Chapter Thirty-Four. Duncan
Temperance always refused to be the little spoon, claiming it made her too hot. The way she curled against him every night was a little bit ridiculous. A dainty espresso spoon curved around a massive soup ladle.
That morning, Duncan had awakened to her clinging to his side, a supple thigh hiked high across his midsection, her hand cupped gently around his neck. Her soft belly rose and fell against his hip bone, deep and slow. Strands of her hair clung to his beard, like he’d walked face-first into a spiderweb.
Gentle rain shimmered on the cabin roof. Milky-gray light and muted birdsong came through the open windows. It had been cool for August, so they’d left the panes cracked a few inches in the night. Duncan could feel the morning on his skin. Elemental and clean. The earth’s first damp exhale of the day.
The rain was forecast to stop by midmorning; good news for the grand opening of the Cloud Tide Winery later that afternoon. Ma and Dad had posted flyers on dozens of community boards around the valley, and they’d even taken out an ad in the Linden Local. Duncan had nerves in his belly for the first time in as long as he could remember, but it wasn’t about how years of his craftsmanship and project management would be on display today. Today’s main event was more than a decade in the making. It would be the first time he and Temperance planned to publicly let on that they were together.
As carefully as he could manage, he twisted around to face her. Her arm slid down to lie across his chest, and he lifted her leg gently, so her knee didn’t catch him in the crotch when she moved.
In only two weeks, they’d fallen into a comfortable routine. It was like their collective subconscious had taken a breath of relief and sighed: finally. They’d been in love with each other for more than half their lives, and at last being able to live inside that love felt like the world itself had changed.
“What do you want?” Temperance murmured in her throaty, sleep-fuzzed voice.
“Good morning,” Duncan replied. “I want a lot of things. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Your hand on my hip. You’ve been tapping your finger there for ten minutes now.”
He balled his fist. “I’m sorry.”
“You do that when you’re waiting for something.” Her sigh was a gentle rise of her chest against his ribs, and a warm breath up his neck. “Or when you’re concentrating.”
“I guess I was doing both. Waiting for you to wake up, and concentrating on your face. I want to draw you.”
Temperance slid away and stretched, bendy as a braid of sweetgrass. “I need you to promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“I’ve seen how often stuff from your sketchbook makes it onto your skin.” Her hair was fuzzy at her temple where she’d been pressed into his shoulder all night, and her eyes were solemn. “Promise me, Duncan. Promise me that you’ll never tattoo my face on your body.”
Duncan laughed and propped up on an elbow. “What? Why?”
“Have you seen how those turn out? They’re cursed.” She swung a pillow at him.
Duncan’s reflexes were fast. He grabbed the pillow in his fist and yanked it—and her—toward him across the bed. Temperance let go at the last second, and he flailed backward. She bounced off the edge of the mattress and spun out of reach, bubbling with laughter. He chased her to the bathroom.
They showered together, as they did most days.
Temperance hip-checked him out of the hot water to rinse the shampoo from her hair. She lingered, playfully blocking him from the spray even after she was finished. He crowded her against the tile wall, and she shrieked at the cold. Their laughter was loud between the walls and the glass of the shower.
He was hard against her belly.
Temperance peered down and sighed melodramatically. “I think something’s come between us.”
Duncan smirked. “It’s a betweenis.”
He widened his stance for leverage to lift her against the wall and dipped his head to kiss her. But Temperance let her legs go slack and slid slowly down the tile. Her breasts dragged over his stomach, over his erection.
“What are you—”
She took him in her mouth, and Duncan nearly blacked out with the first slippery whirl of her tongue.
Her hands skated up the backs of his legs, pausing at his ass to dig in her fingertips. He was so swollen, so molten hot, so fast—it was almost painful. Thighs and calves tightening, his toes curled, squeaking against the bottom of the shower. If she kept up that same rhythmic pull and release, he had about sixty seconds—maybe thirty—
Duncan’s knees went watery. He slapped his hands against the side walls of the shower to keep upright. He had to clench the cheeks of his ass to keep from thrusting unchecked.
