Chapter Six #2
I held there. Her body was stretched tight around my cock, her hands gripping my shoulders, her eyes open and on mine. I wanted her to feel every inch of it. I wanted her to know this was different from the wall, from the urgency of that first night. This was me making a claim.
“You feel incredible,” I said. “Every time. It’s like you were made for me.”
Her hips rolled up. “Rafe. Move.”
“I know, baby.” I pulled back and drove in again, the same deliberate pace. “I’ve got you.”
She made the low sound in her throat that meant it was landing exactly right.
I set a rhythm that wasn’t about speed and kept it—long, slow strokes that had her gripping my shoulders harder with each one, her hips rising to meet mine, her tits moving with every thrust. I could feel how close she already was, the flutter and clench of her around my cock, and I held the pace anyway, held her right at the edge of it.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” she said. Breathless. Certain.
“Yes.”
She laughed—short and real—and then it dissolved into a gasp when I shifted the angle. “There,” she said. “Right there, don’t—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I stayed with that angle and watched her face and felt her building under me.
She was all the way there—loud and unself-conscious and completely present—and I wanted it, every sound she made, the way she said my name when something landed right, her nails leaving marks in my shoulders, the wet slap of her slick pussy taking my cock with each stroke.
“Rafe.” Her voice was wrecked. “I need to—I’m going to—”
“Go ahead. I want to feel you come on my cock.”
I kept the angle and the pace and felt her building under me and stayed with her all the way through it—her whole body going tight and then releasing in waves, her mouth open on my name, her thighs locked hard around me.
I followed her over before it had finished moving through her, buried deep, her nails in my back, both of us still.
Afterward the cabin was quiet. She was on her back and I was beside her and neither of us moved for a while. Her hand found mine on the blanket without ceremony—no announcement, no discussion, just a decision made and acted on.
The morning had gone from pale to gold through the window.
“Rafe,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about summer up here.”
I looked at the ceiling. “Short. Maybe ten weeks of real warmth. The whole valley goes green at once—like it’s been waiting and then it just goes, all at once.
Wildflowers above the treeline. The creek runs fast from snowmelt until July.
” I paused. “It’s loud in summer. Winter’s the quiet season. Summer everything’s moving.”
“I want to see it,” she said.
“I know.” I turned my head to look at her. “You will.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “I’m going to call Bree today. Start building the foundation prospectus for real. Not in my head—on paper, with numbers.”
“Good.”
“She’ll have something to say about all of it.”
“You’ll enjoy that.”
She laughed. “I really will.” She sat up, pulling the sheet around her, and looked at me. “And I’m reapplying to Wharton today. I want it said out loud in the daylight. To a person. Not just in my own head.”
“You just said it out loud to a person.”
“I did.” She turned her hands over in her lap, once. “My father’s going to push back.”
“He can push back all he wants,” I said. “It’s not his call.”
She went still. Her chin came up a fraction and something moved across her face—not resolved, not fixed, but different from the version that had been managing around Warren Grant her entire life.
“Nobody’s ever said that about him to me,” she said. “About it being my call. Not once.”
“It always was.”
She reached out and touched my jaw, one hand, brief. Then she got up and went to find her clothes.
I lay there another minute and looked at the ceiling and thought about what was waiting on the other side of tomorrow: the drive south, the city, Warren’s world closing back in around her. She was going to walk back into all of it. The question was what she’d do once she got there.
I already knew the answer. I’d known it since the drive-through, since she’d tracked the hawk and gone quiet over the dry lake bed and stood under the mountains with her mouth open.
I just needed to be along for it.
Warren called while London was on the porch.
I heard the call connect through the open door.
“London.” Warren’s voice carried in the cold air, compressed and certain, the voice of a man who considered follow-up questions a character flaw. “The threat’s been cleared. Be ready to return tomorrow.”
A pause.
“I’m fine, Daddy.” Her voice was even. Not placating—just true.
“I trust you’re intact.”
She looked out at the valley. “More than intact.”
A beat. Warren didn’t know what to do with that. She didn’t help him.
“Be ready at seven.”
“I’ll be there.”
Ninety seconds and she came back inside with the phone held out.
