The Mountain Man’s Mail Order Secret (Mountain Man Sanctuary Season 2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

CARMEN

The last patient I lost was a nineteen-year-old girl who came into the ER on a Tuesday with a stomach ache that turned out to be a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

She bled out while I held pressure. Her boyfriend stood in the hallway screaming her name, and security had to pin him to the wall because he kept trying to get through the doors.

That was six weeks ago.

I haven't slept through the night since.

My sister Cat thinks I'm taking a job at a mountain retreat in Colorado.

Live-in caretaker, room included, one month minimum.

The ad was specific: remote property, help with upkeep, solitude guaranteed.

Exactly what I need. Somewhere quiet enough that I can stop hearing monitors beeping in my sleep.

The drive from Houston took fourteen hours with two gas station coffees and one breakdown in the parking lot of a Buc-ee's outside Amarillo where I sat in my car crying so hard the steering wheel got slippery.

That's the kind of tired I am. Not sleepy tired.

Emptied-out tired. The kind where your body keeps moving but the part of you that cares about anything has packed up and left the building.

Bear Creek Valley, Colorado. Population 847. One road in, one road out, cell service that dies about thirty minutes before you get there. My GPS gave up somewhere around a switchback that made my Honda groan in protest.

Now I'm pulling into a gravel lot in front of a cluster of cabins that look like they belong on a postcard. Log walls. Tin roofs catching the late afternoon sun. A creek running behind them, the sound of it reaching me the second I cut the engine.

Quiet.

Real, actual quiet. No sirens. No overhead pages. No beeping, no alarms, no family members sobbing in the waiting room at three in the morning.

My hands are still shaking on the wheel. They've been doing that for weeks. Adrenaline withdrawal, maybe. Or just my body forgetting how to stop bracing for the next emergency.

A wooden sign reads MCCALL CABINS in hand-carved letters. Underneath, smaller: CHECK-IN AT MAIN HOUSE.

The main house sits at the end of the row. Bigger than the cabins, with a wraparound porch and smoke curling from a stone chimney. Someone left a pot of yellow wildflowers on the top step. The whole place smells like pine and cold water and something baking. Bread, maybe. Or biscuits.

My stomach growls. Can't remember the last time I ate something that wasn't wrapped in cellophane from a vending machine.

The front door opens before I reach the porch.

He fills the doorway.

That's the first thing I register. Not his face, not his clothes.

Just the sheer amount of space he occupies.

Broad shoulders in a flannel shirt rolled to the elbows, forearms corded with muscle, hands braced on either side of the door frame like he's holding the house up.

Sandy brown hair, a little too long, falling across his forehead.

Warm brown eyes that land on me and stay.

Something in my chest flickers. Not attraction. Too tired for attraction. More like recognition. The way you notice a fire when you've been cold for a long time.

"Carmen Reyes?"

His voice is low. Not rough, just steady. The kind of voice that belongs on a porch in the mountains, unhurried, like he's got nowhere else to be.

"That's me." My own voice sounds like gravel. Fourteen hours of driving will do that. "I'm here about the caretaker position."

His expression shifts. The easy warmth tightens into something I can't read. His hands drop from the door frame.

"The what?"

"The caretaker position. Live-in help with the property?

The ad said room and board included, one month minimum, duties include general maintenance, guest coordination, light cleaning.

" I've memorized the listing. Read it forty times on my phone during those fourteen hours.

"I applied through the Mountain Match site.

Got a confirmation email three days ago. "

The color drains from his face.

Not slowly, either. One second he looks like a man who runs a mountain retreat. The next he looks like a man who just swallowed a lit match.

"Mountain Match," he repeats. His jaw works. "That's not a job site."

"What?"

"Mountain Match is a matchmaking service. For men looking for..." He stops. Scrubs a hand down his face. When he drops it, his ears are red. "It's a mail-order bride site, ma'am."

The words land somewhere between my ribs and my common sense.

A mail-order bride site.

"You're telling me I drove fourteen hours from Houston because someone posted you on a dating site for mountain men looking for wives, and I thought it was a job listing."

"I didn't post anything."

"Somebody did."

"Yeah." His voice drops even lower. "And when I find out who, there's gonna be a conversation involving the business end of my patience."

We stare at each other across the porch steps. Pine trees sigh overhead. The creek keeps running like nothing is wrong, like the universe hasn't just played the world's most elaborate practical joke on a woman who can barely remember to eat.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket.

Cat:

Did you make it?? Send pics of the cabin!! How's your new boss??

The laugh that comes out of me is closer to a bark. Unhinged. Too loud for this quiet place.

Owen McCall takes a step forward. "You okay?"

"I'm great." My voice cracks on the word.

"I quit my job. Broke my lease. Packed everything I own into a Honda Civic.

Drove fourteen hours across three states to apply for a job that doesn't exist, at a cabin retreat run by a man who didn't ask for me.

" The shaking in my hands crawls up my arms. "So yeah. Doing fantastic."

His eyes track the trembling. Not with pity. Something else.

"When's the last time you ate?"

The question catches me off guard. Not "where will you go" or "do you need a refund" or "I'm sorry about the mix-up." When's the last time you ate.

"I don't know. Amarillo?"

"That's ten hours ago."

"I wasn't counting."

He turns without another word and walks inside, leaving the door open behind him. The smell of bread hits me full in the face, warm yeast and butter, and my knees almost buckle.

"Come inside," he calls from somewhere deep in the house. "I've got soup on the stove."

Every survival instinct I've built over twelve years of ER nursing says don't walk into a stranger's house in the mountains.

Every other part of me, the part that's been running on fumes for six weeks, the part that hasn't been taken care of by anyone in so long that a man offering soup feels like being handed a lifeline, says sit down and eat.

The cabin's already paid for. My old apartment isn't. The ER has already posted my position. Houston is fourteen hours in the wrong direction.

Nowhere else to go.

My feet carry me up the porch steps before my brain agrees. The wood is solid under my sneakers. The wildflowers smell like honey. From inside, I hear the clink of a bowl being set on a counter, a spoon placed beside it, a chair pulled out.

Owen McCall is making me a place at his table before he even knows my last name is the same one I've been signing on death certificates for the past twelve years.

I step through the door.