Page 57 of Shared By the Mountain Men

“You’ve shown an awful lot of interest in me since finding me on the trail last week.”

“Because you’re an inexperienced hiker who has no fucking idea what she’s doing. If I didn’t help you, you’d probably be fucking dead.”

“So you dragged me down from the mountain out of the kindness of your heart?”

“I didn’t drag you down at all. Ash carried you.”

“He did the physical dragging,” I clarified. “But you’re the one who stopped and insisted I needed to see a doctor. And then drove methree hoursto your town. And offered me a free place to stay a dozen yards from your own cabin.”

Jack kicked back the chair as he rose to his feet, the cat nimbly leaping away. “This is why I don’t help strays. It always bites me in the ass.”

“So you don’t like me?” I asked, fueled on by the alcohol’s buzz. “You didn’t help me in the hopes that we would hook up?”

His eyes widened with surprise, then rage. “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”

“You had an erection,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. “On the ATV ride home.”

He rolled his eyes and stabbed his fingers in his hair. “Your ass was pressed against my crotch. You could have been the ugliest woman in the world and I still would have gotten hard.”

“So you’re admitting I’m not ugly?” It was a desperate angle, one I didn’t really want to pursue, but I felt committed now.

“You know you’re not ugly,” Jack replied.

I stood and moved closer to him, pressing into his space. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, what I was trying to prove, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Single men don’t help attractive women without ulterior motives.”

He clenched his jaw and bit off his words: “Fuck. You.”

Jack grabbed his baseball bat and stormed back inside, slamming the door and engaging the lock. I stood there on the porch, trembling with anger and disappointment and a handful of other emotions I couldn’t place.

I left the bottle on the table and retreated to my cabin, but I struggled to sleep. I tossed and turned, replaying the argument in my head over and over.

I’ll bet you were, he’d said in response to me sleeping soundly. That was a jealous comment if I’d ever heard one. Maybe he did care about Noah’s emotions and whether or not I would hurt him, but there was more that was bothering Jack. I was certain of it.

The way he had growled at me, eyes full of emotion, his physical presence impossible to ignore… it turned me on. I was embarrassed to admit it even to myself, but it did.

There was something about Jack that intrigued me, even though he was kind of an asshole.

Eventually I managed to fall asleep. I hadn’t bothered to set an alarm, so the sun was shining and birds were chirping when I finally opened my eyes. I went to the kitchenette to make a cup of coffee. While it brewed, I heard footsteps outside on the porch.

Then someone knocked on the door with a heavy fist.

I immediately knew it was Jack. Itshouldn’thave been him, since he was supposed to be at Mount Princeton today, but there was an urgency to the knocks that matched his mood last night. All my emotions came back, intrigue and frustration, so I left my coffee brewing and threw open the front door.

“Listen, if you regret what you said last night—”

I cut off. The man standing on my porch was not Jack. It was Ash.

“Oh,” I said, flustered to be suddenly faced with a taller, wider, more terrifying man. “What are you doing here?”

“Get dressed.”

“What? Why?”

He held up a helmet and climbing harness. “You have a via ferrata to finish.”

27

Ash

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