I braced my head in my palm and breathed out a laugh. “Oh my god, Lincoln.”
“Mabel would definitely be our scandalous influencer. All it would take was one hooky video, and the honey sticks would go viral.”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
“Don’t want to go for the overdone shirtless angle? Bam!” He flipped to the next slide of him in a suit, looking hot as fuck, honey sticks poking out of his breast pocket. “Fake CEO vibes but make it sticky.”
“When the hell did you even do this? I just made that jam this morning!”
“Almost done, hellcat. Next up is my artisanal pricing breakdown. Small batch, locally sourced, infused with hot farmer wife energy.”
“Lincoln. Be serious.”
“Oh, I am, wife.” He turned to the next slide, his grin cocky, his voice smug. “Slide seven—jam so good you’ll want to marry the maker. Too bad, I already did.”
The image was of him licking jam off his ring finger, his black wedding band prominent and his sex eyes on point like he was posing for the cover of a romance novel.
I snorted a laugh, my annoyance quickly fading to amusement. “That one was pretty good.”
He flashed me his dimples before turning to the final slide. This one featured him staring straight at me, that smug look wiped off his face. No jokes, no pretenses—just him. And above him in a speech bubble were the words,I’m serious, wife.
It would’ve been easy to write this off as a stunt, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t smirking, wasn’t having fun. He was just standing there, looking at me like this mattered. LikeImattered.
Doing something like this had been my dream for longer than I’d admit. But I hadn’t even told my brother about it. Why would I, when I couldn’t even make what I already had work?
But somehow, Lincoln had seen right through me. Through all my bluster and bravado and straight to the heart of what I really, truly wanted.
Not only that, but he believed I could. Thatwecould.
“How the hell would we fund the increased production this would need?” I asked.
“You let me worry about that.”
“And what if your brother is our only customer?” I said, trying to sound flippant even as my chest went tight.
“He won’t be.”
Of course Lincoln would say that. He didn’t know how to be anything but confident. Confident enough to stand shirtless next to jam jars and lick it off his finger and make PowerPoint slides full of all the images.
But this wasn’t a joke. This was my life…my livelihood. My legacy.
“What if he is?” I asked again, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.
Lincoln just shrugged, like that wasn’t a big deal. “Then we take Atlas for all he’s worth. Pretty sure he can afford a hundred-dollar-a-day jam habit.”
I huffed out a laugh, meeting Lincoln’s gaze when he squatted in front of me, his hands on my hips.
“I know you’re not used to someone betting on you, Willa,” he said, quiet now. Serious. “But I’ve believed in you since we were kids. Just took me a while to say it out loud.”
With that, he pressed a soft, sweet kiss to my lips before heading upstairs to shower. And there I sat, wineglass long forgotten as I stared at the laptop, the final slide glowing on the screen.
I’m serious, wife.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
WILLA
By the timeI pulled into our gravel driveway the following week, the sun was low and my head was spinning from the chaos that had been my first official book club. What I’d learned was that it was less abookclub and more alet’s drink wine and talk about hot men and sexclub. And those women didn’t hold back—especially the retirees.
