Red Hot Mountain Man (Hot Mountain Nights 2 #13)

PROLOGUE

Roxie

Some girls had a Sweet Sixteen birthday party. Complete with a to-die-for dress, balloons, cake, dancing, surrounded by friends. And boys.

I got momma’s rules.

They came in a little leather notebook—the kind you’d expect to find in an antique store, all worn edges and yellowed pages.

She’d handed it to me at the kitchen table on the morning of my sixteenth birthday, right between the chocolate chip pancakes and the pile of cards from relatives I barely knew.

“Open it,” she’d said, sipping her coffee like she hadn’t just handed me a book that was going to define the next decade of my life.

I’d flipped it open, expecting a journal. Maybe some inspirational quotes.

Instead, I’d found rules. There were thirty of them, written in momma’s looping cursive, scattered across pages numbered all the way to forty-nine.

And, what really made me smile? The gaps.

Blank lines between the ones she’d written, numbers already assigned and waiting so I could make my own as life taught me the tough lessons.

Rule #4: Always keep a twenty in your bra and another in your shoe. Cash gets you out of more situations than charm ever will.

Rule #12: Be nice—until you can’t be. And then slap the shit out of them.

Rule #25: Don’t try to hold onto something—or someone—that isn’t yours.

I’d looked up at her. “Mom. Seriously?”

She’d just smiled that slow, knowing smile—the kind that came from a woman who’d lived enough to know things I hadn’t yet.

“Read them. Memorize them. Live by them.”

And the thing was? I had.

Momma was a force of nature in a five-foot-two package.

Big hair, bigger laugh, and a mouth that could peel the paint off the walls when she wanted it to.

She’d raised me on her own in our little Tennessee town, working double shifts at the diner and somehow still making it to every school play or soccer game, every parent-teacher conference.

And when she gave you advice, you listened.

I’d kept my standards high and my tolerance for bullshit low. I’d never lied, even when the truth was ugly. I’d kept that twenty in my bra. I’d been nice—mostly—and slapped the metaphorical shit out of the ones who deserved it.

For twenty-eight years, I’d been a good rule-follower.

And for twenty-eight years, I’d been quietly, steadily miserable.

The corporate job that drained me. The apartment I could barely afford.

The dates with men who looked good on paper and felt like nothing in person.

Men who made suggestions they shouldn’t have about my appearance or eating habits.

I spent years trying to shrink myself to fit into a corporate world and a dating market that wasn’t built for a woman with hips.

The slow, creeping realization that I was building a life I didn’t actually want, brick by careful brick, just because someone had told me that was how you did it.

So I quit.

Quit the job. Sublet the apartment. Packed up my twelve-year-old hatchback with everything I could fit inside and one thing I could never leave behind—momma’s little leather notebook, tucked into the glove compartment like a security blanket.

I’d called her from a gas station outside Nashville to tell her what I’d done.

She’d been quiet for a long moment.

Then she said, “Took you long enough.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Baby girl, I gave you those rules to keep you safe, not stuck. Go see the world. Just don’t get murdered.”

“I’ll add that to the list.”

That had made her laugh, “You do that.”

I’d hung up and pointed the car west. Momma hadn’t included any rules about what to do when your soul was suffocating, but packing my entire life into my car and driving felt like one of those unspoken rules.

That had been three weeks ago.

I’d seen the Grand Canyon. The Badlands. A field of sunflowers in Kansas that had made me cry for reasons I still couldn’t explain. I’d slept in cheap motels and eaten gas station hot dogs and felt, for the first time in my adult life like maybe I was figuring out who I was.

Then my car broke down in Lone Mountain, Montana.

And I met him.

I’d broken three of my momma’s rules before noon.

By nightfall, I was sleeping in a stranger’s bed.

But that’s getting ahead of the story.