Protected by the Wylde Mountain Man (Wylde Mountain Heat #2)

Chapter 1

Jenna

I have been on this mountain for three days and I’m about to do something my mother would describe as “creative decision-making,” which is her polite way of saying I’ve made a choice that will require a rescue helicopter or a very long walk.

Neither, hopefully. But the week is young.

My actual phone is at forty-one percent.

This is going to be a problem later. I know this the way I know that the golden hour light on a south-facing ridge is going to be better than anything I can plan for.

I know it and I’m looking at it and I’m not plugging it in because the charger is in Marissa’s guest room and I’m already packed and the light waits for no one.

“You’re leaving without coffee.” Marissa appears in the doorway of Outfitters with two mugs and an expression I recognize from nine years of friendship. It’s her “I support you but I’m also preparing your eulogy” face.

“I have a thermos in the car.”

“That coffee is dead.” She hands me the fresh one.

It’s good. It’s always good. Marissa doesn’t do things halfway, including relocation.

She moved to this mountain a few weeks ago for a river guide with a crooked grin and an outfitting business that needed a woman with a clipboard.

She’s already rebranded the website, tripled the bookings, and installed a sixty-inch oak desk with cable management.

The desk is bigger than Levi’s. She brings this up frequently.

“Okay.” She leans against the doorframe. “Let’s hear the plan.”

“Trail starts at the north ridge trailhead. I follow it up past the waterfall, then cut east toward the canyon overlook. First camp near the upper basin. The magazine wants wide landscapes, dramatic terrain, untouched-wilderness energy. I’ll work my way north along the ridgeline over the week.”

“And if you go off-trail?”

“I won’t go off-trail.”

“Jenna.”

“I probably won’t go off-trail.”

She gives me the look. The look that organized a six-person reunion trip across four states, the look that rebuilt a business from a folding table. It’s the look of a woman who loves me and also knows me well enough to plan for my worst impulses.

“Satellite phone check-in every night by seven,” she says. “If I don’t hear from you, I’m calling search and rescue. Not the next morning. That night.”

“That seems aggressive.”

“I’m serious. Seven o’clock. A message. Actual words, not a photo of a sunset with no context.”

“That was one time.”

“It was four times.”

I laugh because she’s right. I once sent Marissa a photo of a glacier in Iceland instead of confirming I was alive, and she didn’t sleep until I responded to her seventeen follow-up messages eight hours later. We don’t talk about it. She talks about it constantly.

“Seven o’clock,” I say. “Satellite phone. Words. Proof of life.”

“Thank you.” She hugs me. Quick, tight, the Marissa hug that feels like being held together by someone who would burn down a building for you. “Go get your shots. And stay on the trail.”

“Mostly.”

“Jenna.”

“Leaving now.”

My phone buzzes as I pull out of the lot. The group chat.

Claire: Did she bring the satellite phone?

Marissa: She brought it. I watched her pack it.

Jules: Jenna, if you die on a mountain for a photo, I’m putting the worst picture of you from college on the memorial slideshow. The one from formal. You know which one.

Tori: She’s not going to die. She’s a professional.

Jules: Professionals die on mountains all the time. That’s like half of every nature documentary.

Paige: Be safe!! Take amazing photos!! We love you!!

Paige uses exclamation points the way other people use periods. Everything she says sounds like a greeting card written by someone who genuinely means every word, and the thing is, she does. Six weeks since she gave back a ring and she’s still the kindest person in any room, digital or otherwise.

Me: Alive. Caffeinated. Camera charged. Phone less so. Love you all. Check-in at seven.

Jules: “Phone less so” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

I put the phone in the center console and drive.

The trailhead is forty minutes from town on a gravel road that narrows twice and dead-ends at a clearing with room for three cars.

Mine is the only one. The air up here is different.

Thinner, cleaner, sharp with pine and the mineral smell of rock and cold water.

The sky is wide and deep and so blue it looks fake.

