Planted By the Mountain Man (Spring in the Mountains #8)

Chapter One

FLORA

THE SAPPHIRE RANGE was doing that thing where it tried to kill you with beauty before you’d even found a gas station.

Late April in western Montana meant snow on the peaks and wildflowers rioting across every south-facing slope — balsamroot blazing yellow against dark volcanic soil, lupine just starting to purple up in the meadow edges.

That spring light in the Northern Rockies made everything look as though it had been rinsed clean and hung out to dry.

I drove through it with my windows down, the rental car full of gas station coffee and prenatal vitamins.

This is either the bravest thing I’ve ever done or the dumbest, I thought.

And I will not know which until I’m already in too deep to fix it.

And yet.

Six weeks pregnant, nine hours into a drive I’d told my mother was a “design research trip,” I was winding through the foothills with binoculars on the passenger seat and a half-formed plan that boiled down to: see him, confirm he’s a real person and not a serial killer, go home, never speak of this again.

A solid plan. A sane plan. A plan made by a woman in full control of her faculties who definitely had not Googled her sperm donor’s hometown, found it on a map, and packed a bag the same afternoon.

I checked the GPS. Four miles to Colter Creek. My stomach flipped — the baby or the nerves, impossible to tell at six weeks, though I suspected the baby was already picking up on my poor decision-making and forming opinions.

I found his road by accident, which felt on-brand for the day. A gravel track turned off the county road with no sign, no mailbox, just tire ruts worn into mud from snowmelt. I pulled the rental onto a wide shoulder fifty yards short and killed the engine.

The property opened up through the trees: meadows, a cabin, outbuildings, and hives.

Dozens of hives, white-boxed and scattered across the meadow edge in clusters that followed the tree line.

Even from here I could see the placement was intentional: south-facing exposure, windbreak from the conifers, proximity to what would be prime wildflower forage in another few weeks.

Whoever had sited those hives understood sun, wind, and bloom timing.

Good loam. Southern aspect. The balsamroot density suggested undisturbed meadow, which meant good mycorrhizal networks underneath.

I pulled the binoculars from the passenger seat and told myself this was fine. Normal. A perfectly reasonable thing for a pregnant woman to be doing alone on a Tuesday in Montana.

The problem with binoculars is they eliminate peripheral vision, which is relevant when you’re creeping through unfamiliar terrain toward a man who doesn’t know you exist.

I’d left the car and moved closer — just to the tree line, just for a better angle — and I was so focused on the cabin porch where a figure had appeared that I didn’t see the hive equipment until I was in it.

My boot caught the edge of a hive box. I stumbled forward into a stack of honey supers, which went over with a spectacular crash that scattered wooden frames across the grass, startled approximately ten thousand bees, and sent me to my hands and knees in the dirt.

The binoculars hit a rock. My notebook landed in a puddle. A single bee detached from the general chaos and settled on the bridge of my nose with the energy of a very small, very disappointed hall monitor.

I did not scream. I want that on the record. What I did was hold very, very still and think: This is it. This is how the story of Flora Diaz ends. Not with grace, not with dignity, but on all fours in a stranger’s bee yard with equipment scattered to the four winds and a bee on her face.

“Don’t move.”

The voice came from above me, low, flat, and about as warm as the mud currently soaking through my jeans. I looked up.

The donor profile had included: height, 6’2”. Weight, 210. Brown hair, brown eyes. Athletic build. Education: B.S. Entomology, Montana State.

It had not included: the shoulders, the forearms, the way he stood like the mountain had grown him specifically to fill that space.

He was shirtless — working in the spring warmth, apparently, because the universe had decided I hadn’t been punished enough.

Close-cropped hair, trimmed beard, hands the size of dinner plates.

Chest and stomach built by actual labor, not a gym — the kind of torso that existed to ruin your concentration — and a trail of dark hair that started below his navel and disappeared under his waistband, and my eyes followed it down.

All the way down. And then my imagination kept going without authorization from the rest of me.

I should mention: there were ten thousand bees in the air.

