Page 5 of Seeking the Mountain Man

With that, I picked up my sandwich and tackled it again, hoping he didn’t notice the way my fingers trembled. I tried to grip onto it.

I’d always been the most confident of my friend group. It was why I was still single. Most men bored me. Even the ones my friends went all weak in the knees over. I could see right through their games, and I had no patience for silly fake compliments and the typical romantic gestures.

No, it would take a real man to win me over. Will Threader was definitely a real man.

“How about I show you?” Will asked.

My mind had drifted so far away from our conversation, it took me a second to piece together what he was saying. For a heart-stopping second, I was sure he’d read my thoughts. Was he saying he’d personally show me what a real man could do to a woman?

“Show me?” I asked.

“Show you my friends.”

I really had no interest in meeting a bunch of single guys right now. Which was absurd, considering that was what I was here to do.

“I’ll show you around town,” he said. “You can get a feel for the place. Make sure your clients want to uproot their lives and move up here to the mountains.”

“What makes you think my clients would be the ones to move?”

The look he shot me then told me the answer. I was silly for even thinking there might be some kind of compromise.

“Nobody’s moving away from Blackbear Bluff,” he said. “This place gets in your blood. Spend a couple of nights here, and you’ll never want to leave.”

The whole reason I was sitting in this restaurant was that it was in the parking lot of the only hotel in town. I’d come here with plans to snoop around in delivery uniform, spend the night, and maybe poke around a little more tomorrow.

Yes, I’d stay one night as planned. But at checkout time tomorrow morning, I’d be packing my bags, tossing them in my trunk, and heading back to Charlotte. No set of bulging pecs and steel-gray eyes could get me out of my condo in a Charlotte high-rise. Not in this lifetime.

“You have a deal,” I said.

3

WILL

Wine lowered a woman’s inhibitions. That was what I kept telling myself as I watched the woman across from me take her first sip from her second glass. Riesling was what she’d ordered. Whatever the hell that was.

I ordered another beer but sipped it slower. No need to lowermyinhibitions. They were about as low as they could go.

We stepped out into the warm night air and headed for my truck. I’d somehow talked her into taking a ride with me, but only because she wanted to see the town. She was just out of college and looking for work, but she was hoping this matchmaking gig would let her do her own thing.

“Take me where the men are,” Kenzie said with a giggle as I pulled out of the parking lot.

I couldn’t help but smile. She was definitely tipsy. When she sobered up a little, I’d give her a talking-to about climbing into trucks with men she didn’t know in strange towns.

But maybe she trusted me. Or maybe she wanted me. Maybe the past hour or so with me had left her panties as wet as they were in my fantasies.

I cleared my throat and slowed as we reached my cabin. “That’s my home.” I gestured in that direction. “I got it at a steal. It was a rental before I bought it. Turns out, there just aren’t enough people who want to come all the way out here to spend the weekend fishing.”

“Yeah, I could see that.”

What did that mean? “Do you have something against fishing?”

She made a face. I caught it out of the corner of my eye. But she said nothing. I decided to let it drop.

“That’s the cabin that started it all,” I said. “That woman came to town back in February and ended up stranded with Granger North. She’s the one who wrote the article.”

“Hmph,” Kenzie said.

She didn’t seem all that interested, so I kept going. “That’s Phoenix. He works with us at the logging company. You probably won’t want to fix any of your clients up with that one. Unless you want to punish someone, that is.”

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