Page 33 of Saved By the Mountain Man

But a small part of me was terrified. He’d left me before. What if he left again? But I was in his house, his territory, not the other way around. And the truth was that eventually I would be the one leaving. As soon as the winter was gone, I would keep moving if Jethro hadn’t found me yet.

I pushed the thoughts away and closed my eyes. There was nothing to think about or talk about right now.

The time for those things would come later.

10

TANNER

Slowly, Rae’s ankle healed and she seemed to be less hostile, less suspicious of me.

I didn’t want her to be. As long as she was angry with me, pushing me away, fighting me, the easier it was to not fall for her all over again.

Fuck, even when she was pissed off, seething, a fire burning with pure rage in her eyes, she was so beautiful that I wanted to grab her and make her mine in every way that I could.

The walls I had built around myself began to crumble involuntarily and that upset me.

How the hell was I supposed to keep my guard up when she could tear right through it without even trying?

What got to me the most was the times we spent together, eating, talking, looking out over the forest as the rain came down in steady sheets sometimes, or the forest recovered from the storm, when I caught glimpses of the life we could have had.

The life I’d left behind the night I’d run without even saying goodbye.

One evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, we stood side by side in the small kitchen, chopping vegetables for dinner. The rhythmic sound of the knife against the cutting board was soothing, a stark contrast to the stormy emotions that usually raged inside me.

“You’re pretty handy with that knife,” I said, glancing over at her.

Rae smiled, her eyes twinkling. “I had to learn. In the city, living on takeout is a thing, but here…” She glanced at me. “I’m not great at cooking. My food still tastes like crap.”

I chuckled, the sound surprising me. “You could never cook.”

“Hey,” she said, feigning offense.

I laughed, and we fell silent again.

“You ever miss it? The city?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she admitted, her gaze distant. “But there’s something peaceful about this place. It’s a good place to heal.”

“Heal?” I echoed, my tone softer. What did she have to heal from so many years after I’d left her behind? “Yeah, I guess it is.”

We fell into a comfortable silence. The last time I’d felt so at ease, so connected to someone, was when we’d been together. Since then, I’d been haunted, my demons attacking me for years, making every day a struggle to survive my own past. Having Rae here was a soothing balm to my aching soul.

It wasn’t Silver Ridge that had offered me any kind of healing.

It was her.

Rae had always been the girl for me, the one who made everything better just by being there.

As we ate dinner, the conversation flowed easily. We talked about everything and nothing, sharing stories from our pasts, laughing at old memories. It was like peeling back the layers of who we were, rediscovering the people we had been before everything went wrong.

After dinner, we sat by the fire, sipping on hot cocoa. The cabin had always been a shelter. I’d collected things over the years that made the space more my own, but it was only now, with her here, that it had gone from a house to a home.

Rae leaned back on the wooden sleeper couch I’d built with my own hands, her eyes half-closed. “This is nice,” she murmured. “I’ve missed this.”

“Me too,” I admitted, my heart aching with the truth of it. “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this… normal.”

She turned her gaze to me. “So, what happened after you left? Did you ever fall in love again?”

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