Page 5 of Merciless Mountain Man

“Not drinking, huh?” he said. “Smart move. You never know what this guy will put in your drink.”

“Hey!” the bartender said, looking up.

But he didn’t seem offended—amused, if anything. Did that mean he’d been slipping things into people’s drinks? Now I had to wonder.

“He could put something in a sweet tea too,” I said, eyeing my drink. Then I lifted my gaze and smiled at the bartender. “Just kidding.”

I didn’t want him messing with my food. I had to play nice.

“Gotcha,” the bartender said. “Will you two be ordering dinner tonight?”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll take the burger with onion rings.”

Dane looked over at me. I wasn’t sure what to make of his stare. Was he surprised I could put away that much food? Or maybe he was thinking about kissing me later. Onion breath wouldn’t be that appealing.

“I’ll take the same,” he said. “And a sweet tea to go with my drink.”

We’d both have onion breath. That meant if we kissed, we wouldn’t be able to detect it on the other person, right?

My last kiss had been senior year at a school dance. Not prom, either. My experiences had me wondering if maybe I just wasn’t that sexual of a person. But today, when I’d seen this guy nude—well, it was clear that wasn’t true at all.

Maybe I’d just been meeting the wrong guys. Maybe a guy like Dane was exactly what I needed.

4

DANE

Cassady was all woman.

That was the name of the beautiful woman seated beside me at the bar. Cassady. And Cassady was going to town on a burger.

Even when she bit into an onion ring, she didn’t take dainty little rabbit bites like the women I usually dated. No, this was a woman who liked to eat. Cassady was my kind of woman.

This wasn’t a date, though. I had to keep reminding myself of that. I’d shown up here by invitation and plopped down on the barstool, and now we were getting to know each other like it was a date.

“All my life,” she said in answer to my question about how long she’d lived here. “Grew up in Seduction Summit. Went to Seduction Summit schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I worked at the diner in high school. After high school, I got a job in Adairsville, working for a real estate agent. Gradually, that led to property management. When the job opening came up here in Seduction Summit, it was perfect for me.”

“How long have you been doing that?” I asked.

“Just six months. Rental cabins are kind of new here, but I guess you’d know that.”

I held in a sarcastic remark. No need to be rude to her. It wasn’t her fault. Besides, she was probably all too aware that the locals weren’t happy about all the cabins being shoved into the bare land around our property.

At one time, I could walk out on my front porch in my underwear with my cup of coffee in the morning just to enjoy the peace and quiet. I would never have done that, of course, but just knowing I could was nice.

Nowadays, I couldn’t even burp without my neighbors knowing about it. That was an exaggeration, but not by much.

“So, how’d you end up at the wrong house this morning?” I asked.

I’d been curious about it, and this was the only way to find out. I could pretend it hadn’t happened. Maybe she was embarrassed that she stumbled upon me naked. It certainly didn’t bother me.

“It’s all my fault,” she said. “I transposed two of the numbers. It was 3485, not 3458.”

“Easy enough to do,” I said. “Was your boss mad?”

She shook her head. “He’ll never know. Unless you tell him.”

She looked over at me. This was a test. Did she have my loyalty? Hell, even if I wasn’t trying to get into her pants—well, she was wearing a skirt, so maybe I should say underwear—I wouldn’t tell her boss her secret. My loyalty was not to the business owners who were making this town a living hell for those of us who came here looking for peace and quiet, that was for sure.

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