The part of my brain responsible for self-preservation was screaming stinger, stinger, you are surrounded by stingers — but the rest of my brain had looked at this man and decided there was only one stinger in this meadow it was interested in, and it did not belong to a bee.

I was going to die here. Not from anaphylaxis.

From being a person who thinks like this.

One hand held a bee smoker. The other was reaching toward my face, and my first thought — I need to be honest here — was not oh no or I’m sorry or please don’t call the police.

It was: I want those hands on my skin. It was: I want the weight of him.

It was, specifically and vividly, the image of that body pressing mine into a mattress, and I could not stop staring at the cut of muscle above his hip where it angled inward and I was having this thought facedown in his bee yard.

Six weeks pregnant with his genetic material.

Covered in mud. A bee on my nose. Get a grip, Flora. Get an immediate grip.

He lifted the bee off my nose with two fingers.

Gentle. The same fingers had old scars across the knuckles from what I assumed was a lifetime of exactly this kind of work.

He set the bee on a nearby frame, then looked down at me the way you’d look at a raccoon that had gotten into your trash: annoyed, mildly curious, waiting for it to leave.

Great. Perfect. I’m on my knees in front of this man and I got here via beekeeping equipment.

Exactly how I drew it up. And yes, I heard what I just thought.

On my knees in front of. My brain served up the full image — unprompted, in vivid detail, the two of us in a context that had nothing to do with hive repair and everything to do with what was at my eye level if I looked straight ahead.

I caught the thought. I killed it. I buried it in a shallow grave and my brain dug it back up.

My brain had been feral since the waistband and showed no signs of rehabilitation.

“Hi,” I said, from the ground. “I am so sorry. I’m — this isn’t — I’m a landscape designer.”

He stared at me.

“I’m scouting the area,” I went on, because apparently my mouth had decided to commit to this before my brain could catch up.

“For a client. Native plantings, pollinator habitat, that kind of thing. I saw the property from the road and I was — I got curious about your setup and I should have knocked, obviously, I should have absolutely knocked, and I will pay for anything I broke.”

He still hadn’t said a word. He looked at the toppled supers. The scattered frames. Me, still on my knees in his mud, with dirt on my face and a notebook dissolving in a puddle.

“You done?” he said.

I stood up, wiped my hands on my jeans, and tried to look like a professional person who had not just destroyed a man’s livelihood with her shins.

“I’m Flora,” I said. “Flora Diaz. Landscape design. I’m based in Portland.” All true. Every word of it true. The lie was everything around the truth: why I was here, why I’d been watching, why my jaw ached from clenching.

He studied me for a long moment. Then he turned toward the meadow, the open stretch between the hive clusters where wildflowers were pushing through the spring mud.

“I’ve been thinking about pollinator plantings,” he said. “Around the hives. Native species, perennial. Extend the forage season.” His eyes came back to me. “You do that?”

I had dirt on my face. I’d just knocked over his equipment. A bee had sat on my nose.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I do.”

He nodded once. “Tomorrow. Seven.” He turned and walked back toward his hives without another word, and I stood in the wreckage of his bee yard with a job I had invented thirty seconds ago and a cover story I was now contractually obligated to maintain.

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs and walked back to the rental car on legs that didn’t feel entirely reliable, and I did not look back because I was afraid that if I looked at him again I would say something true.

The Juniper cabin was exactly as advertised: one room, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a porch with a view of nothing in particular.

Connie Aldrich at the general store had handed me the key without comment but with both eyebrows fully engaged, and I’d driven the ten minutes from Atlas’s property in a state of shock that had not yet organized itself into a coherent emotion.

I sat on the bed. I called Britt.

“Okay,” I said. “Don’t freak out.”

“You’re in Montana,” Britt said. “I’m already freaking out. Give me the damage.”

“I found him.”

“And?”

“And I tripped over his beehives and crash-landed at his feet and panicked and told him I was a landscape designer and he hired me on the spot.”

Silence.

“Britt?”

