30. Harper
HARPER
The midsummer event is only a few days away, and to say that I’m nervous is an understatement.
So much so that a fresh pan bagnat was waiting at my desk this afternoon in the business tower, which made me smile at how Asher always seems to know when to intervene on my stomach’s behalf.
I’ve showered, eaten, and I’m camped out on the sectional in Killian’s condo with my tablet, going through the final vendor confirmations one more time even though I’ve already gone through them twice.
I’m wearing one of his white button-downs and nothing else, which is the standard uniform once we’re past business hours, an arrangement the three of them have made very clear they prefer and one I’ve stopped pretending I don’t enjoy just as much as they do.
What woman doesn’t want to peel off her bra the second the workday’s over.
The florist confirmation makes me smile before I even get to the line items. Garden roses in a soft champagne blush, sweet pea in pale lavender as a quiet nod to Killian’s nickname for me that nobody else on the vendor side will ever know is intentional, and trailing eucalyptus woven through everything to keep the whole arrangement from feeling too precious.
The archways are being delivered the morning of, two of them, reclaimed wood wrapped in greenery and string lights, one for the entrance to Sophia’s boutique and one framing the path down to the great hall.
I’ve looked at the rendering Odette sent over so many times I could probably build the things myself at this point.
The setup list is the longer document, the one that actually keeps me up at night, because midsummer isn’t run the way most events are run here.
Mallory explained it to me my first week and I didn’t fully understand what she meant until I watched it happen at the opening event in miniature.
Every other event on this estate gets staffed top-down, normal hierarchy, field crews and junior staff handling the physical labor while leadership oversees from a clipboard.
Midsummer doesn’t work like that.
The field workers get the day off entirely, full pay, their choice whether to show up as guests or stay home, because the one thing Killian’s always been firm about is that the people who spend the rest of the year with dirt under their nails don’t spend this particular day working it.
Some of them come anyway, not because they have to but because the food’s good and the wine’s better and their kids like running around the grounds. That’s fine. That’s the point.
What replaces them is leadership, all of it, top to bottom, hands actually dirty for once.
étienne, the directeur technique, has been out at the great hall every morning this week checking load capacity on the temporary flooring himself instead of sending an assistant.
Margaux, who runs the vineyard as chef de culture and has opinions about everything involving soil that I’ve learned to nod along with respectfully, is personally overseeing the pathway lighting through the lower rows because she doesn’t trust anyone else to keep the cable runs far enough from the root systems. The ma?tre de chai is somewhere in the cellar right now hand-labeling the reserve bottles going up for the evening’s private tasting, and both of the consulting oenologists Killian flies in twice a year are apparently expected to help carry tables tomorrow, which I only know because one of them emailed me directly asking which shoes he should wear for it.
Even the investors get pulled in. There’s a section in the run-of-show, one I wrote myself and am inordinately proud of, that has three of our biggest stakeholders helping string lights along the garden fencing at ten in the morning before they change into anything resembling cocktail attire.
No hierarchy. Not for one day. Everyone gets their hands dirty, everyone eats at the same long tables afterward, and by the time the sun sets the entire estate looks less like a business and more like what it actually is underneath the business, which is a family that happens to also make extraordinary wine.
It’s the reason this event matters more to me than almost anything I’ve ever worked on.
It’s not just a launch for Sophia’s boutique, though it’s absolutely that too.
It’s the one day a year Thorne Estates proves to itself and to everyone watching that it isn’t like its competitors, the ones with the velvet ropes and the staff who disappear the moment the cameras do.
This is mine to run. My first solo project here, the one with my name actually on the planning documents instead of buried under Mallory’s, and I want every blade of grass on this property to know it was handled with care.
I haven’t seen Killian once today. He left before I was fully awake this morning, some early call with the regional distributors, and the few texts we traded all afternoon were short and logistical, nothing personal in them at all.
I’ve been so deep in spreadsheets I haven’t had time to miss him properly, just a low background hum of it underneath everything else.
So when the elevator chimes, something in my chest lifts before I’ve even looked up.
He still has his suit on, jacket already shed and folded over one forearm, tie pulled loose and hanging undone around his neck, the top button of his shirt finally given up on.
His hair’s slightly less perfect than it was this morning, like he’s run a hand through it more than once today without noticing.
He looks like a man who’s been negotiating with difficult people since seven a.m. and hasn’t stopped to breathe since.
I smile before I can stop myself. I always do.
It happens before I’ve even decided to, some automatic reflex that’s apparently permanent now, and it doesn’t seem to matter how tired he looks or how long the day’s clearly been.
If anything the tired version gets me worse, the one fewer people see, the one that isn’t performing anything for anyone.
I love him.
I’ve known it for weeks now, the same way I know it about Maddox, the same way I know it about Asher, except I said it out loud once in a dark hallway off the maze and haven’t said it since, to anyone, like saying it more than once would make it something I have to actually account for instead of something I get to just feel quietly on my own.
I never thought this was something a person could do.
Love three men at once, completely, without one of them being a smaller version of the feeling than the others.
I assumed, the way you assume things you’ve never had reason to question, that love divided itself the more places you tried to put it, that there’d be some natural ceiling where the math stopped working.
There isn’t one. I love Killian entirely.
I love Asher entirely. I love Maddox entirely.
None of it competes with the others for space.
It just keeps being true, all three directions at once, and some days that fact alone is enough to take the breath out of me.
Today is one of those days, watching him cross the room toward me looking like the world ran him through a wringer.
He comes straight to me, bends down, and kisses me, quick and soft despite everything in his shoulders saying otherwise.
