Epilogue #2
She hung up. I walked the last two blocks home with the cold on my face and the city doing what it did in the early evening — people coming home, lights going on in windows, the smell of someone cooking drifting down from an open floor above me — and my phone buzzed.
Wells. Two words: You good?
I typed back: Still alive and undefeated. Miss me?
Three dots. Then: Don't push it.
That was the whole conversation. It was everything.
I SMELLED THE DOG BEFORE I opened the door.
Not unpleasantly — in the way of something very large and very alive that had recently been outside and had already formed strong opinions about interior seating arrangements. The scent reached me on the landing and I stood there a moment with my key in the lock and thought: Rafe.
I opened the door.
The dog was enormous. Bernese Mountain Dog enormous — the kind of scale that suggested his previous owner had significantly underestimated a puppy, or had maintained extraordinary optimism about apartment square footage, or both.
He was sitting in the center of our living room rug with the particular stillness of an animal that had decided it lived here now and was prepared to wait out any objections.
Tricolor coat, black and rust and white, chest like a barrel, a face so earnest and serious it bordered on distinguished.
He looked at me with dark, steady eyes. I looked at him.
Rafe was leaning against the kitchen doorframe with his coffee cup and the expression of a man with a prepared statement.
"Eleven weeks at the rescue on Chestnut," he said.
"He's the size of a sectional sofa."
"He's calm."
"He's the size of a sectional sofa and he's calm. We have an apartment."
"It's a good-sized apartment."
"It is a good-sized apartment that now contains a Bernese Mountain Dog who is visibly calculating whether he fits on the couch."
The dog stood up, walked to the couch with great purpose, and got on it. All of him. He arranged his legs, settled his broad tricolor head on the armrest, and looked at me with the patience of an animal that had been through things and arrived at a philosophical acceptance of how life went.
I dropped my tote on the chair by the door, crossed the room, and sat on the couch next to the dog, who immediately shifted his broad tricolor head into my lap with the confidence of someone who had always known this was where he was going to end up.
I ran my hand along his tricolor coat. He closed his eyes.
I looked at him — the serious face, the magnificent scale of him, the rust and black and white — and something arrived fully formed, the way the right things always did.
"His name is Lumberjack," I said.
Rafe went very still.
I said it again, to the dog this time. "Lumberjack."
The dog lifted his head and looked at me with complete, immediate attention. Like he'd been waiting for it. Like it had always been his name and someone had finally gotten around to saying it out loud.
Rafe said nothing for a long moment. When I looked up his expression had done the thing it did when something landed that he wasn't going to discuss — contained, certain, a decision already made somewhere behind his eyes.
He knew exactly where Lumberjack came from.
The diner. The Eastern Sierra. The cartoon label on a plastic jug of syrup that I had picked up and poured directly onto my eggs at six forty-eight in the morning without saying a single word about it afterward.
He knew, and he wasn't going to say so, and neither was I.
"Jack," Rafe said quietly, to the dog. Trying it out.
The dog's tail moved once — slow, certain — against the couch cushion.
"He answers to both," I said.
Rafe set down his coffee and came. He sat on the other side of Lumberjack, who reorganized his considerable self between us with great purpose, and Rafe put his arm along the back of the couch and I leaned into his side and the dark was coming up outside the windows and the apartment smelled like whatever he'd been cooking, and now also, definitively, like mountain dog. Our mountain dog.
"You planned this," I said.
"I went for a different reason."
"What different reason?"
"I was just going to look."
"And?"
"Eleven weeks," he said. The way he said everything that mattered — just the fact of it, set down, and that was the end of the argument.
I tipped my head up and kissed him. His hand came to my jaw, certain and steady, and Lumberjack made a sound of dignified complaint at the disruption to his equilibrium, shifted his full weight across the cushion, and resettled with the patience of a dog who had decided to be very mature about the humans.
Rafe pulled back just enough to look at me.
His eyes were dark in the low light and the beard was longer than it had been in Idaho, and he was still wearing the canvas jacket built for mountain weather rather than East Coast autumn, because the proper wool one I'd bought him was still in the bag by the door where I'd left it two weeks ago.
I had decided to let this be his problem.
It was going to keep being his problem until the first real cold front came through, at which point I anticipated a wordless transition to the new jacket and zero acknowledgment that the bag had been sitting there since the second week of the month.
This was fine. I was prepared for all of it.
"How was your father?" he said.
"He put the prospectus in his pocket."
Rafe smiled at that — wide and real, the smile I'd first seen at a drive-through window in Nevada and had been collecting ever since. "That's really good," he said. "You should be proud of that."
"He said the vision statement was strong."
"It is strong. It was strong in the second draft when I read it off the table."
"That was private. It was face-down."
"The title was visible and I wanted to read it." He looked at me steadily. "I wanted to read it because everything you build is worth reading. I'm not sorry about that."
