Page 109 of Shared By the Mountain Men

“Noah? What are you doing here?” The sight of him caused something in my chest to settle. Like a puzzle piece snapping into place.

He grinned and gestured at the fire. “Making breakfast!”

My stomach rumbled at the sight of bacon, eggs, and hashbrowns sizzling in the pan. “That’s not exactly what I was asking.”

“I had a day off, and nothing better to do. Coffee?” He hefted a French press. “It’s better than instant.”

I had indeed been subsisting on instant coffee almost every day. Which was fine, but the smell from the French press was a quick reminder that nothing beat the real thing.

I fished my camp cup out of my pack and held it out. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

Noah leaned forward to fill it with steaming black liquid. “You told me your plan was roughly twenty miles a day. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate your daily route from Ouray to here.”

“What if I was slower than expected?” I asked. “What if I was days behind schedule?”

He smiled and met my gaze. “I knew you wouldn’t be.”

I cupped the coffee with both hands and sighed happily. “My ankle is great.”

“I can see that. You must have had a good doctor.”

“Technically, I was never anyone’s patient,” I said.

Noah nodded slowly. “Ah, yes. Of course.”

Having a real breakfast brightened my mood more than I expected. The company was good, too; Noah asked about the hiking so far, the freeze dried meals, the sleeping pad.

Then I tore down my camp and used the bathroom one final time before hitting the trail. I wasn’t sure how to say goodbye to Noah; I still hadn’t figured out what I was going to do or how I would approach everything with them. But when I got back from the toilet, I found that I didn’t need to say goodbye.

Because Noah was wearing a hiking pack himself.

“What are you doing?”

He glanced at his GPS watch. “About twenty miles, give or take.”

“I’m supposed to be hiking alone,” I reminded him. “To collect my thoughts and figure everything out.”

“This is a public trail,” Noah said cheerfully. “I’m just another random hiker going in the same direction.”

He winked, then began hiking toward the trail.

I gathered my things and followed him. We hiked in silence for a while, Noah staying fifty feet or so ahead of me. We really might have been total strangers for all the interacting we did.

But he was always there in my vision. It annoyed me, at first. I couldn’t lose myself in my own thoughts while he wasright there, looking gorgeous in hiking pants and a T-shirt, blond hair swaying whenever a gust of wind picked up. It was like being on a diet and having a big, juicy cinnamon roll waved in front of my face every second of every minute of the day.

Around noon, he stopped and pulled out two long sandwiches from his backpack. “From Marlene’s,” he said, tossing me one. “Turkey club. No tomatoes, since it would make the bread all soggy.”

“Thanks, but I like to keep moving while eating lunch.”

He nodded without missing a beat. “Me too.”

We walked together while eating our sandwiches. Mine wasamazing. Much better than a Mexican PB&J. I could have eaten three of them, and was disappointed when there were only crumbs left.”

“Want to hear about the crazy patient I had this week?” he asked.

I started to tell him no, but then changed my mind. “How crazy are we talking?”

He glanced sideways at me. “The kind of crazy where they fractured their leg mountain biking, but wanted to keep going because they paid for a weekend pass and didn’t want it to go to waste.”

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