Working for the Mountain Man (Hard Hat Hotties #3)

1. Elsie

Elsie

Ireach for the coffee cup and take a sip, my eyes glued to the road ahead of me. The moment the coffee touches my lips, I wince. God, it’s cold. I glance down at the clock and see that it’s been almost an hour since I purchased it.

I sigh deeply, I really need the coffee, but my mind is working overtime as I choose to drive six hours to a rented cabin in a mountain town I have never heard of.

I’m hoping it will help me solve my current situation.

I haven’t run. away, I won’t give that ass the satisfaction of doing that. No, I’m on a writing retreat.

A professional, intentional, carefully planned writing retreat that I absolutely did not book in a panic at two in the morning while sitting on my bathroom floor eating cereal.

The mountains ahead of me are grey and enormous, rising out of the valley.

The road narrows as I get closer to Forge Creek.

The sky is a haze of colors, meaning it could snow at any moment.

Snow sits in dirty ridges along both shoulders, the fields between the pines are full of frozen mud and dead grass, and there is not a single warm or decorative thing in sight.

My phone buzzes in the passenger seat, I don’t look at it, I already know who it is. I flip the phone face down and turn up the radio instead.

The thing about being publicly broken up with is that it stays public.

That’s the part no one warns you about. It is not just the breakup, it’s the screenshots, the comments, and the very cheerful strangers on the internet who want you to know exactly how embarrassing your reaction was, in detail, with timestamps.

It is your ex going on a podcast three days later and talking about how he needed someone less emotional, less romantic, just less.

There was nothing I could do knowing that fourteen thousand people have heard the word less applied to you by someone who used to say he loved you.

It is realizing that you’ve written a full chapter of your novel using dialogue that sounded exactly like him and now you want to delete it.

But you also can’t bear to because it’s yet another dagger to the heart knowing that you’ve lost the man you thought you loved, also an entire chapter, especially when you have a deadline in six weeks.

I have a romance novel that is forty thousand words of wrong turns and a hero who currently has the personality of a cardboard tube. I’m a romance author who can no longer remember why anyone would choose to fall in love voluntarily.

This is fine. It’ll all work out. I have no other option but for it to be fine.

The road gets narrower after I pass the edge of Forge Creek.

I barely see the town, just a glimpse of old brick storefronts, and a lit diner window.

Then the GPS has me turning north and the town falls away behind me.

I’m now on a mountain road that looks like it hasn’t been repaved in the past two decades.

The rental directions said the cabin was three miles out of town. Scenic and private, it sounds like the perfect spot for a writer seeking inspiration.

What the ad failed to mention was the orange cones.

I slow down when I see them and then I spot the work truck, the machinery, some kind of big articulated thing that is taking up most of the road, and the men in high-vis gear moving around it.

There is a washed-out section on the left side of the road.

I can see where the shoulder has collapsed and taken the edge of the tarmac with it, the gravel and mud spilling down the slope below like the road just gave up.

A culvert, maybe? The drainage is wrecked, there is water pooling in the ruts.

I pull up behind the cones and stop, nobody comes over.

So I wait, but still nobody comes over. I get out of the car and immediately regret it as the cold hits me.

I’m in leggings, an oversized sweater and boots that aren’t warm at all.

Damn, I really should have done some research on what to wear while I’m here before I left.

Then again, I was in a hurry, and it didn’t cross my mind what clothes would be practical.

"Hello?" I call out, over the engine noise.

A couple of the crew members look up, one of them says something to another, but nobody moves in my direction.

Then out of the corner of my eyes, I spot a guy moving toward me.

He comes from the far side of the machinery, and the first thing I notice is the size of him.

He’s enormous, tall and broad, hard hat, a heavy jacket with the collar turned up, faded jeans, and boots thick with mud.

He has a radio clipped to his jacket, and a tablet in one hand.

He’s got dark stubble on his jaw, with some grey in it, and he has brown eyes that go straight to me and do not leave my face.

No smile, nowhere even close. Of course he’s attractive. Because apparently rock bottom comes from being cosmically punished for something I have not done yet.

"Road's closed," he says, his voice low and even.

“I can see that," I say. "I have a rental cabin about a mile up this road. I’ve been driving since six this morning and I need to get there."

He looks at me for a moment, then past me at my car. "Culvert washed out in the storm," he says. "The left shoulder is unstable. We need another hour before I can let anyone through safely."

"An hour?" I ask, horrified that I’ll have to wait that long.

He continues to stare at me, his gaze unflinching. "Give or take."

I gape at him. "It's freezing."

"It is," he agrees.

I wrap my arms around myself and resist the urge to say something that will not help. "Is there any way to speed it up?"

"No."

"Right," I say. "Okay."

I go back to my car because there is nothing else to do. I get in, turn the heater up, and stare at the work crew through the windscreen while trying not to think about how much I want to cry.

It has nothing to do with the road. I’m exhausted and cold and my phone keeps buzzing. I’m sitting in a mountain town that I’ve never been to because the alternative was staying in my apartment watching my life get dissected in the comment sections on social media.

