Page 9 of Ensnared By the Mountain Man

6

ELIAS

She’s waiting for me outside Sugar Moon when I pull up at two.

She changed out of her work clothes. Jeans, a light jacket, and hiking boots. I notice the boots and breathe a sigh of relief. She learned from the last time.

Her hair is down, which I’ve never seen before because she always has it pulled back at the bakery. It falls past her shoulders in loose waves, and I sit in the truck for a second longer than I should, watching her through the windshield and telling myself to breathe.

She spots the truck and smiles, and the whole damn street gets brighter.

I lean across and open the passenger door. She climbs in, and the cab fills with that scent I’ve had in my head for days. Vanilla and sugar. She buckles in and looks over at me, and I realize I haven’t said anything yet.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey.”

She’s smiling, and it’s different from her bakery smile. That one is warm but practiced—the one she gives everyone. This one is smaller, a little uncertain, like she’s not sure what the rules are when we’re not separated by a counter and a cash register.

That makes two of us.

I drive out of town and up the mountain road. The turnoff to the lookout is about two miles past my cabin—a dirt track that dead-ends at a clearing where the trees open up and the whole valley spreads out below. I found it my first week in Wildwood—one of those days when the cabin was too small and the station was too crowded and I needed to stand somewhere high enough to see the edges of everything.

I’ve never brought anyone up here.

We park, and I grab a couple of water bottles from behind the seat. The trail to the lookout is short, maybe a quarter mile through old-growth pine. I let her set the pace. Her ankle is better, but I can still see the ghost of the limp if I watch closely—the way she places her left foot a fraction more carefully than her right. She doesn’t mention it, and I don’t ask. The last four days have taught me that Morgan talks about her pain when she’s ready and not a second before.

The trees thin out and then we’re there.

The lookout is just a flat rock shelf at the edge of the ridge—nothing official, no guardrail, no marker. Just granite and sky and the valley below, and on a clear day you can see all the way to the next range. Today is clear. The light is that late-afternoon gold that makes everything look like it exists outside of time. The kind of light that makes you forget about stations and shifts and all the things that keep you moving so you don’t have to stand still.

She stops at the edge and takes a breath, and I watch her shoulders drop. “This is yours,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“This place. It’s where you come when you need to not be anywhere else.” She looks back at me. “I can tell because it feels like you.”

I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what it means to feel like me, or how she figured that out, or why the fact that she said it makes something behind my ribs ache in a way that almost feels good.

We sit on the rock. Not too close, not too far. The distance between us is about the length of my forearm, and I’m aware of every inch of it.

“Tell me about Copper Peak,” she says.

She doesn’t push. She just opens the door and waits to see if I’ll walk through it, the same way she’s been doing since the first morning I showed up at her counter and said nothing—and she let me. I’ve been walking past that door for months. Today I stop.

“My dad was a firefighter,” I say. “His dad before him. Small-town department, volunteer mostly. The kind of place where everyone knows your family and your family goes back far enough that the town feels like it belongs to you.”

“That sounds nice.”

“It was.” I pick up a piece of loose granite and turn it over in my hand. “I left when I was nineteen. Joined a hotshot crew out of Montana.”

“That’s the wildfire teams?”

“Yeah. Twenty guys on a line, cutting fuel breaks, hiking into terrain nobody else wants to touch. You train together, eat together, sleep in the dirt together. After a while, they’re not your crew. They’re your family.”

I can feel her watching me. Patient. Still.

“There was a fire in eastern Oregon. August, four years ago. The wind was doing something unpredictable—shifting every few hours—and we were cutting a line along a ridge that was supposed to hold. I was the one who called the position. I read the terrain, I checked the weather, I told the guys where to dig.” I stop. The granite in my hand is warm from the sun and I press my thumb into the flat side of it until it hurts. “The wind shifted. Not gradually. All at once, and the fire came over the ridge from a direction I didn’t account for.”