Page 87 of Ten Mountain Men

Ranger shakes his head, then runs his hand through his hair, which he can do easily now that there are no tangles. It’s an incredibly sexy gesture, especially when it sends rivulets of water slowly rolling down his sun-dappled chest. “Oh, sweet girl, don’t worry. He was never going to go to the big cave.”

I nod, but I’m not feeling relieved. I need more info. You can take the producer out of reality television, but you can’t take the reality television out of the producer. Or something like that. Anyway, I wouldn’t be me if I just took the first answer at face value and moved on. That’s not how interviews tend to work, I’ve found through the years.

Ranger snakes his arms around my waist and I move my hands to his shoulders. Around us, the silence has been broken and it sounds like it did when I first stumbled upon the brothers my first day on the mountain. Loud, wild. But filled with pure joy.

I love that. I don’t know why, but it’s like I feel their joy in every fiber of my being.

Wait, was that just yesterday?!

“How do you know?” I ask Ranger. “How do you know Luke wasn’t going to go to the big cave?”

He presses his lips together and his brow furrows contemplatively. Then he says, “Well, he went to the big cave once. And when he came back, he promised he would never go again.”

There’s a catch in Ranger’s voice that, if this were a reality television show and I were being paid to induce crying, I would prod. But I press my own lips together, keeping the questions inside. This isn’t reality television. This is, as hard as it is to believe, reality. And I won’t treat them like cast members whose souls I’m paid to dig around in.

Turns out, I don’t even have to ask anything else.

Ranger shakes his head. “I don’t understand it, Goldie. We just met, but I feel like I’ve known you forever and a day. I’m going to tell you something, but I need you to keep it to yourself, alright? Don’t tell any of the others you know this.”

I nod. “But I don’t want you to tell me anything that’s going to feel like you’re betraying them, okay?”

He looks so earnest, somehow both hesitant and certain, and I want to pull him to me and hold him and never let go. This big, burly man looks like he needs to be held. He nods.

“It was after our Pa died,” he begins, staring into my eyes, not even blinking.

I nearly gasp. As far as I can tell, this subject is very off-limits.

“Luke went up to the big cave for four, five months. Of course, none of us knew where he was back then. But when he came back, he swore he would never disappear on us like that again. Never go to the big cave again and leave us all behind. And Luke is a man of his word.”

“Oh.” It’s inadequate as hell, but it’s all I can come up with.

“And besides, Ma would rightly kick his ass if she found out he broke his promise,” Ranger adds, clearly to inject some levity into the heavy moment. He gives me a smile that obviously takes some effort to work up.

“Your Ma…” I can’t help glancing around. He spoke of her in present tense. “Does she…live close by?”

Now his smile is easy, real. Those blue, blue eyes teasing. “Why? You worried she might’ve bore witness to you ruttin’ with Brooks and Hunter?”

“Oh my gosh, Ranger!” I cry, giving his shoulders an ineffective push. I laugh, but my face must be lit up like a red Christmas light. “Rutting. Oh sweet Lord. But I mean…could she have?”

His rumbly laugh makes waves around us in the water. “Nah, darlin’. Ma doesn’t come up on the mountain, ever, so no worries about that.”

He looks at me, shaking his head yet again, looking downright mystified. “I can’t believe I told you all that. But then again, my brothers do say my honesty will be my downfall.”

Now I shake my head. “Not with me, it won’t,” I promise. “You can trust me.”

As soon as I say the wordtrust, it’s like my conscience becomes a hurricane in my gut and I remember with a wave of guilt-ridden nausea why I tried to flee back to the cabin after Hunter and Brooks and I finished, well, rutting.

One minute, I was floating on a cloud of euphoria, wishing I had a working phone and a WiFi connection so I could google “how much sex is too much sex to have before vagina breakage,” hoping with all my hormones and heart that I was nowhere near the limit, because I NEEDED MORE SEX. So much more sex. Naked in the great outdoors, sprawled out between Brooks (my first lover!) and Hunter (my second lover!), basking in the sunlight and glow of back-to-back-to-back orgasms, wishing that somehow our threesome had been captured on film for posterity because damn, what I wouldn’t give to haveGoldie Gets Her V-Card Taken By The Mountain Menin my own personal porn collection to watch during a future clam-slapping session.

And the next minute, Hunter was saying, “You’re coming back to the cabin with us and that’s that.”

And I was saying, “I can’t, not if Luke is going to move out…I can’t go back to the cabin.”

And the euphoria was GONE. The rampant, rabid desire to be filled by cocks was GONE.

All that existed was one thought and a fuckton of panic—the cameras. The cameras in the cabin.I have to get to the cabin and take down the cameras.

Then Hunter swept me off my feet and we got here and, well, all thoughts of the cameras got swept out of my head.

---