Page 37 of Maple Kissed by the Mountain Man

I retrieved my jacket and locked the gate, the iron key turning heavy and final in the padlock. The moment I pushed open the front door, the cabin felt brutally, shockingly wrong.

It felt dead.

My gut twisted into a tight, agonizing knot. I could still feel the warmth of her bare body pressed against me, how she’d taken every inch of me, surrounding me. I shoved the sleeping bag into the washing machine, slammed the lid, and reached for the dial.

I stopped.

I stood there in the dark utility room, my breathing rough and uneven, and pulled it back out before I could turn the water on. Washing it would be like erasing last night. And I didn’t want that.

That was how I knew I was completely fucked.

I’d spent years arranging my life like a fortress, letting no one else inside. She’d hit that on the head. I had my mountain, my timber, my silence, and more than enough work to keep my hands bloody and tired by nightfall. Nobody asked where I’d been or when I was coming home. Nobody touched my things. Nobody stood outside my gate with wild eyes and dark hair, demanding a place in a life I’d kept sealed shut.

I’d liked it that way. I’d needed it that way.

Then Maggie Bennett had wrecked it all.

She filled every silence I’d spent years protecting. And now, the silence in this house felt like a physical weight pressing against my chest, crushing the air out of my lungs.

When she’d stood in front of me and asked that damning question. Did last night mean something? I hadn’t said a single word. Not one. I couldn’t manage an honest answer to the one person who’d earned the truth from me.

The woman standing in my oversized clothes, her lips swollen from my mouth, and fear had done what nothing else on this earth had ever managed to do.

It made me a coward.

Telling her that what happened in that tent was a mistake—that I didn’t want her here—was the worst lie I’d ever spoken.

And I couldn’t live with it. I didn’t want to live with it.

I drove down to the valley the next morning, the tires of my truck kicking up gravel as I pushed sixty down the winding mountain pass.

Maggie’s apartment sat above the bakery on main street, but her SUV wasn’t parked in the alley behind the building. The bakery owner looked at me with sympathy in her eyes as if she knew what had transpired between me and Maggie. And maybe she had. There had been no secret that Maggie had wanted on my land. She told me Maggie was delivering her festival entry and working the photography exhibit for the rest of the day.

I could cross a flooded creek in the dark. I could fell an eighty-foot pine in a blizzard. I could spend months alone without seeing a single human face.

The Lone Mountain Maple Festival was a different beast entirely.

Hundreds of people packed into the town every October. They crowded around wooden booths, bought cheap trinkets, and basically took up space.

I’d avoided it for a decade.

This year, Maggie was down there. And if I had to march through a sea of tourists to get my hands on her, I’d do it.

I finally reached my destination, the old brick town hall. I drew in a deep breath and walked inside, praying I hadn’t fucked this up entirely.

I found her photograph before I found her.

It hung dead-center on the back wall beneath a small white card bearing her name. The frame was dark wood, but the image inside looked alive. Red leaves burned like fire in the upper half of the shot, glowing beneath a sharp morning sun. The still rainwater below reflected the canopy so flawlessly that the ancient tree seemed to stretch into an infinite, burning abyss above and below.

Maggie had been right.

It wasn’t just a shot of a tree. It was power. It was age. It was a violent, beautiful thing that didn’t ask anyone for permission to exist.

I stared at it until the murmur of the crowd around me faded into static.

“Why are you here, Ford?”

I turned around slow.