Page 2 of Wanted By the Mountain Man
“Why don’t I just meet you there?” I said. “What time?”
His expression changed slightly. Nothing dramatic, just a slight flicker. A normal person wouldn’t have noticed, but I was pretty tuned in to this guy. Something about him had grabbed me from the beginning, and those brown eyes seemed to haunt my dreams.
“Whenever the workday finishes,” Rourke said. “But I think the girlfriends are meeting us at seven. So around seven.”
“Do I need to bring anything?”
It seemed like the polite thing to ask. I had no idea if this was a get-together where everyone would just drink and not eat. If so, I’d have to grab some dinner before I went. But even then, it seemed polite to offer to bring something. In Seduction Summit, you always offered to bring something.
“Maybe a gallon of your mom’s sweet tea, if you can,” he said.
My mom’s sweet tea. Everyone thought she made it. She actually had it shipped in from Alabama in an unmarked truck.
We always took the label off. It cost too much extra to get the manufacturer to do it so that any part-time employees didn’t realize it wasn’t homemade. Although the fact that there were shelves full of unlabeled plastic gallon jugs should’ve tipped someone off, even after we perfected the art of removing the label off without leaving any sticker residue.
“We’ll have food,” he blurted.
It took me a second to process what he just said. Food. I wouldn’t need to grab dinner first. That would give me extra time to get ready and pace around my tiny apartment. Maybe even rest a little.
Oh, who was I kidding? I’d be pacing nervously around my apartment until time to leave.
“Bring your swimsuit,” he said as he set his credit card on top of the check I’d placed face down a good twenty minutes ago.
I gave him a confident smile, grabbed the card, and walked away. But that smile promptly turned to a frown. Swimsuit. This guy hadn’t even seen me out of my uniform yet, and I’d be wearing nothing more than a swimsuit in front of him? Sure, men had seen me in a bathing suit before. But it was a completely different matter when it was your first date.
Was it a date? Maybe not in the traditional sense. But it meant I’d get to spend more time with this gorgeous lumberjack. And no woman in her right mind would pass that up.
2
ROURKE
Lumberjack Cove was a small manmade pond in the mountains of Seduction Summit. One of the guys had discovered it and told the rest of us about it, and it quickly became a popular hangout for guys on the logging crew and their families.
Tonight, there were no kids, just couples. The guys on my crew were newer to town and didn’t have wives and kids yet. “Yet” being the key word. The couples I was hanging with tonight were well on their way to marriage and kids despite the fact that they’d all pretty much just met. I didn’t understand how that had happened.
But then here I was, waiting eagerly for a redheaded server to show up. Pepper was her name, but that was a nickname. Her real name was Penelope. Someone said she went by Penny in high school. I liked Pepper, though. It fit her bright-eyed, perky personality.
“Hey, Donovan!” Ryan called out. “When’s your chick showing up?”
My chick. I took offense to Pepper being called a chick, but at the same time, I liked that he was calling her mine. Thatgorgeous woman was bringing out stuff in me that I didn’t even know was there.
“You just worry about yourself and that woman you talked into dating you,” I shot back.
“Ooh,” Dayton said. “Rourke owned your ass.”
I cringed. It was all just playing around, but Rafe was nearby with his new girlfriend, Sahara. He didn’t care for me much, and he’d probably learned by now that I had bought the property next to his. He had some beef with me. Thought I was trying to pick up a woman he’d gone home with when he was new to town.
The funny thing was, I wasn’t trying to pick the woman up. I was a flirt—had been all my life. I loved the attention from women. But most of them bored me, and I couldn’t explain why. I’d always assumed I just liked a good challenge. The thrill of the chase and all.
But now I was questioning all that because the woman at the diner—the one I hoped would meet me here—had captured my attention in a way no woman ever had. And that fascinated me. I was basically stalking her more as a way to figure out why I couldn’t stop thinking about her than anything else.
Okay, so maybe that was only partly true. The fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about her made me want to spend as much time around her as possible. Night and day, I found myself wondering what she was doing now. Was she at work? Was she watching TV? Was she eating dinner alone like I was? Or did she have a full life where she hung out with her friends after working with her mom all day?
I’d just ripped off my shirt and hopped into the pond when something caught my eye. I glanced toward the parking lot the way I had at least a hundred times in the past twenty minutes or so since arriving. But unlike all those other times, something new was in the parking lot. A small sedan that I knew all too well. It was Pepper’s.
I should get out and greet her, but I didn’t want to look too eager to my buddies. They’d never let me live that down. So I wiped my eyes and slowly whipped my head around to dislodge excess water. By the time I reached shore, the women had taken her into their fold, and she was over at the blanket with all the food, sitting with three of them.
“You’re dating the girl from the diner?” Dayton asked, sidling up to me.
