Page 3 of Working for the Mountain Man

I hope you're doing okay.

The audacity of that sentence, he’s utterly delusional. I block the number, I can’t be dealing with him, not now, God, maybe not ever. Not anymore.

I sit here for a moment with my hands in my lap, feeling the sting of it settle somewhere under my ribs. Not because I want him back.I do not. It’s more that I wanted to be far enough away from all of it that it couldn’t reach me, and apparently six hours and a mountain range is not far enough.

I came here to write a happy ending, not to feel like a walking cautionary tale about reading too much into things.

I take a deep breath and push the thoughts of Daniel out of my mind. I make a cup of tea, that always helps. Once I’m seated at the table again, looking at my manuscript, I put my fingers on the keyboard, and pray something happens.

I sit there for ten minutes and nothing. The problem is that every time I try to write Callum, I am not seeing Callum anymore. No, I’m seeing a hard hat, a tablet and a pair of scarred hands directing traffic. I’m hearing a low voice sayingstay leftlike a man who is absolutely certain you will do what he tells you.

I shake my head.No. Absolutely not.

Hugo is grumpy bossy and at least forty. Not to mention he looked at me like I was an inconvenience to be managed, whichis not romantic in the slightest. And not one single romance novel starts with the heroine being waved through a road closure by someone who can’t be bothered to finish a sentence.

I am done with men. I decided this three weeks ago and the decision still stands. I’m especially done with men who are too grumpy, too competent, too broad, and too unsettlingly calm for their own good.

I look back at Callum in chapter eleven. God, he’s still terrible.

I close the laptop and sigh. I came to Forge Creek to swear off men. That would be easier if the first one I met hadn’t looked like he was built to ruin every promise I was planning to keep.

Chapter 2

Hugo

Iwatch her car until it disappears around the bend and then I go back to work.

That is the whole of it, that is the beginning and end of Elsie Bell as far as I am concerned. She needed to get through and I got her through. She has a cabin and a functioning road, so she can manage the rest of it herself.

"Soft shoulder's still moving," Darnell calls from the far side of the culvert. He’s crouched at the edge with a stick, probing the ground the way I showed him two winters ago, he’s got good instinct and he doesn’t need me to tell him that.

"Shore it with the gravel before we pack up," I say. "I don't want anything shifting overnight."

He nods.

The snow is coming in faster than I'd like, it’s not heavy, not yet, but it’s the persistent fine stuff that gets into everything and makes roads deceptive. I check the shoulder again myself, walking the worst of it twice, pressing my boot into the soft spots. It will hold; probably. I make a note on the tablet to get someone back up here first thing in the morning with a proper load of aggregate.

"Who was the woman?" Corey questions, he’s not the worst on the crew but he’s the one most likely to push something he should leave alone. I look at him and he reads the look correctly. "Never mind," he says, and goes back to the compactor.

Good.

She was tired, that’s what I noticed more than anything else. Not just travelling tired, but something underneath that, something deep in her bones. Although she tried to hide it behind the Google Maps joke which had me almost smiling and for some reason that bothers me.

I don’t almost smile at strangers in road closures. I give them safety instructions and send them on their way. That’s how it works.

She is not my problem, she has a cabin and presumably a key to it, and if she is cold, she’ll figure out the wood burner the way everyone figures out the wood burner, which is by nearly smoking herself out and then asking Doris at the hardware store what she did wrong.

"Let's get packed up," I say. "I want the cones repositioned before dark."

The Road and Ridge office is small but it’s compact and has everything we need, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t look messy as hell, because it does. There are messages on my desk, but then again, there are always messages on my desk.

Three from Lila Moreno about the state grant documentation. One from Red Holloway at the Union Hall, probably about the crew hours that Darnell still has not logged. And a handwritten note from Hank Mullins stuck to the bridgefile that saysphotos still not labelled, Hugo, this is a disaster, which is not helpful in the slightest.

I pour coffee into my mug and look at the state of the office. I know what is in every pile, I know which folder is urgent and which one can wait until Thursday, I know that the bridge photos are on the third tablet from the left and that the retaining wall receipts are in the manila envelope that got coffee on it in October, and that the crew hours from September's emergency repairs are logged on a spreadsheet that only I know how to navigate.

It’s manageable, but it’s not a grant-ready filing system, and I am aware of that.

The inspection is in three weeks; the state team is coming to review our documentation for the infrastructure funding application. Storm damage from last spring's runoff took out two culvert systems, cracked the south bridge deck, collapsed a section of retaining wall on the Ridge Road, and punched holes in the drainage along the upper access route. We fixed all of it. My crew fixed all of it, in bad weather, under budget, and ahead of schedule in most cases.