Page 18 of Working for the Mountain Man

Ugh, this man is infuriating. "Trying doesn't seem to be working," I say.

I don’t know which one of us moves first, but his hand comes up to my jaw the way it almost did last night, except this time he doesn’t stop, and his mouth is on mine. It’s rough and not as restrained as I think Hugo would want, but God, the man can kiss, he takes my breath away as his lips press harder against my own. My back finds the cold wood of the door, and his other hand settles at my waist.

I feel wanted, not managed, not pitied, and not a problem someone is fixing. I feel wanted.

He kisses me like he's been starving himself of it, and I kiss him back because I have spent three weeks telling myself this would be ridiculous and I’m done holding back.

Then he pulls back, his breathing hard, his jaw tight, and his hand is still at my waist. "This can't happen again," he says, roughly.

I look at him and see the want and need blazing in his eyes. "You're a terrible liar, Hugo," I say.

He doesn’t argue, which is good, because I can still feel his mouth on my skin and his hands every place he touched me.

I’m already in enough trouble without pretending either of us believes him.

Chapter 6

Hugo

Ishouldn’t have kissed her, God, I shouldn’t have done it, but I needed to, I’ve been wanting to kiss her since the moment I saw her.

Now, I’m sitting in my truck in her cabin driveway, my engine running, watching the sleet come down, and all I can think about is doing it again.

The feel of her mouth, the way she kissed me back without hesitating, the way her hand found the front of my jacket, and the way she saidyou're a terrible liar, Hugoletting me know she wasn’t hurt by me pulling back, instead, she was joking with me about it.

I put the truck in reverse and pull away and remind myself that she works for me and she’s twenty-four years old. She’s in Forge Creek for three weeks, and then she goes back to the city and her life that has nothing to do with mountain roads. She came here after a man hurt her publicly?, and she is still flinching from it, even when she is pretending not to. I was to curious about her, that I searched her name up online, it wasn’t hard to find and I read everything, I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help myself.

She needs steady ground, not a man who is nineteen years older than her and pressing her against a cabin door in the sleet because he ran out of restraint.

I drive home, but I don’t sleep.

The storm has moved faster than the forecast said it would. By six in the morning there’s snow above four thousand feet and sleet below it, and the upper ridge access road has two reported inches of new ice since midnight. I’m at the Road & Ridge office before seven, working through weather reports and road closure updates, along with a message from Hank Mullins asking if I can get eyes on the upper ridge drainage before the main storm front comes in this afternoon.

There is also a message from Lila; the state team has confirmed the inspection date. Twenty-two days is now fifteen, they had a cancellation and we’ve been moved up. Damn it, that’s what we get for being on their cancellation list.

I stand at the window with my coffee and look at the weather moving in off the mountains and think about everything still sitting in the grant file that is not done. The remote bridge on the upper ridge access route, we repaired the drainage channel and the abutment on that bridge two months ago. The repair is solid, but the photo log has a gap. The weather condition note is missing, and the state file will flag it as incomplete if we don’t document the site before the inspection, and if this storm settles in for three or four days the way the forecast suggests, we won’t get back up there before the road conditions become impossible to justify.

It needs to be done today.

I’m making the file list when I hear the office door.

I turn and see Elsie enter the office and I notice that she’s wearing her new boots, she’s carrying coffee, her laptop bag, and wearing her high-vis vest already, over a thick sweater, like she’s about to going on a field trip.

"Road's worse today," I say.

"Good morning to you too," she says.

She glances at me and looks away and then deliberately looks back, chin up, the same way she did at the culvert the first day, like she is daring herself to hold the eye contact.

I give her the upper ridge file without saying anything else, she laughs as she opens it and thankfully doesn’t say anything as she gets to work.

I try to act normal, but I fail, somewhat, because about fifteen minutes later she says, without looking up. "Are we doing this?"

"Doing what?" I ask, acting like I’ve no idea what she’s talking about.

"Pretending you didn't kiss me against my front door last night."

I go still, but she hasn’t noticed as she’s still looking at the file.