“I’m processing. Give me a second.” A pause. “He hired you?”

“He needs pollinator plantings around his hives. I said I could do it. Which I can, that’s the insane part — I can actually do the job I made up as a panic response.”

“What does he look like?”

I pressed my free hand against my stomach. “Britt.”

“I need the full picture. For safety reasons.”

“He’s...” I stared at the cabin ceiling. “He’s six-two. Shoulders that should require a building permit. He was shirtless and holding a bee smoker and he looked at me the way you look at a raccoon.”

The silence this time was different. Longer. More dangerous.

“Flora,” she said, in the voice she used when she was about to say something I didn’t want to hear. “You cannot sleep with your sperm donor.”

“Obviously I’m not going to sleep with my sperm donor.”

“You’re going to.”

“I’m NOT.”

“You’re already in love. I can hear it.”

“I’ve known him for forty minutes. He said about twelve words to me and half of them were ‘don’t move.’”

“And you committed insurance fraud on his bees.”

“That was an accident!”

“Flora. Honey. Sweetheart.” Britt took a breath. “You drove nine hours, stalked a man with binoculars, fell into his workplace, lied about your identity, and accepted a fake job. All in one afternoon. This is not the behavior of a woman who’s going to keep professional boundaries.”

She wasn’t wrong. That was the worst part.

“I’m going home Sunday,” I said.

“Sure you are.”

“I’m going to do one day of work tomorrow, confirm he’s a normal decent human being, and drive back to Portland and raise my baby and never think about this again.”

“I’m going to screenshot this and send it back to you in two weeks.”

“It’s a phone call. You can’t screenshot a phone call.”

“Watch me.”

We talked for another hour. I did not hang up. I should note that for the record too.

Later, after I’d showered the mud off and eaten a granola bar that was supposed to be dinner and wasn’t, I sat on the Juniper’s narrow bed and pulled up the donor profile.

Donor #3847. Height: 6’2”. Weight: 210 lbs.

Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Education: B.S.

, Entomology. The essay was two paragraphs about why he loved working with bees — how a hive was its own perfect system, how the bees didn’t care about anything except the work and the season, and how the best thing he’d ever learned was to pay attention to what was already growing instead of forcing what wasn’t.

That essay had made me choose him over 3846 and 3848 and every other number in the catalogue.

The man I’d met today was not a number. He’d lifted a bee off my nose with scarred fingers and said “you done?” in that flat voice, and he’d stood in his meadow with the mountains behind him and the spring light turning his skin gold and offered me a job with fewer words than most people used to order coffee.

The profile said nothing about what his voice would do to the base of my spine.

It said nothing about the way his jeans had hung on his hips, or the size of his hands, or the fact that I was lying in a cabin bed thinking about those hands and where I wanted them and I was going to stop that thought right now. Right now. Stopping.

I closed the profile. I put the phone facedown on the nightstand.

It didn’t help. In the dark, without the screen to focus on, the day came back in pieces — not the humiliation, not the cover story, but him.

His hands first. The scarred fingers lifting the bee off my nose with a care that contradicted everything else about his delivery, and I thought about those fingers and my skin flushed hot under the quilt.

The width of his chest. The way he’d stood in that meadow, unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be and never would.

My thighs pressed together in the dark — quiet, involuntary, undeniable.

My body had already made a decision my brain was still arguing about.

I stared at the ceiling until my pulse evened out.

I was supposed to be here for a weekend.

I had a job that didn’t exist at a company that wasn’t real.

I’d given a fake reason for being on the property of a man who was biologically connected to the baby currently the size of a lentil in my uterus, and tomorrow morning I had to show up at seven a.m. and pretend to be a person who had any idea what she was doing.

I pressed my hand against my stomach. Flat, still. No evidence of anything except bad choices and excellent instincts.

I was in so much trouble.

I was also — and I could hear Britt’s voice telling me this was a red flag — a little bit thrilled.

Don’t be thrilled. This is a reconnaissance mission, not a romcom.

I turned off the light.

It was absolutely a romcom.