Page 1 of Surrendering To The Forbidden Mountain Man

Chapter One

REID

Five thirty in the morning, and the east fence line is the only thing standing between Holloway cattle and two hundred acres of BLM land.

Not exactly the kind of threat that requires a man with my training. But the job is the job. Camera feeds checked, perimeter walked, locks tested on gates that haven't been touched since yesterday. Same routine, every morning. Same boots, same coffee in a thermos that keeps it too hot, same silence that used to feel like a combat zone and now feels like the only honest thing left.

Three years back in Bear Creek Valley. Three years of trading night patrols in countries I can't name for fence checks and security cameras. My body made the call for me. Blown knee, shrapnel scar along my ribs, enough concussions that the Army docs stopped pretending the headaches would stop.

So I came home. To a town that remembered me as the Holloway kid who left at twenty-one and came back looking like he'd been through something nobody wanted to ask about.

They don't ask. I don't tell.

The phone buzzes in my back pocket.

Ben:

Jasper's guy Kyle took a fall off the east section. Fence post snapped. Might've cracked a rib.

Already called Mira. She's heading up.

My thumb hovers over the screen. Of course he called his sister. She's the closest medical professional in the valley, and she's competent as hell. Six years of trauma nursing in Denver will do that to a person.

None of which is the problem.

The problem is that Mira Cross has been back in Bear Creek Valley for six weeks, and every single one of those weeks has been a test of the discipline that kept me alive in places where discipline was the difference between walking out and getting shipped home in a box.

Me:

On my way.

Ben doesn't need more than that. Twenty-three years of friendship boiled down to a communication style other people find alarming. Ben just calls it efficient.

The truck eats the switchback road in ten minutes. Cold morning, frost on the windshield I scraped with my sleeve because the ice scraper broke last week and I haven't replaced it. Civilian logistics. Still adjusting.

Dust kicks up when I pull off the gravel track near the east section. Kyle's truck is parked at an angle with the door hanging open. A spool of wire and a post driver sit abandoned in the brown grass.

Then I see her.

Mira is kneeling in the dirt next to Kyle, who's sitting on a downed fence post with his shirt pulled up and his face the color of old paper. Her hands move across his ribcage with calm authority earned in trauma bays at two in the morning. Blonde hair twisted up in a knot that's already falling apart. Blue scrub top, jeans, hiking boots. No makeup. No pretense.

She was eighteen the last time I paid attention. Gangly, loud, always underfoot when Ben and I were working on something. Braces. A ponytail she chewed the end of when she was nervous.

That girl doesn't exist anymore.

The woman kneeling in the dirt with steady hands on a grown man's ribs is thirty years old. Five foot five. Curves that her scrub top does nothing to hide, soft hips that fill out her jeans in a way that makes my jaw lock. She's got a mouth I've spent three years trying not to stare at in church, at Mabel's diner, at every gathering Ben drags me to where she sits across the table with blue eyes that dare me to look back.

I always look away first.

Kyle winces when she presses along his left side. "Two and three," she says. Not to him. To herself. Clinical. "Bruised, not broken. You're lucky."

"Doesn't feel lucky," Kyle mutters.

"You fell six feet onto frozen ground. That's physics, not luck." She pulls his shirt down gently. "Wrap them when you get home. Ice twenty on, twenty off. No heavy lifting for two weeks."

"Two weeks?" Kyle looks at me. "Reid, c'mon. Jasper needs me on the south section before the⁠—"

"You heard her." My voice comes out flat. Automatic. The one that kept soldiers in line and alive for twenty years. "Two weeks."