Page 2 of Under The Mountain Man’s Spell

"Tomorrow night," he said. "The masquerade. Mia's making the punch again, so pace yourself. You coming, or are you going to stand at the tent flap with a radio, glaring at people for having a good time?"

"Somebody has to watch the exits."

"Your second in command is working the tent, and you trained Silas yourself, so you know he can handle it." He drank his coffee and watched me over the rim, easy about it, a happy man with nothing to prove. "You could dance if you wanted to, Grayson. Leave the radio in the truck and dance with somebody."

I told him I'd think about it, which we both understood to mean the tent flap and the radio, and he laughed and headed off toward the hayride, where he'd promised somebody a look at the wagon's brakes. Around me the green kept filling up, banners going taut between the lampposts, a truck of pumpkins backing toward the rows, half the town out in the cold bright morning building four days of Halloween noise.

I drove up to the cabin at dusk with the windows cracked, wood-smoke and cut corn in the air the whole way. The place I'd rebuilt with my own hands over six years stood exactly as I'd left it, solid and square and dark, and I went in and turned on the kitchen light and nothing else. Down the hall, the second bedroom kept its door open the way it had since my sister moved out to build her own life. Three years, and I still told myself I was keeping it for guests I never invited. Molly had never been up here. I'd fixed her gutters, replaced the latch on her clinic gate, and drunk her coffee at her kitchen table more times than I could count, and every time she'd said something about seeing the place, I'd found a reason the timing was bad. She'd stopped asking about a year ago. I felt like an ass every time I thought about it, and I thought about it most nights, because the alternative was Molly MacKenzie standing in my kitchen with her hair down, and I didn't trust myself with that. I banked the stove and ate standing up and washed the one plate, and through the window over the sink the festival's glow sat low in the valley.

It was a good life, and I'd earned every quiet inch of it. I stood there drying my hands longer than the job took, with no sound in the house but the stove ticking, and by the time I got to bed I was already hard again. I lay on my back in the dark and let myself have the one picture I never allowed in daylight: her braid pulled loose, all that hair wound around my fist, her head tipped back against my shoulder while I kissed down her throat and took my time learning every soft inch of her with my mouth and my hands. I didn't know how long her hair ran. I gave it to myself down to the small of her back, and I stroked myself slow to the sound of her saying my name, and when I came I swore into the empty room. Then I lay there with my pulse still going hard and set the alarm for five-thirty, because I'd be back under that water before sunrise, and I already knew it.

Chapter 2

Molly

The sexy devil costume had been hanging on my closet door for three weeks, and every night while I brushed my teeth I looked at it and thought about taking it back.

I'd bought it two towns away, in a Halloween pop-up next to a mattress outlet, from a teenager who looked at the red dress, then at my cardigan, and decided not to comment. I appreciated that, because I was doing enough commenting in my own head for both of us. The horns were small. The mask covered the top half of my face. The dress was the most noticeable thing I had ever owned, and I paid cash for it like a woman buying something illegal.

My plan was simple. I'd talked it through with Trip, my three-legged cat, over two separate mugs of tea in my kitchen, and he'd had no objections. One night. One mask. The festival brought in enough strangers from Devil's Rest and the resort that a woman nobody recognized wouldn't even make the gossip rounds. Grayson would never know it was me. Nothing would change at the council or at the clinic, nobody would get hurt, and I'd have one memory to keep for the rest of my life.

The alternative was what I'd been doing for two years, which was nothing.

Twice a month I took the chair beside Grayson Carter at council and told myself it was because it was closest to the door. It wasn't. I liked sitting next to him. I liked the warmth coming off his arm an inch from mine and the way he'd slide the agenda over without being asked. His hands were big and scarred and patient, and I'd watched them coax a panicked dog out of the back of a kennel without him ever raising his voice. His own voice was low and unhurried, and I could still feel it an hour after he'd finished talking about budget lines. I had gone home from more council meetings than I would ever admit with my thighs pressed together and my face still warm.

He'd poured my coffee at my very first meeting, before I'd said a word, already fixed the way I took it, because apparently he'd noticed at the diner. I went home and sat in my driveway for ten minutes like I'd been mildly concussed. Since then he'd fixed my gutters and I'd patched up his department's rescues, and we'd had whole conversations in six sentences, and he'd treated me with the careful courtesy of a man looking after a friend's kid sister. He'd never once asked me up to his cabin, either, and I'd stopped hinting. He was my friend, the best one I had in this town, and I wasn't going to wreck that by saying something I couldn't take back. I didn't trust myself to stop at one sentence, either. I loved him so quietly that not even Trip knew, and Trip knew everything, including where I hid the good treats.

