Cameron was standing by the window that looked out over the vineyard. Cameron had a penchant for dramatic poses like that, and I almost laughed when I saw him. It was like he was always auditioning to be a new cover boy for a fancy men’s underwear brand. He had a glass of wine in his hand, and I cocked an eyebrow. He turned to see me and smiled.

“Drinking on the job?” I joked. He looked down at the wine and shrugged.

“Drinking kind of is the job, you know,” he shot back. “Kane sent me this. It’s a blend he’s working on. It’s quite good.”

“I’m sure it is,” I said, hoping to avoid any more conversation about Kane or his lab. “So, what’s up?”

“Well, I have the blueprints here,” Alex said. He looked up and spun the screen over so I could see it. “I digitized them so we could share them as a PDF whenever we wanted to, and you could edit them in AutoCAD or whatever you use.”

“Nice,” I said. “I usually just use markers on blueprints, but that’s neat.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Neat? What are you? A hundred years old? Anyway, I was thinking this part here, it needed to be extended west by—”

“And I told him that in no uncertain circumstances were we going to be extending the tasting room anywhere,” Cameron said. “Absolutely not. It won’t work.”

“But it will,” Alex shot back. “If you would look at the design.”

“I don’t need to. I know these walls. I know this space. It cannot extend anywhere.”

I sat back and listened to them bicker. It soothed my soul a bit to hear them go at it almost as rough as Derek and I had, and it also reminded me of when we were kids. Those two were often in competition for attention in some way, and I smiled and waited them out before engaging with them over the plans and trying to come up with a solution. Eventually, I got back to work, keeping an ear out for them and their continued back-and-forth. Not too much longer after that, it was lunchtime.

“Hey, Noah,” Cameron said. “You want to get lunch with us? I’m going to go over the budget again, and I could use your input.”

“Hey, man, it’s your money we’re using to do the renovation. How could I say no?” I asked.

“Well, by saying no, for one,” he joked. “But seriously, come with us to lunch. Alex says he has something he wants to talk about too.”

I shrugged. “Sure. When?”

“Now?” Cameron asked. “I’m starving.”

“Should have had a donut,” Alex said from the other side of the room.

We ended up at a local restaurant, one that would very likely be competitors of ours in a few weeks. Sitting down, we were immediately recognized by the owners, who must have known what was going on with us doing renovations. The side-eye as we ordered lunch and talked was so obvious it was impossible to ignore.

It felt good to be around my brothers again. Not just Cameron and Alex, who were already droning on about their plans and why I should agree with one or the other, but also Kane and Derek. We had grown up so close to each other, it seemed a shame we were not as close now that we were grown.

It took our grandparents dying to bring us together again. That was a regret we all shared.

I missed my grandparents. Grandpa especially would have so much to say about what was going on that he would have been able to help me. He wouldn’t have stopped me, but he would have been able to give me advice that I could choose to take or leave. That was always his way. He would let me make the mistakes he warned me about, but then he was there and could protect me from myself and my own anger at failing or ignoring his advice.

Yet, though the reason we were together, that they were both gone, meant that we all spent a lot more time together as brothers. We could lean on each other again, trust each other to pick up the slack. Maybe even learn how to work together as adults, to make better than they could have ever imagined.

14

Ally

I came out of the weekend with the plan to take Holly’s advice and just put the entire encounter with Noah behind me. In fact, I was planning on putting everything about him behind me. I didn’t need to interact with him. There was no need for the two of us to engage in any conversation or even really be in the same room together.

He’d made it very clear he only actually cared about Derek’s opinion, and he wasn’t going to listen to anything I had to say anyway. So, why bother? I could just cut out the middleman and let them talk about everything themselves.

Tags: Natasha L. Black Romance
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