Chapter Six
RAFE
THE MOUNTAIN WAS DOING what it did before a clear day: going still and cold and precise, every edge of it sharp in the pale light before eight.
I’d been up for an hour. Coffee was on. I’d found potatoes in the bottom of the cabinet and eggs that hadn’t been touched since yesterday’s omelette incident and I’d cooked both without thinking about it, which was not something I made a habit of—cooking for someone, standing in a kitchen that had always been mine alone and feeling the weight of another person still asleep in the back room.
I felt it, and I didn’t put it away.
The potatoes were done and resting in the pan when I heard her moving—the creak of the floorboard near the bed, the small sounds of someone coming awake in a space that wasn’t theirs yet.
A pause. Then bare feet on the wood and London appeared in the kitchen doorway, hair down, the flannel hanging off one shoulder, the thrift store jeans she’d pulled on after her shower last night.
Her eyes went to the stove. Then to me.
“You cooked,” she said.
“Eggs and potatoes.”
“You cooked breakfast.” She came to the table and sat down and picked up the coffee I’d left there for her, both hands wrapped around it, and looked at the plate like it was evidence. “I want you to know I understand that this is a direct comment on yesterday’s omelette situation.”
“It’s not.”
“It absolutely is. You’ve staged an intervention using carbohydrates.” She picked up her fork with great dignity. “I respect the commitment.”
“I was hungry.”
“That’s what someone says when they’re also staging an intervention.” She took a bite of potatoes and her eyes went briefly closed. “Okay. These are genuinely good. Which somehow makes it worse.”
I sat across from her. “How does that make it worse?”
“Because now I can’t even be quietly defensive about the omelette. You’ve removed that option.” She pointed at me with the fork. “That was calculated.”
“Eat your eggs.”
She ate her eggs.
The morning light through the west window was the thin, early kind, running pale across the table, and London ate without saying anything for a few minutes, which I’d learned by now wasn’t absence. Just there. Just eating breakfast in a cabin in Idaho.
I’d been trying not to think about the fact that she was leaving tomorrow.
I wasn’t succeeding.
“Can I ask you something?” London said.
“Go ahead.”
She set her fork down and met my eyes, the way she did when she’d decided something. “Wharton. When I reapply—and I’m going to, I’ve decided that—it’s a two-year program. In Philadelphia.” She held my gaze. “I want to know what you think that means.”
I looked at my coffee. Then at her.
“I think it means you’re going to Philadelphia,” I said. “And I think you’re going to be excellent at it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“London.” I set my mug down. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to tell me what you actually think. Not the version where you’re managing the situation.
” Her eyes were steady and very green. “Yesterday on that road you said something stopped following the rules. I’m asking if that’s still true this morning, with twenty-four hours of daylight and a clear head. ”
The morning was quiet around us—birds outside, the sound of the creek somewhere below the property, the small shift of the cabin settling in the cold.
“It’s still true,” I said.
“Okay.” She didn’t move. “Then what does Philadelphia mean to you?”
I thought about it honestly, the way she was asking for.
“It means figuring it out,” I said. “Montana’s not going anywhere.
The work I do, I can run it from anywhere with a secure line and a truck.
Philadelphia’s not the obstacle you’re framing it as.
” I looked at her. “You’re asking if I’m in. I’m in.”
Something in her face shifted—not relief exactly, something quieter.
“You’re very certain for a man who met me five days ago,” she said.
“Four days. And I was certain by day two, which I’m aware doesn’t help my case.”
She laughed—genuine, wide open—and reached across the table and covered my hand with hers, once, and then went back to her coffee.
“Okay,” she said. “Good.”
We did the dishes together, which was not something I’d planned, but she stood at the sink and I dried and she talked about the foundation she wanted to build—not the abstract version, but the specific one, the one she’d apparently been constructing in her head the whole drive north.
Hospitality workforce programs. Using the Grant name and the platform not as a liability but as a door into an industry she knew from the inside.
Scholarships, mentorships, paths into hotel management for people who didn’t have a father who owned the hotels.