I took it.
“Coulter.” Warren’s voice was the same as it had been in Beverly Hills: directives, no inflection, the man who expected compliance in advance. “I wanted to thank you for the work this week. London will be returning to LA. I trust we can put this behind us and get her back on a normal schedule.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Before you go—I want to say one thing.”
A pause. He wasn’t accustomed to one-things.
“London isn’t a liability,” I said. “She was never a liability. You’ve been managing the wrong version of her for twenty-six years. She’s going to Wharton. She’s going to make something real with her name and her platform.”
Silence on the line.
“She’s my daughter,” Warren said finally.
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m telling you.”
I handed the phone back to London.
She was watching me. Her eyes were bright and her jaw was tight and for one second she looked like she was going to say something complicated. Then she pressed her lips together and turned away and went to the window and looked out at the valley.
I gave her a minute.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said, without turning around.
“No.”
“He’s not going to change overnight.”
“Probably not.”
“He might not change at all.”
“That’s his problem,” I said. “Not yours.”
She stood at the window a moment longer. Then she turned around. Her jaw had gone loose and her eyes were clear in a way they hadn’t been when she walked through my door five days ago.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s pack up.”
We worked through the cabin together—dishes back in their places, the bed stripped and the sheets stacked, the firewood restocked from the pile under the eave for when they came back.
London moved through the space with a quiet efficiency that was nothing like the organized chaos of the penthouse, and I watched her fold a blanket and set it on the shelf.
She found the fortune cookie slip on the nightstand, still there from four nights ago. She looked at it for a moment, then folded it once and put it in the pocket of the flannel.
“Evidence,” she said.
“Of what?”
“That I was here.” She looked at the room one last time—the stone fireplace, the window, the valley view. “That this happened.”
I picked up the bag. “Ready?”
She looked at me.
“No,” she said. “But let’s go anyway.”
Outside, the morning had gone fully clear, the peaks white and definite against the blue, the air smelling like pine and cold water and the high-altitude clarity that the valley below would never have. She stopped at the top of the porch steps and looked out at it for a long moment.
Then she went down the steps and got in the truck.
I locked the cabin, put the key back under the third step, and stood on the porch for a moment and looked at the valley.
Four years I’d been coming here alone, to have a place where the only voice was mine and the weather’s.
It had been exactly what I needed and now it had something else in it, something that was going to be there every time I came back, in the blanket on the shelf and the fortune slip that wasn’t on the nightstand anymore.
I found I didn’t mind that at all.
I got in the truck.
London had her feet up on the dashboard already—one foot, then the other, the ease of someone who’d stopped testing and started belonging.
She looked at me when I got in and said nothing, the corner of her mouth moving, and I backed us down the gravel road and out through the lodgepoles and onto the two-lane heading south.
The mountains held in the rearview as we descended. She watched them until the treeline closed.
“You know what I’m going to think about?” she said, after a while.
“What?”
“The hot dog.” She was looking out the window, the flannel soft around her shoulders, her hair loose in the morning light.
“Three months from now, in Philadelphia, I’m going to walk past some unremarkable gas station and I’m going to think about that hot dog at two in the morning and how it was actually fine and I didn’t say so. ”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because it was funnier not to.” She turned her head to look at me. “And because I think I needed you to believe I was more high-maintenance than I actually am.”
“You’re exactly as high-maintenance as you actually are,” I said. “Which turns out to be considerably less than advertised.”
She laughed at that—all the way through, filling the cab.
The truck rolled south. The road opened up ahead of us, long and straight through the basin, the high desert coming back in on either side as we dropped out of the mountains.
I had the window down a few inches and the cold mountain air was running through it and she had her feet on the dashboard and neither of us was trying to solve anything.
“Tell me about Montana winters,” she said.
“I told you about Montana winters.”
“Tell me again.” She settled back against the seat. “I want to hear it on the way home.”
Home. She’d said it without thinking about it and I didn’t point it out. I let it sit in the cab between us, doing what it was doing.
I told her about the winters.
The road ran south toward everything that came next, and somewhere in the last four days, without either of us planning it, it had started to feel like the right direction.