Page 2 of Stolen By the Mountain Man

He was nervous too. I knew for a fact he’d never done anything like this before. He’d signed up for the online dating site on a dare, determined he would never agree to marry someone until he met her in person, but he’d been so taken with my sister’s picture and emails that he broke his own rule.

What he didn’t realize was he’d been emailing withmefor two of those six weeks. My sister and I shared a laptop, and every day, throughout the day, I’d check her email, reply to him,and delete both his message and my response. It was Daphne’s personal email account, so she didn’t get on there while she was at work, and I had all his messages forwarded to a folder hidden under another folder that she’d created.

I was sure she’d catch me at any moment, but she never had. And here I was.

Climbing into the vehicle first gave me the chance to catch my breath as I buckled in and settled my purse on my lap. Inside the purse, my phone buzzed, and I knew my sister was probably replying to my text saying I’d arrived and was heading to meet my ride-share driver. I’d have to find a way to stay in touch with her while I was up here.

“Ready to see Seduction Summit?” he asked.

I nodded, my lips still clamped shut. I couldn’t do that the whole time, though. He’d spoken to my sister on the phone once, and she definitely had a different voice than I did. But I’d been watching her over the past few days, paying attention to her vocal tics and the pitch of her voice. I had to give it a try.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

No, that definitely didn’t sound like Daphne. Hopefully, their conversation had been so long ago, he couldn’t remember her voice. Or maybe he’d write it off as sounding different by phone than in person. That could happen.

“Three years,” he said. “Got out of the military. Moved back home, but it just didn’t feel right. I miss that sense of community that you get living on base. A group of us had cabins built around a pond.”

“And those are the guys who dared you to join Mountain Mates?”

That was the name of the app where Isaac and Daphne had connected. It wasn’t just a dating app in the traditional sense. Its entire goal was to help guys living in places like Seduction Summit find women when there weren’t any locally.

But not just women. Wives. Both parties signed up knowing that the main goal was to find a spouse, not just meet up for coffee and see if it went anywhere. My sister signed up after being dumped by her boyfriend of seven years. But as the time drew closer to follow through, she got cold feet and decided she wanted to do things the old-fashioned way, even if it took a little longer.

“Yep,” Isaac said. “One night, I had a little too much to drink and my buddies were giving me a hard time. One of them mentioned this site, so we pulled it up. They snapped that picture of me that you first saw. I planned to take it down, but it matched me with you and several others. Your picture jumped out at me.”

His words warmed my heart until I remembered something. That wasn’t my picture. He’d fallen for my sister, not me. I’d just stepped in four weeks later and pretended to be the woman he loved.

Thank God the guy hadn’t wanted to video chat. He’d said he wanted to get to know her personality first. They’d only spoken on the phone once, early on, and it was just a getting-to-know-you call. Everything else had been through email and not even on the platform. It had all been the perfect setup for me to step in when my sister sent him a Dear John email and moved on with her life as though he’d never even existed.

And now, here I sat, in the passenger seat of a stranger’s SUV, heading to a town I’d never even known existed before six weeks ago. I was terrified and exhilarated at the same time. I’d never done anything so adventurous in my life.

This might just be addictive.

2

ISAAC

Daphne was even more beautiful than her pictures. And that was saying a lot.

Her curves hadn’t quite come through online, and that had been the one thing I’d been hesitant about. I liked my women to look like women. Big boobs, rounded hips, an ass I could grab on to…

But one look at her walking toward my vehicle, and I knew I’d be fighting an erection every second I spent with her until I could do something about it. I couldn’t wait to do something about it. But first, we needed to get to know each other more than we’d gotten to know each other over the course of hundreds of emails and one long-ago half-hour phone call.

By the time we passed the “Welcome to Seduction Summit” sign, I already knew more about her than I did any woman I’d ever dated. Well, that was combined with what I’d already learned over the past six weeks.

She was the oldest daughter of a divorced couple. Both parents had remarried, and she and her sister had spent most of their childhood shuffling between the two homes. She was also a nurse, and she was looking into getting licensed in this state. Butshe’d resigned from her position a couple of weeks ago. At least that was the plan. She hadn’t really said much about it when I asked her how it went.

“I talked to my buddy, Chaz,” I said. “He agreed with me that this would be the perfect place for an old folks’ home.”

I saw her wince and glanced over at her. She’d been taking in the passing scenery, although there wasn’t much to see beyond this point. Just the shopping center that was under construction and a sign pointing passersby to the downtown area where the courthouse and some offices were. Past this was the occasional shop and restaurant, along with some cabins along the main road. Eventually, we’d reach the ski lodge. My place was a few miles up the mountain from there.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, backtracking through my words. “You cringed.”

Maybe I’d imagined it. Maybe her face was in response to what she was seeing all around her. Was she disappointed? I’d never been to Philadelphia, but it was a decent-sized city. I’d assume it looked nothing like this.

But for me, that was exactly where I wanted to live. The beauty of Seduction Summit was that every square inch of land wasn’t sold off for a fast-food restaurant, bank, or apartment complex. But give it time. The way this town was going, I’d be surprised if eventually we didn’t have at least some of that.

“We don’t really use the term old folks’ home,” she said. “I guess it’s been drilled into me. Sorry, it was a reflex.”

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