Page 3 of Tempted By The Forbidden Mountain Man

"Nobody. I measured."

"You measured my venue."

"I measured the terrain I'm responsible for securing. Your venue happens to be on it."

Something crosses her face. Not annoyance. Not approval. Something more complicated. Something that makes her eyes narrow just slightly, makes the corner of her mouth do a thing that isn't quite a smile but suggests one is being held back.

"Meet me at the north entrance tomorrow at eight. Bring a measuring tape."

"Already have one."

"Of course you do." She picks up her clipboard. Then the cold coffee. Then she walks past me toward the door, and her shoulder brushes my arm in the narrow space between the counter and the prep island.

The kitchen isn't that narrow.

She knows that. I know that. And the contact lasts exactly long enough for me to register the warmth of it through two layers of fabric before she's through the door, heels clicking on the hardwood of the Ember Lounge hallway.

I stand in the empty kitchen.

The smart thing is to file this interaction under Professional Contact and move on. She's the event coordinator. I'm the security lead. She reports to Noah. I report to her for the next seventy two hours. The chain of command is clean and simple, and I like clean and simple because clean and simple doesn't end with someone's career imploding.

My phone buzzes.

Jake:

How'd the intro go?

Me:

Fine. She's thorough.

Jake:

She's also your boss for the weekend so keep it professional.

Me:

When have I ever not been professional?

Jake:

I'm going to pretend you didn't ask me that.

I pocket my phone. Walk back out to the terrace. The bonfire has settled into a steady burn now, the flames lower but more consistent. Someone on the setup crew put on music, something acoustic and folksy that drifts through the cedar posts.

October in Crimson Hollow is the one thing I'd admit out loud that I love about living here. The mountains go amber and rust. The air gets sharp enough to feel alive in your chest. Mornings are cold enough to justify the kind of strong coffee that would make most people's hearts stutter, and the evenings have a softness to them that seems designed to make people sit closer around a fire than they need to.

My father used to say autumn was the season for people who think too much. Thinkers and romantics, he called them, which in his vocabulary was basically the same thing. He was neither. He was a career man. Forty two years in law enforcement, three marriages wrecked by the job, and the emotional range of a filing cabinet. I loved him. I love him. But I watched every woman who tried to build a life with him learn the same lesson. The job comes first. The job always comes first. And the man behind the badge is someone you only get in pieces, between shifts, when he's too tired to hold the walls up.

I swore I'd be different. I swore I'd never let a job eat the parts of me that mattered.

Instead I just never let anyone close enough to find out if those parts still existed.

Which is fine. It's a system. It works. Eight years in the Marines, four years doing private security, two years in Crimson Hollow working events for Jake and the Kane brothers. Clean record. Good reputation. No complications.

Then Sloane Whitfield walks past me at a bonfire, clipboard tucked under her arm, phone already pressed to her ear again, solving some new crisis with the calm precision of a woman who has never in her life waited for someone else to handle a problem.

She doesn't look at me as she passes.