Mastering the Mountain Man (Mountain Man Mail Order Bride #10)

Chapter One

Nell

THE CASCADES WERE STUNNING, and I didn't have a contingency for that.

I'd been driving for two hours through scenery I could manage — green hills, a pleasant sky, beauty I could multitask through.

Then the road climbed, the mountains opened up, and my whole running agenda went quiet.

Snowcapped peaks rose above the tree line, still holding snow in late May, and a river appeared below the road, running fast and bright with snowmelt.

I heard it before I saw it. Wildflowers filled a meadow to my left, every color sharp enough to stop me mid-thought, and the afternoon light turned everything so gold I took my foot off the gas without meaning to.

I had not budgeted for this.

I had budgeted for everything else. The flight from San Francisco to the regional airport, the white Prius rental, the 47-page Partnership Agreement and Household Operations Guide in a binder on the passenger seat.

I had budgeted for the man I was about to marry, his mountain, and the twelve to eighteen months I planned to stay before filing for divorce.

What I had not budgeted for was a landscape that made me forget, for six full seconds, that I was a woman with a plan.

I put my foot back on the gas.

The plan was solid. Four months of research, one casual remark from my gynecologist ("if you're planning to have children, earlier is better than later"), and the kind of decisive action that had made me very good at my job and very bad at second dates.

I was thirty-two. I'd set this as my deadline not because a doctor told me I was running out of time, but because I did not leave major life milestones to chance.

Other women waited and hoped. I had a Gantt chart.

Mountain Mates had been the efficient choice.

Not a dating app, but a matchmaking-to-marriage service for men in remote areas who wanted wives but couldn't attract them through conventional means.

The company handled compatibility screening, a structured introduction, and logistics right down to the officiant and the rings.

Match to marriage in under a month. I'd read the fine print.

I'd read the reviews. I'd had Marcy Ferrante, named one of Silicon Valley's Top Ten Divorce Attorneys, review the legal exposure before I ever created a profile.

Marcy was on retainer. The exit timeline was drafted.

Get married, get pregnant, stay through the birth in case of complications requiring a second attempt, then divorce and raise the child as a single mother in San Francisco.

A wilderness guide in a remote mountain town was ideal.

Isolated. Unlikely to contest custody. Unlikely to show up at my door in Pacific Heights wanting to talk about his feelings.

Cliff Masterson and I had exchanged profiles through the app and done one fifteen-minute video call.

He'd been direct and quiet, answered my questions about his property with minimal enthusiasm, and hadn't tried to impress me once.

I'd found that reassuring. A man who couldn't be bothered to fake charm was unlikely to fight a divorce.

I'd written ideal in the margin of my notes and booked the flight into the nearest airport.

The Prius rounded a bend and Cedar Bluff appeared — a cluster of buildings along a main road, a town that fit inside a single glance.

A hand-painted sign welcomed me. Where the population should have been, someone had painted A Bushel and a Peck.

I tried to convert that to an actual number, ran it twice, and got nowhere.

I hadn't crossed the town line and my primary skill set was already useless.

My phone had lost signal ten minutes ago. I checked my reflection in the rearview, took one extra second I shouldn't have needed, and pulled into the gravel lot beside a storefront with a covered wooden overhang and a sign that read MOOSE'S GENERAL GOODS, EST. 1974.

He was already there.

I'd seen his photos. I'd had the video call. I knew what he looked like: dark-haired, bearded, gray-eyed, big. What I did not know, and what no camera on earth could have transmitted, was what Cliff Masterson felt like at twenty feet.

He leaned against the storefront post with his arms crossed, watching my car pull in, and the sheer physical fact of him hit me below my ribs before my brain caught up.

He was bigger in person. Not just taller but wider, denser, taking up space the way a man does when his body is the primary tool of his profession.

His thermal shirt pulled across his shoulders when he shifted his weight.

Jeans worn pale at the knees. Boots resoled at least once.

Hands large enough to make mine disappear.

My pulse climbed. Warmth spread low through my belly and I pressed my knees together, which was not in any section of the 47-page manual.