“It uses what I actually know,” she said, handing me a plate. “I’ve been in these rooms my whole life. I know how the industry runs. I know the people at the top. I just never had a reason to use any of it for anything that mattered.”
“You have one now.”
She stopped. Looked at me. “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”
She handed me the last mug, and when I reached for it her fingers stayed around it a beat longer than necessary. I set the mug down and pulled her in and her hands came up around the back of my neck and her mouth was already there, warm and sure, tasting like coffee.
She pulled back first. Her eyes were open and on mine.
Then she took a step back toward the bedroom doorway and looked at me over her shoulder.
I set the dish towel down.
THE MORNING LIGHT THROUGH the bedroom window was pale and exact and she was already sitting on the edge of the bed by the time I got there, the flannel off, watching me close the distance with the patience of someone who had made a decision and was done waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
“Off,” she said, nodding at my thermal.
I pulled it over my head. Her hands went flat to my chest—taking inventory, not asking—and I let her look for a moment, then took her wrists and brought them above her head and pressed her back onto the bed.
She made a sound that wasn’t a protest.
“My turn,” I said.
That first night she’d set the pace from the moment we walked through the door—her voice, her hands, her instructions—and I’d followed every one. This was different. I knew what I wanted and I intended to take my time getting there.
I got her jeans off first, then her underwear, and when I settled between her thighs she was already wet for me. I ran two fingers through her slick pussy and she made a sound that went straight down my spine.
“Rafe—”
“I know what you need.”
I got her shirt off and tossed it. Her tits were bare and I took a moment to look at her—really look, all of her spread out on my bed in the pale morning light, flushed and breathing hard and already wanting—before I dropped my head and took one nipple into my mouth.
Her back came off the bed.
“Oh—God, that—” Her hands were in my hair, not directing, just holding on. “Please.”
I worked her slowly, mouth at her nipples, fingers sliding through her wet heat, until she was rocking her hips against my hand and pulling at my hair with real intent. Her clit was swollen and slick and every time my thumb grazed it she made a short, sharp sound that she clearly couldn’t control.
“You have a beautiful pussy,” I said against her breast. “I’ve been thinking about getting my mouth on it again since the moment I woke up.”
“Then—” She pulled at my hair. “Stop making me wait for it.”
I moved down her body. I put my mouth on her clit and felt her hips come up hard against me.
“There,” she breathed. “Right there—don’t you dare move.”
I had no intention of moving. I worked her clit slow, reading every change in her breathing, every tightening of her thighs, every hitch when I found the angle that made her loud.
I slid two fingers inside her and felt her clench around them and heard the sharp sound she made when I curled them forward.
Her fingers went into my hair and pulled and I felt her thighs go tight against my shoulders and I stayed exactly where I was, working her with my mouth and my hand together, until she came—her back arching off the bed, her whole body pulling tight and then releasing, my name on her mouth, loud and completely unself-conscious.
I came up over her while she was still catching her breath. She looked wrecked and satisfied and her eyes opened and found mine and she reached up and gripped the back of my neck.
“I want you,” she said. “Now. Please.”
“I know.”
I got my jeans off. She watched me the whole time, her gaze moving down, and then she sat up and wrapped her hand around my cock and I held very still.
“God,” she said, almost to herself, and I felt her thumb swipe across the head, through the bead of pre-cum already there, and she looked up at me from under her lashes with an expression that was not innocent in any respect.
“London.”
“Hold on.”
She lowered her head and swirled her tongue around the tip of my cock, lapping up the pre-cum, and the sound I made was not something I’d planned on making.
She took me deeper, her mouth wet and warm and moving in a rhythm that had me bracing one hand on the headboard and breathing through it, and when she looked up at me while she did it I was dangerously close to losing the thread of everything I’d intended this morning to be.
I pulled her up. She came with a small noise of protest.
“I’m going to fuck you now,” I said. “And I’m going to take my time doing it. So get on your back.”
She went. Eyes on mine the whole way down, the corner of her mouth moving.
I settled over her and reached between us and lined up and drove in slow—all the way, one long stroke—and her breath left her body entirely.