Page 28 of Stuck with my Mountain Daddies

“Good,” I replied, turning away before I revealed anything more. “It’s my house.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Riley

This was it.

The actual worst-case scenario.

Trapped in a cabin. No Wi-Fi. No signal because of the storm. No way to check in on what the internet was saying about me, which was probably for the best. But still it felt like slow suffocation.

My thumbs twitched with the ghost of my phone. I kept unlocking it every ten minutes out of habit, staring at thatNo Servicenotification like it had personally wronged me.

I’d tried opening Instagram earlier, as if maybe the algorithm would pity me and let one post load. It didn’t.

“Cool, cool,” I muttered to myself, tossing the useless brick of a phone onto the worn leather couch. “Nothing like a complete digital blackout to really take the edge off a public meltdown.”

Outside, snow fell in fat, fluffy clumps. Inside, everything smelled like woodsmoke and testosterone. Three Wolfe brothers, one ticking time bomb formerly known as me, and no way out.

This cabin was gorgeous in that rugged, lumberjack-core way. Vaulted ceilings, stone fireplace, wide plank floors, anda kitchen stocked with enough canned goods to ride out the apocalypse.

Great for the average person. Aesthetic. Cozy.

I hated it.

Not because it was ugly, because it was too nice. Too real. Too untouched by the curated chaos of the life I used to live.

I paced the living room, wrapped in an oversized flannel that definitely wasn’t mine and somehow smelled like all three brothers at once. Leather, wood, fire. Trouble.

Beckett barely glanced up from where he sat in the corner, whittling something out of a block of wood like he’d been born in a damn folk song.

He hadn’t said a word to me since this morning. Just kept working with this quiet, concentrated intensity that felt like a wall I couldn’t scale.

Every time I tried to start a conversation—“Whatcha making?”, “How long have you lived here?”, “Do you ever smile or is this a permanent thing?”—he’d respond with a grunt or a blink or, if I was really lucky, a full sentence that sounded vaguely like a threat.

Asher, of course, was having the time of his life.

He sprawled across the love seat like a cat in a sunbeam, strumming a beat-up guitar I was pretty sure he’d only picked up to annoy me.

“You’re woundsotight,” he said around a lopsided grin. “You know, there are worse things than being snowed in with three hot guys.”

“Hot guys?” I raised a brow. “Point me in their direction.”

He clutched his chest. “Ouch. You wound me.”

“You’ll live,” I said, plopping down on the edge of the couch and tugging a blanket over my legs.

“Barely,” he said, plucking a few moody chords like he was about to launch into a broody breakup song. “It’s the lack of appreciation that kills me.”

“You’re like a golden retriever with a superiority complex,” I muttered, leaning my head back against the couch.

He winked. “Still hot, though.”

Garrett entered the room like some kind of storm-tracking general, clipboard in hand—and yes, the man actually had a clipboard.

He was tall, broad, annoyingly attractive in that responsible eldest brother way, and clearly one power outage away from taking over a small country.

“We’ve got enough wood stacked for two more days if the temps stay low,” he said, talking more to himself than any of us. “Water’s fine. Pantry’s stocked. Should be able to ride this out.”

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