Page 1 of Under The Mountain Man’s Spell

Chapter 1

Grayson

I'd woken up hard, thinking about Molly MacKenzie, a woman I had no right to be thinking about, and at five-thirty I'd stood under the shower with my forearm braced on the tile and my fist around my cock, trying to get her out of my system before I had to work beside her in daylight.

It never worked.

I came with the water running over my face, picturing the strand of hair that always worked loose from her braid and lay against the lush curve of her breasts. Then I toweled off, pulled on my chief's uniform, and drove down the ridge with my jaw tight, the way I'd driven down it most mornings for two years.

The masquerade tent had gone up crooked, which meant somebody was going to trip on a guy-line in the dark on Friday night and break an ankle. I walked the perimeter with my clipboard and made the vendor's kid re-stake the east side while I watched, because fourteen years on the job had taught me that "we'll get to it" was how most fires started. A crooked tent was also a problem I could fix, and I needed one of those.

The festival ran four days, Thursday through Sunday, ending Halloween night, and the town green had been filling up all week. Pumpkin rows lined the path down by the gazebo; the hayride wagon sat behind the bandstand, and the food booths stood in two lines with their propane tanks spaced the way I'd told them to space them last year and the year before that. The corn maze took up the whole north end, eight feet tall and dry as paper. Colt's crew had built the frame under all that corn, so it was the one structure out here I didn't need to worry about, and I walked it anyway, checking the emergency exits, the service gaps, and the fire lane on the far side. A maze was a building made of fuel. Nobody on the council wanted to hear me say so, but nothing got built in this town without my signature on the fire plan, and I didn't sign until everyone had fixed what I flagged. That arrangement suited us fine.

By ten I'd cleared the tent, the booths, and the generators, and I quit pretending my route didn't end at the petting zoo.

Molly, the veterinary nurse at Lyle Brown's clinic, was in the pen with a crate of rescues: two goats, a sheep with opinions, and a pot-bellied pig somebody in the valley had surrendered last month. She had her sleeves pushed up and her glasses shoved to the top of her head, holding back the loose bits of that dark auburn hair, and the rest of it hung in a braid down over one shoulder and well past her collarbone. I'd spent two years wondering how long it ran when it wasn't pinned up.

She was reading a vaccination card with a pen caught between her teeth, her oatmeal cardigan hanging open over a soft green shirt, her jeans doing nothing to hide the full swell of her hips as she bent over the crate. The pig had been screaming blue murder when I walked up, and she'd quieted it with one hand flat on its back and a low word I couldn't hear, without once taking her eyes off the card. I knew that pen habit far better than I should have. I'd watched her mouth work at it across the council table with my hands flat on my thighs under the edge, meeting after meeting.

"Water trough's on the wrong side," I said, coming up to the rail. "Kids'll reach through the fence to splash it and spook your sheep."

She glanced at the trough, then at the sheep, running the math. "You want to move it, or do you want me to stand here admiring the safety inspection?"

That was Molly, dry enough that you could miss the joke if you didn't know to listen for it. I climbed into the pen and hauled the trough to the back rail, eighty pounds of slosh because nobody had thought to empty it first, and she didn't thank me, and I didn't wait for it. Council business had worn us into a rhythm. She handed me things to carry, and I carried them. I pointed out hazards, and she fixed the real ones and mocked the rest.

The goat, the brown one, the delinquent, got a mouthful of my jacket while I was setting the trough down. Molly snapped her fingers once and he let go.

"He's testing you," she said. "Don't take it personally. He tests everyone under six feet and disappoints himself."

"I'm six-two."

"He's a goat. His measurements are aspirational." She took the pen out of her mouth to make a note on the card, and there it was, the strand working loose from her braid and lying against the side of her neck, exactly where I'd pictured it this morning. She looked up then, and her eyes were what they always were when the glasses weren't in the way, a gray-green that read as calm until you caught the dry humor in them.

