34. Jade
JADE
Three tests. All negative.
I'm not pregnant yet. I know this the way I know the barrel room temperature by feel now—fact, noted, moved through. I've been here three weeks. My cycle is its own quiet calendar.
I feel my window open this morning. The low ache of it, the warmth that's different from other warmth. My body doing what bodies do. I lie in Cormac's bed for a moment and look at the ceiling and think: today.
I come down to breakfast.
They're all at the table already. Cormac with his coffee and the estate ledger. Killian going through the south slope numbers. Ryan with his hands around his mug, watching me come through the doorway. I pour coffee. I sit in the fourth chair. I look at each of them in turn.
"I'm ovulating," I say. "Right now. Since this morning."
The kitchen goes quiet.
Not uncomfortable. The charged kind—the kind this table generates when everyone in it understands what's just been said and is deciding what to do with it.
Cormac sets down his mug.
They talk—briefly, plainly, in the way we've learned to talk about things that matter.
The order is named without drama. Cormac goes first. He always goes first. Killian's jaw tightens once and then releases, which is as close as he gets to acceptance without resistance. He waits for Cormac's nod. He gets it.
Ryan looks at his coffee for a long moment. Then: "I'll go last."
Killian looks at him. Not hostile. Surprised.
Ryan says: "You've been here longer than I have. You've been doing everything right for longer than I have." His eyes come to me. "And I haven't gone second yet. That's still mine to earn."
Something about the way he says it—the plain, unglamorous honesty of it—closes my throat. He's not offering it as sacrifice. He means it.
Cormac looks at his younger son for a long moment. Something moves in his face—the private version of what he feels, the kind he doesn't put on display. "When she's ready for a third," he says quietly, "you go first."
Ryan goes completely still.
I go completely still.
Killian makes a sound that might be a laugh—short and surprised—and goes back to his eggs. "Third's a long way off," he says. "Get in line."
I laugh. It comes out real. Then my throat tightens because it isn't only funny—it's the full scope of what we've built sitting right there at the breakfast table.
Not just tonight. After tonight. After the second.
The third. They've planned a life they're waiting for me to step into. They're completely certain I will.
I look at my coffee so nobody sees my face doing what my face is doing.
Cormac says: "Tonight." Just that. They all know what it means.
The day is ordinary. That's the thing about the estate: it keeps going regardless of what the evening holds.
There's ledger work, a call with the bottling team, a walk through the barrel room with the hydrometer.
Killian is in the south rows all afternoon.
Ryan does the winery intake. Cormac is everywhere he needs to be, the same as always, his face exactly as calm as it always is.
At dusk I find myself at his door.
He opens it before I knock.
He stands there and looks at me. Takes my face in both hands—that full, unhurried assessment—and then: "You're staying."
"I'm staying," I say.
He moves when I say it.
He undresses me without ceremony—he knows me now, knows what takes time and what doesn't, his hands moving with the certainty of a man who has been here before and doesn't need to relearn anything.
He lays me back and comes down over me, and his mouth finds my throat, my collarbone, and then he moves lower.
His fingers are already inside my pussy before I've made a sound.
He knows the exact pressure. He uses it.
I come the first time fast—faster than the cellar, faster than any of the nights between—clenching around his hand, his name bitten off quiet.
He doesn't stop.
He slides inside me in one long press and my body opens around his cock before I've exhaled, already knowing the stretch of him, already clenching in small welcome pulls. He settles his weight and holds.
"Three tests," he says. Low. Not asking.
"Three," I say.
"Tonight changes that." A breath. "All three of us.
Don't know whose it takes." His hips draw back and press in—not the careful pace of the first night but something more deliberate.
He already knows every inch of what undoes me, and he's using it now.
Direct. Each stroke angled exactly where he knows I'll grip hardest.
I grip hardest.
"That." His voice drops. "I want to feel that."
I clench deliberately, pulling him in, and his breath changes against my neck the way it does when I've got him and he knows it. He's counting. He's always counting.
"Give it to me," he says. Low. "Say it first." His thumb finds my clit. "Tell me."
"I want your cum inside me." My voice is already breaking. "I want you to breed me, please, I want it to take?—"
The sound he makes is private and fractured and gone in under a second. Then he drives into me with everything he has and his thumb doesn't stop and the second orgasm hits like something that's been building since breakfast.
I clench around his cock so fiercely his jaw locks.
He holds there—buried, still, breathing through every pulse I send around him—and then he drives through it.
Controlled. Certain. Taking what he came for in three long deliberate strokes, the sharp-held breath, and then the warmth flooding into me—slow distinct pulses, each one felt completely, buried as deep as he goes.
He stays.
His hands pin my hips exactly where he wants them.
"Don't let it out," he says. Quiet. The same two words he always says, and they land the same way every time.
I clench. He closes his eyes for a beat.
He withdraws slowly. Watches. Draws the sheet over me and keeps my hips elevated—hands still there, making sure. His palm comes down flat against my lower belly and stays.
He looks at me for a long time without speaking.
Then he straightens. He picks up his shirt. He opens the door.