“Hnnnh—fuck—”He palmed the back of her head.
Her soft laugh vibrated from tip to root. “Use your words, Mr. Brady,” she murmured.
“We’re supposed to be—oh my god”—he choked on the words when she gave him another deep, slow tug—“at the tasting room—”
“Actually, I changed my mind.” She cut him off, reaching up to flatten her hand against his belly. “Stop talking, Mr. Brady.” Another low laugh, another heavy drag of her tongue. “Right now, this is the tasting room.”
THEtasting room grand opening at Cloud Tide Winery didn’t include any actual Cloud Tide wine.
Ma and Dad decided they wanted to open Cloud Tide as a celebration of the valley community at-large, and to put the place officially on the map as an event and recreation destination. Proud to help kick-start the American offshoot of her family’s winemaking legacy, Aunt Renata sent several cases of wine and spirits from Vega. There was a Spanish Tempranillo and a red blend, a Galician Godello, and an Albari?o. The Mencía—another red—was so deeply pigmented it almost looked violet around the rim when poured into glasses. The Everetts also contributed several cases of Three Birds’ signature red, an oak-aged Baco Noir, and a case of their bestselling white, a Traminette that had won several national and local awards.
Duncan and Temperance were an hour late.
The grounds had never been more beautiful, a prismatic explosion of color in every direction. Still damp from the morning rain, grapes glistened like dark jewels in the sunshine. The air was filled with the fizzy, far-off buzz of cicadas. The bee mural Duncan had painted earlier in the summer was attached to the side of the bank barn that faced the outdoor patio. Each individual piece of wood was slightly offset in depth and height from the piece beside it, giving it a different appearance depending on which angle you looked at it from.
He was proud of it.
The Bristow family’s barbecue food truck was parked in the field to the west of the stone patio, filling the air with sweet, tangy smokiness. Millie had left for school in Michigan the week prior, but Birdie and Midge waved at them from the open front, rosy-cheeked in matching white aprons.
The sliding doors of the bank barn were open to the flat expanse of green lawn in front, as were the glass garage-style doors of the tasting room. Music played from outdoor speakers attached to the stone face of the barn, and sawed-off wine barrels overflowed with greenery and colorful flowers that Rowan had grown from seed earlier that spring. Pennant garlands in maroon and apricot were strung from the front corners of the barn to lantern poles that would light the path to the small gravel parking lot at night.
They managed to slip in relatively unnoticed, as large as the mingling crowd was. They each grabbed a glass of Vega Vineyards’ Albari?o from the tasting room bar. The wine was tart and intense, fresh as the North Atlantic Ocean air and Galician sunshine. To preview the tasting room menu, Dad had spent two days personally preparing hundreds of finger foods. Date-and-prosciutto sourdough flatbread was drizzled with honey from Florence Holley’s beehives. Savory hand pies were filled with sweet tomatoes, caramelized onion, and herbs—all grown from seed right there at Cloud Tide. Peach bruschetta with basil and goat cheese from Bennett Goodwin’s farm. Half a dozen others.
In the big barn space, they found a nook along the wall. Temperance stood by his side, close enough that the heat of her arm radiated into his. She felt entirely too far away after they’d spent the past fifteen hours in near-constant bodily contact.
“Feels weird,” he whispered.
“Hmm?” She extended her pinkie to brush lengthwise against his.
“Being here. With you. Like this. I’m so conditioned to keep a reasonable distance from you. Making sure there were enough people between us, but not so many that it looked obvious that I was trying to avoid you.”
“I have a confession.” Temperance hid a soft laugh and a da Vinci smile behind her raised glass. “I always tried to stand where I could be seen by you.”
Duncan chuckled. “Witch.”
“Who will be the first to notice, you think?” She tucked her hand up the back of his shirt, flattening her warm palm against his skin.
“Definitely Frankie,” they said at the same time.