On Thursday, at the petting zoo, a pumpkin vendor had asked if he could buy me a drink at the masquerade, and I'd told him I wasn't dating. Not this year, not next. Grayson was standing right there with his hand locked on the rail, and he didn't say a word, and he didn't look at me. I had meant I wasn't dating anyone who wasn't him, and he'd heard exactly what I said. I told myself his silence was an answer too. It was also the best argument for my plan I'd ever been handed, because a night wasn't dating.

I didn't feel sorry for myself, whatever Trip's face said. I'd been the smart, shy, curvy girl my whole life, and I'd spent my twenties proving myself at work instead. Ten years in Seattle finance. Spreadsheets at midnight, a generous salary and benefits, a fiancé who turned out to have another girlfriend, and a tightness in my chest that got worse every quarter, until at thirty I walked out mid-bonus-season, re-qualified as a veterinary nurse, and followed a job listing to a mountain town that needed me. I'd sworn off men somewhere on the drive. Savage Ridge took me in without asking questions. I built a life I liked, with Lyle's clinic and my little house and the animals, and I loved living here.

So, one night. If I couldn't have the man, I could at least have the memory. I wasn't greedy. One would be plenty.

* * *

Getting ready on Friday took two hours, and the first ninety minutes were my hair.

It had been braided or knotted up for so long that I was out of practice. When I finally finished wrangling the hot brush, it fell halfway down my back in smooth, dark auburn waves I barely recognized. The hair was the one risk I couldn't remove, but Grayson had never once seen it down, the tent would be lit by torches, and if the night went where I intended, I'd be asking for the lights low anyway.

The dress was a different problem. It hugged my breasts and my waist and let my hips go wherever they liked, and when I had it on and the mask settled, the woman in the mirror was a stranger with my mouth. She didn't wear reading glasses or carry a stool sample bag in her trunk. She looked like a woman who got exactly what she wanted. I stood there long enough for Trip to yowl at me from the hallway, and then I said out loud, to nobody, "Well. Look at me."

The green at night was a different place, string lights and torch flames everywhere, the corn maze a black wall to the north, and the masquerade tent glowing gold. Inside, half the town wore masks that hid nothing. Nobody looked at me twice except the people who looked twice for the new reason, which made me want to hide and stand up straighter at the same time. I made it to the punch table mostly to have a destination.

Mia was behind it in cat ears and an apron, ladling amber punch into paper cups, and she handed me one with the smile she gave strangers. "Fair warning," she said, "it's the good batch. Sip it slowly."

"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me all day," I told her, in the low, warm voice that had come out of the mirror with the stranger. She laughed and moved on down the table, none the wiser. I stood at the edge of the light and nursed that one cup for forty minutes. I was not drunk. My shoulders were looser and my head was clear, and I was tracking the band, the exits, and the tent flap the way I always did. The decision was three weeks old and had been made sober, in my kitchen. The punch was for my nerves, not my judgment.

And then I saw him, and I nearly lost my nerve on the spot.

He was standing off to the side of the tent flap in dark jeans, a dark henley, and a plain black half-mask, and I stopped walking.

Dammit, he looked good. Two years of keeping it friendly, of rationing myself to glances, and behind my mask I could finally look as long as I wanted. His shoulders filled out the henley, his forearms were bare, and the silver coming in at his temples that he didn't know about was something I had a lot of feelings about. The jaw I'd memorized in profile across the council table was dark with end-of-day stubble I wanted to feel under my palm. I wanted my hands up under that shirt, finding out if his skin was as hot as it looked.

His second in command stood a few yards off in uniform with the radio on his belt, and Grayson had none, and no clipboard either. He still took up the doorway without trying, but something was different, and it took me a second to work out what. The watchfulness he wore even off duty had been turned down to coals. He looked like a man who had given himself one night off from being Grayson Carter. My mouth went dry, my palm went damp around the paper cup, and I was already aching, low and hot, before I'd crossed half the distance between us. I got moving before my nerve could object.

He saw me coming. His jaw tightened under the edge of the mask, and he didn't look away.

"You're off duty," I said, keeping the stranger's voice. "I checked. No radio."