His hand slides around to the front and his fingers find my clit and I cry out. He doesn't slow, doesn't ease up — driving into me hard while his fingers work in tight circles and I brace against the counter and take it and ask for more.
"Nash—"
"I know." His fingers press harder. "Come for me again."
I do. I clench around him and say his name and keep saying it and he groans against my neck and drives deeper and harder and I feel him lose the rhythm, feel the control go, and then his hands grip me so tight it's almost too much and he buries himself deep and shudders. Warmth fills me. His whole body pressing me into the counter, hips stuttering, my name torn out of him like he had no choice about it.
Then still. Both of us breathing hard. His forehead on my shoulder.
After a moment his chin drops to rest there. The silk is crumpled around my hips, and neither of us moves to fix it. The kitchen is warm and lit and the mountain sits dark through the window and the house holds, solid and quiet, the radiators ticking.
Rivet trots in from the hall and sits on Nash's boot with the serene satisfaction of a dog whose plan has come together exactly on schedule.
"Our dog," he says, before I can say a word.
I look at our reflection in the dark window. His arms around me, my hair loose, the kitchen warm and lit at three in the morning.
"Tea," I say.
"Yeah," he says. Neither of us moves.
Wrench appears in the doorway, takes one look, and folds himself across both our feet with a long exhale.
Penny doesn't come downstairs.
Penny has decided, correctly, that her work here is done.
six
Maple
Thehotelopensona 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.
