Page 14 of Stolen By the Mountain Man

When I finally got to the window, I gasped at what I saw. It wasn’t a neighbor or a friend stopping by to say hi. It wasn’t Isaac deciding to come through the front door instead of the basement. No, this was a very familiar face. A face I’d looked at all my life. It was the face of my sister.

The reality of the past two weeks came crashing down on me. The impulsive decision to take my sister’s place. Manipulating her emails so she wasn’t dumping Isaac like she thought. The knowledge that I’d not only betrayed Daphne but also the man who owned the very house I stood in right now. A man who thought he was marrying my sister, not me.

I weighed my options. I could just ignore the visitor on the front porch, pretending I wasn’t home. But then what? Would she wait around until Isaac pulled into the driveway? Probably. She’d obviously figured out what I was doing and was here for answers, so hiding would do no good. She knew I was in here.

Taking a deep breath, I walked over to the door, unlocked it, and yanked it open. But instead of the anger, or at the very leastconfusion, I’d expected on her face, I saw something else. A big smile. She was happy to see me.

But then her smile fell. “You don’t want me here. I’m interrupting your alone time. I’m sorry. I can go back home. I just thought you might want some company. I was thinking of you all alone up here. I can tell from your face that you’re fine being alone. I’ll just go.”

I tilted my head, frowning at her. “You came up here to spend the week with me?”

Daphne nodded. “I’d booked vacation time for this week anyway with plans to resign if everything went well. Can I come in, or do you want me to go?”

I took the opportunity to look around the front yard. A black sedan that was not my sister’s sat in the driveway. I assumed that was a rental car. She’d flown here, rented a car, and taken the drive from the airport up to the mountains.

I just had one question. “How did you know the address?”

She yanked her phone out of her pocket and held it up. “I found you in the app.”

We had an app where we could see each other’s location at all times. I hadn’t thought much about it, but it wasn’t worth worrying about because I was supposed to be up here in the mountains, anyway. I had no clue that she would use it to navigate her way to this very spot—an address Isaac had shared with her, but the information had gone to that hidden folder, so only I had seen it.

“You know what?” I asked. “Why don’t we go out?”

Yes, we should go out. We’d go to dinner and talk. Anything to get her away from here.

But just as my gaze had scanned the front yard behind her, her attention was on what was going on behind me. “That’s a whole lot of food for one person.”

I turned and followed her gaze to the table where the place settings and bowls full of food now sat. I was busted. There was no point in lying.

“Come on in,” I said, suddenly feeling sick to my stomach.

Any minute now, Isaac would be pulling into that driveway. He’d no doubt wonder where the black sedan with rental tags had come from.

“It smells delicious,” Daphne said. “Did you know I was coming or…?”

She rolled her suitcase through the front door and stopped in the center of the living room, turning to face me. I closed the door and turned, still feeling chilled to the bone, even though I’d closed off the cold weather outside. This chill had nothing to do with the environment around me.

I was about to get every bit of the punishment I deserved.

“This isn’t a rental cabin,” I said.

Daphne looked around, frown taking over her face. “Whose cabin is it?”

I gestured toward the worn sofa Isaac had set up in front of the much smaller TV than the one he had downstairs. “Let’s have a seat.”

My sister didn’t budge. “Whose cabin is it?” she repeated, this time speaking much slower.

The anger in her voice made it clear she knew exactly whose cabin it was. She was mad already, and I hadn’t even fully confessed.

“I got a bit of a crush on the guy you were thinking about marrying,” I blurted.

“My fiancé?” she asked.

I opened my mouth, planning to remind her she’d backed out of that deal, so he technically wasn’t her fiancé anymore, but that was a cop-out. Isaac thought he was marrying the woman he’dbeen communicating with for six weeks. I was the only one who knew otherwise—until now, anyway.

“I started falling for him,” I said. “From the first time I saw his picture. I was happy for you, but jealous at the same time. He was so handsome and good to you, and a genuinely amazing person, and the chance to live up here in the mountains…well, that’s the dream. So I did something really stupid.”

It might be stupid, but I didn’t regret it, even now. Even though it was all crashing down on me, I didn’t regret a second of it. If all I ever had was that one beautiful day with the man of my dreams, then I’d find some way to live with that, but I’d never regret what I did. I’d only regret hurting two genuinely good people.

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