Coming Home To The Mountain Man (Ozark Mountain Men Temptations #5)

Chapter 1

Mallory

I clicked out of the bookstore in heels that didn’t fit this town, clutching my portfolio to my chest.

My life suddenly felt absurd.

I’d spent so many years working to get away from Red Oak Mountain only to find myself back here again, licking my wounds.

Until recently, I’d been a high-level marketing director. But today I’d stooped low enough to interview for a part-time cashier job in a small-town bookstore.

And I was fairly certain I wasn’t getting the position.

The people who’d interviewed me had been nice, but I’d seen the look in Avery’s eyes. She wasn’t going to let Flint hire me.

I miss Quincy.

My heart stuttered in my chest as I thought about my little Frenchie.

Life had knocked me flat this year.

First the divorce. Which is when my ex stole my dog.

Then the layoff.

Since then my life had been in a freefall.

Three months ago I’d been presenting quarterly campaign analytics to a boardroom of executives in Chicago, and now I was hoping two very kind locals would hire me to stock their bookshelves.

Coming home to Red Oak Mountain had been a mistake.

Maybe I should just go.

The highway wasn’t far. I could take an entrance ramp and be on my way to anywhere else in the world within minutes.

I pushed the front door of the bookshop open with more force than I intended and walked directly into a wall of warm flannel.

I shrieked in surprise as my face collided with a man-chest, then dropped the portfolio I’d been holding. The resume pages inside it caught the breeze, scattering across the damp sidewalk, ruining them.

“Oh, no!” I’d have to reprint them now. And I’d used a quality linen bond for the paper that wasn’t sold here in this tiny burg of a town.

Thick hands reached out to steady me, settling on my waist.

“Whoa, easy there.”

The voice was deep and unhurried, a low rumble that flowed right into my chest, where I hadn’t felt anything in months.

I knew that voice.

I’d spent three years memorizing it at the Hungry Rooster.

And twelve years of distance hadn’t dulled a single note of it.

“Zane?”

He was already crouching down to gather my scattered resumes, one large hand pressing a sheet flat against the concrete before the wind could take it.

Zane looked up when I said his name, surprise rolling across his face.

He was broader than I remembered, his shoulders filling out a dark green flannel that stretched across his chest in a way that made my brain short-circuit.

His jaw was sharper now, shadowed with a short beard that made him look half-grizzly bear. And the lines around his eyes were deeper, the kind that come from years of squinting into sun and wind.

“Mallory?”

I knelt down beside him to help pick up the papers.

“Hi, Zane.” My voice came out breathless and a little too high, nothing like the composed professional woman I’d been pretending to be for the last hour.

He stared at me as though he couldn’t believe I was really here, and our faces were suddenly very close.

We were close enough to remind me why seeing him again was such a terrible idea.

If I’d leaned forward even slightly, our lips would have touched.

My heart stuttered, then restarted in a completely different rhythm.

His dark hair was even longer than it had been, pushed back carelessly, and all the years that had passed since I’d last seen this man suddenly disappeared.

Zane’s mouth opened, silently working to say something.

“You’re back.”

“Yeah. I guess I am.”

His fingers brushed mine as we both reached for the same sheet of paper at the same time, and the contact sent a jolt up my arm that I felt all the way to my collarbone.

His hand was warm and rough with calluses, and he didn’t pull away immediately. Neither did I.

We straightened up together, and he handed me the stack of pages he’d collected. I pressed them against my folder and clutched the whole thing to my chest like a shield. Zane Thompson was the one man I’d been both hoping and dreading to see.

“It’s been a while,” he growled, his eyes moving over my face with an intensity that made me feel like he was cataloging every change the years had written there.

After his initial surprise, his expression had turned careful, guarded in that quiet way I remembered.

Zane was a man who kept his real thoughts locked behind a door he rarely opened. And seeing him again made my chest ache something fierce.

“Twelve years,” I said, then immediately wished I hadn’t because it sounded like I’d been counting. Which I had. “You look good, Zane. You look really good.”

