Page 4 of Reckless Mountain Man

He kept walking, even though I’d frozen. As he got closer, he’d see I was just standing here like a lump on a log.

That realization was all it took to get my butt in gear. I walked briskly toward the door and reached for the handle, only for it to hit me that the door was unlocked. I didn’t have to come all the way over here to let him in. In fact, I was coming over here to lock the door in the first place.

So I did what any nincompoop would do in that situation. I flipped the sign to closed, then pulled the door open. His footsteps faltered, but he kept coming. He was only several feet away at that point.

“Are you closed?” he asked.

“Well, technically, the shop doesn’t close until six,” I said. “But it’s kind of dead right now—it’s been dead all day—so I thought I’d close a few minutes early. Come on in.”

I winced at how mixed those messages were. If I was closed, why was I inviting him in? Maybe I should have stepped out and locked the door behind me, but my purse was still inside, and I needed to shut off the lights. Yeah, this guy made me kind of a mess.

If Boone thought it was odd, though, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he just followed me into the store while I headed behind the cash register to grab my purse from under the counter.

“Feel free to look around,” I called out while crouched down where he couldn’t see me.

It took a second to unlock the safe and get my purse, so when I stood, I expected to find him looking at the T-shirts and weird assortment of bear carvings that filled the store these days.Instead, he was standing next to one of the T-shirt displays, hands in jacket pockets, looking awkward as he stared in my direction.

“Are you in charge of stocking this place?” he asked.

I stared at him a long moment before answering. What was really throwing me off was how shy he suddenly seemed. The guy had been all confidence when he walked into the lodge this morning, but now he looked like a guy who wanted to ask a woman to the prom. Or, in this case, on a date.

Yeah, I was probably dreaming where that was concerned. But it did get my heart going a little faster.

“Yes and no,” I said, looking around. “Those bear carvings are left over from before. The rest, my boss picked out. Occasionally, I make suggestions, but mostly my job is just to keep these products in stock. When something runs out, I order more.”

“Before what?” he asked.

I tucked my phone into the pocket of my purse and retraced my earlier words. What had I been saying? Oh right.

“Before Brandon came to town,” I said, remembering I’d mentioned the bear carvings being left over from before. “Brandon is a friend of Alex’s. The owner.” I added that in case he’d forgotten. “He came back to town after being away for a while. Long story. He ran a lodge over in Passion Point. Anyway, I guess he somehow managed to convince my boss to work hard to make this a year-round place. Well, him and his employee, who is now Alex’s girlfriend.”

Boone’s eyebrows shot up, and I realized I’d gotten way too far into the drama of it all. He probably didn’t care about any of that.

“Beefing up our gift shop offerings is part of it,” I rushed to add. I gestured to indicate our surroundings. “The whole town seems to be stepping up its game, actually.”

He nodded. “There’s a shopping center going in near the square.”

“Yeah, that’s Brandon’s project.”

“Does Brandon need lumber?”

Now I was the one whose eyebrows shot up. This guy wasn’t giving up simply because my boss had given the job to someone else. He’d consider sticking around to compete if he thought it was worth his while.

Keeping him around a while was exactly what I wanted. And that meant I had to figure out a way to help him.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this.” I glanced toward the door, but the area of the lobby I could see was still deserted. “Local gossip says that there’s a big developer looking to build cabins all the way to the top of this road. It’s a straight shot with no side roads, which means they’re going to have to cut through some forest.”

“Which means they’re going to need logging crews,” he said.

“You’re not just some fly-by-night operation.”

“Those big trucks that the bigger cities use?” he asked. “Yeah, I don’t have one of those.”

“So get one. You’ve been doing this a while. You probably have enough connections to bridge the gap.”

I didn’t know what I meant by “bridge the gap,” but I sucked in a deep breath when I realized what I just revealed. I’d looked him up online—his company, his history…anything I could find. There wasn’t much about him directly, but his family had been in the business for at least forty years. He was carrying on the family tradition.

“You looked me up?” he asked.

---