A steamy small-town mountain man romance featuring a quietly intense adventure-operator hero who’d been waiting two years without knowing what for, a buttoned-up librarian who drove twenty minutes up a mountain for a professional meeting, and the weekend she stopped holding her clipboard long enough to see what was right in front of her.
She came up the mountain for a partnership agreement. She left with something she didn’t have a name for yet.
I had not driven twenty minutes up that mountain to stare at a man’s arms.
I was a librarian in Hartsville. I read at lunch.I wore cardigans. I’d spent twenty-three years being the indoor girl and I’d been very good at it—comfortable, contained, never more than a twenty-minute drive from the life I’d built around knowing exactly what to expect.I drove up that mountain with a clipboard and a list of questions and the absolute intention of staying professional.
Then Alec Hollister looked at my face instead of anywhere else, and I forgot what I’d come to ask him.
He told me to wear something I could move in. He said it like it meant nothing. I drove home with my hands shaking and a signed partnership agreement, and I already knew I was coming back the next day.
I didn’t jump off cliffs. I didn’t sleep with men I’d just met. I didn’t spend weekends in the mountains with quiet, unhurried men who looked at me like they’d been waiting for something to arrive and had just figured out what it was.
Apparently, that weekend, I did all three.
Alec had noticed me two years earlier in a hardware store.I was twenty-one and trying to buy chain for a curtain rod and didn’t know what gauge I needed.He almost said something. He didn’t—because I was too young and he wasn’t a man who chased girls into hardware stores. He waited. He was good at waiting.
When I came up his mountain on a Friday morning with my clipboard held to my chest like a shield, the first thing he saw on my face was that nobody had ever looked at me the way he was about to.He didn’t say that. He just handed me a waiver and told me about the swimming hole, and I felt something shift in a way I didn’t have the vocabulary for yet.
He knew I had an apartment in Hartsville and a library that opened Monday morning.He knew that was a twenty-minute drive. He took me to a forty-foot cliff anyway—patient, unhurried, completely certain about something I was still catching up to—and waited while I stood at the edge of everything I’d told myself I couldn’t do.
I jumped.
I was the indoor girl my whole life. I didn’t know what it felt like to be seen by someone who’d already decided to wait for me before I’d ever said a word worth waiting for.By Sunday morning I was starting to understand that the weekend hadn’t changed me.It had just finally let me be the version of myself that had been there all along.
Heatwave with the Mountain Man is part of the Mountain Man Summer series. Check out the entire series!
Featuring these tropes:
Quietly intense adventure-operator hero who waited two years
Indoor-girl librarian heroine stepping off every edge
He fell first—before she ever came up the mountain
Patient alpha devotion with dog-day summer heat
Virgin heroine, opposites attract, instalove
