Tempted by the Wylde Lumberjack (Wylde Mountain Timber #5)

Chapter 1

Mel

My truck smells like the coffee I bought two hours ago and forgot to drink.

It’s sitting in the cupholder, cold, lid still on, and I keep looking at it like it’s going to tell me whether this drive is a good idea.

It has no opinion. It’s coffee. I should stop asking inanimate objects for life advice, but the alternatives are worse, because the alternatives involve thinking about why I’m actually on this road, and I’ve been managing that question for about six hundred miles by not answering it.

I’m twenty-four. I have a degree in finance from a school that cost too much and a resignation letter I sent three weeks ago and a truck full of everything I own, which turns out to be less than I thought. I left these mountains at eighteen because they weren’t enough.

I went to California because California was supposed to be the thing that was.

I got a job as a financial analyst at a firm where the men drank smoothies for lunch and talked about their skincare routines and called me “girl” in meetings, and I thought: this is what I wanted. This is the bigger life.

It wasn’t. It was fine. Fine the way a shirt can be fine when it’s the wrong size. You can wear it. You can button it. You just can’t breathe.

So I quit. I packed. I’m driving to my brother’s place in Wylde Mountain to help with his books and figure out what comes next, which is the version I’ve been telling people because it’s true enough and doesn’t require follow-up questions.

The fuller version involves a man I met once, a bar, a truck ride where he saw straight through me, and a moment that didn’t happen.

I am not telling anyone that version because it makes me sound like a woman who drove a thousand miles over one almost-touch from a man she hasn’t spoken to in almost six months.

I might be that woman. The jury’s still out.

The mountains are getting closer. December, but the weather’s wrong for it right now.

A warm front is sitting over the range even though there was a snowstorm two weeks ago. Feels like early fall up here. It’s a weird year, according to my brother.

The roads are dry and the pines are green-black against a sky that should be gray but isn’t, and the air coming through my cracked window smells like home. Dirt and pine and clean mountain air.

I make the turn toward The Burning Tree and my hands tighten on the wheel.

It was this past summer. July. I was visiting Connor for a couple of weeks, no plan, just the mountain and my brother and a break from California.

The crew took me out. The Burning Tree was loud and warm and full of men who work with their hands and didn’t discuss their pore-minimizing routines, and I liked it.

I liked all of them. But I noticed Graham instantly.

He was at the far end of the table, beer in hand, watching the room with the steady attention of a man who sees everything and reacts to almost nothing.

Dark hair. Short beard. Just starting to go gray at the temples.

Hands that looked like they’d built something and could build more.

Instant butterflies, and I thought: oh. That’s what that’s supposed to feel like.

I’d been in California for six years surrounded by men in slim-fit chinos and not one of them had made my stomach drop just by sitting still.

The crew thinned out the way crews do, by ones and twos, until the bar was quieter and I was still there. Graham had left with the first wave, or so I thought. I had stayed, hanging on to my last night in Wylde Mountain, dreading the thought of going back to California.

A guy appeared from nowhere. Or maybe he’d been there all night and I hadn’t noticed.

He was next to me and then he was too close, his hand on my arm, his body angled in.

The kind of man who decides a conversation is happening and doesn’t check whether the other person agreed.

His fingers pressed into my forearm and his breath was warm and sour and I was about to handle it myself, because I’m Connor Hayes’s sister and I can handle things, when an arm came around my shoulders.

Graham Brady slid onto the stool beside me like he’d been there all night.

His arm settled across my shoulders, easy, familiar, and he pulled me into his side.

My pulse went straight to my throat. Not from the guy.

From the weight of Graham’s arm, the heat of his body against mine, the absolute certainty of the gesture, like this was something we did.

Like I was his and he was just getting back to his seat.

“Hey, babe,” he said, his voice low and unhurried. “Sorry I took so long.”

Babe. He called me babe. My heart was hammering and he was playing a role and I wanted the role to be real so badly that my fingers curled into the fabric of my jeans under the bar where no one could see.

Then he looked at the guy. Not a word at first. Just a look, steady and flat and patient, the look of a man who has all the time in the world and is choosing to spend it right here, with his arm around this woman.

