Rescued by the Fierce Mountain Man (Summer Heat in Silver Ridge #3)

1. Hallie

one

Hallie

The vacancy sign is hand-lettered. Just a notecard in the window, black marker, someone's actual handwriting. I pull into the lot and sit there with the engine running, staring up at the Victorian hotel.

Silver Ridge.

Never heard of it. Didn't plan to end up here.

I drove north until north stopped making sense, then west, the highway shrinking down to two lanes and then one and then just dark mountain curves with my headlights doing their best. Then streetlights.

A main street. A sign that said Brooks Boutique Hotel and in the window, that card.

Vacancy.

Okay.

The woman at the desk is still up. She greets us with a smile, doesn’t ask too many questions, and slides me a key.

"How long are you thinking?" she asks.

"I'm not sure yet."

She writes something. I lean to see. Open-ended. Like it's a standard option.

Maybe it is. Maybe that's what this hotel is.

Theo is a deadweight on my shoulder going up the stairs. He wakes up just enough to say "where?" and I say "bed" and that's the whole conversation. I get his shoes off and get him under the covers, and he's gone before I've straightened up.

I stand in the middle of the room for a while. There are extra blankets folded on the chair. The window looks out at the mountains, dark shapes against a dark sky.

I sleep with my hand on his back.

He's awake before the sun rises, standing next to the bed, holding a button he's found somewhere.

"Hungry," he says.

"Good morning to you too."

"Good morning. Hungry."

I Google the local diner and then take us to Juniper’s, which is already full with the morning rush.

Theo gets pancakes. I get eggs and coffee and then more coffee. The waitress has a grey braid and moves like someone who's been doing this for thirty years and does not need your input. I like her immediately.

Theo eats with the single-minded focus of someone who has decided pancakes are the only thing that exists. He gets syrup on his elbow somehow. I hand him a napkin. He ignores it.

I watch the street. Every car. Every grey truck. Brad drives a Silverado, dark grey, nothing remarkable about it. That's the thing about Brad, nothing about him is remarkable, you'd never clock him coming.

I know he doesn't know where we are. I turned off location sharing in Kamloops, paid cash after that, drove routes that didn't make obvious sense. I know all of this.

I watch anyway.

"Mama."

"Mm?"

"That bird."

Magpie on the windowsill. Big, bold, looking straight at Theo like they have an appointment.

"That's a magpie."

Theo stares at it. Slides a piece of pancake toward the edge of his plate, then looks at me.

"No," I say.

He looks back at the magpie. Moves the pancake back. The magpie tips its head.

"He's waiting. He wants pancakes." Theo says.

"He's going to keep waiting."

Theo thinks about this. "That's sad."

"He'll find something else."

I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to care about the Magpie at the moment.

I just need to eat and let the tension that’s been building up inside me fade to a more manageable level.

Relaxing is hard when you have a four-year-old.

It’s even harder when you’re a single mom on the run from her ex, but I carry the weight.

I can’t let Theo know I’m barely holding it together. I have to be strong for both of us.

After breakfast, we walk around town for a bit. This place puts the small in small town. Theo spots a trail sign behind the hotel and points at it.

"That."

"We just got here."

"That," he says again, still pointing, in case I've forgotten where the trees are.

He's been in a car for two days. The trees are right there. My son needs fresh air and exercise; God knows I need it too. So, I relent.

"Okay," I say. "But we stay on the path."

He's already walking.

The trail is well-marked, a map is posted at the trailhead, and the trees are marked. I take a photo of the map, just in case.

For the first stretch, it's genuinely nice.

Theo holds my hand on the rooty parts and drops it everywhere else, and he has opinions about everything — stops to crouch over an ant, picks up a stick and immediately uses it to hit another stick, finds a puddle that he needs to step in specifically four times.

I let him. There's no one to tell him not to.

I'm watching him splash and thinking about nothing in particular when he's suddenly on a different path. Smaller, branching left, and he's already several steps down it.

"Theo. That's not the main trail."

He points at something I can't see. "That way."

I stand there for a second. He's four. He weighs thirty-eight pounds. I could just pick him up, but he gets his curious streak from me, and how I want to know what he saw.

I follow him down the path.

We walk longer than I mean to. The trail gets narrow and then just sort of implies itself between the trees, and when I stop and check my phone there's no signal, and when I pull up my photo of the map it tells me nothing useful about where we currently are on it.

The sky goes flat. The temperature drops.

"Okay, bud. Let's turn around."

"Not yet."

"Yeah, now." It’s not time to negotiate anymore.

He stops walking and turns to look at me with his full, serious face. Then he looks up at the sky. Then back at me. "Is it going to rain?"

"Probably."

He holds up his arms.

I pick him up, and we start back. Or I think we start back. The path splits somewhere I don't remember it splitting and I take the branch that feels right and it doesn't feel right for long. The rain starts, and Theo tucks his face against my neck.

I keep moving because stopping doesn't help anything.

"We're okay," I tell him. "I've got you."

He doesn't answer. He's not crying, but I can feel him tense up. I talk anyway, just to fill the air: “Look, there's a big tree; that one's huge; we'll find the path; we're okay.”

I hear footsteps.

I stop.

I turn, and he's just there, like the trees put him there — enormous, SAR pack on his back, rain jacket dark with wet. He stops when he sees me, his eyes going from me to Theo, who hides behind my leg.

My body does its thing. The old thing. Read him fast, figure out what he wants, get ahead of it. Protection.

But he's already looking away from me. He crouches down — actually crouches, brings all that size down to a crouch — and talks to Theo.

"Hey. I'm Ronan." He's calm. Matter-of-fact. "You doing okay?"

Theo stares at him.

Ronan waits. Doesn't push it.

"I’m Theo. This is my mommy. We're lost," Theo tells him.

"You're about a mile off the marked trail." He glances up at me briefly. "Easy to do."

"Can you find it?" I ask, not removing myself from my anchor point between them.

"Yeah." The man, Ronan, stands up to look at me properly. He’s way taller than me.

I nod.

"Can I go up?" Theo asks.

Ronan straightens and lifts him in one motion, settles him across his shoulders like it's nothing. "Hold on."

Theo grabs his hair. Not gently. Ronan doesn't react.

"You're very tall," Theo informs him.

"Yep."

"Mama's not this tall."

"I heard that," I say.

Ronan chuckles. “Follow me. I’ll get you back to town.” He turns and starts walking and I follow, and within minutes I can see the main path through the trees.

He walks us all the way to the trailhead, Theo still up top, still holding his hair, chattering now about the hawk we spotted and whether hawks eat pancakes. Ronan answers this seriously — no, mostly mice — which opens up a whole line of questioning about mice that I can't entirely follow.

At the trailhead, he lifts Theo down and sets him on his feet.

Theo immediately sits down on the ground to examine a pinecone.

I look at this man, Ronan, standing in the rain at the edge of the trees. Close up, he's even bigger. There's mud on his jacket, and he doesn't look like someone who minds.

"Thank you," I say.

He nods.

"Main trails only," he says. "The side ones stop being marked fast. That’s why we patrol the parks, just in case."

"I figured that out."

He looks at Theo on the ground, then back at me, and there's a question in it that he doesn't ask.

"We just got here," I say, because it seems like the relevant information.

He looks at me for a moment. “Well, welcome to Silver Ridge. Make sure you get dry and warm.” That's it. He steps back, turns, and goes into the trees.

Theo watches him go. Then he holds up the pinecone.

"For the bird," he says.

"Magpies don't eat pinecones."

He considers this. "For me, then."

"Sure."

He puts it in his pocket and stands up and takes my hand, and we walk back to the hotel in the rain.