I turned off the engine. I took a breath and got out.

He straightened off the post and walked over. Unhurried. His legs were long enough that unhurried still covered ground, and I caught myself watching how he moved, loose and easy and nothing wasted, and then caught myself watching, which was worse.

"You're shorter than your photos," he said. His voice was lower in person too. Of course it was.

"And you skip the pleasantries. I was told there'd be small talk first."

"That was small talk."

"Barely."

He held out his hand. I took it. His palm was rough and warm and engulfed mine. I felt the calluses against my fingers and thought about those hands in places I had no business thinking about in a parking lot in front of a general store at four in the afternoon.

The handshake lasted exactly the right amount of time, which annoyed me because I'd expected to be the one controlling that.

He glanced through the Prius's back window at my luggage. Two coordinated Louis Vuitton leather bags, a garment case, and a tote containing my laptop and three backup charging cables.

"That all yours?"

"I like to be prepared."

"For what?"

"For anything."

His mouth moved into an expression that wasn't a smile but lived in the same neighborhood. He nodded toward a mud-spattered pickup at the end of the lot. "Your car won't make it up the mountain. We'll take the truck."

I grabbed my briefcase from the passenger seat (the 47-page manual was inside, and I wasn't leaving it in an unattended Prius in a town I'd known for three minutes) and followed him to the pickup.

He transferred my bags. My coordinated luggage settled into the truck bed between a coil of climbing rope and a battered toolbox, which was either a metaphor for my immediate future or just interesting cargo organization.

"Jeannie at the store will keep an eye on your vehicle," he said, closing the tailgate.

"Jeannie?"

"Runs Moose's."

"And Moose?"

"Her grandfather. Dead since '98."

That was, apparently, the complete history. I climbed into the cab. It smelled like pine and rope, and underneath that, something closer — skin and soap, him, probably, soaked into the seat after years of driving this road. I buckled my seatbelt and swallowed.

He pulled out of the lot. Cedar Bluff's main road gave way to a two-lane road that gave way to ruts.

The road climbed and the truck bounced hard enough that conversation was impractical and reading was impossible.

I'd planned to introduce the binder during the drive.

Instead I gripped the door handle while my briefcase slid across the bench seat and bumped his thigh.

"Sorry."

He glanced down at the briefcase against his leg. "It's fine."

I pulled it back. His well-muscled thigh was right there. This was going to be a very long twelve months.

We turned and stopped in front of a house still in town, tidy clapboard with a wide porch, wind chimes turning lazily in the late afternoon air.

The garden was ambitious for the altitude and winning.

Dahlias crowded against a border of purple wildflowers, and I liked the person who lived here before the door opened.

"Barbara Pruitt," Cliff said. "She'll marry us."

I'd known the ceremony would be today. The app's concierge service had arranged it. Knowing and standing on the porch about to walk through the door were different things.

The door opened, and the woman behind it was in her mid-sixties with hair tinted an improbable shade of plum that didn't occur in nature but suited her so completely it made you wonder why nature hadn't thought of it.

Reading glasses hung on a beaded chain, and a cat-shaped brooch was pinned to the collar of a cardigan that had spent significant time in the company of an actual cat.

Her lipstick was a committed red, applied with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and two different-colored socks were visible at her ankles — one teal, one mustard, both loud enough to be on purpose.

"You're on time," she said to Cliff. "That's new." She turned to me and her whole face opened into warmth I wasn't ready for. "Come in, hon. Don't let Governor out."

Governor was an enormous orange tabby sitting on the hallway table with the bearing of a creature who had never once been told no. His collar tag glinted.

"Governor the Third," Barbara told me, giving him a scratch he accepted as tribute. "The first two also attended every ceremony. It's a family commitment."

She said it to the cat as much as to me, and Governor blinked once in what I could only interpret as confirmation.

She led us into the living room. The room smelled like cinnamon and old books.

A grandfather clock ticking against the far wall.

The floral sofa had been pushed back, and a side table held a marriage license and two ring boxes.

The room had the worn ease of a space that had held hundreds of beginnings, and something in my chest responded before I could get ahead of it.