Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
DESI
DESI
His generator dies on a Wednesday night.
I know because the glow from his property, that steady amber light visible through the tree line since his construction crew wired the temporary electrical panel, goes black at nine forty-seven.
I'm sitting on my porch with a glass of wine, sketching a drainage plan for a client in Nelson who wants a rain garden on a slope that defies gravity.
The night goes quiet. Then comes the knock.
Beck Rhodes is standing on my porch in the rain. Hair plastered to his forehead. Grey T-shirt soaked through, clinging to every line of his chest. Water dripping from his jaw. He looks ridiculous. He looks incredible.
"My generator died."
"Clearly."
"I don't have a flashlight. I don't have candles. I have one bar of cell signal and a dead espresso machine."
"So you walked next door in the dark in the rain."
"You were the closest light."
Something about the way he says it. Closest light. Standing there wet, sheepish, big, looking at me with those whiskey eyes that hold zero arrogance and total honesty.
"Get in here before you drown on my porch."
He steps inside. Water pools on my floor. The man takes up my entire doorway and then some, shoulders nearly brushing the frame. My cabin feels smaller with him in it. Every room does.
"Sit." I grab the afghan blanket off the couch, toss it at him. "I'll make coffee."
He wraps the blanket around his shoulders.
Sits at my kitchen table. His knees almost touch the underside because the table's too low for someone his size.
The domestic absurdity of it, Beckett Rhodes sitting in my tiny kitchen wrapped in a crocheted blanket from a thrift store in Trail, makes a laugh slip out before I can stop it.
He looks up. "You laughed."
"Don't get excited."
"Too late."
The coffee brews. Rain drums the roof. Outside the window, his property is a dark silhouette against darker mountains.
"I'll call the electrician tomorrow," he says. "Steve thinks the transfer switch might've shorted."
"You could just buy a backup generator. You can afford twelve."
"I could. Or I could come bother you every time the power goes out."
"Terrible plan."
"You laughed, though."
I set the mug in front of him. The cactus mug. His mug now, apparently, because I keep giving it to him. He wraps his hands around it, and the size difference between his palms and the ceramic shouldn't do anything to me. Shouldn't.
"Your sketches are good." He nods at the drainage plan spread across the table, the one I pushed aside to make room for his coffee. "That's the Nelson client?"
"Yeah. She wants a rain garden on a forty-degree slope with clay subsoil. Basically wants water to flow uphill."
"Can you make it work?"
"Already figured out the swale system. Three tiers, each one catches runoff from the tier above. Native sedges and rushes do the filtration. It'll look like it grew there naturally."
"Which is the hardest thing to design."
My eyebrows go up. He shouldn't know that. Nobody outside the industry knows that.
"I spent eight months working with landscape architects on my Vancouver office campus," he says. "The lead designer told me the best landscapes are the ones nobody notices. The ones that look inevitable."
"Who was the designer?"
"Miriam Chao."
"Miriam Chao did your campus?" My hand goes flat on the table. "She's one of the best ecological designers in the country. Her stormwater capture system for the UBC botanical garden is referenced in every hydrology textbook I own."
"I'll tell her you're a fan. She'd probably love your terracing work."
"Don't you dare tell Miriam Chao about me."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm sitting in a cabin with a leaky roof eating leftover rice for dinner. Let me at least have the Nelson project built before I get introduced to my professional hero."
He grins. My stomach flips. Traitorous organ.
We keep talking. About Miriam's campus design, about the problems with conventional drainage in mountain soil, about how his build site should've had a bioswale along the east face to manage the runoff his grading created.
He listens differently than anyone I've worked with.
Leans forward. Asks follow-up questions that prove he's actually processing what I said, not just waiting for his turn.
"You really did Google soil amendment at two a.m."
"I Google a lot of things at two a.m. My search history is a mess. Last week it was 'how to stop a stove from clicking' and 'what elevation do hummingbirds live at.'"
"Hummingbirds?"
