6. Maple
six
Maple
The hotel opens on a Saturday in February and it is, against every odd I spent four months accumulating, perfect.
I know this because I'm standing in the entrance hall in my great-aunt's pearl earrings and a deep red dress that took me three weeks to find, watching Silver Ridge fill up my parlours, and I cannot find a single thing wrong.
The chandeliers are throwing light across the original plasterwork the way I always knew they would if I could just get them clean.
The dining room shutters are open to the mountain and the south light is doing exactly what Ruth promised it would do in thirty years of letters.
The bar is set up on the original sideboard and Vernon Cooper is already on his second glass of something sparkling and telling anyone who will listen that he knew this house had potential.
He did not know this house had potential. He told me in October it was a money pit.
I let him have it. Tonight everyone gets to be right.
The dogs have the run of the ground floor because I decided two weeks ago that Rivet in the velvet window seat of the front parlour was not a problem to be solved but a feature to be leaned into, and I was correct.
She has not moved from the window seat in two hours and there is a queue of guests waiting to be photographed with her.
Wrench has stationed himself below the shortbread platter with the patience of a dog who has identified the highest-value position in the room and intends to hold it.
Penny is asleep in the kitchen on her folded towel, which is where Penny has decided she will be, and nobody is going to argue with Penny.
Garrett MacKenzie is near the back with Autumn, who is enormously and serenely pregnant and has claimed the most comfortable chair in the room with the confidence of a woman who has earned it.
Ryder and Celeste are near the window — Celeste talking to the cabinetry contractor, Ryder doing what Ryder does, which is stand slightly apart from everything and notice it all.
And Nash is by the door.
He's in a dark shirt I've never seen before, collar open, and he looks profoundly uncomfortable in a social setting and profoundly handsome and completely unaware of the second thing.
He's holding a glass of sparkling something that he is not drinking and he's watching the room with those steady green eyes and when they find me across the parlour something moves through his face that he doesn't bother to hide.
I've been waiting for that look all night.
I hand my glass to a passing tray and cross the room.
He watches me come the whole way. Doesn't move, doesn't look away, just waits with that particular stillness of his that I used to read as reserve and now read correctly as a man exercising significant patience.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi," he says.
We stand together in the entrance hall and I look up at him and he looks down at me and neither of us says anything for a moment.
"The fireplace is going," he says.
I glance toward the east parlour. The fire, the original brick surround, the wingbacks in deep green, the room warm and amber and exactly what I drew in my notebook the first week I arrived. I look back at him.
"Has been since Tuesday," he says. Carefully neutral.
I take the lapel of his shirt in one hand. "Tuesday."
"The flue needed—"
"Nash."
"Yes."
"Thank you," I say. "For the fireplace. And the tile. And the weatherstripping. All of it."
Something in his face shifts. Settles. "You're not angry."
"I was going to be," I say. "And then I walked into the east parlour and saw the fire going and thought about Ruth and decided I'd rather just be grateful."
He reaches out and tucks a loose piece of hair back from my face, his thumb at my cheekbone, and leaves his hand there.
Behind us a small focused weight lands on both our feet simultaneously. We look down. Rivet has abandoned her window seat, crossed the room, and planted herself squarely across both our feet with the satisfaction of a dog completing a long-running project.
"She left her post," Nash says.
"She's been working toward this for months," I say. "She deserves a moment."
He looks down at her. Then at me. Then he takes the glass out of my hand, sets both glasses on the hall table, and says, low enough that only I can hear it: "Show me the owner's suite."
"Top of the stairs," I say.
"Show me anyway."
I take his hand and show him.
The owner's suite is the most beautiful room in the house.
I built it that way on purpose — the original plaster rose, the iron bed from Ruth's grandmother's era made up in white linen, the dressing table with the triptych mirror, the lamplight doing something particular to the plasterwork that I always knew it would.
I unclip the pearl earrings and set them on the dresser and look at him in the mirror.
He crosses the room and finds the first pin in my hair without being asked, sets it on the dresser, finds the next.
I watch him in the mirror doing it — this large, careful man taking my hair down by degrees in the lamplight — and my chest does something I stopped pretending to have a category for weeks ago.
When the last pin is down he puts his mouth to the back of my neck.
I reach back and get my hand in his hair and pull and he makes a sound against my skin that I feel in my knees. His hands find the fastenings of the dress — patient, unhurried, undoing each one — and the fabric opens and falls and he turns me around and looks at me in the lamplight.
He looks at me the way he looked at this house the very first night. Like he can see exactly what it was always supposed to be.
