Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
ALANA
The gravel crunches under my ankle boots as I kill the engine and just sit there, both hands still on the wheel.
I stare at the cabin like it might explain something.
It won’t. The cabin is just there — a log structure hunkered under pine trees, the kind of place that grew out of the mountain instead of being built on it.
The woodpile beside it catches my attention first because my artist brain catalogues details: every log the same length, cut ends facing out in perfect rows, the kind of obsessive neatness that says a man needed something to do with his hands and this was it.
The porch steps are worn smooth in the center from thousands of footfalls, lighter wood showing through the darkened stain.
A single metal chair faces the forest. No other furniture. No flowers. Not even a welcome mat.
This is smaller than I pictured. More remote. More like the end of the world than a place where I’m supposed to have a marriage trial for thirty days and then... what? Drive back down the mountain like nothing happened?
My phone lights up in my lap. Four missed calls from Nate.
I didn’t answer any of them on the drive up.
This is the first decision I’ve made that my brothers don’t know about, and my hands won’t stop shaking.
I almost turned around twice. Once at the bottom of the mountain pass, again when I saw the private road marker that pointed up and up and up into nowhere.
I’d packed three suitcases for this. Three.
Like I was moving in, not trialing a thirty-day marriage contract with a stranger I met through an algorithm.
The logical part of me — the part that exists between the panic attacks — knows I packed three because I didn’t know what a mail-order bride wears and I was stalling by including options.
Sundresses for warm days, sweaters for cool ones, jeans I’ve had since college that still fit in the hips but gap at the waist, lingerie I bought sophomore year in a fit of optimism and have never worn around another person.
No plan. Zero contingency. Just suitcases and the desperate hope that a stranger on a mountain would look at me and want to keep me around for longer than the contract stipulates.
The front door opens.
A man fills the frame. Too tall. Too broad. Too familiar.
It’s not a stranger. It’s Zac Walsh.
Nate’s oldest friend. The man I’ve spent four years carefully not thinking about at family dinners. The man I absolutely did not imagine every time I locked my college apartment door and pressed my hand between my thighs, thinking about rough hands and a beard with silver in it.
He’s bigger than I remembered. Silver threads his beard more heavily now, and his shoulders are broader somehow, even though I know that’s not biologically possible — people don’t grow at forty-one.
He looks at me, and the way he does it is predatory.
Hungry. Like he’s been waiting at the window and I’m the exact meal he’s been staring at through the glass for hours.
His dark eyes drop from my face to my chest, then my hips, then back up again, and it’s slow enough that I feel it move across my body like a hand.
No one has ever looked at me like they wanted to consume me.
Then he catches himself. It’s like watching a light switch off.
His expression goes neutral. Shielded. The hunger disappears and gets replaced with something that looks a lot like professional distance, and my stomach drops because I’m already certain I imagined it, that I imagined the whole thing because I wanted it so badly.
“Come in,” he says. His voice is lower than I remember. Rougher. “I’ll take your bag.”
I don’t move. I’m sitting in my car with the door still closed, trying to rewire my nervous system into functioning because the look he just gave me is already burrowing into my spine and making camp there, and if I’m wrong about what I saw, if that was just my pathetic wishful thinking, I don’t know how I’m going to survive thirty days of him being polite and distant and absolutely not hungry for the girl who showed up with three suitcases and no plan.
He steps down from the porch. He’s walking toward me.
The closer he gets, the more I realize his chest is actually wider than I thought, and his hands are bigger, and the rope-burn scar on his forearm — the one from that hiking accident Nate mentioned years ago — is darker now, more visible against his tanned skin.
He opens my car door. His scent rolls in and it’s pine resin, woodsmoke, black coffee and something clean underneath that’s probably soap, and it’s so specifically him that I have to grab the car keys with white knuckles because at least that’s something to hold onto.
“Been a long drive,” he says. Not a question.
“Yeah,” I manage. My voice comes out higher than normal. I sound like I’m asking a question instead of answering one. “Really long. The road’s kind of... winding.”
He reaches past me and grabs the main suitcase from the back seat.
Not the biggest one, just the first one, like he’s testing whether I have fifty bags or three.
The muscles in his arm cord as he lifts it, and I watch the rope-burn scar shift across his forearm, and I think about Nate telling me years ago that Zac got it from tying off a line to rescue some idiot tourist who’d fallen, and I think about ropes, and then I think about his hands, and then I have to look away because apparently my face broadcasts every thought I have.
“Come on,” he says. He’s not looking at me anymore. He’s walking toward the cabin like I’m already following him, like I’ve already made the choice to walk into that log structure surrounded by forest and shut the door on the rest of the world. “Let’s get you settled.”
I climb out of my car on shaking legs. The mountain air is cooler up here, sharp with pine and something wild underneath, and I’m alone in the driveway for just a second — long enough to realize there’s no cell signal, that I’m about to walk into a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a man who just looked at me like he could consume me whole and then decided he wouldn’t, and that every choice from this moment forward is one I’m making myself without my brothers’ permission or knowledge or protection.
I follow him inside on legs that don’t feel like mine, my skin still humming from the look he gave me and then took back. This is either the beginning of everything or the most monumental mistake I’ve ever made. Possibly both.