Page 3 of Craved By the Mountain Man

My mother planted most of them years ago.

Declan merely watered the garden.

The phone vibrates again.

I snatch it from the cupholder when the road straightens, praying for Kaden.

Unknown number again.

My pulse trips as a new message appears.

We can do this the easy way.

I stare at it long enough for the road to blur, then flip the phone facedown.

“Fantastic. Love choices.”

My voice sounds thinner than I want inside the car, so I clear my throat and focus on the road.

The last sign said WILDWOOD, 7 MILES.

Seven miles to a town of roughly three thousand people tucked so deep into the mountains that I am fairly sure the internet arrives by mule.

I have been there once.

Two years ago, Kaden brought me along for a weekend because he was passing through and decided his twenty-one-year-old sister needed fresh air, mountains, and a firsthand demonstration of what severe sexual frustration felt like.

That last part was Gavin Mercer’s fault.

I met him for one weekend and have remembered his face for two years, which seems unfair.

Especially because Gavin is not pretty.

Pretty suggests softness. Symmetry. A man who has never looked across a room and made a woman forget what she was saying halfway through the word probably.

Gavin is six-foot-four, broad enough to make doorways look decorative, with black hair, silver-gray eyes, scars, dark stubble, and the general energy of a man who could chop wood during a blizzard and somehow make the blizzard apologize.

He spoke maybe forty words to me that entire weekend.

I treasured thirty-seven of them.

The remaining three were, “Careful. It’s hot.”

He was handing me coffee.

I nearly proposed.

My dignity has always been delicate.

Thankfully, none of that matters now because Gavin is gone.

Kaden mentioned months ago that he was taking a long security assignment. I do not know where or for whom, but I know one important thing.

His cabin is empty.

My chest loosens by half an inch.

This is temporary. I stay one night, maybe two, get hold of Kaden, and we figure out what to do.