Page 28 of The Pack's Knotty Runaway
“I mean—we’re not even a third done with this one tree, and there’s, like, six of us in this whole stretch. At this pace we’ll be picking into November. By then half the apples will be on the ground.”
Jenna lets out a long breath through her nose and leans her shoulder against the trunk. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?” I ask.
“Thereshouldbe more of us.” She shrugs and twists another apple free. “Well, you saw the orchard. You can see Bram, Ash, and Reed aren’t exactly rolling in cash this season.”
Well, I did notice the place is a little... beat down.
“What do they all actually do?” I ask. “I mean, Bram seems to be the one giving orders, but aside from that...”
“They actually do more than meets the eye.” Jenna twists another stem free. “Bram does harvest timing. He decides whichtrees we hit on which day, which ones are ripe, how to stage the labor. All of that lives in his head.”
She drops the apple. “Reed runs logistics. If something breaks, and something breaks almost every other day, he fixes it. He coordinates the client trucks that come to pick up what they sell in bulk. Reed schedules when they arrive, which loading docks they use, and makes sure the right bins are staged for each one.”
A picture starts to assemble. The Miller brothers, slightly less than three delicious-smelling alphas.
“And Ash?”
“Ash is the money.” Jenna picks another apple. “He’s the one who goes out and finds buyers and investors. They need advance payments to even get the harvest off the trees—labor, fuel, cooler power. All of it takes cash they don’t have on hand. He’s also been trying to sell more of their own product lines like their cider, an apple butter thing and some apple dessert vinegar. He’s been hunting wholesale deals on those.”
I twist another apple free. Drop it.
“He actually went out a few days back for a deal,” Jenna says. “A big one. It was supposed to keep us above water this season.”
My hand stops on the next apple.
“He didn’t get it.” She winces.
“Oh,” I say.
She drops another apple in her bag. “And apparently, he didn’t even come back that night. Or the next morning. He didn’t roll in until the following late afternoon.” She glances at me, then away. “I think he needed a little time. He couldn’t bring himself to drive back and tell his brothers he didn’t land the deal.”
My hand finds another apple on the branch. Twists. Drops it in the bag.
Wait. Does that mean—
“Where was the meeting?” I ask.
“Some fancy resort. Evergreen Peak.”
The apple in my bag suddenly weighs about forty pounds.
Evergreen Peak Resort.
The math is not difficult. I met Ash two nights ago, which means by the time Ash was buying me a drink, he was already done. He’d already lost the deal...
I press the heel of my hand against my forehead. Oh,no.
Of course, after he’d been carryingthataround, I—We—
—the thought collapses, because my body, helpfully reminded, takes over. A slow, embarrassing pulse rolls down the center of me. Fresh slick.
Oh my god, Luna, read the room.The man lost his deal, got zero reciprocation in bed, and then I kicked him out of my room. Getting horny now is a terrible way to show sympathy.
“Anyway,” Jenna says, a smile tugging at her lips. “Care to explain how a girl goes from squatting a cabin to being invited in the owners’ guest room? And all that under twenty-four hours?”
My face goes a color it has no business going. “It’s not like that. They just offered me a room.”
