Hot Blooded Mountain Man (Hot Mountain Nights 2)

Chapter 1

STACIA

The tent was winning.

I'd been fighting it for forty minutes, and the tent was winning. The instructions promised an easy two-person setup, which was either a lie or an indication that I was somehow less capable than two people, and I wasn't ready to accept that yet.

I yanked the last pole free and tried threading it through the sleeve for the fourth time.

It bowed in the middle, the fabric bunched, and the whole thing collapsed sideways like a drunk leaning on a bar.

I stood there holding one end of the pole while the other end poked out of the dirt at an angle that mocked me.

"Come on," I muttered. "Come on."

I'd driven four hours from Charlotte. I'd packed everything on the checklist—the one I'd found on a camping blog written by a woman who called herself WildHeart Jeana and who made solo camping look like a spiritual experience involving wine and sunsets.

But WildHeart Jeana hadn't mentioned that tent poles were spring-loaded weapons designed to snap back and hit you in the chin.

WildHeart Jeana had also not mentioned that the ground in the North Carolina mountains was approximately seventy percent rock and thirty percent root, which made driving a tent stake roughly as effective as hammering a nail into concrete with a flip-flop.

I crouched down and tried a different approach—threading from the opposite end. The fabric caught. I tugged. Something ripped.

I closed my eyes.

Sweat was running down the back of my neck and pooling in places I didn't want to think about.

It was late July, and the mountains were supposed to be cooler than Charlotte, which was true in the way that getting hit by a sedan was cooler than getting hit by a truck.

The air was thick and still, heavy with moisture, and the tree canopy trapped the heat like a lid on a pot.

My T-shirt was soaked through. My hair, which I'd pulled into a knot that morning with optimistic confidence, had surrendered to the humidity and was plastered to my temples in dark, damp strings.

The bucket list was in my back pocket. I'd written it on the back of a syllabus for a class I’d barely passed—Intermediate Statistics, a course I'd signed up for because my advisor said it would round out my degree and that I'd find the material "surprisingly accessible." It wasn’t.

I'd started college two years late because I'd spent the time after high school working reception at my mom's friend's dental office, saving money and pretending I had a plan. The plan had always been someone else's. College was just the latest version of it.

One night in my dorm room, when I couldn't sleep and couldn't study and couldn't stop thinking about how nothing in my life felt like mine, I'd flipped that syllabus over and started writing.

Go camping alone in the mountains.

It was item number three. Item number one had been eat at a restaurant alone, which I'd accomplished two weeks ago at a Chili's off the highway, and which had gone fine.

Item number two was drive somewhere I've never been with no plan, which was technically how I'd gotten here, so that was two down.

Camping alone was supposed to be the next logical step. Manageable. A controlled adventure. Proof that I could do something hard and unfamiliar and come out the other side of it a slightly different person.

I was a slightly different person, all right. A worse one. A person who couldn't pitch a tent.

I stood up and wiped my hands on my shorts.

The clearing I'd chosen was flat enough—a little patch of dirt and grass off a logging road, surrounded by hardwoods and rhododendron so thick I could barely see ten feet into the tree line.

The light came in gold and slanted through the canopy, and the air smelled like warm pine and baked earth and the faintly sweet rot of last year's leaves.

It would have been beautiful if I weren't drenched in sweat and trying not to cry.

The car was the other problem. My twelve-year-old sedan had made ugly sounds the last half mile up the logging road, and when I'd tried to start it after unloading my gear, it clicked once and went silent.

I'd tried four more times with the same result.

Dead. The hood was up because that seemed like what you did when a car stopped working, but I'd looked at the engine and understood exactly none of it.

So I was here. In the woods. With a dead car and a broken tent and a six-pack of water bottles that had seemed like plenty when I'd loaded them into the car that morning and now seemed like a miscalculation.

I'd already gone through four of them. The heat had turned me into a person who drank water the way a radiator drank coolant. I had two left to get me through the night.

The bucket list was starting to feel less like self-authorship and more like a catalog of things I was bad at.

I crouched down again. One more try. I would get this tent up if it killed me, and at this rate, heatstroke might do exactly that—

"You're threading it backward."

I spun so fast, I lost my balance and sat down hard in the dirt.

A man stood at the edge of the clearing, one shoulder leaning against a tulip poplar like he'd been there for a while.

Tall. Wide through the chest and shoulders.

Reddish-brown hair pushed back off his forehead, a beard, and the kind of calm expression that suggested nothing about this situation—including me on the ground—surprised him.

My heart hammered, but not because I was afraid. This was more like a full-body awareness that started in my chest and radiated outward.

"How long have you been standing there?" I asked.

"A minute."

"You watched me rip my tent."

"I watched you fight it." The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one. "It was impressive. Misguided, but impressive."

I scrambled to my feet and brushed dirt off the back of my shorts. He didn't move from the tree. He had a pack slung over one shoulder—not a day pack, a real one, framed and weathered—and he wore boots that looked like they'd covered a lot of ground without complaining about it.

He wasn't sweating. The air was ninety degrees and drowning in humidity, and this man was standing in the shade of a tulip poplar looking like the heat was something that happened to other people.

"The pole sleeve runs left to right," he said, nodding toward the crumpled tent. "You've been going right to left. That's why it bunches at the crossover."

I looked down at the tent, then back at him. "There is absolutely no indication of that anywhere on this tent or in the instructions."

"There wouldn't be. It's a design flaw. That model's been doing it for years."

I narrowed my eyes. "You know my tent model."

"I know most of them."

He straightened off the tree and walked into the clearing, and the way he moved through the space changed it. Like the woods rearranged themselves around him slightly, making room. He crouched next to the mess of poles and fabric and started threading without asking.

"I didn't ask for help," I said.

"I know."

"I'm doing this alone. It's the whole point."

"You can take the credit. I won't tell anyone." He glanced up. "I'm Duff."

My name was on my tongue before I could decide whether giving it to him was a good idea. "Stacia."

"Stacia." He said it like he was saving it to recall later. "You picked a decent clearing. Flat, good drainage, windbreak from the rhododendron. The campsite selection was solid."

"Everything after that has been a disaster."

"That's most of camping." He stood, and the tent came with him—fully shaped, the poles seated, the rain fly loose but ready. It had taken him maybe ninety seconds. "It gets better."

I stared at the tent. My tent. Standing upright like a functional object for the first time in its miserable life.

"I hate you a little bit," I said.

That almost-smile again. "Fair enough."