"Nash," I say.
"I know," he says. "Come here."
I pull him toward the bed and he comes down over me and I get my hands in his shirt and pull it open and put my mouth to his chest and work my way down — his stomach, the trail of dark hair below his navel, the muscles tensing under my mouth.
His breath goes sharp when I get to his belt.
I undo it without breaking eye contact and take him out and wrap my hand around him — thick and hard and already wanting — and watch his head drop back against the pillow.
"Maple." Wrecked. Like my name is the only word he has left.
I put my mouth on him and his hand fists in my hair and he says "Christ" and then just breathes, shallow and unsteady, while I take my time because he takes his time with everything and I have learned from the best. I work him slow and thorough until his hips are moving and his grip in my hair has gone tight and he's saying my name like a warning.
"Come here," he says, pulling me up. "Right now. Come here."
He rolls me under him and puts his mouth to my throat and then my breasts — his tongue and teeth, unhurried, until I'm arching up and pulling at his shoulders telling him to keep going, don't stop, lower — and he works his way down my stomach and settles between my thighs and looks up at me once before he puts his mouth on me.
Two fingers and his tongue and that precise devastating patience — reading every sound I make, every roll of my hips, adjusting without being asked.
He finds the right pressure and stays there and I stop trying to be quiet about any of it.
I get both hands in his hair and hold on and say his name and say right there and say don't stop, and he doesn't, not until I'm shaking and pulling him up by the hair.
"Inside me," I say. "Nash. Now."
He moves up over me and I reach for him and guide him and he pushes inside me in one slow deliberate stroke, and we both go still.
Full. Deep. His forehead drops to mine. I can feel his heart going as hard as mine and the lamplight is warm on the plasterwork above and the sound of the party is somewhere far below and none of it exists.
There is only this — his weight over me, the stretch and heat of him, the way he's looking at me like I'm the only thing in the room.
"Maple," he says. Just my name. But the way he says it.
"I know," I say. "I love you. I know."
He goes still for a moment. Pulls back far enough to look at me — that steady green taking me in all the way — and something in his face opens up that I haven't seen before. Something underneath all the capable and the careful and the quiet.
"Since the back parlour," he says. "For me."
"For me too," I say. "I just needed longer to say it."
He kisses me slow and deep and then starts to move and I stop being able to say anything coherent at all.
Deep and slow at first, each stroke deliberate, and I feel every inch of it. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and he groans against my throat, low and rough, and does it again. I drag my nails down his back.
"Harder," I say.
He gives me harder.
"Nash." I dig my nails in. "I mean it. Harder."
He grips my hips and pulls me down to meet him and I cry out at the ceiling. His mouth finds my ear.
"Like that?" he says.
"Yes," I say. "Right there. Don't stop. Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't stop.
"I'm not stopping." His mouth is at my ear. "You feel so fucking good. You have no idea."
"I love you," I say, because it keeps coming out of me, because I can't stop saying it now that "I love you," he says, against my jaw.
He picks up the pace and I stop being able to form words.
My hands are in his hair. My hips are up to meet him. He drives into me deep and hard and I say "right there" and he gives me more of it, exactly that, and I dig my nails in and say "don't stop."
"I'm not stopping." His mouth is at my ear. "You feel so good. You have no idea."
He goes deeper and I gasp and say his name and he says "I know" and does it again and I say "Nash, please" and he says "I know, come on, I've got you" and I stop thinking entirely.
I come hard, thighs clamped around him, nails in his shoulders, his name in my throat at a volume that is absolutely carrying through the original plasterwork to every remaining guest below. I find I have not one single concern about it.
He follows me down into it. His hips press flush and his arms pull me hard against him and he groans "Christ, Maple" into my neck. Then: "I love you." Low and wrecked and completely certain. Like he's done keeping it to himself.
Afterward he's warm against my side and the room smells like my perfume and the woodsmoke drifting up from the parlour fireplace below and the mountain is dark through the window and the house is quiet and full and exactly what it was always supposed to be.
"Ruth would have liked you," I say.
He's quiet for a moment. "Yeah?"
"She had a gift for people who showed up when it mattered."
His arm tightens around me. His mouth is at my temple.
"I love you," he says. Like now that he's said it once, he doesn't see any reason to stop.
"I know," I say. "I love you too."
Below us the last guests are leaving. Vernon's voice carries through the plasterwork. Darlene laughing. The sound of Silver Ridge at the end of a good night, going home warm and full and happy, and up here in the owner's suite Nash Brennan is exactly where he's supposed to be.
So am I.