Grump of Hollow Peak (Hollow Peak Mountain Men #11)

Chapter 1

TREYTON

She wasn’t supposed to get in until Thursday. It was Tuesday morning, my truck bed was full of cabin supplies, and I'd planned my whole week around having one more full day of peace and quiet before summer rental season began. So why was there an SUV parked in front of cabin three?

I pulled up next to the dusty SUV with Illinois plates and killed the engine. Biscuit whined.

“Don't start,” I told him.

He whined again. He'd been good while I ran errands this morning. But the second the SUV came into view, he'd put his nose on the dash and started wiggling his butt like he was about to be reunited with a long-lost friend.

I glanced over at the SUV. Notebooks sprawled across the passenger seat. Squares of sticky notes dotted the dash. Boxes and bags filled the back end. So much for one more day of silence.

The dog pushed past me as I opened my door. “Biscuit, get back here.”

He ignored me. That was new. Biscuit didn’t pay attention to a hell of a lot of things, but he’d never totally ignored me. He trotted around the back of the SUV, his tail high in the air, and that's when I saw her.

My pulse kicked up immediately as I tried to make sense of the blonde sprawled out across the gravel.

She was on her stomach with her legs stretched out behind her.

Had she passed out on her way to the door?

Had an allergic reaction to a bee sting?

It would be just my fucking luck if she’d had a heart attack on the first day of her three-month stay.

“Ma’am? Are you okay?” I rushed to her side as I pulled my phone out of my back pocket, ready to dial 9-1-1.

“Shh. I’m concentrating.”

Relief flooded my veins at the sound of her voice. She was alive. But what the hell was she doing? I glanced around. Except for Biscuit, we were alone. “Concentrating on what?”

“Her.” The woman nodded toward a glacier lily at the edge of the gravel. “Just a minute. I’m almost done.”

Her. The flower.

I took a closer look. She had a pencil in one hand and appeared to be making a quick sketch of the flower on a pad of paper. Biscuit walked right up and sat down next to her. I opened my mouth to call him back, but something stopped me.

“Well, hi there.” She tucked the pencil behind her ear, sat up on her knees, and smiled at my dog.

“Sorry,” I said. “He's friendly.”

“He's perfect.” She held out her hand for him to sniff, which was unnecessary because he was already shoving his head under it. “What's his name?”

“Biscuit.”

She laughed and scratched behind his ears. “You look like a Biscuit. It’s nice to meet you.”

I waited for her to look up at me, but she didn't. Instead, she wrapped her fingers around the pencil again and went back to her sketchbook, one hand still on my dog. “Sorry, give me one more second. I’m almost done with her.”

Her. Did she mean the flower?

I stood next to my truck and watched a woman I didn't know talk to a plant on my property while my dog refused to come when called. My to-do list was a mile long, and I still had four more cabins to check and restock.

“You'll want to unload your car,” I said. “Bears are out.”

She glanced up then, and I got my first real look at her. Hazel eyes. Honey-blonde hair piled on top of her head in some sort of messy updo. A smudge of dirt smeared across her cheek. She was stunning.

“Bears?”

“Yeah. This time of year they come down for the early growth.”

“Right. I'm Soleil, by the way. I assume you're—”

“Treyton. I own the cabins.”

“The grump,” she said and immediately winced. “Sorry. Evelyn at the bookstore said you'd warn me about the trails and to take everything seriously and that you were —” she waved her pencil around “— um, particular about things.”

“And she called me a grump,” I said. Figured.

Evelyn was always trying to get me to come to events that were happening in town.

Truth was, I didn’t have the patience for small talk.

I’d rather spend my free time in my workshop or fishing down at the creek with nothing but the wind and the trees as company.

And maybe Biscuit if I didn’t disown the damn dog after this.

“I’m sure she didn’t mean it,” Soleil offered with a smile. As her lips curled, her whole face lit up. “I mean, who could stay grumpy in a place like this?”

I stared at her for a long beat while I tried to summon the willpower to look away. There was something about the curvy blonde who talked to flowers like they were people that tugged at something buried deep inside my chest.

“You should get your bags out of the car,” I said. “I'll bring the supplies in. The bears are real.”

She got to her feet, brushing dirt off her jeans. She was shorter than I expected. The top of her head didn’t even reach my shoulder.

“Thank you… for the help… and the bear warning… and…sorry. I'm not usually this scattered, I just spent twenty hours on the road, and I saw a glacier lily, and I haven't drawn one from life in —”

“Soleil. The car.”

“Right.” She turned around and started emptying the front seat. First, a stack of notebooks, then a duffel.

I unloaded the kitchen supplies from my truck and watched her in my peripheral vision because I'd been raised to not stare at women and because I didn't trust whatever my face was doing. Or my hands. I'd already clocked her body twice. I wasn't going to do it again.

