CHAPTER SIX
Keely
I sat up in bed, the sheets sliding down my skin as last night came flooding back to me. For the first time in years, the crushing pressure to be productive—to study, to work, to worry—wasn’t the first thing I felt.
Instead, I felt the emptiness where Griffin should have been.
I looked up and found him standing in the doorway.
Dark blue sweatpants hanging low on his hips, his chest bare, the morning light cutting along the ridge of his shoulder and catching every scar.
There were more than I’d registered last night.
A long rope of pale tissue down his left side.
A puckered star below his collarbone. A burn mark, faded to silver, across his ribs.
Years of surviving etched into his skin and I wanted to put my mouth on every single one.
He was watching me the way he watched everything—still, thorough, like he had all the time in the world.
He looked different in the morning light.
Not softer exactly—Griffin was never going to be soft.
But something in the set of his jaw had loosened.
The permanent brace he carried, like he was always waiting for something to go wrong, was still there.
Just quieter. I noticed it the way you notice when a sound you’ve gotten used to finally stops.
“Good,” he said. “You’re awake.”
He’d said it like he’d been watching me, waiting for me to wake up. I could tell by the set of his shoulders—that particular stillness that was so much a part of him.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Now I am.”
He crossed the room without asking, reached down, and lifted me.
I laughed. I was done being shy about it.
Mentally making excuses of why he shouldn’t carry me.
Griffin was a big man and could do this.
Pick me up with ease. I wrapped my arms around his neck and felt the solid heat of him against my bare skin—the wall of his chest, the flex of his arms under my thighs.
I was twenty-three years old and I had never once in my life let anyone carry me somewhere. I hadn’t known it would feel like this.
The bathroom was warm. The large tub was already filled, steam drifting off the surface, a thick layer of bubbles moving across the water.
He’d done this before he woke me. He’d run the bath, tested the temperature no doubt, because that was Griffin, and placed a folded towel against the back of the tub for my head.
Taking care of me. I looked at that folded towel and felt something shift in my chest that I wasn’t expecting.
He lowered me into the water slowly, his hands steady at my waist, his eyes on my face the whole time.
The heat hit my skin in a wave—a deep, penetrating warmth that worked into the soreness, my muscles unknotting inch by inch.
I couldn’t quite hold back the sound that escaped me.
The feeling wasn’t as good as it had been when he’d been inside me last night, but it was good.
He knelt beside the tub. He wasn’t looking at me the way men usually looked at me—like they were assessing, comparing.
He was looking at me the way he’d looked at me last night when I’d been pressed against his door and he’d said mine like it was a fact he was finally saying out loud.
As if there wasn’t a single inch of me he wanted to skip.
“A mountain man who runs bubble baths,” I said. “Is that in the survival manual?”
“Section four,” he said. “Taking care of what’s yours.”
He reached for a pitcher on the side of the tub and used it to wet my hair. “Lean back, baby.”
I closed my eyes as the warm water washed over me. Next, he grabbed a bottle of shampoo and poured some into his palm and rubbed it between his hands before sliding his fingers into my hair.
I knew from last night that his hands were enormous.
Calloused, scarred, and built for entirely different work than this.
He washed my hair like he’d done it a thousand times before.
His fingertips pressed into my scalp in slow, firm circles.
He worked from the roots out, thorough and unhurried, and I sat there with my eyes closed and my hands resting on my knees and let him.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let someone do something for me without arguing first.
He rinsed away the suds slowly. The warm water tracked down my neck, across my collarbones, and I felt his thumb follow it—just once, a slow deliberate drag along the line of my throat that had nothing to do with washing my hair and everything to do with him reminding both of us who I belonged to now.
Then he picked up the cloth.
He was slow about that too—unhurried, methodical, the rough texture of the cloth moving across my skin in long strokes that were half practical and half something else entirely.
Down each arm, his free hand following behind the cloth, palm flat against my wet skin.
He turned my wrist over and pressed his lips to the inside where my pulse was jumping.
I watched his face. His jaw was set, his eyes dark and focused. He looked like a man exercising very deliberate control and finding it costly.
Good. I wasn’t the only one feeling what I was feeling.
The cloth moved across my collar bone, over the swell of my breast before going lower. Across my stomach, just brushing between my legs before sliding the length of my leg. I felt the weight of his touch everywhere—deep in my core where I was still tender and still wanting him.
He dropped the cloth.
His hand slid beneath the water, fingers spreading my pussy open without hesitation, his thumb finding my clit and working it in slow, deliberate. My hips lifted. The water sloshed. I grabbed the edge of the tub.
“Sore?” he asked.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Good. I want you to remember the feel my cock every time you move today.”
I opened my eyes. “You’re not supposed to say things like that.”
“Says who.” He pressed deeper, rubbing my clit harder, watching my face with that focused attention. My hips were moving against his hand now, small and involuntary, chasing the pressure. “I’m glad I was the first, Keely. And I’m damn well going to be the last.”