My hand started to move. I turned it into reaching for the rail, stared at the extinguisher mounting by the gate, and counted the bolts twice. A kid from the high-school volunteer crew jogged over to ask where the rabbit hutch was going and called her ma'am, and the color climbed her neck and went all the way to her ears. Her skin was fair enough that nothing stayed private on it. Compliments did it, small attention did it, a teenager calling her ma'am did it, and she answered the kid in two calm sentences while her face went right on blushing without her. I wanted to know how far down it went. I'd wanted to know for a long time.

The blush hadn't even faded when the pumpkin vendor from the next stall leaned over the rail with his hat in his hand and asked if she'd be at the masquerade tomorrow night, because he'd be glad to buy her a drink.

"Thanks, but no," Molly said, her pen still moving. "I'm not dating. Not this year, not next. I'm not interested."

He nodded, put his hat back on, and went back to his pumpkins. I should have felt sorry for him. What I felt was a quick, ugly flash of relief, and the relief didn't last, because she'd said it in the flat voice she used for things she'd settled a long time ago. It sounded like an answer to a question I'd never had the guts to ask. She wasn't looking for anybody, and she sure as hell wasn't looking for a man more than a decade older who couldn't keep his eyes off her. That should have been the end of it. It didn't make the wanting any less painful.

I knew more about Molly than I had any business knowing, two years of council meetings' worth, and God help me, I could have listed it in my sleep. Smart. Kind in ways she never advertised, like the department's rescue animals she nursed back on her own time, and the petting zoo she ran for free at every event this town put on, from the spring fair to the Christmas market, hauling the same goats in and out of the same trailer herself. Funny, but only if you were close enough to catch it. Lyle might own the clinic, but everyone in the county knew who picked up the phone at two in the morning when a horse went down, and who showed up with steady hands and the right answer before the owner had finished panicking.

Last spring the council spent forty minutes fighting over the maze budget, and Molly sat there and let them. When they'd finally run out of air she sat back, folded her arms, and asked how much a lawsuit cost if it wasn't done safely, and that was the end of it. I'd watched her cut through the bullshit enough times to start waiting for it, and to notice that whatever she said was also dry as hell and funny, but only three of us in the room were quick enough to catch it. Molly was the smartest person in any room she walked into but because she was quiet, most never saw it. I'd been gone on her since our first meeting.

And dammit, she was young. Mid-twenties, I'd figured at that first council meeting, going by her unlined face and the way she dressed like my little sister's crowd. Then there was old Lyle introducing her around as his young assistant, and Molly had never volunteered it herself. As my grandmother used to say, never ask a woman's age or dress size. Good advice, and I'd stuck to it.

A decade or more between us, and she was a friend, I reminded myself about once an hour, and that friendship mattered more to me than I'd ever have told her. Molly MacKenzie was out of bounds twice over: way too young, and she was my friend. My brain reminded me of this daily. My body still had to catch on.

I looked at her anyway, every chance I got, always a second too long, and I hated myself a little for every one. Standing in a goat pen at ten in the morning with one hand locked on a rail so it wouldn't touch her hair, I felt like the careless kid I'd been at twenty-five, before the scar on my forearm, and I'd spent fourteen years making sure he stayed buried. So I stood next to Molly and didn't touch her. Careful was the one thing I'd gotten good at.

"You're coming Sunday," she said, writing. "The finale does a kids' hour before the pumpkins get lit. The fire department promised a truck."

"I promised a truck," I agreed. "The department will also be inspecting your hay storage, which is currently stacked against a booth running a deep fryer."

Her mouth tipped toward a smile and pulled back before it got there, and she wrote something on her card that I would have paid money to read. I stood there longer than the hay storage needed, then I made my legs carry me out of the pen.

I found Wyatt at the coffee stand near the gazebo, waiting on two cups, still in his work shirt with the shop's grease on the cuff. He'd been my friend for years, the good kind, who showed up with a truck when you were pouring a slab and didn't need conversation while you worked. He handed me the second cup without asking, and his wedding ring caught the morning light off the bandstand's tin roof.