“We’re good on drinks, thanks.”

The guy opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Graham’s arm around my shoulders, looked at Graham’s face, and whatever he found there finished the conversation. He left.

Graham didn’t move right away. His arm stayed around me for three, maybe four seconds after the guy was gone. I could feel his chest against my shoulder and his thumb resting on the curve of my arm and the deliberate steadiness of a man who is choosing each second he stays.

Then he let go. He took his arm back and sat beside me and looked straight ahead and the space where his body had been went cold and I have been thinking about those three or four seconds for too long. The weight of his arm. The heat of his side. The way he said babe like he meant it.

We sat there for a moment, side by side, not touching. The bar noise filled in around us. I should have let it go. I should have said thank you and gone back to my beer and let the moment be what it was: a favor from a man on my brother’s crew.

“Babe?” I said.

He didn’t look at me. The corner of his mouth curved. “First thing that came out.”

“You could have gone with ‘excuse me’ or ‘she’s with someone.’”

“Could have.”

“Instead you went full boyfriend.”

“Seemed more convincing.”

I waited for him to say something else. He didn’t. Graham Brady was not a man who filled silence for comfort, and I was learning that in real time.

“Well,” I said. “Thanks. For the convincing boyfriend performance.”

Now he looked at me. Just a glance, quick, but his eyes caught mine and held for a beat too long and whatever I was going to say next went somewhere I couldn’t reach.

“You need a ride home?” he said.

“I can call Connor.”

“Connor left an hour ago. I’ll drive you.”

That was it. Not a suggestion. Not a question, even though it had been phrased like one seconds ago. A decision, made quietly, without negotiation. I should have argued on principle. I didn’t.

He drove me to Connor’s. The truck smelled like pine and coffee and leather, and his hands on the steering wheel were steady and sure and I was watching them instead of the road, which tells you where my head was.

The first minute of the drive was quiet.

Not awkward quiet. Not exactly. More like the kind of quiet that happens when two people have both noticed the same thing and neither one wants to be the first to name it.

The road out of town curved between dark pines, and the lights from town disappeared behind us one by one until there was nothing but his headlights on the pavement and the mountain rising black and huge on either side of us.

I should have checked my phone. I should have texted Connor and told him I was on my way.

I should have done anything except sit there cataloging every detail of Graham Brady’s truck like it was going to be on a test later.

One coffee cup in the console. One pair of work gloves on the dash. A folded flannel on the backseat. A small notebook tucked into the door pocket with a pencil clipped to the cover.

Everything had a place.

I noticed that too.

Maybe because my whole life in California had started to feel like nothing had a place. Not my desk. Not my apartment. Not me.

“You’re quiet,” I said, because apparently I had decided to make that his problem.

His hands stayed steady on the wheel. “So are you.”

“I’m not usually.”

“I noticed.”

Of course he had.

I turned my head and looked at him. His profile was cut in shadows and dashboard light, jaw firm, eyes on the road, mouth relaxed like he had all the time in the world and no particular interest in wasting words.

“What else have you noticed?”

That should have sounded flirtier than it did. Maybe it did. Maybe the beer was making me brave. Maybe it was him.

He didn’t answer right away.

“You don’t want to go back,” he said.

My stomach dropped.

Not because he was wrong. Because he wasn’t.

I looked out the passenger window. The glass reflected a ghost version of my face back at me, soft around the edges, older than I felt and younger than I wanted to be.

“Back where?”

“California.”

I laughed because that was safer than telling the truth. “That’s a big conclusion from one night at a bar.”

“It’s a small conclusion from watching you check the time three times and look miserable every time you did.”

“I wasn’t miserable.”

He didn’t say anything.

I hated how effective that was. Graham Brady did not argue. He just let silence sit there until I either filled it or exposed myself trying not to.

“I have a good job,” I said.

“I didn’t say you didn’t.”

“A real job. Benefits. A salary. A desk with my name on it.”

“Sounds official.”

“It is official.”

He nodded once. “Does it fit?”

I looked at him then.