Page 6 of Waiting for the Mountain Man

A smile spread over his face. An actual smile. It was the first one I’d seen from him. The smile softened his features as that stare of his lowered to my mouth. Was he thinking about kissing me?

“Who said anything about the man of your dreams?” he asked. “It’s supposed to be all about sex, right?”

What conversation were we even having? I couldn’t sort it out. All I could think about was the fact that suddenly he fit my dream guy. Not just as the guy who’d been standing in the kitchen earlier, wearing the very type of T-shirt with stretched-out sleeves that had occupied my fantasy.

No, this was the guy with the grumpy exterior who had a heart of gold deep down. And that side of himself was only shown to the woman he loved.

But that was impossible. I wasn’t the woman he loved. If anything, he was thinking about how to get me into bed, which should make me want to celebrate. It was exactly why I was here, after all. No, I wanted him to be thinking beyond that crap.

He was right about me. I’d come to town to find the man of my dreams. Or maybe it was that I’d come to town for one thing and I met the man of my dreams in the process.

“I’m confused,” I said.

His smile lessened a little, but his features remained softened. He tilted his head slightly. He had to pause as the server returned with our breakfast. A full plate of eggs, bacon, hash browns, and biscuits for him and a Belgian waffle with strawberry topping for me. As I pulled my fork out of the paper sleeve it rested in, I found myself hoping he wouldn’t pick up the conversation where it had left off.

“Confused about what?” he asked.

So much for that hope. I took a deep breath and tried to remember exactly why I’d been confused. I couldn’t tell him the truth, so I blurted it out.

“You seem to think most of the women who showed up today are looking for…love?” I asked. “In a disaster zone?

He laughed and grabbed the ketchup bottle, squirting a generous helping on top of his hash browns. Then he exchanged that for the salt shaker and began seasoning his entire plate of food.

“Everyone’s been asking for Jax,” he said. “Who the hell knows where the guy even is? He’s probably hiding out in his cabin. And then there’s the fact that some of these women showed up looking like they were heading out for a night on the town, not to dig through debris and board up windows and…”

“Pick up tarps,” I said with a smile.

He paused, fork poised above his plate. “And pick up tarps.”

Our eyes met and held, and in that moment, I had a weird thought. What if I did something crazy and just packed up and moved to the mountains? There were worse places to live. A guy like this might be worth making a major life change.

I shoved that thought aside and focused on slicing off a small piece of waffle to slide into my mouth. Only after I did that did I realize this was date behavior. I was eating like I was trying to impress the man in front of me—or, at the very least, not repulse him. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get away from this crush that was developing.

I’d come to town looking for the Cyclone Stud, but I found something else much more interesting.

4

DENVER

“You have to be fucking kidding me.”

I muttered those words under my breath as I stepped back from the customer service desk at the hardware store Bryce had sent me to. Apparently, the tarps that were waiting for us didn’t exist, but I’d spent a full forty-five minutes going in circles with these guys to get to that point.

I looked down at my phone screen again. Bryce seemed too busy to pay attention to his phone. I’d texted and called and gotten nothing but silence in return.

And now Cassie was walking toward me. The last thing I wanted to do was to fail in front of her. That thought slammed into me. Since when did I care all that much what some chick thought?

When I met a woman who was far more than just “some chick.” That was the answer to that.

“Let’s go,” Cassie said.

She had a big smile on her face. I saw that as she drew closer. I tried to puzzle over what had made her so happy, but I was too busy thinking how adorable she was. Beautiful, sexy, cute—the whole package. She had to be the closest thing to a perfect woman I’d ever seen.

She had one major flaw, though. She lived about three hours away.

“I’m not leaving here until I get the tarps,” I said.

It was a stupid threat. These guys couldn’t pull a tarp out of their ass just because I refused to leave until they did. One of them had already called around to the other stores in the area and found no tarps in supply anywhere. Not the kind we needed, anyway.

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