Page 1 of Dangerous Mountain Man

1

MALLORIE

Someone was shooting outside this cabin.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The sound woke me from a delicious dream where I was lounging on a beach with my best friend, Cassady. A shirtless, beefy mountain man was fanning us.

Okay, so a mountain man probably wouldn’t be standing on a beach with a fan, but that didn’t matter. The dream was what it was. It didn’t have to be realistic.

I still had the memory of that gorgeous face in my head as I shook myself awake, sitting up. I tossed my legs over the side of the bed and took a look at the alarm clock. That was when I fully woke up.

It was freaking 4:27 a.m.

“What the actual fuck?”

I clamped my hands over my mouth. I’d been raised better than that. Good girls didn’t cuss. Good girls didn’t drink, smoke, or make out in cars with boys. And I’d always done exactly what was expected of me.

But right now, I was ready to go out and shout a bunch of profanities at whoever this clown was waking me up at the asscrack of dawn. See? He’d driven me to cussing. Another reason he deserved a chewing out.

I grabbed my robe from the hook on the back of the door, annoyed at the fact that it was no longer freezing out there. If this had happened a couple of weeks ago, I would have thrown on my very thick down jacket—the one with all the quilting. That would have concealed the fact that I wore a very thin cotton PJ set with the wordsBearly Awakeon the front and a gigantic picture of a bear.

I didn’t even care that it was cheesy. I just didn’t want this guy to not take me seriously because of what I was wearing.

I threw open the cabin door just in time to hear another series of gunshots. That was when I stopped short. I was used to small-town living. My high school friend Joely, who’d moved to Nashville for a job in urban planning, would have a completely different reaction to gunshots at four in the morning.

I assumed it was a hunter—someone roaming through the woods behind this rental cabin looking for deer or birds or whatever wildlife was back here. I wasn’t exactly a country bumpkin. I was born and raised at the base of this mountain near the city line. We had schools nearby, and all we had to do was cross over to Adairsville to get to shops and restaurants. So basically, I was a child of the suburbs.

But after my landlord ignored my complaints about insects and rodents regularly appearing in my one-bedroom apartment, my boss set up a deal for me. His friend owned a bunch of rental cabins, and he wanted someone to stay in them when they weren’t occupied. Mostly to check in on things between renters and keep them from getting musty and stale.

Seduction Summit was becoming more of a year-round destination. The number of available cabins was getting tight, which was why I was up here in his most remote property—with a next-door neighbor who looked more than a little scary.

That scary neighbor was on my mind as I shut my front door and headed out to the back deck. What if it was the dangerous guy? The one with the bulky build and hostile expression? I’d seen him through my windows this past weekend, clearing away brush. And yesterday morning, I saw him climbing into his truck with a giant tumbler. That had humanized him a little.

Bad guys didn’t drink out of tumblers, did they?

Bang!

That shot was way too close. I jumped, pressing my hands to my chest, and looked around like the overly sheltered person I was. Could I even be considered a grown woman when I was acting like such a baby over gunshots? What if they weren’t even gunshots? They could be fireworks.

Bang!

This time, I jumped, reflexively yelling out, “Hey!”

I was shouting into the trees. I saw no sign of anything that might be making that noise, but right past this deck was a literal forest. I was acting absolutely out of my mind. Cuckoo. Like someone who needed to get out more often.

Silence.

Then came the rustling of something moving through those trees. Was there anything creepier? It could be a bear. It could be my next-door neighbor, holding a weapon that could kill me in two seconds flat. It could be the ghost of some mean mountain man who’d lived here decades ago…

A dark figure emerged. I squinted and tugged my robe tighter, like it could protect me somehow. Oh yes, it was definitely my neighbor. He wore an army green jacket and his usual scowl. The way the back porch light shone on him, it was like he was in a spotlight.

“What the fuck?” I asked nobody in particular.

Good girls didn’t cuss.

He set the bottom part of the gun down on the ground next to his left foot. That seemed dangerous too. What if the thing went off? Would it shoot straight up in the sky? But then, would the bullet come down and hit one of us? Did that happen outside of movies and TV shows?

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