Chapter 19
Sierra
Advanced yoga should be torture. Instead, I’m standing here getting verbally abused by a deceptively sweet-looking old lady and somehow enjoying it.
Sure, it’s intense, and Nadia, the yogi, looks like someone’s kindly grandmother, but looks can be deceiving, and in reality, she has the attitude and language of a tattooed deckhand on a South Seas container ship.
She’s not shy about call-outs either and immediately dubs my form that of a stiff noodle.
And that’s nothing compared to poor old Luke, who she describes as having the grace of a rhinoceros crossed with a drunk giraffe.
To be fair, she can take it as well as she gives it. When I flip her off, she just laughs, and when another guest calls her a wicked old hag, she fires back, “Old hag I may be, but I’m not the one whose Raised Tiger ought to be renamed Constipated Beaver.”
That sends all of us, including the poor victim, collapsing into laughter before she barks us back into position. Bertha, meanwhile, moves through the poses with surprising ease, completely focused, like she’s done this a hundred times before. It’s… unsettling.
I end up enjoying it way more than the meditation class. It feels grounded and real, not all spiritual woo-woo. The exertion helps. Nothing clears your head quite like trying to hold a scorpion pose without face-planting. It’s damn near impossible to think about anything else.
After that, the yoga group and a few others head out for the nature walk, although I notice Amanda doesn’t join us, instead scurrying away as soon as the class is finished. Probably gone to find Reid. She can’t seem to manage for too long without him.
Luke and I join the walking group. For my own part, I think it might be a great chance to get to know some of the guests.
Luke just seems happy whatever he’s doing.
Relaxed, joking and chatting with the guests.
He really does have a way about him. “Charming” is the word that springs to mind.
Like an old fashioned, silver-screen movie star, but in full glorious color.
Bertha walks ahead of us with one of the other women she seems to know.
The two of them are relaxed, chatting, occasionally laughing, completely at ease with themselves and their surroundings.
Quite a contrast to the serious, almost austere businesswoman I used to see in my physio room.
On the face of it, a change for the better—if only I could truly believe in it.
For a while I end up walking alongside of Holly—a stay-at-home mom recovering from a miscarriage—and Key, who introduces himself as a “social media star trying to unplug for a week”.
He looks genuinely offended when I don’t recognize him.
“How come,” Luke cuts in, “considering you run a YouTube channel?”
“You have a YouTube channel?” Key jumps on that before I can answer, immediately demanding my subscriber count. When I tell him it’s only around twenty thousand, he looks distinctly unimpressed and tells me I need Instagram, then casually offers a collab like he’s doing me a favor.
The walk winds gently up the mountainside, stretching on longer than I expect, the trail eventually opening out into a clearing where we stop for lunch.
The views are amazing from up here, and Luke comes over to join me.
He points out a patch of shimmering green in the far distance.
“That’s Emerald Lake,” he says. “In my opinion, it’s the most beautiful spot in the whole of Rocky Mountain National Park, but it gets fewer visitors than Bear Lake, which we can’t quite see from here because it’s hidden behind that line of trees. ”
“Why does it get fewer visitors?”
“Because it’s a little further out, a little more isolated, most people go to Bear Lake instead. Actually, the two lakes make a great day out, because you can hike between them.”
“Is it safe?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well… bears, I guess. I assume with a name like Bear Lake there must be bears around.”
Luke laughs, and when I glance up at his face it’s very hard not to melt into those crystal-clear blue eyes smiling back at me.
“There are a few black bears around, but they tend not to bother humans if you stick to the trails, though it’s advisable to keep your distance if you do see one. Especially cubs, because Momma Bear can get a little protective if you’re not careful.”
We pack up our lunch and start back down the mountain along a different trail, and for a moment… yes, perhaps I’m beginning to see a little of whatever it is that’s captivated Bertha so much. It’s hard to stay skeptical on a day like this—sunlight, mountains, good company.
I shake my head. I mustn’t go native. I came here for a reason, and I’m not about to forget it, but I have to admit, these dangerously attractive men who own the place are gradually winning me over.
Luke had even got me a satellite internet connection this morning, so I can do my work, but I had to promise not to disappear into my laptop all day.
I’m grateful for that—and for a lot of things he does.
He really is a great guy.
Which makes it a lot harder not to constantly think about jumping his bones.
I manage it. Barely. Mostly because I don’t want to make things weird, now everything is going so well.
One of the things I haven’t tried is Reiki. That still feels like a step too far. From everything I’ve read, it’s basically pseudoscience, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.
Also, the Reiki practice is Reid’s bag, and I’m not risking a session with Reid.
He’s kept his distance like he promised. I only see him occasionally at meals, and sometimes not even then. When he’s not there, Amanda usually isn’t either, which just fuels my suspicion. I don’t care what he says, that kind of attachment is strange, especially when he’s not even her therapist.
Speaking of therapists, Luke keeps nudging me in that direction. Not pushing, just suggesting. Asking questions, giving me an out with a wink if I don’t want to answer.
But his eyes say he’s ready when I am.
It’s not that simple.