"You have rufous hummingbird feeders on your porch. The red ones."
"You noticed my hummingbird feeders."
"I notice everything about your property." He says it simply. Then seems to hear himself, shifts in the chair, takes a long drink of coffee. "From an architectural perspective."
"Mmhm."
"Purely structural interest."
"Sure."
His neck flushes red above the blanket. The billionaire is blushing in my kitchen.
The conversation turns personal. His childhood in Ontario, a middle class family in a suburb outside London. Parents still married, still in the same house, still confused by the fact that their son who couldn't keep his room clean built a tech empire.
"My dad's a high school math teacher. Thirty-four years. Still uses an overhead projector. Calls my phone a 'device' with genuine suspicion. When I told them about the sale he went quiet for a really long time, then asked if the tax implications were manageable."
"Tax implications."
"My mom cried. My dad asked about taxes. That's their whole marriage."
Something eases in my chest. The picture of him shifts. Not a man who grew up wealthy and bought his way into everything. A man who built it from nothing, same as me, and ended up so far from where he started that the people who raised him can't bridge the distance.
"My parents met in a church kitchen in East Vancouver." The words come out before I decide to share them. "My dad was washing dishes. My mom told him he was doing it wrong. Took the sponge out of his hand, showed him the right way, and he fell in love on the spot."
"Smart man."
"He was. He used to say that Maman didn't save him from dirty dishes.
She saved him from doing everything alone.
" My thumb traces the rim of my mason jar.
"They built the restaurant together. Every wall, every menu, every twelve-hour shift.
When the landlord sold the building, my dad stood in the empty dining room for an hour before he locked the door.
Then went home, made my mom coffee, and started planning what came next. "
"What came next?"
"Her catering business. His support. Same partnership, different building.
" The tightness in my throat is familiar.
Comes every time I talk about them. "He died in the restaurant kitchen.
Heart attack. Six months later the landlord sold the building.
My mother stood in that empty dining room alone.
Locked the door. Went home and started her catering business because stopping wasn't an option. "
Beck's hand moves across the table. Stops an inch from mine. Waits.
My fingers close the gap. His palm is warm. Rough. Enormous under mine.
"Your wall work," he says quietly. "The stone wall in your garden."
"What about it?"
"You built things that root. Because they took something rootless from your parents and you decided never again."
Nobody has ever said it back to me that simply. Five years of telling people I'm a landscape designer and watching them nod politely. He said it in one sentence. My hand tightens on his.
The rain slows. My wine glass is empty. His coffee is gone. Neither of us moves. His thumb is tracing slow circles on my knuckles, each one sending warmth up my wrist into my arm.
"I should go check the panel. See if anything's salvageable tonight." He stands. The blanket falls off his shoulders. His shirt is still damp, stretched across his chest, and my eyes track the dark hair visible above the neckline.
"I'll walk you out."
We step onto the porch. The rain has thinned to mist. My garden beds stretch below, the stone wall running the length of the south border. Moonlight breaks through the clouds.
"Your wall work is perfect." He's looking at the stonework, not at me. "Dry stacked?"
"Every stone hand placed."
He turns. Full attention. The way he looks at things he's trying to understand. We're close already, the porch narrow, two bodies' width at best. But he takes a half step forward and the air between us compresses to nothing.
My hand is flat on his chest before I decide to put it there, pressing against wet cotton and warm muscle underneath.
His breath catches. I feel it under my palm. Those whiskey eyes drop to my mouth.
"Tell me to go home." His voice is low, rough.
"No."
The kiss happens against my garden wall.
He steps us off the porch, backward, my feet leaving the wooden deck for wet grass.
His mouth finds mine and the world narrows to the taste of him, coffee and rain.
My spine meets stone. Cool rock against my back, his body burning hot against my front.
One of his hands cradles the back of my head, fingers in my braids, protecting my skull from the wall.
The other grips my hip. Massive. His hand spans from my waist to the top of my thigh.
