Chapter 2
Decklan
She hasn’t stopped talking since the parking lot.
I’m setting up the camp at the first night’s clearing—bear boxes, tent positioning, fire ring—and she’s narrating everything she does as she does it.
Hammering a stake while telling me about a podcast on altitude sickness.
The stake goes in crooked. She doesn’t ask for help.
I’m watching her out of my peripheral vision because I cannot stop watching her and I don’t know what to do about that.
I’ve known for three hours. Since the parking lot. Since she got out of that rental car and the wind came off the mountain and hit me sideways. My wolf went absolutely still.
The kind of still that comes before a lunge.
Mate.
My whole chest locked up. I was across the lot in three strides before I’d thought about it, before I’d decided anything, before I’d done anything except respond to an instinct I haven’t had in three years of deliberate solitude.
I stopped myself at ten feet. She was fighting her pack out of the back seat, muttering under her breath, morning sun on her brown skin and her curls coming loose from whatever was supposed to be holding them, and I stood there like an idiot and watched her fix it herself instead of helping because I hadn’t figured out how to be near her yet.
I still haven’t figured it out.
She’s curvy and short and she moves through the backcountry on pure momentum—she just keeps going, adjusts as she goes, doesn’t stop to agonize.
She tripped twice on the ascent after the creek crossing and caught herself both times and kept talking without missing a beat.
I watched her catch herself and had to look somewhere else.
I left the pack because the pack meant rules.
Expectations. An alpha who thought dominance was a thing you put on in the morning.
Three years of building something clean up here—clients who wanted a guide, a mountain that didn’t require anything from me except competence.
No politics. No posturing. No one I wanted standing ten feet away while I kept my hands to myself.
Three years and it was fine.
Gemma Torres looks up from her crooked stake and grins at me. “I think I did it.”
The stake is still crooked. “The guy line needs to go to the left anchor,” I say.
She looks at it. Looks at me. “I see that now.” She adjusts it without complaint. “Can I ask you something?”
“You’ve been asking me things all day.”
“Yeah, but those were more like observations with question marks. This is an actual question.” She sits back on her heels. “Why do you do this alone?”
I don’t answer that one.
“The guiding,” she says. “Like—you could have a partner. An assistant or whatever. But you don’t. The website is one photo of the mountains and your name and a booking link.”
“It works.”
“I wasn’t saying it doesn’t work.” She stands, brushes dirt off her leggings. “I was being nosy. Forget it.” She’s already moving toward the bear boxes. “What’s for dinner? Tell me you’re not one of those trail mix guys.”
I set up the stove. The routine of it helps—something concrete to focus on instead of the fact that she smells like she belongs to me, every nerve in my body lit up since 9 AM. “Pasta. Beef.”
“Oh thank god.” She drops down onto the flat rock near the fire ring and stretches her arms over her head. Her shirt rides up an inch. “I was so prepared to be miserable about dinner and now I’m relieved and I feel like that’s a win.”
I cook. I keep my back to her for most of it, which helps.
She talks—about Harlow, about what it looks like from the valley versus from up here, about how she had a very fixed idea of Montana before she came and it’s different from the reality in ways she can’t quite articulate.
She asks if I’ve ever been anywhere outside Montana.
“Oregon,” I say. “Washington. Northern Idaho.”
“Did you like them?”
“Mountains were good.”
She laughs again, that big full sound that goes everywhere. “You are extremely consistent in your preferences.”
I hand her the first bowl. She’s sitting with her knees pulled up, the evening light catching the angles of her face. Our fingers touch again. My wolf slams against the inside of my chest like a screen door in a gale.
She doesn’t notice. She takes the bowl, smells it, closes her eyes. Opens them—already taken a bite. The sound she makes?—
Low and unbidden and entirely too much for a wilderness camp site.
“This is incredible,” she says. “You cooked this on a camp stove.”
“Olive oil. Fresh garlic.” I’m not sure why I’m explaining.
“I could eat this every night for the rest of my life.” She says it easy, offhand, not meaning anything by it, and my wolf hears “the rest of my life” and wants it.
I eat fast. I put out the camp fire. I stand at the edge of the clearing and tell her that the tent is hers, that I sleep outside the first night to run the perimeter, that it’s secure.
“You sleep outside?” She frowns at me over her shoulder. “It’s going to be in the forties.”
“I run warm.”
That’s the understatement of my life. I run three degrees above human normal. I haven’t felt cold in years. Right now I’m anything but.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Go to sleep.” I put enough authority into it that she blinks. “You’ll be tired tomorrow. Today was easy.”
She gives me a look I can’t fully decode, and she nods and goes to the tent. I stand at the tree line in the dark and listen to her settle in. Her heartbeat, once she stops moving. The rhythm of her breathing going slow.
I strip off my jacket. Walk to the creek and stand ankle-deep in the snowmelt and stare at the ridge.
Three years of nothing.
Then Gemma Torres gets out of a rental car and twenty feet away is apparently a distance I can’t negotiate.
The creek is very cold. I stand in it for a long time. It doesn’t help as much as it should.
She shifts in her sleep. Her heartbeat stays even. I stay at the edge of the trees and watch the tent. Mine. I should not do this. There is no version of the next four days that ends well. Then she murmurs something in her sleep—a laugh, almost, like something’s funny—and my chest aches with it.
One night. I can keep my hands to myself for one night.
I tell my wolf that. My wolf is not convinced.