Claimed By the Mountain Men (Claimed by… Reverse Harems #3)

Chapter 1

REID

The snow crust breaks clean under my boot.

Good. That's what we need to know.

Jace walks ahead of me, three days back from Honduras and already restless. Today it's about the boots. Tomorrow it'll be a new route, a harder ridge line, some faraway place that hasn't seen him yet. That's Jace. The horizon has to keep moving or something in him pulls tight.

Owen walks to my left, quieter, his eyes tracking the tree line with the same methodical sweep he'd give a quarterly report.

It's good to have Jace back.

The Honduras leg ran three weeks. Technically it was a field test: high-altitude jungle terrain, stress-testing the new cold-weather layering system in extreme humidity before we run it in dry cold.

He came back with forty pages of handwritten notes, mud permanently set into the seams of three pieces of gear, and the specific, barely-contained energy of a man who has been moving through difficult country and isn't ready to stop yet.

Of the three of us, he's always been the one who needs to go.

Owen and I grew into this land the way the larch does, slow and deep, until the leaving of it would feel like pulling something up by the roots. Jace loves it here. He also cannot stay still for too long. Both things are true, and we stopped trying to resolve the contradiction years ago.

The boots are performing. The sole compound was Jace's push from the beginning, his conviction that we were leaving serious winter market share on the table because every comparable product stiffens and loses traction under sustained subzero use.

He wasn't wrong. We're on packed frozen ground at twenty-two degrees and the flex retention is holding, the grip pattern biting clean through the crust without the brittleness that kills confidence on technical terrain.

I work my way across the ice shelf at the creek crossing and feel nothing give. Good grip. Good flex. Good.

"The sole compound is going to be the thing that moves units," Jace says, not looking back.

He drives his boot into a frozen lip of snow at the trail's edge, deliberate, testing.

"Serious cold-weather buyers have been making peace with stiff soles for years because there wasn't a better option. Now there is."

"At a cost." Even on a trail in the woods, Owen sounds like he's chairing a meeting. "The compound runs twelve percent above materials projection. That compresses margin on the base model."

"Margin compresses if we hold the current price point. We don't have to."

"We've modeled price elasticity in this segment."

"We modeled it with last year's customer data. Our position in the market has shifted. The ceiling has moved."

There it is. The particular frequency of their disagreements.

Owen is right about the numbers. Jace is right about the product.

I've sat in the middle of some version of this argument across four product cycles, and the resolution is always the same: we find the number that honors both. We're not there yet today.

"The compound stays," I say. "We work the price question separately. But, not now."

We keep walking.

The trees close around us as the trail bends north.

Old growth Douglas fir and western larch, trunks so wide that three men linking hands couldn't reach around them.

Snow sits heavy on the lower branches. The light comes through grey and flat, late February in the Flathead Valley, and the cold works through the base layer where the wind finds the collar and the cuffs.

My lungs register every inhale. That bite.

That particular clean sharpness you only get at elevation in real Montana winter.

I've lived in a lot of places. Done difficult work in difficult environments across three continents. None of them settle in the chest the way these mountains do.

Owen lets a beat pass. He's not done discussing business.

"The investment fund representative called again this morning," he says. "They're pressing for a decision."

I feel the shift in Jace before I see it. He doesn't stop walking, but his shoulders stiffen.

True North. Our brand of outdoor gear.

We built it from nothing, and that word is not rhetorical.

Twelve years ago we had Jace's field notebooks, Owen's projections on a laptop, and my signature on an equipment lease I wasn't sure we could service.

We ran the first season out of a converted barn on the north edge of the property.

The second season we hired two people. The fifth season we turned our first real profit and Owen made a spreadsheet about it that I still have somewhere.

Now we have forty-three employees, a product line that outdoor industry publications use as a quality benchmark, and an investment fund with nine figures under management telling us they want to buy it.

We are already wealthy men. That fact still catches me sideways sometimes, the distance between the barn and where we are now. The acquisition would push that number past anything I know how to think about clearly.

And still.

Letting go of what we built is harder to calculate than the money makes it sound.

There are reasons to do it. The Wolf Rescue Center runs on what we funnel to it privately. Acquisition capital would let us do more. And Jace has his own projects, things that would benefit from the kind of funding this deal would free up.

