Dominant Mountain Man (Hot Mountain Nights 2 #11)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

KIERAN

The whiskey is good. The company is the problem.

"You're sulking," Declan says, leaning against the bar beside me. "It's a whole vibe. Very tragic. Women love it."

"I'm not sulking."

"You've been holding that glass for ten minutes without drinking. That's either sulking or you've finally lost it."

I drink, mostly to shut him up. Behind the bar, the bottles glow under low amber light, and the back wall of Club Crimson hums with the kind of crowd that only shows up for Hot Mountain Nights.

Once a year the doors open to vetted newcomers.

Tourists who read one spicy book and decided they wanted to see the deep end.

Curious locals. People dipping a toe in water they have no business standing near.

My brothers run this place. I just bleed for it on the build, hauled the timber, set the beams, sanded every inch of that bar top with my own hands two summers back.

That's the only reason I agreed to come.

One whiskey. A nod at the regulars. Then back up the mountain to my workshop and my dog and the silence I actually like.

"Bishop says you haven't scened since the spring before last," Declan says, casual, watching the room instead of me. My other brother. The blunt one.

"Bishop talks too much."

"Bishop's worried. There's a difference between taking a break and going feral, brother. You've gone feral."

A year and three months. Not that I'm counting.

The last time I trusted somebody with that part of me, she took the control I handed over and sharpened it into something she could turn around and cut me with.

Lied to my face about her limits to manufacture a reason to be wounded.

Used the trust like leverage. Vanessa understood exactly what she was doing, and that's what still sits wrong in my chest. It wasn't a mistake. It was a strategy.

So I built furniture instead. Cleaner work. Wood does what you tell it or it doesn't, and either way it never pretends.

"I'm having my whiskey," I tell him. "Then I'm gone."

"Sure you are."

The door opens.

I don't know why I look. The door's opened forty times tonight. But I look, and then I'm looking, and the whiskey stays where it is.

Red dress. Fitted close enough that it qualifies as an opinion. Brown skin warm under the lights, dark curls pushed back off one shoulder, gold at her ears. She stops three steps inside and scans the room, slow, taking inventory.

Her eyes move across the bar. Land on me.

She doesn't look away.

Most people do. They feel the weight of being seen by somebody who isn't going to blink first and they find the floor real interesting. She holds it. One eyebrow goes up half an inch, faint, almost bored, and something in my spine pulls tight that hasn't pulled tight in over a year.

"Oh," Declan says quietly. "There it is."

"Shut up."

"That's the most alive your face has looked since Thanksgiving."

She starts toward the bar. Not toward me, exactly. Toward the open stretch of it that happens to be next to the empty stool on my left. Confident in her hips, unhurried, a woman who learned a long time ago that the room waits for her and not the reverse.

She reaches the bar. Doesn't sit. Catches the bartender's eye and orders something I can't hear over the music, then turns her head a few degrees and finds me again like she's confirming I'm still paying attention.

I am. We both know I am.

Here's the part I should be smart about. Summer crowd. New face. She's got vacation written all over her, here a few weeks and gone before the leaves turn, and the smartest move I own is to finish my drink and let her be somebody else's good idea.

I pull out the empty stool next to mine.

"Sit."

It comes out low. One word. The first thing I've said to a stranger in this club in longer than I want to admit.

She looks at the stool. Looks at me. That eyebrow climbs the rest of the way.

"That usually work for you?"

"You're still standing here."

She laughs, and it's a real one, surprised out of her, husky at the edges. Then she sits. Crosses one leg over the other, slow, and angles toward me with her drink, and the whole time her eyes stay on my face doing math I'd pay good money to read.

"Bianca," she says.

"No names was the rule tonight, I heard."

"I never agreed to that rule. I just got here." She sips. "And you don't strike me as a man who follows rules he didn't write."

She's not wrong. "Kieran."

"Kieran." She tries it out, and the way my name sits in her mouth does something to me I'd rather she didn't know about. "You've been guarding that whiskey like it owes you money. Your friend left, by the way."

He has. Declan's halfway across the room already, the traitor, grinning at me over his shoulder.

"He does that."

"Mm." She studies me, open about it, no shame in the looking. Her gaze drops to my hands on the bar, the scars across the knuckles, the burn mark on my left thumb from a router that bit back. Comes back up. "You don't talk much."

"No."

"Strong, silent, glowering in the corner of a sex club. Very on theme." She tilts her head. "Let me guess. Brothers dragged you out. You planned one drink. You were gonna disappear up whatever mountain you live on before anybody made you have a conversation."

My jaw tightens, because that's accurate to the word.

She watches it happen and her mouth curves. "There it is. Hit a nerve."

"You here for a month," I say. Not a question. Vacation rentals run in four-week blocks this time of year, and a woman who orders without reading the cocktail list knows what she likes and isn't staying long enough to learn anything new.

"Four weeks. My aunt left me her cabin up off Sutter Ridge.

I'm deciding what to do with the rest of my life.

" She says it plain, no apology. "I walked out of a kitchen six weeks ago.

Head chef, real talent, real garbage human.

Screamed at a nineteen-year-old until she cried over a torn pasta sheet.

So, I took off my apron and left." She shrugs one shoulder.

"Now I'm here, drinking overpriced bourbon, looking at a man who clearly hasn't let himself have a good time in a while. "

"You always read people this fast?"

"Only the ones worth reading." She leans in.

Close enough that I catch leather and warm vanilla off her skin, close enough that her knee brushes mine and stays there, deliberate.

Her voice drops. "I've done this before, Kieran.

The deep end. I know exactly how deep I like it, and I know what I'm looking at when I look at you. So here's my question."

"What's your question."

"You've been telling yourself you're leaving for the last twenty minutes." Her eyes hold mine, dark and steady and not one bit scared. "Are you?"

The smart answer is yes. Finish the whiskey. Walk out into the cold mountain dark and forget the red dress by morning.

I cover her knee with my hand. Feel her breath catch, the only crack she's shown all night, and watch her fight to keep her face even.

"No," I tell her. "I'm not."