Not a question. Not a line. Just Griffin stating a fact.
Within moments I was coming. Arching my back, letting the feel of my release wash over me. He pressed a kiss to my forehead, soothing his hand over my thigh.
I reached out and put my wet fingers against the scar on his jaw—the one I’d been looking at for weeks, winching inwardly at how much pain he must have endured.
He went still under my touch the way he’d gone still last night when I’d first put my hands on him.
Like being touched gently was something he’d forgotten how to receive.
“I know,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Really looked—no wall, no careful distance, just him. Something moved across his face that I’d only seen once before, last night when he’d discovered I’d never been with a man, when the possession in his eyes had changed to something rawer, deeper.
“Keely.” He hands gripping the sides of the tub.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been in this town for months I didn’t talk to anyone for the first three. Ate alone. Worked alone. Went home alone every night and told myself that was fine. It wasn’t fine. I didn’t have anything to compare it to until you.”
“Griffin—”
“I’m not finished.” His free hand came up and gripped my chin, tilting my face up to his. Gentle. Immovable. “I walked into that diner, ate, drove home and lay in the dark for hours trying to talk myself out of going back. I came back the next night anyway.”
“I know,” I said softly. “I noticed.”
He put his hands on my face and I held my breath. I knew something was about to change the same way you sometimes knew when a storm was about to break.
“I love you.” He said it the same way he said everything—certain, sure, and completely without performance, like it was just a thing that was true and he was tired of not saying it.
“I’ve loved you since that first night. I didn’t know what to do with it and I tried to leave it—you— alone, but I couldn’t. ”
I felt my eyes go bright and hot and I blinked hard because I was not going to cry in this man’s bathtub, I absolutely refused. \
“I love you too.” My voice only broke slightly on the last word. “I think I loved you when you told that kid he didn’t get to touch me. Like it was a law. Like it had already been decided.”
“It had,” he said simply.
He leaned in and kissed me—slow this time, different from last night’s heat and urgency.
This was something deliberate. His mouth moved against mine like he was making a point, like this was the kiss that meant something different than the ones before it, like he was signing his name to something.
I kissed him back with everything I had, my wet hands coming up to grip the back of his neck, pulling him closer, the water sloshing against the porcelain.
When he broke away, he pressed his forehead to mine and we stayed like that, both of us breathing hard.
“You’re going to get your sweatpants wet,” I said finally.
“They’ll dry.”
I laughed—a real one, surprised out of me—and felt him respond to it, felt the tension in his frame shift into something easier. This man who checked sightlines, carried scars inside and out—
laughed too. Low and quiet, barely there, but real.
Finally, he stood up and reached for a towel, holding it open. “Come here.”
I stood and he wrapped it around me, tucking it in at my chest, his hands smoothing across my shoulders. Then he picked me up and carried me back to the bedroom. He laid me down on the quilt, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked at me. “Sleep,” he said.
“It’s morning.”
“You worked a twelve-hour shift yesterday and didn’t sleep enough. Sleep.”
I looked at him—at the scars and the set jaw and the dark eyes that had been watching me for weeks from a corner booth, waiting. “Are you going to stay?”
He didn’t answer, just took off his sweatpants and got into bed beside me and held out his arms. I snuggled up against him as he pulled the covers up around us.
My cheek found his chest, his heartbeat slow and steady under my ear—not the racing pulse of a man who was uncertain, but the deep, even rhythm of one who had decided and settled.
His arm came around me and the weight of it was everything.
Warm and absolute and not going anywhere.
I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for weeks. Maybe years.
Outside the window the mountain was bright, the pines moving in a low wind. Griffin’s chest rose and fell, slow and even. His thumb moved once across my shoulder, a single absent stroke, like he was making sure I was still there.
I thought about saying something. I had things I could have said—about the diner, about the first night, about the weeks I’d spent telling myself a man like him wouldn’t look twice at a woman like me.
I could have told him that he’d been the first person in longer than I could remember to make me feel like the weight I was carrying was something someone else might actually want to help hold.
I didn’t say any of it. I didn’t need to. He already knew—I could feel it in the way he held me, certain and unhurried, like this was simply where I lived now and he’d already made his peace with that and was glad about it.
The endless running list of things to do and things to worry about and things I couldn’t afford to let slide—had gone quiet.
Not forever, I knew that. Tomorrow there would be shifts and textbooks and brothers who needed things and a world that didn’t pause because I’d finally found somewhere I wanted to be.
But not right now.
Right now, there was just this. His heartbeat. The light through the curtains. The unfamiliar, devastating peace of being held by someone who had decided I was worth holding onto.
I pressed my palm flat against his chest, over the steady thump of his heart and his hand covered mine.
I closed my eyes, and for the first time in longer than I could count, I didn’t lie awake.