She talked the entire time. Not to me. To the dog, mostly. To herself sometimes. To the flower she'd been drawing when I pulled up, which she stopped beside on her way to the cabin door with an armload of duffels.

“I'll be back,” she told it.

I'd lived on this ridge for nine years. I'd rented these cabins for seven. I had never, not once, watched anyone say “I'll be back” to a wildflower.

Biscuit followed her into the cabin. He didn't even look at me on the way.

Just went up the porch steps while I stood in the open doorway with a box of coffee filters and dish soap and a roll of paper towels and watched my dog disappear into the bedroom where she was dropping bags.

He hopped up on the bed, turned in a circle, and lay down.

“You're done,” I told him. “We're done.”

Soleil came out of the bathroom holding a toothbrush. “Is he okay there? I don't mind. I love dogs.”

“He shouldn’t be on the bed.”

“Treyton.” She said my name like she'd been saying it for years. “He's fine. Look at him.”

He was, in fact, fine. He was extremely fine. He'd been a stray when I picked him up off the side of the highway outside Durango a few years ago and he'd never once been extremely fine about anything until thirty seconds ago when a curvy stranger with hazel eyes had scratched behind his ears.

I set the box on the counter. “Coffee filters are in here. There's a starter pack with sugar, salt, and the basics. You can pick up anything else you need in town. Mae at the Switchback Café does breakfast all day.”

“Mae at the Switchback. Got it.”

I kept going. The sooner I relayed all the information, the sooner I could get on with my day.

“Trails on this side of the property are marked.

Look for the wooden posts with green tops.

There's a map inside the front door. Don't go up past the second ridge marker.

The runoff's bad this year. You'll end up in the creek before you see it coming.”

“Okay.”

“If you see a moose, don't —”

“Don't run. Don't approach. Back away slowly and don't break eye contact.” She'd come out of the kitchen and was leaning on the doorframe watching me. The toothbrush was still in her hand. “I used to visit my grandparents in Vermont. I know about moose.”

“This isn't Vermont.”

“No,” she said. “It's much prettier here.”

I had to look away from her then. I didn't know why and I didn't want to try to figure it out. I set the paper towels next to the coffee filters and went back to my truck for the last of the supplies.

When I came in, she was kneeling by the front wheel of the SUV again. The sketchbook was open on her thigh.

“Soleil.”

“I know. The bags. I just — she's almost done.”

I came around the side of the SUV and looked down at what she was drawing. It was a glacier lily, like she'd said. There were three of them in the grass by her knee. Pale yellow, the kind that came up first when the snow started to melt.

In her drawing, the lily had a face. It had eyes and a mouth and was looking up at something not on the page. The flower looked hopeful. Like it was waiting to see if whatever it was looking at would acknowledge her.

It was just a flower. But she'd given a flower a face. She'd given a flower a face and an expression and the expression was good. Whoever taught her to draw had taught her well and I wasn’t sure how I felt about all of that.

Soleil hummed something under her breath. Then she leaned closer to the actual flower, her voice low. “Where are your friends, huh? Are you the brave one? The scout?”

For fuck’s sake. I had work to do. I had four more cabins to get ready.

“Do they come up like this every year?” she asked.

It took me a second to realize she was talking to me. “Yeah.”

“Just like this? This early?”

“Some years earlier. Depends on the thaw.”

She nodded like I'd given her something more than a simple answer. “Thanks, Treyton.”

I should have left then. Instead, I opened my big mouth. “There's a bunch of them. Up the south trail about a quarter mile. They’re bigger, and the light’s better up there.”

She turned her face up at me. The smear of dirt was still on her cheekbone, and a piece of her hair had come down out of the tie. Her eyes had gone bright like I'd handed her a gift.

“Don't go past the second marker,” I said. “And watch for bears.”

“Got it.” She gave me a huge smile. “Thank you. Really.”

I shook my head and wondered what the hell had gotten into me as I headed back into the cabin for Biscuit. He followed me out, pouting the whole way, and the second he hopped into the front seat, he hung his head out the window and looked back at her.

She waved at him.

Through the windshield I watched her go back to her sketchbook. She'd already forgotten I was there. The pencil moved fast and she was talking to the flower again and the wind had picked up enough to lift the loose strands of her hair off her neck.

I started the truck. Biscuit whined. “Don't,” I told him.

I put the truck in reverse and turned out down the dirt road, gravel crunching under the tires, and I checked the rearview without meaning to. She was still kneeling there. Sketchbook on her thigh. Honey-blonde hair coming undone. Talking to a flower in the grass like the flower could hear her.

Biscuit had the decency to look guilty in the passenger seat.

Three months. How was I going to survive her for three damn months?