Page 6 of Romanced By the Mountain Man

I’m quiet for a long moment. If there were ever a time to take a chance and confess my true identity, this would be it. But soulmates don’t actually exist. Happy endings don’t happen, and guys like me don’t get to keep the beautiful ball of sunshine that bounces into their lives. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Well, do you think it would for someone else in town?”

“Unlikely.” My friends are the only people that know what I do, and they wouldn’t bring that up in casual conversation.

“Oh,” she sighs out the word.

Her disappointment hits me straight in the gut and for some crazy reason, I want to fix this for her. I want to find a way to give her the soulmate she’s looking for. “Why do you want to find this guy so badly anyway?”

“Don’tyouwant to find your soulmate?”

And disillusion some poor woman against the whole idea of love and marriage? No thanks with a capital no. I’m sure as hell not a saint, but I’ve never broken a woman’s heart either. Still, I search for a soft answer, something that won’t hurt the beauty beside me. “Sometimes, being alone is a good thing.”

“Yeah,” she answers with a sniffle.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.She’s crying. Gwen is sitting beside me, and the girl is crying over not finding her soulmate. A soulmate that I can’t possibly be. I clear my throat, uncomfortable with her emotion.

“You know, I could help you look for him while you’re here.” The words leave my mouth before I even think them through. What the hell am I going to do? Am I going to parade her around in front of every single male in town and get each one to admit that he’s not Landon Shaw?

Yes, yes, I am. But I’ll be by her side the entire time so none of these fuckers get any bright ideas. Then by the time her car is fixed, she’ll be convinced Landon isn’t here and she’ll move on with her life. Probably find some other bastard to be her soulmate instead. The idea has me gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles ache.

“You would do that for me?” She asks with a little bit of hope in her voice and fuck, the sound is killing me.

All of those nights listening to her read out the dirty parts of her book in that sensual voice and now she’s here. She’s right beside me, and she has no idea who I am. No idea of how many times I’ve fisted my cock and called her name.

“Sure.” The word comes out strangled.

She claps her hands together in excitement, the sound loud in the cab of my truck. “Can we start first thing tomorrow morning?”

I grunt out a non-comital response, but she’s too excited to be paying much attention to me. How do I get myself into these dumb ass things? How can one woman’s tears affect me this much?

“How will we start our search?”

With liquor. Lots of liquor. That’s what it will take to get me through the next few days. Oh, sure I could try to win her over. I could tell her I’m Landon. I could romance her. But what would that get her? A broken heart, that’s what because I’m no woman’s prize.

Still, her books got me through a dark time in my life. I owe this to her and if I can find a way to give her just an ounce of the sunshine she’s given me, I want to offer it. “What do you know about the guy?”

“Hmm…well, he’s got a sexy voice, so I’ll know it when I hear him!” She says this with such a note of triumph, but all I can fixate on is the fact that she thinks my voice is sexy. Sure, I know women like it. Her audiobooks get a ton of positive reviews for my voice, but knowing she finds it sexy does something to me. It makes my chest puff out with pride.

“So, you’re telling me you’d recognize his voice?” I work to keep mine normal, trying not to give it away. “But let’s say for argument’s sake that you don’t recognize it, what else do we know about him?”

“I think I would recognize my soulmate’s voice,” she argues. “But I know that he lives here in Courage County. He loves the color honey. I don’t know what that’s about.”

Honey is the exact shade of golden brown that her eyes are. It became my favorite after I saw her first author photo.

I turn the truck onto the winding dirt road that will lead to my cabin as she says, “He’ll know about alphas and fated mates too.”

I make a mental note that I can’t afford to let on that I know all about shifter romances. They’re love stories where one or both of the love interests can also shift into an animal. A popular trope in the genre is that each shifter has a fated mate, one person that they were meant to be with. “Which are…?”

“I write shifter romances, mainly wolves. Although bears are becoming popular. I can kind of see the appeal after…” She stops herself.

I’m desperate to hear the rest of that sentence. I’m fascinated by how she does her work, and I have a million questions I want to ask her now that she’s here. But I push them down and remind myself that I can’t be obvious. “So, we have a guy that knows about wolf romances. Got it.”

She blows out her breath. “It’s not much to go on. But then, maybe he’ll recognize me. Do you think that could happen? I’ll totally let you be part of the wedding ceremony. I was going to write you out, but I think you’re a pretty cool guy.”

I stop the truck in my driveway and turn off the ignition. I don’t say anything for a long moment, processing. She has a lot of words. This shouldn’t surprise me, given what she does.

There’s no way in hell I’d sit on the sidelines and let her marry another man. But since she won’t find Landon, she doesn’t need to know that. “Not much of a wedding guy. I’ll send you a nice gift though.”

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