Caught by the Wylde Mountain Man (Wylde Mountain Heat #3)

Chapter 1

Tori

The group chat has been going for eleven minutes and Jules has already used the word “screenshotted” twice.

Claire: It’s a boat ride, Jules. On water. With a paddle.

Jules: Marissa took a boat ride with a paddle. She now lives on the mountain and runs the man’s business. Jenna went for a photo assignment. She now lives on the mountain in a cabin built by a man who speaks four words a day. The data is the data.

Paige: Have so much fun today!! Send pictures!!

Me: It’s a rafting trip. Marissa planned it. I said yes because saying no to Marissa requires energy I do not currently possess.

Jules: You said yes because the mountain is doing what the mountain does.

Me: I said yes because I came home from the reunion trip feeling human and the ER burned through it in weeks. I was going to start an IV on myself in the break room just for the lie-down.

Claire: That’s concerning.

Me: I’m being dramatic.

Claire: Are you?

Jules: She’s not. Tori, when’s the last time you slept more than five hours?

I look at that question for a long time. I do not answer it.

Me: Gotta go. Raft awaits.

Jules: SCREENSHOTTED. That’s two now. I still have “no love stories, no mountain men, no dramatic life changes” from when you announced this trip. The collection grows.

Paige: Be safe!! Have an amazing day!! You deserve this!!

Paige uses exclamation points the way I use lidocaine: generously and with total sincerity. I love her for it. I love all of them. Even Jules, who is wrong about everything except the sleep thing.

I set my phone on the passenger seat and look through the windshield at Wylde Mountain Outfitters. The gravel lot. The equipment trailer. The sign in green paint above the office door. Behind all of it, the river, loud enough to hear with the windows up.

I know this parking lot. I was here six weeks ago for the reunion trip, all six of us piling out of a rental van in life jackets while Claire audited the safety waiver with a highlighter.

I went home from that trip recharged. Shoulders down, sleep restored, the closest thing to functional I’d felt in months.

Charlotte Metro’s ER ate through all of it in under two months.

Summer is trauma season. Every weekend warrior with a dirt bike and no helmet.

Every pool accident, every heatstroke, every tourist who thought cliff jumping looked easy until it wasn’t.

July and August are the months that remind you why emergency nursing has one of the highest burnout rates in medicine.

I came home from the reunion feeling human.

Six weeks later I’m worse than before I left, because now I know what rest feels like and I can measure the exact distance between that and this.

Levi and Marissa picked me up at the airport in Bozeman yesterday.

The drive up the mountain hit different the second time.

Not the excitement of something new. The relief of something familiar.

The air smelled like that green, alive thing that doesn’t exist inside hospitals.

Marissa talked the whole drive. Where we’d hike, where we’d eat, the rafting trip I’m about to do.

She had an itinerary. Of course she had an itinerary.

Marissa has itineraries the way other people have nervous habits.

Levi drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on her knee and he looked at her the way men in insurance commercials look at sunsets. Completely gone.

I sat in the back seat and felt my shoulders drop.

My trapezius muscles had gone right back to my earlobes after my first shift home.

They released about twenty minutes into the drive yesterday, and the relief was so immediate I almost gasped.

A healthy person does not experience muscle release as a medical event.

I’m an ER nurse. Four years at Charlotte Metro, which is a Level I trauma center that averages a hundred and sixty patients a day and staffs its overnight shifts with the cheerful energy of a submarine crew on month nine.

I’m good at the work. I’m good at the chaos, the triage, the three-second decisions that determine whether someone’s Tuesday ends with discharge papers or not.

I love it. I love being the person in the room who knows what to do when everyone else has stopped knowing.

I also put my car keys in the refrigerator last week and didn’t find them for two days.

I don’t say the word “burnout” because that word means something is broken, and nothing is broken.

I just need to stop again. Stop being the reliable one.

Stop holding people’s lives in my hands at 3am while the fluorescent lights hum and the coffee tastes like it gave up on itself three pots ago.

I did this six weeks ago and it worked and I’m back because I need it to work again.

Time. That’s what I have. Time on a mountain where two of my best friends fell in love and forgot to leave.

Jenna is on the north side with Jasper now, living in a cabin he built, photographing ridgelines and communicating with her boyfriend through furniture placement.

