Page 34 of Rescued By the Mountain Man

To give myself time to answer, I sipped my coffee. “You think so?”

“Not for sure, but what is life like if you can’t dare it to work for you?” Marie asked. “When I left my dead-end life as a maître d' in Butte, I didn’t think I would end up here. All I knew was that I wanted fresh air and to cook. Frankly, I'm glad you ran into me instead of someone else.”

I quirked a brow. “Like whom? The mob?”

She shrugged while the rest of the guys began to file into the kitchen. Most early mornings like this, we have breakfast in the kitchen instead of at the table outside, and Zara came down, smartly dressed in jeans and a thick polo.

“Morning, guys,” she said, then beelined for the coffee carafe.

“Mph-ning Zha-rha,” Frankie said over a mouthful, and I smacked him.

“Eat with your mouth closed,” I chastised him. “We don’t need to see your masticated shit.”

He swallowed. “Oh, look who learned a big word. I don’t know what it means.”

I rolled my eyes as Zara dumped a mountain of sugar and a river of cream into her cup. “Are you back on the sugar coffee again? Don’t you know better now?”

“There is no quaint coffee shop with artisanal coffee around,” she said. “Until I go back there, sugar coffee it is. So what are we going to do today, bossman?”

I buttered my toast. “Actually, we’re going to see the mayor about the fairground. I need you with me to catch stuff I can’t.”

“So I am going to need a notebook, a recorder, a chisel, and a portable photocopy machine,” she said, joining us at the table.

“Why do you need that?”

“To make multiple copies so your old man brain won't forget,” she stirred her drink while the guys laughed. “I’ll nail them in your room, in your bathroom, and on top of that ridiculous hat of yours.”

“I do not have selective memory, thank you very much, and I am not old,” I grumbled.

“I saw you complaining about your back the other day,” Lucas said.

Frankie added, “And I went to grab your arthritis medication a week before.”

“Not to mention you went into your dentist for a denture fitting last month,” Santos chuckled, sipping his coffee. “And you plucked a gray hair from your nose in front of me.”

“You’re all fired,” I said.

“See you later, bossman,” Frankie grinned. “We’ll be rounding up the ornery bastards today and getting them into the breeding barn. Let’s hope I don’t lose an arm wrangling them in.”

“Pay attention then,” I muttered, checking my watch. It was after seven, and we needed to go. Swallowing the rest of my coffee, I asked Zara, “Do you need to get that in a traveler's mug? We need to leave now.”

“I—” she looked around. “Yes.”

Swiftly, Marie sat a large cup in front of Zara, and she poured the drink in, then cupped it. “Ready.”

I like being early, by at least five minutes, if not a little more, so we hustled out to the truck and hopped in. On a cool, clear morning like this, I would have rather saddled up Silver and ridden up to the Eagle’s Crag and looked down at the vista. But now, I was back down to the town, unsure of what I was about to walk into when we entered Treeve’s meeting room.

We broke through the lonely road and got to the main before Zara asked a question I hadn’t asked myself in years. “Do you miss it?”

“Miss what?”

“The city life, you know, from back in the days when you were riding high in your career,” she explained.

“To be honest, I never was a city boy at heart,” I replied after swallowing. “Leaving the ranch was inevitable. If I wanted to be the best bull rider in this half of the country, I had to get out and learn how the city ran. It didn’t stop me from dreaming about open spaces and free-running rivers, though. But, yeah, living in a crowded city wasn’t my favorite thing.”

“I figured. Ranching is in your blood,” she said.

“What about you?” I asked, feeling oddly lopsided in this situation. Zara knew more about me in less than a week, and I knew little to nothing about her. Sneaking a look over to her, I pressed. “Surely you left a life behind in New York? A boyfriend, perhaps?”

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