Weak for the Wylde Mountain Man (Wylde Mountain Heat #5)

Chapter 1

Paige

The price of her electric bill in August. The calorie count of the queso she just ate an entire bowl of. The fact that her ex-fiancé, the man who told her she was “too much” and left a few months ago, is now engaged to someone else.

I found out via Instagram. His new fiancée (I’m going to call her that, fiancée, because that’s what she is and words should mean what they mean even when they make you want to throw your phone into the Cumberland River) posted a photo of her hand on his chest, ring catching the light, caption: When you know, you know.

I called Claire. Not the group chat. Claire, because Claire is the friend who won’t say “you’re better off” or “his loss” or any of the things that are true but don’t help when you’re sitting on your kitchen floor with a bowl of queso and a phone full of evidence that you were replaceable.

Claire said: “Come to the mountain.”

I booked the flight while we were still on the phone.

~~~

Claire picks me up at Bozeman. She’s standing at the arrivals curb by a Subaru with a “RECONCILED” bumper sticker that I am ninety percent sure is an accounting joke and ten percent sure Leo put there to make her laugh.

She looks different. Not the clothes or the hair.

The posture. Claire used to hold herself like a woman bracing for the next thing to go wrong.

Now she holds herself like a woman who found the thing that went right.

She hugs me. I hug her back. I hold on a beat longer than I mean to because my body is tired and my heart is tired and my face hurts from smiling at the gate agent and the flight attendant and the man in 14C who asked if I was okay and I said “I’m great!

” with an exclamation point so sharp it could cut glass.

I’m not great. I’m a twenty-six-year-old music teacher from Nashville whose fiancé told her she was too much and then found someone better in two months.

I’m a woman who sings at open mic nights and teaches third graders to play recorder and has been the happy friend for so long that I don’t know how to walk through an airport looking the way I actually feel.

“You look tired,” Claire says.

“Nice to see you too,” I reply with a weak smile.

She smiles. The real Claire smile, the one that took a mountain and a man with sawdust on his jeans to unlock.

She puts the car in drive and we head toward the mountain and I press my forehead against the window and watch Montana go by.

Green and huge and quiet. The kind of quiet that doesn’t need you to fill it.

I’ve been here before. The reunion trip with the girls, back in July, right after things ended with Ryan. I came because I needed my friends and because I didn’t know how to sit in my apartment alone with a canceled wedding and an empty ring box.

I came and I smiled and I cheered and I paddled too hard on the raft and I laughed at the rapids because laughing is what I do when I don’t know what else to do.

The mountain was good to me then. Maybe it’ll be good to me now.

We’re forty minutes into the drive, on the two-lane road that winds up toward the mountain, when the car shudders.

“That’s not good,” I say.

“No,” Claire says. She’s already pulling over. Her hands are steady on the wheel, her jaw set. Claire in crisis mode is Claire at her best: controlled, efficient, already running the protocol in her head. She gets out. Walks around the car. Comes back.

“Flat tire. Right rear.”

“Do you know how to change a tire?”

“I watched a YouTube tutorial before this trip.”

“When?”

“Before the trip. As a precaution.”

“Claire.”

“The precaution didn’t include a practicum component.”

We’re standing on the gravel shoulder, me holding a tire iron like it’s an instrument I’ve never played and Claire examining the jack with the focused confusion of a woman whose skill set does not include roadside mechanics, when a truck comes around the bend.

Dark green. Older. Well-maintained the way things are well-maintained by people who care about what they own. It slows. Pulls over behind us. The door opens.

The first thing I notice is his hands. They’re on the truck door as he swings down from the cab, large and rough and certain. The kind of hands that have held things heavier than a steering wheel. The kind of hands that know what they’re doing in the wilds of Montana.

The second thing I notice is the rest of him. He’s tall. Broad through the shoulders in a way that doesn’t come from a gym. Dark hair with gray at the temples. His jaw is the jaw of a man who makes decisions and doesn’t revisit them. His eyes are sharp and steady and they land on me.

On me. Not on Claire, not on the car, not on the tire. On me. For a half second that I feel in the soles of my feet.

He’s older. Not old. Older. The kind of older that settles on a man like a chord resolving, everything arriving where it’s supposed to be.