Frankie was there to document the event in full photographer regalia—dressed in slim black jeans and a snug-fitting black T-shirt, equipped with a harness attached to two separate camera bodies over one shoulder. A battery pack for her flash hung from the opposite shoulder.
The music quieted, and Ma stepped up onto a makeshift pedestal created from a wooden wine crate.
“Hello, everyone.” Ma paused and looked around the crowd. She smiled and made eye contact, like she was engaged in an intimate conversation instead of speaking to a crowd of nearly two hundred people. “First—thank you, thank you for being here. Maybe next time we have a party like this, we’ll have some of our own wine!”
Everyone in the crowd raised cups and glasses, laughing.
“I think the most difficult part of doing a hard thing is making the choice to do it. This project of ours has been a labor of love for the last two years—heavy on the love and even more on the labor.” Ma’s eyes crinkled at the corners and lingered on Duncan. “It’s been the hardest thing we’ve ever done. But once you begin, you’re in it, you know? You get to stop fretting that you might have missed out on something extraordinary because you didn’t try. And that’s one of the things that makes it wonderful.”
Duncan scanned the crowd as people nodded and murmured in agreement. Near the back wall, Malcolm watched Frankie shoot a photo of the Everett brothers. Sunshine beamed through the big windows along the northern face of the barn, making the wine in their glasses seem to glow from within. It made for an outstanding shot.
Shooting photos seemed to be an athletic process for Frankie, the way she bent and stretched and crouched. People were naturally eager to smile for her. She flitted around the crowd like a dark, beautiful dragonfly.
Mal swallowed hard and closed his eyes before looking down at the ground. The poor guy was in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Ma went on. “So. Family, friends. Strangers from around Vesper and surrounding counties who heard there was free wine here today”—she paused for laughter—“thank you for being here on this big day for the Bradys. Salud!”
Beside her, Dad raised his own glass and shouted, “Sláinte!”
The crowd quieted, and Ma stepped off the wine crate so Dad could take her place. The wood creaked and cracked as soon as he stepped up, and everyone gasped. Dad hopped off with theatrical flair, swinging a hand through the air. “Hell with it—don’t need it anyway,” he said, and the crowd roared. “Before I let you all get back to the party, I want to share the names of the first Cloud Tide wines we’ll be perfecting over the next few years. The first will be Rosebud, a blend of reds named after our sweet Rowan, who helped set this family on a trajectory we couldn’t have imagined or navigated without her. In more ways than one.”
Rowan and Harry stood silhouetted in the open door of the barn. She had her face buried in the crook of his neck, and Harry grinned and waved on her behalf. He cupped a hand around his mouth and shouted, “That’s my wife!”
“The second will be called Footprint, a Cab Franc.” Dad hesitated. “Ah, when we do the tour of the tasting room, the inspiration behind that one will become clearer.”
Somewhere in the crowd, Nate barked an obnoxious laugh. Duncan’s cheeks got hot beneath his beard.
“Our Chardonnay will be called Afterglow—simply because Gia likes the name. My Gia gets what she wants.” The crowd sent up a collective “Awww,” and Dad paused for an indulgent beat. “We have plans to plant a few more three-acre blocks with Spanish grapes. Hopefully they lead to some wonderful wine like the ones you’re enjoying from Vega Vineyards right now.”
Dad waited a moment, then turned to face where Temperance and Duncan stood. “And finally, I just want to say—it’s about damned time.” The crowd buzzed, and Dad waved his hand. “Sorry, that’s not a wine name,” he clarified with his arm pointed straight at them. “I’m talking about those two knuckleheads.”
Heads swung around and bodies turned to see where he’d pointed. Laughter and scattered applause followed. Frankie whooped and aimed her camera at them, and Colby Everett did the Colby Everett whistle that everyone in the valley recognized.
Temperance shone up at Duncan like the sun. She was gravity itself, and he’d been falling most of his life.
Finally, finally, it was time to land.
Duncan pulled her tight against his side, and the wine in both of their glasses tipped perilously close to the rims. “I’m going to kiss you now,” he said.