I step out of the car and the mountain hits me the way it always does, the way it did the first time I came here with the girls three weeks ago for the reunion trip.

Not beautiful. That word is useless. Every mountain is beautiful.

The way the morning light cuts between the pines at this elevation, low and gold, turning the bark orange and throwing long shadows across the trail.

The way the canyon opens up half a mile in and the rock face catches the sun on its eastern wall and the color shifts from gray to amber to something close to copper.

I see the first shot before I’ve walked a hundred yards.

Second growth pine against exposed granite, the texture contrast, the way the trunk curves toward the light.

I shoot it. Check the frame. Adjust. Shoot again.

This is the assignment. Montana Backcountry hired me to photograph the parts of this mountain that tourists walk past. The trails nobody takes, the terrain that isn’t on the brochures.

I pitched the series after the reunion trip because I couldn’t stop thinking about the light up here.

The way it moves through the canyon. The way the landscape changes every quarter mile.

I’ve shot glaciers in Iceland and wind-carved rock in Patagonia and none of it did what these mountains did, which was make me forget to look at my phone for six straight hours.

I shoot all day. By late afternoon I have over a hundred frames and the beginning of something I can feel in my chest, the shape of the series taking form.

I make camp near the upper basin, where a flat stretch of ground sits between two pines and the creek is close enough to hear.

The tent goes up in four minutes. Camp stove, water filter, bear canister hung.

I eat rehydrated pad thai that tastes like salt and ambition and I don’t care because the sky above the ridge is going pink and orange and the only sound is the creek and the wind in the pines and my own breathing.

I sit on a rock with my hands around a tin cup of terrible instant coffee and I breathe out so deeply my whole body loosens.

This. This is the thing I can never explain to people who don’t do what I do.

The silence that isn’t empty. The kind of quiet that has weight and texture, that fills up the spaces in your brain where the noise usually lives.

I could live out here. I think that every time, in every wild place I’ve ever worked, but this time I mean it differently.

Not as a fantasy. As a fact I haven’t figured out the logistics for yet.

I check in with Marissa on the satellite phone.

“Alive. Camp is set. The light up here is unreal.” She sends back a voice message I can barely make out through the static: something about bears and something about Levi saying to stay south of the ridge.

I send her my GPS coordinates and close my eyes and sleep like a person with no alarm and no regrets.

The next morning the light is even better.

The trail climbs. I shoot as I go. The wildflowers on the south-facing slope, purple and yellow against dark soil.

A creek crossing where the water runs clear over green-black rock, and the refracted light creates this pattern on the surface I’ve never seen anywhere else.

A dead tree at the ridgeline, stripped white by weather, standing alone against the sky like it’s making a point about something.

By noon I have eighty-seven frames and the trail has gotten quieter.

Fewer boot prints. No trail markers for the last mile.

The main trail curved south toward the waterfall viewpoint, the one every hiker photographs, the one Montana Backcountry does not need because they can pull that from any stock library in the country.

I curved north.

I curved north because the light curved north.

Because the canyon wall on this side catches the afternoon sun at an angle that turns the rock face into something I’ve never seen in a photograph, warm and striated and layered with color.

Because the ridge ahead has a composition that makes me giddy: old-growth pines against a cliff face with the canyon dropping away behind them, the depth, the scale.

I can see the shot. I can see it in the magazine. Full spread, maybe the cover.

I mark the spot where I leave the trail. A cairn of three rocks on the left side, next to a distinctive split-trunk pine. I’ll find it on the way back. I always find my way back.

The terrain changes. Steeper, rockier, less traveled.

The undergrowth is thicker. I push through it because the light is ahead of me and the composition is always just a little further.

I shoot the cliff face from three angles.

I climb a rock outcropping for elevation and shoot the canyon from above and the frame is so good I forget to breathe for a second.

Just the click of the shutter and the image on the screen and the knowledge that this is the one. This is the shot that sells the series.

I keep going.