“Hey,” I say. “Rough day?”
“Long.” He straightens. “I’m going to shower.”
“Want company?”
“Not this time.”
He’s already heading for the bedroom before I can ask anything else, and I sit there for a second with my tablet on my lap feeling vaguely wrong-footed by it.
Not alarmed. Just off. In the weeks since the four of us decided to actually try this, Killian’s never once walked past a shower without dragging me into it, usually over one shoulder, usually with some comment about efficiency. Tonight he just walked away.
I tell myself it’s the day. Long days make people want fifteen minutes alone, and Killian’s allowed those fifteen minutes same as anyone.
I get up and go to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water from the fridge, cold enough that it makes the back of my throat ache pleasantly, and then cross to the bar to make him his usual scotch.
Funny thing, a man who owns a vineyard reaching for scotch every time he’s wound too tight, but I’ve learned not to question it.
Wine is for celebrating. Scotch is for surviving.
I set both drinks on the coasters on the coffee table and sink back into the sectional, pick my tablet back up, and go to open the guest list.
Locked.
I frown at the screen and try again. Same result. I pull up my messages and text Mallory.
Harper: Hey, the guest list doc is locked, can you send the password?
Three dots almost immediately.
Mallory: Oh don’t worry about that one! Killian asked me to take it off your plate
I stare at the message.
Harper: Wait what? Why?
Mallory: Not sure, just said he wanted to lighten your load before the event. it’s all good, I’ve got it handled
I set the tablet face down on my knee.
That doesn’t track. Killian assigned me the guest list himself, three weeks ago, in this exact room, told me it was mine to run start to finish because he trusted me with it.
Now he’s quietly handed it to my superior without telling me, the same week I’ve been triple-checking it every night, and I don’t love how that sits.
He comes back out in gray sweatpants and nothing else, hair still damp, looking considerably more human than he did twenty minutes ago. He picks up the scotch, takes a sip, and gives me a small, grateful nod before settling onto the sectional beside me.
“Thank you for this,” he says.
“You looked like you needed it.”
He sets the glass down and slides one arm around my shoulders, the other trailing down my side and under the hem of his own shirt, and two fingers slip easily inside me.
It’s become a habit of his lately, holding me like this when we’re settled in for the evening, like he just needs the contact to fully unwind.
I let out a soft sound I can’t help.
He chuckles, low, and reaches for his own tablet with his free hand, pulling up the digital copy of The Prince he’s been working through for the better part of a month, one of maybe a dozen copies he owns if you count the worn hardback in his office bookcase he won’t let anyone else touch.
I try to settle into him and go back to my contracts.
I lose that fight within about ninety seconds, the guest list sitting in the back of my mind like a stone I can’t stop turning over, and apparently it shows, because he glances over at me without lifting his head from the screen.
“You’re biting your lip, Harper. What’s wrong?”
I take a breath. “The guest list. Mallory says you asked her to take it off my plate.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a huge project and I figured I’d lighten your load a little.”
I twist slightly to look at him properly, which is a little complicated given the current state of his fingers, but I manage. “Because you don’t think I can handle everything? The guest list is just as important as the vendor contracts, Killian.”
He exhales, setting his tablet down on the arm of the couch.
“I know you can handle every task required of your position. That’s never been in question.
But I can’t be hands-on with it without it looking like favoritism, and if I’m hands-on with something that’s supposed to be entirely yours, that makes you look insufficient to anyone watching.
Mallory’s your superior. Offloading something like the guest list to her doesn’t read as me doubting you.
It reads as the chain of trust working the way it’s supposed to.
It shows the investors and the board that I trust you, that Mallory trusts you, and that this estate runs like a family from the ground up. ”
I open my mouth.
“You’re a new employee carrying a massive project,” he continues, “while also being Sophia’s partner for the biggest day of her professional life, on the same calendar date. I’m not going to apologize for protecting you from carrying more than you need to.”
His mouth curves. “And making sure you have one less thing on your agenda that would keep you so preoccupied that my fingers wouldn’t make you this wet and needy.”
I narrow my eyes at him, trying to read past the smirk to whatever’s actually underneath it. “Why would I need protecting, Killian?”
He laughs, the real kind, the one that softens his whole face.
“Because you’re American, and therefore a workaholic by default.
” He glances at the clock on the side table.
“Now. You have five more minutes of letting work interfere with our evening before I put you over my knee and then give your mouth something better to do than ask me questions.”
I give him my most unimpressed look. “You wouldn’t.”
His hand moves before I finish the sentence, a single sharp slap against me, and my toes curl against the cushion, a moan breaking out of me before I can stop it, my whole body pressing closer to him on instinct, my teeth catching my bottom lip as my eyes flutter shut.
“Four minutes, Harper.”
I want to kick him. I genuinely consider it.
Instead I spend the next four minutes completely unable to focus on a single contract, his fingers slipping back inside me, his thumb finding slow, deliberate circles against my clit while he calmly goes back to reading about Machiavellian statecraft like he isn’t currently unraveling me one breath at a time.
I give up entirely on the tablet somewhere around minute two.
The elevator dings in the distance.
“Dinner in thirty minutes!” Asher’s voice carries through the condo, already grinning before he’s even visible. “You’d better be done with whatever you’re doing by then, mon coeur. No phones, laptops, or talking about work once your ass is at the table.”
I laugh, breathless, and feel Killian’s chest shake with quiet amusement against my shoulder.
“We heard you,” I call back, voice not nearly as steady as I’d like.
“Thirty minutes,” Killian murmurs against my temple, fingers not slowing down at all.