But there are mornings I walk this land and feel the company the same way I feel the trees and the cold, like something that grew here because it was supposed to, and I don't know what it looks like to hand that to a fund.

"We're not going to settle this on a trail," I say.

Jace turns partway, enough to make the point. "I didn't realize we were settling it at all."

I put myself between the argument and where it's heading. "Both of you have points worth hearing. Neither of you is getting heard right now."

Silence. A raven calls from somewhere in the eastern trees and goes quiet.

Jace faces forward and starts walking again.

Owen says nothing. The argument will keep until tonight.

The trail rises, the ground hardening as the canopy thickens and shades the snow from any daytime softening. My lungs work in the cold. The boots hold.

I built a different kind of life before this one.

A decade in the Marine Corps, Force Reconnaissance.

You learn things in that work that don't unlatch when you're done with it.

How to read a room before you're fully through the door.

How to move without declaring yourself. How to hold your own noise down low enough that the world forgets you're in it.

I'm still running all of it, fourteen years out of uniform, still reading tree lines and approaches and the specific quality of quiet that precedes the thing that breaks it.

Which is why I hear it before Jace or Owen do.

High. Sharp. Gone.

I stop walking.

Jace and Owen stop a half-second later, heads lifting.

The woods absorb it completely. Nothing moves. A spruce somewhere above us drops its snow load and the soft collapse is the only sound for a long moment.

I know what animals sound like in these trees.

Elk, mule deer, the occasional mountain lion calling from the ridge.

I've heard wind work through the canyon breaks to the north and produce sounds that would make a civilian's skin cold.

Years of operating in environments where misidentifying a sound got people killed trained me to sit with ambiguity until I had enough information.

Then it comes again.

Higher pitched. Shorter. A woman's scream.

"Mrs. Smith's place," Jace says.

"She hasn't been there since she moved to Florida, two years ago." Owen says. "And the January storm did real damage. The place is barely standing."

We're already moving.

The cabin sits in its clearing two hundred yards off the main trail. I haven't come this close to it in months, and Owen wasn't wrong. The north side shows serious structural failure. The porch boards are rotted through in several places.

But the chimney is working. Thin grey smoke, consistent draw, the kind that comes from a managed fire.

I stop at the perimeter and look at the ground.

Multiple passes around the cabin's exterior, close to the walls, both directions. The pattern of someone who walked the perimeter more than once, checking something. No tire tracks on the access road. No vehicle parked anywhere I can see.

Whoever made those prints hiked in.

"Squatter," I say. It's the cleanest read. Empty cabin, remote enough that no one checks it through winter. Someone found it and moved in.

I go to the front door and try the handle. Locked.

Jace and Owen are on either side of me. The conversation we're not having is simple: a woman screamed in a locked cabin.

The scream comes again. From inside.

I step back, shift my weight, and put my boot into the door beside the lock. The frame cracks and gives. The door swings hard into the interior wall and we go through fast, the cold air following us in.

The room is small. A main living space, a kitchen along the far wall, a low fire in the hearth. A backpack on the table. An axe next to it.

I register all of it in under a second. Old habit.

A door at the back of the room bursts open.

She comes through it terrified, hair dripping wet, plastered to her neck and shoulders, a towel gripped around her body with one hand. She skids on the bare floor and catches herself on the kitchen table. Sees us.

Goes still.

Her eyes move. Door. Window. Us. Table.

She grabs the axe.

Her back hits the far wall in one move, the axe raised and angled toward the three of us, her grip two-handed on the handle, her forearm pressing the towel against her body. She's shaking. The cold air from the open door is raising goosebumps across her bare shoulders. Her eyes don't leave us.

The hands holding the axe are steadier than the rest of her.

She came out of that room expecting something worse than us.

The door coming off its frame in a frozen February afternoon with no warning is about as terrifying an entry as we could have made.

I'm standing in her space with two other large men and nothing about this looks like help from where she's standing.

I notice her bare shoulders, the water still dripping from the ends of her dark hair, the grey-green of her eyes sharp and furious over the axe handle.

I've walked into rooms where people wanted me dead. I know what that looks like, what it smells like, the specific quality of attention a person gives you when they're calculating whether to act.

She's not calculating.

She's already decided.

She will swing before she'll step back, and some part of my threat assessment that has never once misfired is telling me the most dangerous thing in this room is a terrified woman in a towel who has absolutely nothing left to lose.