About twenty minutes later, there’s a knock on my window. I startle and raise a hand to my chest as I turn and see that it’s him standing at my driver's side with mud on his boots and snow starting to sit on the shoulders of his jacket. I roll the window down.

"We can get you through," he says. "Drive slow, stay left of center. Do not pull over near the bend, the shoulder is still soft there. And don't come back down this road after dark unless you have to."

"Okay."

"Do you have decent tires?"

I stare at him. "I have a bad attitude and Google Maps. Between the two of us, we've managed fine so far."

I watch in fascination as his lips twitch ever so slightly, I think that’s the closest thing to a smile I’ve seen from anyone in a week.

"Stay left," he says again. "And slow."

He walks ahead of the car without asking whether I am going to follow. I follow, because what else am I going to do? He guides me past the cones, past the machinery, and past the section where the road edge crumbles away into a steep drop that makes my stomach lurch when I see it properly.

I keep my eyes on him instead, at his hands, when he signals left or slow or stop for a second, which are enormous and scarred across the knuckles.

He stops beside the car when I am past the worst of it and taps twice on the roof. "You're clear," he says. "Keep going."

"Thank you." I mean it, I’m grateful that he was able to get me through quicker than expected. "I'm Elsie, by the way. Elsie Bell."

He looks at me for a moment. "Hugo Rhodes," he says and then he walks back to the job site.

That’s it, no questions about why I’m here or how long I’m staying or anything else. Just his name and then he’s gone.

Hugo Rhodes.

I drive the rest of the way to the cabin trying not to think about it.

The cabin is not awful. It’s also not the warm, lamp-lit sanctuary the listing photos suggested; because listing photos are fictional and I write fiction for a living and still fell for it, which says something embarrassing about my judgement.

It’s small and cold when I open the door.

The walls are plain wood, there’s a basic kitchen, a bed that looks far from deluxe, but does look comfortable, a wood burner I’m going to have to figure out how to use, and a Wi-Fi router with a light that is blinking rapidly, which I don’t think it should be doing.

The view through the back window is genuinely beautiful: Mountains, pines and the last of the grey afternoon light, and for a second, I just stand there looking at it.

Then the cold catches up with me and I haul my bags inside.

I set up the way I always do when I’m working somewhere new.

Laptop on the table, a new notebook next to it, my charger plugged in, and my manuscript opened to the last scene I was working on, forty-three thousand words of a romance novel that currently has an ending problem and a hero problem and, if I am being fully honest with myself, a I-do-not-believe-in-this-anymore problem.

The hero is named Callum.

Callum is charming, articulate, emotionally available, and he says the right thing at the right moment, he’s the exact man I would have designed two years ago when I still thought that was what love looked like.

I read back the last scene I wrote and wince. God, it’s terrible.

Not the prose, the prose is fine. Callum is so smooth, so perfectly pitched, and the heroine is so charmed by him, that none of it feels true. It feels like I described a feeling I used to have rather than one I actually understand.

My phone buzzes and I pick it up this time without thinking.

It’s a message from Daniel

Daniel: Hey. Heard you left town. I hope you're doing okay.

I stare at it for a long time. He heard I left town.

He heard. As if we’re still in the type of relationship where he gets to check in on me.

He’s acting as though he didn’t spend forty minutes on a podcast telling someone else about my flaws in such detail people on the damn internet have made quotes from his words.

I hope you're doing okay.

The audacity of that sentence, he’s utterly delusional. I block the number, I can’t be dealing with him, not now, God, maybe not ever. Not anymore.

I sit here for a moment with my hands in my lap, feeling the sting of it settle somewhere under my ribs. Not because I want him back. I do not. It’s more that I wanted to be far enough away from all of it that it couldn’t reach me, and apparently six hours and a mountain range is not far enough.

I came here to write a happy ending, not to feel like a walking cautionary tale about reading too much into things.

I take a deep breath and push the thoughts of Daniel out of my mind. I make a cup of tea, that always helps. Once I’m seated at the table again, looking at my manuscript, I put my fingers on the keyboard, and pray something happens.

I sit there for ten minutes and nothing.

The problem is that every time I try to write Callum, I am not seeing Callum anymore.

No, I’m seeing a hard hat, a tablet and a pair of scarred hands directing traffic.

I’m hearing a low voice saying stay left like a man who is absolutely certain you will do what he tells you.

I shake my head. No. Absolutely not.

Hugo is grumpy bossy and at least forty.

Not to mention he looked at me like I was an inconvenience to be managed, which is not romantic in the slightest. And not one single romance novel starts with the heroine being waved through a road closure by someone who can’t be bothered to finish a sentence.

I am done with men. I decided this three weeks ago and the decision still stands. I’m especially done with men who are too grumpy, too competent, too broad, and too unsettlingly calm for their own good.

I look back at Callum in chapter eleven. God, he’s still terrible.

I close the laptop and sigh. I came to Forge Creek to swear off men. That would be easier if the first one I met hadn’t looked like he was built to ruin every promise I was planning to keep.