Page 10 of My Mountain Man Stalker
Easy, because she fits here in ways she shouldn’t.
Hard, because I want her in ways I shouldn’t.
She hums when she cooks. Walks barefoot like the floor belongs to her. Laughs under her breath when she finds the stash of paperbacks I keep hidden behind the woodpile. She’s not soft—not in the way most people mean—but she’s real. Sharp and bright and curious, like she never learned how to keep her guard up even when everything in her life told her to.
And me? I’m a walking guardrail. Barbed wire and bad history.
She shouldn’t feel comfortable here.
But she does.
And that… that’s the problem.
I chop wood until my arms burn. Strip and clean my rifles. Reset the perimeter traps. Replace the camera batteries. Keep my hands moving and my eyes away from her. I do everything short of smashing my head against a tree just to keep my thoughts clean.
But they never stay clean for long.
Not when she sleeps in my bed, curled under my quilt like she was always meant to be there.
Not when I walk past the door and hear her breathing slow and steady in the dark, and every cell in my body screams to go to her.
Not when she looks at me with that tilt of her head like she’s trying to read a language she hasn’t learned yet—and I’m the fucking textbook.
I promised her father I’d keep her safe.
That means from bullets. From bastards like Liam.
And from me.
I step out into the morning cold, the satellite phone already in my hand. Frost bites at my skin. The air smells like woodsmoke and winter. I keep the cabin behind me and pace into the trees until the signal stabilizes.
I hit the speed dial.
It rings twice.
“Jesus Christ,” a voice mutters on the other end, gravel and smoke and too many deployments. “I was hoping this number burned.”
“Nice to hear your voice too, Nate.”
Nate Bishop. Ex-CIA. Still has fingers in enough dirty pies to make politicians nervous. He owes me three favors, one life, and a few nights of sleep.
“You checking in, or you got another corpse to bury?”
“Neither,” I say. “Yet.”
“Ah,” he says. “Her.”
He always was good at reading between the silences.
“You heard anything?” I ask.
“About your girl?” he says. “Chatter’s light. Whoever’s after her, they’re keeping quiet. No contract on the dark web, no bounty on the forums. But someone’s paying a lot of money to ask a lot of quiet questions.”
I grit my teeth. “Liam?”
“Ghosted. Burned all his aliases. Last known location was Boston, two weeks ago. Then nothing.”
Nate pauses.