Stop talking, Mallory.

“So do you.” His gaze held mine for a beat longer than casual, and something flickered in those brown eyes before he looked away toward the street.

“You in town visiting your folks?”

“Sort of. I’m staying at their place for a bit while they’re in Texas.

Just, you know, taking some time.” I was stammering.

I, Mallory Carpenter, who had once pitched a million-dollar campaign to a room full of Fortune 500 executives without breaking a sweat, was stammering on a sidewalk in front of a man in muddy work boots.

“I’m actually in the middle of an exciting career change. New chapter, fresh start, all of that.”

The lie came out bright and shiny and completely unconvincing, at least to my own ears.

But Zane just nodded, steady as always, like he’d take whatever I gave him at face value because that was the kind of man he was.

“They’re at a livestock auction,” I blurted out as a drop of rain landed on my shoulder.

“Yeah? I thought they went out of the cattle business a few years back.”

They had. After a big financial setback. One they refused to let me help them fix.

“They’re getting back on their feet again. Right now they’re getting a handful of breeders to start a herd back up.”

“Good for them,” he rumbled, his voice a balm on my broken heart.

Another raindrop fell from the sky.

“What about you?” I asked. “How have you been?”

“Still running Thompson Land and Timber. Keeps me busy.” He said it simply, the way he’d always talked about his life.

He pointed down the sidewalk. “I was just heading down to see Stone at the hardware store. Need to pick up some parts.”

It started sprinkling in earnest. Welcome to springtime in the Ozarks. It would be raining off and on all month long.

“And I was just coming from Bookish,” I said, gesturing vaguely behind me without offering any further explanation.

If he wondered what I was doing in a small-town bookstore on a Tuesday afternoon with a stack of resumes, he didn’t ask.

I let my gaze drop, just for a second, to his left hand, where it hung relaxed at his side.

No ring.

My pulse kicked up, but I immediately tamped it down. Zane had always been a practical man.

Wearing a wedding band while running a chainsaw and hauling timber would be dangerous, and I bet he didn’t risk it.

But the absence of a ring didn’t mean the absence of a wife.

I’d heard about his marriage to Tina shortly after I married Wade.

Even though I’d been committed to another man, it had still stung.

Zane had always been the one who held my heart, even if we’d never been on so much as a single date.

“So you’re not staying long then,” he said, and it wasn’t really a question.

“No, probably not. Just passing through while I figure out the next move. You know me, always on to something.”

Emotion shifted behind his eyes. A flicker of something that looked almost like resignation, and then it was gone, shuttered behind that calm, steady expression he always wore.

“Of course,” he said, and his voice dropped half a register in a way that vibrated through my chest. “Always an adventure with you. Surprised you don’t get tired of it and set down roots somewhere.”

He looked away and then back. “Maybe someday you will.”

“Maybe.”

Up until three months ago, I’d thought my roots had been solidly planted in Chicago.

How wrong I’d been. Now I was driftless and unmoored, trying to find my new place in the world.

As the sprinkles turned into fatter drops, both of us getting wet now, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone. “Here, give me your number. Or take mine. In case you need anything while you’re in town.”

I gave him my phone, and when he handed it back, our fingers brushed. His jaw tightened just barely, a small involuntary clench that told me he’d felt it too.

The spark that had always been there between us.

“It was really good to see you, Zane,” I said a little too breathlessly.

“You too, Mallory. Real good.”

We stood there for one more moment, letting the rain fall on us, and then he gave me a solemn smile, one filled with regret, and stepped past me toward the hardware store.

Watching him walk away broke something inside me.

Before I’d even reached my SUV, I was wiping away tears.

If anything could have kept me in this town all those years ago, it would have been Zane Thompson.

As I drove back to my parents’ house, my mind kept drifting back to Zane.

He’d been a senior when I was a freshman, and I’d spent those years nursing a hopeless crush on him from afar.

After he graduated I’d caught glimpses of him around town, and my heart would do that same stupid fluttering thing every single time.

But he hadn’t even known I existed.

