Mountain Man’s Summer Drift (Wildwood Valley Rapids #6)

A steamy small-town mountain man romance featuring an alpha outdoorsman who knows on sight, a bookworm heroine finally becoming the protagonist of her own story, and the slow-closing season of a North Carolina river town.

She spent twenty-three years being the friend in the photograph. On day four, she walked the wrong way down a road.

I came on this trip because Suri asked me to. I sat on the cabin couch with a book in my lap and watched my best friend fall in love with a mountain man, and I told myself I preferred the couch. I was good at the couch. I was good at the edges of things—the background of photographs, the supporting role in other people’s stories, the girl who was always there and never quite the point.

Then I walked the wrong direction down a gravel drive and found him.

He was standing in the doorway of a shed with his sleeves pushed up and a stillness I’d never seen in a man before. Ross Baldwin. Fifteen years of living wherever the job was, seven states, eleven jobs, never stayed anywhere. He looked at me like I was already real. Like there was no one else in his line of sight. Like he’d just decided something before I’d said a single word worth deciding about.

I gave him one-word answers and didn’t apologize for them.

He didn’t need me to. He just looked at me the way no one had ever looked at me before—like the story was finally mine—and I felt something shift that I didn’t know how to name and couldn’t put back once I’d felt it.

I’m thirty-five. I’ve been the new guy in seven states. I have not stayed anywhere.

I’m staying now.

He doesn’t explain it. Doesn’t make a production of it. He just stops drifting—quietly, completely, in the way that men like Ross do everything—and suddenly the end-of-summer river I came to sit beside for a week feels like the beginning of something I’ve been waiting my whole life to deserve.

I spent twenty-three years being the friend in the photograph. I don’t know how to be the woman someone chooses on sight. I’m learning. He’s patient. The river is slow and the season is closing and for the first time in my life, I’m not on the couch.

Mountain Man’s Summer Drift is Book 6 in the Wildwood Valley Rapids series and the final chapter in the Wildwood Valley world. It can be read as a standalone but is best enjoyed in order. This is a steamy open-door romance with explicit on-page intimacy, first-time chemistry, and a guaranteed happily ever after.