Marissa is here at Outfitters, running Levi’s business better than he ever did and reminding him of it constantly.

I’m not here for romance. I’m here for sleep. I’m going to sleep like it’s a competitive sport and I am training for the national team.

But first, apparently, I’m going rafting.

The door of the Outfitters office opens and Marissa comes out with two travel mugs and the posture of a woman who has found her calling.

“Coffee,” she says, handing one through my window. “And we’re five minutes ahead of schedule, which means you can sit for a second if you need it.”

I take the coffee. It’s good. Marissa doesn’t do anything below excellent.

“Where’s the schedule?” I ask.

“Phone. I went digital.”

“What happened to laminated?”

“I evolved.” She taps the roof of the car twice. “Come on. Kai’s already rigging the raft.”

Kai. The name surfaces from July. The safety kayaker on our reunion trip.

The quiet one who lifted a hand at the group and said nothing while Levi did all the talking.

He followed the raft downstream like a current with good shoulders.

I registered him the way you register a piece of medical equipment that’s functioning correctly: noted, filed, not thought about again until someone says the name.

I get out of the car. The sun hits my bare arms and they practically glow. Weeks of night shifts in a windowless ER will do that.

The air stops me. Clean, warm, carrying the mineral smell of the river and the green of the pines. Underneath it, a kind of silence that has texture. The opposite of a hospital corridor at shift change.

I follow Marissa toward the water.

And there he is.

He’s at the raft, checking the inflation on the bow tubes.

His back is to me. Which is fine because his back is plenty informative.

Broad. The kind of shoulder development that comes from paddling, not lifting.

Functional musculature, built through use.

Trapezius and deltoids defined under a faded gray t-shirt that’s been washed so many times it barely has a color opinion.

I am not checking him out. I am performing a structural assessment.

Okay, I’m checking him out.

He turns around.

The face matches the back. Strong jaw. Light brown hair, pushed back, a little long.

Tan skin over bone structure that Jenna would describe using words like “compositional integrity” and that I would describe using the word “inconvenient.” He’s handsome in a way that doesn’t announce itself.

The kind of face you’d walk past and then think about three blocks later for reasons you couldn’t articulate.

He sees me. His eyes hold mine for two seconds. They’re blue and steady. No smile. No nod. No the-guide-is-happy-to-see-you energy that Levi projects like a signal flare. He looks at me the way I look at a patient walking into triage. Complete attention. Zero commentary.

Then he goes back to the raft.

I’ve been assessed, cataloged, and dismissed in under three seconds by a man who didn’t use a single word.

I’m standing in a gravel parking lot in Montana with my REI water sandals and my hair in the braid I wear for twelve-hour shifts and my arms glowing like a woman who lives under fluorescent lighting, and I am trying to figure out why being looked at by this man felt different from being looked at by anyone else.

It didn’t. My central nervous system is overtired and producing unreliable data. Moving on.

Levi comes around the side of the equipment trailer with a paddle over each shoulder and the grin I remember from July. Big, wide, the smile of a man who believes everything is the best thing that’s ever happened.

“Tori! How are you feeling? Ready for the water?”

“I’m vertical and caffeinated. That’s what I’ve got.”

“That’s the spirit.” He jerks his chin toward the raft. “Kai’s guiding your trip today. Best on the river. You’re in good hands.”

I look at Kai. He’s adjusting a strap and does not react to the compliment. Levi looks at Kai. Kai does not look at Levi.

“Real chatterbox,” Levi says. “Can’t shut him up.”

Kai pulls the strap tight. Doesn’t speak. His face doesn’t change.

I like him already. Not in a falling-in-love way.

In a “this man does not waste words and I deeply respect that” way.

I have spent four years surrounded by noise.

Patients who need reassurance. Families who need updates.

Monitors that never stop beeping. A man who can exist in a space without filling it with sound is a man I understand on a physiological level.

The safety briefing is two minutes. Kai runs through it the way I run through discharge instructions: clear, precise, one pass, no filler.

PFD buckled tight. Feet braced under the thwarts.

Paddle at the T-grip. If you go in, feet up, float on your back, don’t fight the current.

His voice is low and even and he says each thing exactly once.