admit since I stopped coming to Sunday dinners.

There's an extra place to the left of Cormac's chair at the head of the table.

He set a place for me. He knew I was coming. He saw the text on Ryan's phone, or he knew I'd have to come eventually. And he set a place for me before I knocked on the door. I stand there looking at it and something in my chest leans toward it.

"Ryan mentioned you were coming by," Cormac says, pulling out his chair like we've settled something.

"I was just going to grab the?—"

"Sit down, Jade."

I sit down.

Ryan comes in from the back hall about a minute later and stops when he sees me.

He's still broad through the shoulders—both of them get that from Cormac.

He looks good. He looks better than he has any right to, eight months into paying for what he did, and the body that gave him two years registers all of it before I can stop it.

The line of his jaw. The mouth I used to kiss before we were fully awake.

He pulls it together and says "Hey" in the voice that used to feel like coming home. Lighter than his father's, easier. The same Hey he uses on bartenders and the woman who delivers his mail. I figured that out eventually.

"Hey," I say.

Most painfully ordinary exchange in the history of this kitchen.

It hits me anyway. Saturday mornings on the same side of the bed. The way I used to put my feet under his thigh on the couch. Two years I packed into two boxes in March. I haven't let myself feel any of it since.

Three minutes in his father's kitchen. It's all behind my sternum now—dull, low, in the way.

I resent him. I resent him for the shoulders, the mouth, the body that still does this to me eight months after he made sure it shouldn't.

He stopped wanting me right before he stopped being faithful and I should not still be tracking his face.

My stomach drops a half-inch. Has he found someone since.

Has he been with whoever asks. He cheated once that I know of.

There is no version of these eight months I can be sure of and I'm not going to ask.

Killian comes downstairs.

I hear him first—quick on the stairs, then a pause at the bottom like he caught himself and adjusted.

He comes through the doorway and he is, as always, a lot.

He's built like Cormac—same shoulders, same forearms, the same fence-post calluses—except on Killian it reads younger and coiled, something in him always hovering at the edge of movement.

Twenty years of difference between him and his father in the leanness of the arms below his rolled sleeves.

Dark hair a little overgrown. Green eyes that did not come from his father.

The jawline is his mother's, sharp where Cormac's is broad.

The mouth is fuller than either his father's or his brother's, and right now he's holding it shut by effort.

Cara saw a photo of all four of us at last fall's harvest party. She called me the next afternoon. "Jade. Why didn't you tell me your boyfriend looked like that?" I told her she was looking at Ryan's brother. Long pause. "Oh."

He cuts his eyes to me. Holds a beat too long. My pulse jumps in my throat before I can stop it.

He drops into the chair across the table. "Jade." His voice is lower than Ryan's. Clipped. Choosing his words and making it look easy. "It's been a while."

"Killian," I say.

He leaves his wine glass empty.

Cormac pours mine first.

He doesn't make anything of it—just reaches for the bottle with those hands and fills my glass before his own, before either of his sons'.

Unhurried and certain, the way he does everything.

The pour lands on my skin like a touch I'm not getting yet.

Killian notices. The muscle in his jaw ticks once, his hand goes briefly tight around his empty glass before he sets it down and picks up his fork.

Ryan's knife scrapes his plate with a half-beat too much precision.

I drink.

"The north slope," I say, because someone needs to say something. "Cormac mentioned the drainage at Christmas. Did that end up being a problem?"

Something settles in his expression, comfortable, like this is exactly the evening he expected.

"Less than I thought." That voice, going quieter the more he means something rather than louder, deep and even, already certain you're listening.

"We rerouted the lower channel in March.

Better for the water table. Better for the fruit. "

"Ryan dug the channel," Killian says.

"Killian did the drainage math," Ryan says.

"I did the drainage math and then watched you dig an unnecessarily deep channel for three days."

"It's the right depth."

"It's two feet deeper than the specs."

"The specs were off."

"The specs were mine."

"Yeah." Ryan reaches for his water. "That's what I said."

I laugh before I mean to. Both of them look at me, then at each other—and there's something in that, the private frequency of two brothers who have been doing this their whole lives—that catches me somewhere in the chest. I look at my wine glass.

Killian holds the bread basket out to me without a word. I take it. His knuckles brush my fingers and don't move. I look up. He's watching my face, not the basket.

I take a slice. He sets the basket down.

Cormac tops it off.

I wasn't watching. I look down and it's full again, his hand already pulling back. Easy, like it costs him nothing. I look up and he's watching me—not the wine, me—with those dark steady eyes and the crow's feet at the corners from years of squinting into the sun on the north slope.

His attention goes through me in a slow line. Throat, sternum, low—and stays there.

"Thank you," I say.

"Mm." He picks up his fork.

"The rain Thursday's going to be a problem," Ryan says. "Two rows on the east side still need turning."

"Not ideal," Cormac says.

"I can be up by five." Killian says it to his father. Like Ryan didn't speak.

"I said I could handle it," Ryan says.

"I know what you said."

"Killian—"

"What?"

The table goes quiet. That held-breath feeling, two brothers and twenty-four years of something sitting right under the surface. Cormac lets it sit for exactly three seconds.

"Both of you. Five o'clock. East side. Done by Thursday."