I looked at him for a moment. Outside, the wind came off the Delaware and the last light went out of the sky, and the apartment went low and close around us, and Lumberjack exhaled from his end of the couch with the full satisfaction of a dog who had found his place in the order of things.
"I applied to Wharton in secret," I said. "Twice. The first time someone found out and told me it was a waste. The second time I got in and came here and apparently everyone is reading my drafts off the kitchen table."
"That's progress," Rafe said.
"It really is," I said.
He turned toward me then, shifting on the couch so he could look at me fully, and Lumberjack accommodated this rearrangement with a long-suffering sigh and resettled his chin on my knee. Rafe took my hand in both of his.
"I need to tell you something," he said.
"Okay."
"I came to your door in Beverly Hills to do a job," he said.
"I told myself that was the whole of it — a job, a client, get it done and walk away.
I was wrong about that inside of an hour and I knew it and I kept driving north anyway because I didn't have a better plan and because even then I didn't want to let you out of my sight. Not because of the job. Just you."
My breath went quiet. Outside, the wind moved through the last of the leaves.
"Four months ago I had a lot of rules," Rafe said.
"And then you opened your door with your phone already in your hand and looked at me like I was a problem you were about to solve, and I've been in love with you since roughly that moment.
" He squeezed my hand once. "I should have said it before now. "
I looked at him — at this man who had driven me north and named my hair and read my drafts off the kitchen table and brought a Bernese Mountain Dog home because eleven weeks was too long, who had stood at a rusted gate in Idaho and handed me the most carefully kept part of himself without being asked twice, who had told my father directly and without aggression that I was not a liability and I was going to Wharton — and I thought: obviously.
Obviously it was always going to be him.
"I love you too," I said. "I've loved you since you let me keep the hot pink Jimmy Choos. I just didn't have the vocabulary for it yet."
He laughed — full and wide, filling the apartment — and pulled me in and kissed me, and that was when Lumberjack decided the moment called for his full participation.
He stood up on the couch with no structural justification whatsoever, stepped directly across both our laps with the careful deliberation of a dog who understood he weighed over a hundred pounds and had chosen to deploy that fact, turned one slow circle, and collapsed back down between us with a sigh of profound personal satisfaction, his considerable head on Rafe's thigh and his back legs draped across mine.
We both looked at the dog. We both looked at each other.
"I want you to know," I said, "that I had a very romantic moment planned for immediately after that."
"I know," Rafe said, his hand already moving to scratch Lumberjack behind one ear. "Me too."
"He did this on purpose."
"He absolutely did this on purpose." Rafe looked at the dog with an expression that was not even slightly stern. "He's going to keep doing it."
"Every time," I agreed.
Lumberjack thumped his tail twice against the couch cushion and closed his eyes, deeply unbothered, a Bernese Mountain Dog in a Philadelphia apartment who had correctly identified where he belonged and had every intention of staying.
I leaned back against Rafe's shoulder and looked at our apartment in the evening dark — the second bedroom with the closed door and the aspirational cable management, the bag with the wool jacket by the door that was going to win eventually whether Rafe was ready for it or not, the fortune slip folded once in the flannel pocket on the back of the bathroom door.
The program and the prospectus and the comment thread waiting in my inbox and the Grant name finally pointed at something I'd built myself.
Rafe pressed his mouth to my hair and I felt it move through me all the way down.
"Tell me something," I said.
"What do you want to know?"
"Anything. Something true about what comes next."
He was quiet for a moment, his thumb moving slow across my shoulder.
"I came back to the cabin two weeks ago to check on the property," he said.
"Stood on the porch and looked at the valley and the whole place felt different than it ever had before.
Fuller. Like something had moved in that wasn't going to move out. "
I lifted my head and looked at him.
"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said to me," I told him.
"I have my moments."
"You really do." I settled back against him and laced my fingers through his and looked out at the dark beyond our windows, the city lights coming up gold through the trees. "I'm going to tell two million people you said that, you know."
"I know," he said. He looked like a man who had made his choice and was at peace with every consequence of it.
Lumberjack snored once, loud and authoritative, from his position across our laps.
"The best things in life cannot be planned," I said, to no one in particular. To the apartment. To the fortune slip on the bathroom door. To Rafe and the dog and the dark and the whole improbable, unplanned, entirely mine life I was living inside of.
"No," Rafe said. "They really can't."
He kissed me again, slow and certain, with a hundred-and-ten-pound Bernese Mountain Dog across our laps and the wind outside the windows and my whole life waiting for me in the morning.
I didn't need to document a single second of it.
I was already exactly where I wanted to be.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR reading Kidnapped by the Mountain Man Bodyguard. If you loved Rafe and London’s story then you'll love Pursued by the Mountain Man Enforcer by Wynter Ryan.