My body arches into him. Every inch of contact feels deliberate, earned, inevitable. His tongue slides against mine and a sound comes out of me that I've never made outside of a bedroom, low and raw.
"Inside." I say it against his mouth.
He lifts me. Both hands under my thighs, scooping me off the ground so fast I wrap my legs around his waist on instinct.
The size difference is staggering. My feet don't touch the ground.
His hands hold me up without strain. He carries me through my own front door, kicks it shut behind us, walks us to my bedroom without asking directions because my cabin has four rooms and the bedroom is obvious.
My back hits the mattress. He stands at the edge of the bed, pulling the wet shirt over his head in one motion. Broad chest, dark hair trailing down a flat stomach, muscles that come from actual use. My hands reach for his belt.
"Wait." He catches my wrists. Pins them gently above my head with one hand. One hand. Both my wrists in one of his palms. The grip is firm, not tight. "Let me."
His free hand finds the hem of my tank top. Pushes it up over my stomach, my ribs. I arch so he can pull it off. No bra underneath because I was on my own porch drinking wine. His eyes move over my breasts, my dark nipples already peaked, and his jaw flexes.
"Fuck, Desi."
Then his mouth is on my neck, my collarbone, the swell of my breast. His tongue circles one nipple before his lips close around it, sucking hard enough to make my hips buck off the mattress.
His hand releases my wrists to work my jeans open, pulling them down my thighs along with my underwear.
Everything off. All of it. His mouth trails down my stomach, kissing wet and open along the soft skin below my navel. My thighs fall open.
The first stroke of his tongue on my clit is slow. Deliberate. Testing pressure. The second is firmer, flat tongue dragging from my entrance to the swollen bud at the top. My hand finds his hair. Grips. He groans against me, the vibration shooting straight through my core.
Two fingers push inside. Thick, curved, finding the spot on the first try because this man apparently applies the same precision to sex as he does to everything else.
His tongue works my clit in tight circles while his fingers curl, press, curl again.
My thighs are shaking. One of his hands presses flat on my lower belly, holding me still while he works, and the pressure of his palm combined with his mouth is too much.
The orgasm hits hard. My whole body locks. Back bowed, hand fisted in his hair, the sound torn from my throat embarrassingly loud in the small room. He doesn't stop. Works me through it with his mouth until the aftershocks fade.
Then he stands. Strips. His cock is thick, hard, curving slightly upward. Condom from his wallet, rolled on efficiently. He pulls my hips to the edge of the mattress, hooks one leg over his shoulder, and pushes in.
Full. Stretched. My mouth opens but nothing comes out. He pauses at the bottom, buried to the hilt, giving me a second to adjust. One hand grips the thigh on his shoulder. The other braces on the mattress beside my head.
"Okay?"
"Move."
He does. Deep, measured strokes that drag against every nerve. The angle with my leg on his shoulder makes each thrust hit deeper than the last. His thumb finds my clit, pressing in slow circles that match his rhythm. My hands grab his forearms, nails biting into muscle.
He speeds up. The bed protests. My body climbs again, tighter this time, faster, building from the base of my spine. His breathing is ragged, his jaw tight with control, eyes locked on mine.
"Come for me." His voice is wrecked.
My second orgasm tears through me so hard I stop breathing. He follows three strokes later, buried deep, forehead dropping to my shoulder.
Silence except for breathing. His weight partially on me. Heavy. Warm. My fingers trace the muscles along his spine without permission from my brain.
After cleanup he comes back to bed. Pulls me against his chest. Tucks the blanket around us.
"Stay," I say. Surprise myself.
His arm tightens around my waist. His mouth presses against the back of my neck.
"Couldn't leave if I wanted to."
And lying in the dark, my body humming, this man curled around me occupying every inch of space I have, I think about roots. About things that dig into soil and hold. About how terrifying it is to want something when you've built your whole life around not needing anything from anyone.
I'm in so much trouble.