Mail-Order Bride for my Brother's Best Friend (The Mountain Men of Promise Ridge #2)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

ZAC

The axe splits the log clean down the grain and I kick the halves off the stump.

My shoulders burn. Good. I’ve been out here since noon, working through the stack like I’ve got something to prove, and maybe I do. The mountain air tastes like pine resin and cold dirt, and the sweat on my neck cools in the late-afternoon shade. I could stop. I don’t.

My phone vibrates in my back pocket. I know who it is before I check.

“You eating?” Ma asks, no hello.

“I ate.”

“You ate what?”

“Food, Ma.”

She makes a sound — half sigh, half growl. I get it from her. “Zac, I swear to God, if you’re living on jerky and black coffee again?—“

“I had eggs this morning.” I wedge the axe into the stump and wipe my forearm across my face. The rope-burn scar catches on my sleeve. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You’re forty-one years old, living alone in a cabin that smells like wood shavings, and the last woman you spoke to was me. That’s not fine. That’s a nature documentary.”

I almost laugh. Almost. “I talk to clients.”

“Clients don’t count. Clients pay you to take them into the woods and bring them back alive. That’s not a relationship, that’s a service.” A pause. The diner noise behind her — dishes, the bell over the door, someone ordering the special. “Did you open the envelope?”

My jaw locks. “No.”

“Zac.”

“I said I’d think about it.”

“You said that three days ago.” Her voice drops, and for a second she sounds less like my mother and more like the woman who raised three boys alone and doesn’t have patience left over for bullshit.

“You signed up for Montana Matches. You filled out the paperwork. You sat across from Etta Bowen and answered her questions. And now the match is sitting on your kitchen table and you won’t open it because?—“

“Because it was a mistake.”

“Because you’re scared.”

I don’t answer. She’s right and we both know it.

“Open the envelope, Zac. That’s all I’m asking.”

She hangs up. Ma doesn’t say goodbye. Never has. She just stops talking and the line goes dead, and you’re left holding your phone like an idiot, staring at the trees.

I go inside.

The cabin is quiet. Stone fireplace I built the year I bought the place.

Kitchen that’s too small for two people but fine for one.

Trail maps spread across the table next to a cold mug of coffee and the envelope.

White. Thick paper. Montana Matches in serif font across the front, like it’s something dignified and not a glorified mail-order bride service run by a retired judge who wears pearls to a ranch town.

I sit down. Pick it up. It’s heavier than it should be.

Three days I’ve been ignoring this thing.

I signed up because Ma wouldn’t stop. Because Duncan — my closest friend, the man who found his wife through this same service — told me I was rotting out here alone and that Etta was the real deal.

Because I turned forty-one and realized I couldn’t name the last time I’d touched someone who wasn’t shaking my hand after a guided expedition.

I open it.

There’s a profile. A photo. A name.

Alana Reynolds.

My whole body goes still. Not tense — still. Like the moment before a grizzly charges, when every cell in your body knows what’s coming and the only question is whether you run or hold your ground.

Alana Reynolds. Nate’s little sister.

The profile says twenty-two. Graphic designer.

Size eighteen. But I’m not reading the profile anymore.

I’m seeing the Fourth of July dinner two years ago — her crossing the yard with a bowl of potato salad, the yellow sundress moving against her thighs, her hips swaying in a way she didn’t know she was doing.

I’d been mid-sentence talking to Nate about trail conditions and I lost every word I’d ever known.

She laughed at something Jake said — head tipped back, that snort she tried to swallow and couldn’t — and I felt it in my chest like a fist.

I excused myself early. Drove home gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles ached. Sat in this chair, in this kitchen, and told myself I was a sick bastard for wanting my best friend’s twenty-year-old sister.

That was two years ago. I haven’t been to a Reynolds family dinner since.

I remember the way light caught the beauty mark near her mouth. I remember the exact weight of her laugh. I remember her scent — cocoa butter, vanilla shampoo, and underneath it the faint bite of pencil lead because she’d been sketching in the car and her fingers still smelled like graphite.

Four years of this. Four years of remembering things I have no business remembering about my best friend’s sister.

Mine.

The thought arrives before I can stop it. Not a question. Not a maybe. A fact, like gravity or sunrise, something my body has known longer than my brain has been willing to admit.

I pick up my phone. Dial the number on the letterhead.

Etta answers on the second ring. “Zac Walsh. I was wondering when you’d call.”

“You matched me with Alana Reynolds.”

“I did.”

“She’s my best friend’s sister.”

“I know exactly who she is.”

“She’s twenty-two.”

“And you’re forty-one. I can do arithmetic, Zac.” Her voice is warm and absolutely certain. The voice of a woman who spent forty years on the bench reading people and has never once second-guessed a verdict. “I matched you with the woman you’ve been running from.”

My hand tightens on the phone. “I’m not?—“

“Four years you’ve avoided Reynolds family events. Four years you’ve turned down every woman your mother tried to set you up with. Four years, Zac. I didn’t get to seventy-four by being stupid.”

I close my eyes. The cabin is silent except for the tick of the woodstove cooling and the sound of my own breathing, too fast, too shallow.

“What if Nate finds out?”

“That’s between you and Nate.”

“He’ll kill me.”

“He’ll get over it. The question is whether you’ll get over losing her.”

I don’t answer. I’m looking at the photo. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. The beauty mark near her mouth. She’s smiling in the picture — not her real smile, the one that starts with the snort, but the polite one, the one she gives strangers. I want the real one. I want to be the reason for the real one.

I imagine another man opening this envelope.

Another man looking at this photo. Another man seeing her name and thinking she’s pretty in a casual, careless way.

He wouldn’t notice that she doodles on everything she touches, that she wears mismatched socks on purpose, that she laughs with her whole body and her eyes squeeze shut and her shoulders shake.

Some man who’d get her in his bed for thirty days and never understand what he was holding.

My vision goes red at the edges.

“Where do I sign?” I say.

“Page three. Blue ink.”

I flip to page three. The pen is in my hand before I’ve finished reading the terms. Thirty days. Cohabitation. Either party can walk. Standard Montana Matches contract, same one Duncan signed before he met Ruby.

I sign my name. The ink is blue. The letters are steady.

I’m going to hell for this. Nate is going to put me in the ground. And none of it matters, because the woman I’ve been starving for just landed in my lap, and I’m done pretending I don’t want to eat.

Mine.

Not a question. Not anymore.