Tamed By the Gentle Mountain Man (Summer Heat in Silver Ridge #4)

Chapter 1

one

Sloane

The hotel room is nicer than I expected.

Maple checks me in with a warm smile and a room key and a recommendation for the diner down the street.

The room has a white duvet and a window that looks out over a mountain and a small jar of wildflowers on the dresser.

I drop my bag, kick off my shoes, and lie flat on the bed and stare at the ceiling.

I feel, for the first time in two years, absolutely nothing I have to do about.

It's a Saturday. I have no meetings. No deliverables. No one texting me from across the office about dinner. I quit on Thursday, ended my relationship on Thursday — same conversation, more or less, once it became clear those two things couldn't exist separately anymore.

Then, I packed a bag on Friday and booked this hotel because I'd read about Silver Ridge once in something and the name stuck and I needed to go somewhere that wasn't Vancouver and this was the first name I trusted.

I don't have a plan. I've always had a plan. I had a five-year plan at twenty-three, which I hit in four years, and then built another one. I'm twenty-eight and I just blew up every structure I'd built and drove six hours into the mountains with one bag and no return ticket and… honestly?

Honestly I feel a little electric.

Not fine. I'm not fine.

My ex, Matthew, was two years of my life and some of that was real, but the ending was ugly and I'll feel that later. My job mattered and walking away from it felt like leaving a limb somewhere.

I unzip my bag. I hang a few things up. I stand at the window and look at the mountain for a while.

Then I go find coffee.

The farmer's market is open on Saturday mornings, according to a big a-frame sign.

Maybe a dozen stalls in a town square with a wooden bandstand at one end and a mountain at every other. Produce, honey, baked goods, dried herbs in brown paper bags.

I walk slowly. I have nowhere to be. That's still new enough that I notice it.

Then I reach the last stall in the row and stop.

The produce alone would have stopped me — tomatoes in four varieties with small handwritten stakes, bundles of chard with stems so red they look painted, a flat of strawberries that smell sweet and amazing. But I'm not really looking at the produce.

The man behind the table is the size of a small building.

Six-three at least, broad through the shoulders, dark hair going silver at the temples.

A jaw that looks like it was cut from stone, and underneath it a mouth that is, for no reason I can explain, immediately distracting.

His hands are resting on the table as he makes change for a customer — enormous hands, dark with soil along every crease, the kind that have done real work for a long time and look entirely at home doing it.

He's not looking at me. He's looking at the customer. He gives her change and says, "Those Sungolds are best today. Quarter hour in the sun before you eat them," and she takes her bag and goes. He still doesn't look at me, but I am aware that I have stopped walking because of a man.

I redirect my attention to the table.

On his right, there's a cardboard box. In the box, a scrap of dark flannel folded into a nest. And in the nest. Something small. Something that moves.

I step sideways to see better.

A rabbit. Wild, brown-grey, white flash on the tail, barely the size of my fist. One back leg wrapped in what looks like a toothpick-and-tape splint, the smallest splint I have ever seen, and it's sitting very still in the flannel with its nose twitching.

The man turns to the rabbit and as he does, without breaking stride, picks up a small eyedropper from beside the box, fills it from a little bottle, and offers it to the rabbit. She drinks. He watches until she's done, sets the eyedropper back, turns to a newly arrived customer.

I stand there.

When the customer leaves he looks at me. Up close, his eyes are a quiet brown, and there are deep lines at the corners from squinting into weather, and he waits with the ease of someone who has made peace with silence.

"The rabbit," I say finally.

"Found her in the field this morning. Leg's hurt."

"You brought her to the farmer's market?"

"Couldn't leave her. She needs the drops every hour." He turns back to straightening a stack of chard that didn't need straightening.

I keep looking at the box. The rabbit in her flannel nest with her ridiculous tiny splint. Before he loaded his truck this morning, before the stall, the customers, the whole day — he made her somewhere soft to be. Built his morning around the fact of her.

I had a rabbit when I was eight. Her name was Clover and she was grey with one white ear and she died over a weekend while we were at my grandmother's and I came home and she was just gone.

I cried for three days and my mother said she was just a rabbit, sweetheart and I understood even then that she was entirely missing the point.

I look at the box. I look at the man.

"Is she going to be okay?"

He considers this with the seriousness it deserves. "Leg's clean. No infection. She's eating." A beat. "Good chance."

"What happens to her after today?"

"Keep her somewhere quiet till the leg heals. Release her when she's ready."

I should go. I have a loaf of bread from two stalls back and nowhere particular to be and this man has customers coming.

"I had one," I say. "When I was eight. A rabbit. She died while I was away. I never got to know she was okay first."

"You want to see where this one ends up? Make sure she gets a happy ending?" he says.

He's already turning to lift a crate. Like it's a simple thing to offer. Like he's got nothing against it either way and it's entirely up to me.

It takes me about half a second.

"Yeah," I say. "I do."

I am aware it’s weird to follow a stranger home because of a rabbit.

I follow his truck out of Silver Ridge, through the valley, past the second ridge, up a gravel road through pine that opens without warning into a property that makes me ease off the accelerator without meaning to.

Farmhouse, old and tended. Long porch. A kitchen garden along the south side in dark, straight-edged beds.

Behind it, rows of vegetables. A chicken coop with a few hens moving in the sun.

White boxes at the tree line — beehives, four of them.

And along the fence, something tall and purple-blue that is absolutely covered in bees moving through it like slow, deliberate traffic.

I get out of my car and stand there.

I've lived in cities my whole adult life.

I know what quiet is supposed to sound like — the absence of things.

This isn't that. This is full: wind in the pines, a hen making a low satisfied sound, water somewhere I can't see.

It doesn't feel like anything's missing.

It feels like a frequency I forgot existed.

He's unloading crates, unhurried. He carries the rabbit box last, level and careful, and takes it to the porch where a very old dog lifts his head from a folded blanket and regards us both with ancient, untroubled eyes.

"That's Burl," the man says.

"And you're… uh," I stop. We've been talking for forty minutes and I don't know his name.

"Everett."

"Sloane."

He nods once. Crouches to check on the rabbit, straightens to his full height, looks at me standing in his driveway.

"Coffee?"

I look at the farm. The bees working the purple flowers. Burl putting his grey head back down with a sigh that seems to come from the floor of him. The small rabbit safe in her box on the porch of a man who got up this morning and decided she needed someone.

I look at Everett. Just for a second. The lines at the corners of his eyes. The way he's standing, like a man with nowhere else he'd rather be.

"Yeah," I say. "Okay."