Not until I turned eighteen and started waitressing at the Hungry Rooster. That’s when I’d finally had the chance to talk to him.

Zane came in for lunch almost every day, and our quick daily chats slowly turned into long conversations in his booth.

The more we talked, the more I started to hope he’d finally ask me out.

But he never did.

And when his father died in a logging accident, Zane had transformed almost overnight. His easy smile had dimmed as he shouldered the weight of taking over the logging business.

He carried responsibility the way other men carried ambition. And romance didn’t seem to fit anywhere in his life.

My heart ached. Not from the divorce or losing my career, but from the old what-if of Zane Thompson.

But he was with Tina now. I’d heard about the marriage years ago, not long after my own wedding to Wade, and I’d tucked that information into a small locked room inside my chest where I didn’t have to look at it too often.

I’d missed my chance… if I’d ever had one at all.

The farmhouse was quiet when I let myself in.

I opened a few windows to let the evening air through, then wiped down the kitchen counters just to give my hands something to do. When I crouched to grab a fresh sponge from under the sink, I touched something wet.

I reflexively pulled my hand back, then looked.

Shit.

Water was dripping from the pipe connection, a slow but steady drip that had already formed a dark puddle on the cabinet floor.

I grabbed an old towel and mopped it up, then went to the garage and came back with my father’s wrench.

I positioned it carefully around the fitting and tightened it the way I’d seen my dad do a hundred times.

The drip became a trickle.

No.

“No, no, no, no. Stop that.”

But it didn’t stop. The trickle became a thin, steady stream that ran over my fingers and soaked the cuff of my interview jacket. I took the jacket off and sighed.

I’d made it worse.

Water pooled on the cabinet floor faster now, seeping out onto the kitchen tile, and I grabbed every towel within reach and shoved them under the pipe.

By the end, my silk blouse was soaked through and clinging to my skin.

My pencil skirt was damp at the knees from kneeling on the wet floor, and my hair had come loose from the careful twist I’d pinned it into that morning.

I was a woman in a ruined suit kneeling in a puddle in her parents’ kitchen, and the tears I’d been holding back all year pressed against the backs of my eyes with a force I couldn’t fight anymore.

I wanted Zane. The thought came unbidden and absolute.

Zane would know what to do.

He’d walk in and assess the problem with those calm, steady eyes and have it fixed in ten minutes, and I wouldn’t have to be the one holding everything together for just one night.

I wanted his steadiness and the quiet way he made the world feel manageable just by being in it.

After I soaked up the worst of the water and wedged a bucket under the drip, I flopped down at the kitchen table.

My phone was in front of me, and Zane’s name was right there in my contacts, brand new and already burning a hole in my heart. My thumb hovered over it.

But he was with Tina.

I shouldn’t text him even if his eyes had held an open invitation.

But the pipe was still dripping, and I was so tired of doing everything alone.

I started typing before I lost my nerve.

Me: Hi Zane. I’ve got a leak under the kitchen sink, and I made it worse trying to fix it. Do you know who can fix it? I’m out of the loop on who does plumbing these days.

I set the phone face down on the table and stared at the darkening window while three of the longest minutes of my life crawled past. I could have called any of my friends for referrals. This was a reach.

Then my phone buzzed.

Zane: I’ll be there in ten.

My heart somersaulted in my chest as I set the phone down and leaned back against the kitchen chair, letting my head tip back until I was staring at the ceiling.

My clothes were wet, my mascara was probably halfway down my face, and I felt completely wrung out.

But beneath that, a small, stubborn flame flickered to life in my chest.

I would not cross any lines with him tonight. I wasn’t the kind of person who reached for another woman’s husband. But I’d let myself lean on him a little.

I’d let him fix the sink, and I would be grateful, and I would keep my hands and my heart to myself because Tina deserved that, and so did Zane.

But tonight I’d relish every second with him. This steady mountain man, who I would have given up every single one of my carefully laid plans for, if he’d ever just asked.

And the ache of that truth, a bruise that had never quite healed, was almost more than I could bear.