Page 55 of Ten Mountain Men

Ranger rounds the corner of the cabin with a stack of logs. After adding them to the woodpile, he ambles over.

“Why are y’all talking about…” He pauses and lowers his voice. “Pa?”

He saysPawith reverence that makes me want to bow my head. But instead I steel myself, because I know Ranger’s question will prompt Luke to take it from the top, which he does.

Finally, thank the big man in the blue sky, Ranger interrupts, “Well, I think you’re wrong, Luke. But if you’re not, and if she is a Sasquatch hunter, in a couple of days, she’ll see that Rusty and Bucky here are staying made over and that’ll convince her we aren’t Sasquatches. In fact, maybe I’ll let her make me over too, shave my face clean, shave my head bald and prove it for a fact. Because if Goldie were to make me over, she’d have to touch me a lot, right? And I don’t particularly want to be bald, but…having her touch me a lot…yes, ma’am, sign me up for that. In fact, I wonder if she’d shave medown there. You know. Mow the old lawn, as it were.”

Luke blusters up, his face getting real red and looking like steam is actually about to come out of his ears.

“Luke,” I say, “it’s just a few days. At most, she’ll stay ’til she’s healed up some. Then she’ll leave, and our lives will go right back to how they were.”

Will he be miserable while she’s here? Maybe. But I don’t have the heart to tell him that’s the way the rest of us feel a lot of the time. Miserable. It’s not something we even acknowledge or admit out loud. But sometimes, when we’re all sitting around at night, reading before bed, the dissatisfaction kind of rises off of us like a steam. Luke likes things just the way they are, but the rest of us are missing something.

I wonder if maybe that’s what he’s really scared of, with Goldie being here, that he’s going to have to admit to his own damn self he’s missing something as well.

“Now,” I carry on, pushing aside the turmoil, “since lunch is going to be late anyway, I’m going to go out to the shed and finish working on my latest gnome.”There’s no time to waste—I need to focus and get this done.

“I have three words for you, Bucky,” Luke says. “Susie May Jones.”

My chest tightens, and I feel the old wound opening up. I’ve heard that name enough to last a lifetime, and I don’t need the reminder of how it all went to hell. Not now. Not with Goldie here, stirring up the same feelings I swore I’d never let back in.

I’d started to walk away but turn back to face him. My hands fist. “Don’t even bring up Susie May. This is completely different from Susie May.”

“Aw, hell, I’m not getting involved in this.” Ranger throws up his hands and walks away, back around the corner of the cabin.

After he’s gone, Luke says, “Sometimes I still catch Lynx looking at you like he wants to squash your head like a bug because of Susie May. Both of y’all gettin’ sweet on the same woman is a bad idea. We’ve seen how it turns out.”

“I’ll be in the shed,” I say.

Luke doesn’t know shit about me and Lynx and Susie May. All he knows is she left us both heartbroken. He knows about how it ended, but not about how good it was before it got bad.

Susie May loved me and Lynx both equally. She said so herself, her green eyes sparklin’ like emeralds when they were all welled up with tears. She didn’t want to have to choose. She wanted us to make that call, to decide which one of us loved her more.

But we wouldn’t do that. How could we? We both loved her. Neither of us could give her up. I wasn’t going to take her from my brother and he wasn’t going to take her from me. Or maybe hehadwanted me to back down and never said so and that’s why he occasionally looks at my head like it’s a bug he wants to squish. Or maybe that’s just Luke’s overprotective imagination.

At any rate, Lynx and I were perfectly happy with her seeing both of us, but she thought that was weird and that’s why we never did anything more than some kissing. One of us had to back down, she said.

And what happened was that she tore us apart, unable to choose between me and Lynx on her own, and it escalated into this unspoken competition, each trying to prove who was more deserving of her love and, eventually, every single one of my brothers choosing sides. But for what? We were both broken by her ultimatum, wounded by a love clearly none of us were ready to handle, and the tension that filled the house because of it was unbearable.

Days turned into weeks, and as I tried to move forward, I realized that Susie May had left us all wounded. Every single Björnsson brother.

And now we are all wary of ever loving again.

Or wewere.

Now that Goldie is here, it might be time to face my old heartbreak head-on and mend what was broken. I don’t need to fall in love again. But if I do, I’ll be careful.

And unlike what Luke might think, no matter what, this is different, because I wouldn’t ever dare do anything that would put tears in Goldie’s beautiful blue eyes. If Goldie asked me to, I would back down without question. For some reason, I just want this girl to be happy, even if it means she might pick someone other than me in the end.

I shake my head, trying to knock any notions of Goldie being here for the long haul out of my brain. We just met her yesterday. Why is it so hard to imagine her gone already?

Chapter 16

Goldie

Since it didn’t snow, not even an inch, there’s really no reason for me to claim I have to stay if Luke convinces Buck or any of the others I’ve got to go. So I decide it’s best not to antagonize Luke. Maybe if I show him I can follow his orders, he’ll mellow.

So I stay put on the couch.

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