Page 5 of Tempted By The Forbidden Mountain Man

He glances up. Dark eyes. From this angle, crouching while I'm standing, he has to tilt his chin to look at me. The position puts his face level with my hip, and his gaze travels up slowly enough that we both know he's doing it.

My stomach tightens.

"I'll have the crew rotate it before nine." He stands. Brushes gravel off his knee. "What else?"

Everything about this interaction should feel normal. Two professionals walking a venue, solving logistical problems, doing their jobs. Except he keeps standing a half step closer than necessary. Except every time I point at something on the clipboard, he leans in to look, and his shoulder nearly touches mine. Except when I walked past him in the kitchen last night, I let my shoulder brush his arm, and I've been thinking about it since.

That's the part that annoys me.

I don't think about men between events. Between events is when I'm emailing vendors, reviewing contracts, building timelines, calling florists at midnight because someone changed the linen color two days before a wedding and the whole aesthetic needs to shift. Between events is when I eat takeout at my desk in the apartment I barely see because I'm always on site somewhere, and the loneliness of that desk doesn't bother me until about 2 AM when the work stops and the quiet starts.

Marcus and I broke up nine months ago. High school sweethearts who made it through college on stubbornness and FaceTime calls, until the calls got shorter and my excuses got longer and one night he looked at me across a restaurant table and said, "Sloane, do you even want to be here?"

Honest answer? I wanted to be at the venue I was dressing for a Saturday wedding. I wanted to be reviewing the seating chart that had a conflict in table nine. I wanted to be anywhere my brain could stay busy enough to outrun the guilt of wanting my career more than I wanted the boy I'd loved since I was fifteen.

So he left. And it hurt in the clean, expected way that confirmed what I'd already known. Some women get love and success. Some women have to pick. And I picked.

"Whitfield." Dante's voice pulls me back. "You good?"

"Fine. Thinking about the vendor staging area. Walk it with me?"

We take the loop path around the south terrace. Morning light cuts through the tree line in long gold slashes, and the setup crew is starting to arrive, hauling crates from the service road. Someone's playing music from a portable speaker. Country, which feels right for the setting even though I'd normally complain.

"How long have you been doing event coordination?" he asks. Casual. Conversational. A man making small talk on a work walk.

"Professionally? Two years. But I've been planning things since I was sixteen and organized my cousin's baby shower with a budget of two hundred dollars and a Pinterest board that my auntie said made her cry." A pause. "She cries at everything, but still."

The corner of his mouth twitches. "Two hundred dollars."

"Dollar store tablecloths, grocery store flowers, and a cake from a woman at my church who owed my grandmother a favor. Twenty two guests. Came in eleven dollars under budget."

"Eleven dollars under." He shakes his head, almost smiling. Almost. "And now you're running events for Club Crimson."

"Temporary contract. Three days. If it goes well, there might be more."

"It'll go well."

I look at him. "You don't know that."

"You called a vendor last night at six PM, cited an email from September third with the timestamp, and had four additional heat lamps confirmed within ninety seconds. You're going to be fine."

"You heard that?"

"Kitchen acoustics are better than people think."

Heat climbs up the back of my neck. He heard the whole call. The vendor negotiation, the controlled exhale. All of it.

We've reached the vendor staging area. Canvas tents in two rows, tables inside for artisan displays, a cleared space at the far end for the live cooking demonstration Sage is running tomorrow afternoon. Everything looks right. Everything is right. I've checked it four times.

"Can I ask you something personal?" The question is out before I think it through.

He stops walking. Turns to face me. "Depends on what personal means."

"The tattoos." I nod toward his forearms. "What was it like? Eight years in the Marines."

He's quiet for a beat. "Structured. Loud. The kind of purpose that makes everything else feel slow when it's over." A pause. "Two deployments. Got out at twenty six."

"And now you do security at mountain events."