I have never in my life looked at a stranger and felt what I feel right now, which is a full-body key change, every note in my chest shifting to something I don’t recognize.

“Flat?” he says. His voice is low. Butterflies take flight in my stomach.

“We’re handling it,” Claire says.

He looks at the jack in Claire’s hand, which she’s holding upside down. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t smirk. He nods once and says, “Mind if I help?” in a way that isn’t really a question.

He takes the jack. He takes the tire iron from me and our fingers brush during the handoff and something happens. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Something physically, electrically, unmistakably happens.

A current that runs from his hand through mine and into my wrist and up my arm and into the center of my chest. I’ve held hands with men.

I’ve been touched by men. I was engaged to a man.

None of them, not once, made my body do what this stranger’s fingers just did in a quarter-second of accidental contact.

He crouches next to the car and works. Quick and competent. His sleeves are pushed up. The muscles in his forearms move under tanned skin and I’m watching and I should not be watching but I am watching because my eyes have made a decision without consulting the rest of me.

He finishes. Lowers the car. Stands, wipes his hands on his jeans, and turns to us.

His eyes land on me again. They stay. They stay the way a note holds in a room after you’ve stopped singing it. Resonance. That’s the word. His eyes on my face and the air between us humming at a frequency I’ve never heard before.

“Should get that replaced soon,” he says. To me. Not to Claire. To me.

“Thank you,” I say. My voice comes out quieter than I intended.

Smaller. The performance stripped out of it by surprise.

I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t ready for any of this.

I came to this mountain to eat queso on someone else’s kitchen floor and cry about my ex and here I am standing on a gravel shoulder vibrating like a tuning fork because a man touched my hand.

“Mason,” he says. He extends his hand. The hand. The hand that just did the thing.

“Paige.” I take it.

The current runs again. Stronger this time because we’re facing each other and his hand swallows mine and his grip is warm and firm. Which is good, because my knees feel weak. That’s never happened to me before.

His eyes are on my face and he’s seeing something. I don’t know what. I’m puffy and tired and I cried on the plane and my hair is in a ponytail that gave up somewhere over Wyoming.

But he’s looking at me like he just found something in the road he wasn’t looking for and he’s not sure what to do about it.

“You two headed up the mountain?” he asks.

“My friend lives up here,” I say, teeth chattering. “I’m visiting.”

The evening is cooling down. I’m in a T-shirt and the mountain air is cold against my arms and before I can rub them he pulls his jacket off and puts it around my shoulders.

Just does it. No asking. No “are you cold?” No waiting for permission. He takes his jacket off and puts it on me like covering a woman he met ninety seconds ago is the most natural thing he’s ever done.

The jacket is heavy and warm and it smells like cedar and something underneath that’s decidedly masculine. I pull it closed without thinking. My hands disappear inside the sleeves.

“Gets cold up here at night,” he says.

He gets back in his truck. He drives away. I stand on the gravel shoulder wearing a stranger’s jacket and watching his taillights disappear around the bend and I don’t say a word.

We get in the car. We drive. Three miles of silence, which is a Paige record that may never be broken.

“He left his jacket,” I say.

I’m holding the collar against my jaw. I’m not taking it off.

“We should return it,” I say.

“We should.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“No. But Levi might.”

We get to Marissa and Levi’s place and Marissa is on the porch, waiting to greet me. My phone starts buzzing a few seconds later.

Claire: We got a flat tire on the mountain road. A man named Mason stopped and changed it. Old green truck. He left his jacket with Paige. She hasn’t taken it off. Does anyone know him?

Marissa: I’ll ask Levi.

Two minutes.

Marissa: Mason Lane. He bought the old Crawford ranch on the north side of the mountain about three years ago.

Keeps to himself. Levi says he’s in real estate.

Or was. Retired early. Apparently very early.

Levi says “the guy could buy the mountain if he wanted to, but he just runs cattle and fixes fence posts.”

Jules: A BILLIONAIRE MOUNTAIN MAN RANCHER STOPPED TO CHANGE HER TIRE AND LEFT HIS JACKET. THE MOUNTAIN IS FIVE FOR FIVE. I TOLD YOU. I TOLD ALL OF YOU.

Claire: Nobody said billionaire.

Marissa: Levi implied it pretty strongly.

Me: You guys I’m just going to return his jacket!! It’s just a jacket!! He was just being nice!!

Jules: SCREENSHOT. SAVED. THE JACKET IS EXHIBIT A.

~~~

Morning. My first morning back on Wylde Mountain.