My past isn’t something you just unpack. It’s a mess. A murky, tangled stream full of things that should stay buried. Even brushing up against it brings back memories I’d rather leave alone.
Like the first time I met Reid.
It was at one of the first dive bars I worked at, waiting tables and picking up kitchen shifts when they needed me. Reid was there with a local biker crew—loud, obnoxious, the kind of table I was told to avoid.
But I couldn’t stop looking at him.
He stood out. Not just because he was stunning, but because he was quieter than the rest. Even when he laughed, it never reached his eyes. He was always watching, always alert, his body tight with tension like he was ready for something to go wrong.
I watched him for nights without realizing he’d noticed me.
Then one night, when I took the trash out, he was in the alley, smoking. I tried to walk past like he wasn’t there.
“Aren’t you a little young to be working in a place like this?” he said.
“I’m twenty-one,” I lied, my heart racing. I was eighteen.
“You sure about that?”
"Yeah." Worried he might get me fired, I whipped out my fake ID and flashed it at him. He smirked without even looking at it, his eyes fixed on me instead.
It felt like he could see right through me, like every secret in my head and every way I pretended to be okay was laid bare.
Like he knew I wasn’t.
After that, he started showing up every night I worked. Even when the rest of his crew were nowhere to be found. He’d sit in the corner, drink, and say almost nothing.
Sometimes he’d shoot pool or let one of the women hovering around him flirt for a while. There were always a few.
But I never got the sense he was there for any of that.
I got the sense he was there for me.
I told myself I was imagining it. I almost never caught him looking my way, even when I wanted him to, and he never flirted with me the way the older men did.
Then one night, one of the regulars got too handsy while I was clearing his table, and Reid appeared out of nowhere.
It was like something out of a movie.
One second, I was bent over collecting plates and empty bottles.
The next, a hand slid over my jeans and grabbed my ass. I yelped and jumped back as the table burst into laughter.
The laughter cut off fast.
One of the men was suddenly lifted off his feet and slammed into the wall, a fist cracking his nose before anyone could react.
It happened so fast I barely tracked it.
Reid was just there, right beside me, pinning the guy to the wall, his expression cold enough to kill.
“You try that shit again,” he growled, “I’m going to chop off your arm.”
The man stammered out something that might have been an apology, but I didn’t really hear it. I was too busy staring at Reid.
It was the first time I really saw him.
Not the quiet guy in the corner. Not the one who blended into the background.
This version.
How had he moved that fast? Before I could even react, he’d already broken the guy’s nose and cleared the entire table out of the bar. They left quickly. Quietly. After throwing down a generous tip.
He didn’t say a single word to me.
But I couldn’t just let it end there.
That was the beginning of my obsession with him.
Later, like confirmation of everything I’d been telling myself not to believe, the bartender mentioned that Reid always left when my shift ended. He didn’t come in on nights I wasn’t working, and he timed his visits around mine.
So yeah.
It looked a lot like he was showing up for me.
I didn’t know what to do with that at first. It scared me. There was something deeply unsettling about someone focusing on you that completely.
No one ever had.
I didn’t know how to handle it, but I also knew how stories like that usually went.
The guy watches you, follows you, protects you. You ignore the warning signs because he’s attractive and intense and makes you feel seen.
You fall for him.
And then the same intensity turns into something else. Control. Possession. Isolation.
And suddenly you have nowhere left to go.
I wasn’t going to let that happen. I might have been young, but I wasn’t naive.
So, one night, I waited outside for him. I told myself I was going to shut it down. Tell him to stop. Tell him I didn’t need him.
It didn’t go the way I expected.
If anything, it made everything worse.
And somehow, even now, out here on this nature walk all these years later, it still ties my stomach in knots.
“There she goes again,” Luke says, snapping me out of it. “Penny for your thoughts?”
“Sorry,” I say, realizing the others on the hike are watching. “Were you saying something?”
“Nothing important.”
“As usual,” Key mutters, earning himself a shove.
“You know, I’d pay good money to hear what’s going on in that head of yours,” Luke says as we start walking again.
“How much?” I ask lightly.
“A billion dollars,” he says after a moment.
“Yeah, right. Like you have a billion dollars lying around.” I laugh, but no one else does.
I glance between them, frowning. “You don’t have a billion dollars, do you?”
He clicks his tongue and shakes his head. “I can’t believe you still don’t know who I am. After all the hints I’ve dropped.”
“What hints?” I narrow my eyes. “Who are you?”
“Seriously?” Key cuts in. “You don’t know?”
I shake my head.
“I mean, I get you don’t use social media, but you don’t own a TV either?”
We come to a natural break in the forest canopy, and for the first time on our walk, we see the tree-covered mountainside we’ve been steadily climbing, with the retreat center far below us in the distance.
Beyond that, the road up to it winds along the mountainside before eventually disappearing behind the ridge of the adjacent peak.
Above us, a few crows drift lazily in the still air. We pause, taking it all in.
“Who is he?” I ask again, but Holly suddenly points toward the road. “Are those cop cars?”
We all turn, following her finger down to the distant ribbon of road. Three police cars race along it, blue lights flashing as they snake through the bends.
They’re heading straight for the retreat.