With a thumb through one of his belt loops, Temperance crinkled her nose and tugged him closer. “About time.”
Heart hammering his breastbone, Duncan dropped into the kiss. Her low laugh resonated into his mouth, and he laughed back. Nothing around them actually changed—the crowd still hummed with happy conversation, the sky remained the same celestial blue of Temperance’s eyes, and the floor under his feet stayed intact. But for Duncan Brady, that simple connection of his lips to Temperance Jean Madigan’s here in this public space was one of the most important moments of his life.
She was his, he was hers, and it didn’t matter who saw them. They were together as a canonical part of the moment, no longer hidden in the background.
It felt simple and right and good, and simultaneously an extraordinary privilege, having this thing he’d been convinced over half of his life that he’d never deserve. The way he loved her was built into the architecture of his bones. It was as much his identity as the pattern on his fingertips and the chemistry of his blood.
And now everyone else knew it, too.
THEribbon was cut, more wine was poured, and tours of the winery began.
Everyone was ushered back outside to mingle, and small groups were taken for tours. They began with the concrete crush pad outside the north face of the barn, where a combination of new and refurbished stainless-steel equipment sat ready for the first harvest in a few months. Rowan gave a narrative tour of how the grapes would pass through the crush process, then the group moved on to the inner parts of the winery inside the barn. Fully in her element, she was in effortless academic mode, without a trace of blush in her cheeks or a flare of red at the tips of her ears. She guided them to the production and lab areas—and she even made a joke about how awful her first attempt at fermentation was with the initial batch of fruit from last year.
In the barrel room, Duncan’s personal touches were everywhere. The light fixtures were all LED, faucets were all low-flow, and the walls were insulated with a sustainable composite to minimize air infiltration. Bolted to the walls were racks made of kiln-dried chestnut beams from the demolished gambrel barn. Eventually, oak barrels would rest there to age reds, but since they were empty, the space looked more like a grown-up jungle gym. On the opposite side of the room sat several steel fermentation tanks. They diminished the rustic romanticism of the space, but they were necessary for the whites that wouldn’t be aged in the barrels.
Throughout the day, they overheard Nate tell the story about Duncan’s pastrami sandwich and the animal footprints in the tasting room’s concrete four different times. Each recounting grew more absurdist and embellished than the last, finally landing on a fanciful rendition where Duncan had set the bait on purpose to recruit the animals to leave footprints as an intentional design choice. They also heard Dad tell Ace and Charlie about how buttload and bunghole were legitimate winemaking terms. It earned a giggle from Ace and an eye roll from Charlie. Ma had been close behind, and she’d snickered a little before she pinched her lips closed and poked him in the ribs with her knuckle.
Duncan walked behind Temperance as the crowd flowed. He ran a knuckle up her spine whenever the group squeezed together in a bottleneck. They indulged in lingering gazes, and they walked with arms slung low around each other’s waists, hands tucked into back pockets.
They loved, visibly.
When they exited the barrel room into the open east pasture, Duncan saw something that made his heart stutter.
Corbin Madigan and Laine Talbot-Madigan were there.
Standing at the edge of a group of valley folks, they looked awkward and out of place, their posture tilted toward each other but their eyes unmistakably scanning the crowd. Both were dressed in casual clothing—khaki shorts and a pale green polo on Corbin, Laine in a flowy white-and-blue-striped sundress. They almost looked like normal people.
Corbin met his eyes across the crowd, and his chest expanded in a big, slow breath. With a subtle nod, he raised his wineglass the barest inch higher. At first, Duncan didn’t react, but he didn’t look away, either.
Beside him, Temperance leaned into him and tightened her arm around his waist while she chatted with the family of one of her former clinic patients. By how loose her posture was, she hadn’t seen them yet.
Duncan nodded back to Corbin Madigan with a slight dip of his chin. Then he turned his attention back to Temperance as she wrapped up her conversation. Before he could speak, Maren came out of nowhere, putting her body between them and where the Madigans stood.
“Duncan,” Maren warned. Her eyes flicked sideways before locking to his. She raised her brows. Are you going to handle this, or do I need to? her expression said.
Temperance smiled at Maren, but it faded fast. She tensed. “What’s going on?”
Duncan glanced over Maren’s shoulder. Corbin and Laine wound through the crowd, making their way straight to them.
His first instinct was to sweep her away. Run interference. Clearly, it was Maren’s, too.
“I get to decide when I need to be protected.”
Duncan slid his hand up Temperance’s back. He pressed his palm between her shoulders and met her eyes. Softly, he said, “Your parents are here.”
Maren’s expression was thunderous.
Temperance frowned, glancing between her sister and him. “That’s not possible. They’re somewhere in California right now—”
Then she saw them.
Her jaw tightened, her back straightened, and Maren deflated with an annoyed sigh.
Duncan dipped close to her ear and murmured, “What do you want to do?”
Temperance took a bracing breath. After a beat of hesitation, she wiped her palms on her shorts and said, “I want to know why they’re here.”
“What can I do?” he whispered.
“Just be with me,” she whispered back.
Maren turned sideways to accommodate their approach, but she didn’t say a word. Duncan raised his chin and planted his feet a little wider. He kept his arm loose around Temperance’s back, his hand tight against her hip.
“Phenomenal wine,” Laine said by way of greeting, raising a crystalline glass of Vega Albari?o. She swallowed hard, glancing at her daughters. “Hello, Temperance. Maren. You look well.”
With Leo on his hip, Nate appeared behind Maren. She swung the baby into her arms and leaned back against him. Ace and Grey came a moment later, plowing into Maren from opposite sides.
A glance of understanding passed between Duncan and his brother.
“You can fight for someone, but you have to be sure they’re ready to be fought for.”
Grey blurted, “Who are they?”
Laine dampened her lips and looked down at the ground.
“This is your grandma,” Maren said, “and this is your grandpa.”
Ace only looked at them with mild curiosity, but Grey said, “Grandma and Grandpa are over there.” He pointed to where Ma and Dad stood under a sprawling copper beech, laughing and chatting with people Duncan didn’t recognize.
“Well.” Maren hitched Leo higher on her hip and gave her parents a cool smile. “I guess that says everything, doesn’t it?”
“Maren—” Laine’s voice was strained.
Corbin interrupted. “We were in town on some business for the Helen Talbot Community Center and noticed the article in the Linden Local about the opening today.” He spent a moment to take in the grounds and the winery behind them. “Impressive.” He nodded, and his brows creased together. “Truly.”
“Thank you,” Duncan said, simply.
Laine said, “I hope it’s okay that we’re here—”
Temperance cut her off. “That depends on why you’re here, Mom.”
Leo said, “Bluhdoo,” and brought a fistful of Maren’s windblown hair to his mouth.
The elder Madigans shared a look. “We wanted to close the loop on the grant,” Laine said.
“It’s official,” Corbin said. “Capewell-Talbot has won the award, thanks to you.”
“Congratulations.” Temperance hesitated. “You could have told me that in an email, though. Or a phone call.”
For the first time, the look Duncan saw in Laine Talbot-Madigan’s eyes was something other than imperious coolness. It wasn’t softness or vulnerability either, but it was close. She looked… human. Laine sipped her wine, then cleared her throat. “We’d like to invite you to be a part of the family organization—”
Maren cut in. “Temperance—”
“Please. Please hear me out,” Laine said.
Nate put both hands on Maren’s shoulders.
Cautiously, Laine began again. “We’ve worked with the board to facilitate your involvement—both of you—to whatever extent you’d like.”
“It’s time for the organization to move into the future,” Corbin said.
Temperance looked up at Duncan, then to Maren, who lifted a single pale eyebrow.
Duncan held his breath.
In the distance, one of the Bristow sisters jangled the dinner bell that hung over the front window of their food truck.
Temperance turned toward the noise, and her eyes lit with determination. “I have an idea.”