“Maybe… two minutes? I pulled over as soon as I saw the… that.” I motion wildly to what can’t be good and is making my head fester with fears and anxiety.
“Good.” With gloved hands, he lifts the car’s hood. Not a hesitation in sight. It releases a fresh billow of smoke that makes me cough. But he doesn’t flinch, just aims the extinguisher and unleashes a stream of white foam into the engine compartment with the practiced efficiency of someone who does this sort of thing before breakfast.
The smoke slowly dissipates, like mist off of a lake.
Merry barks a pleased little ode of happiness and I give her a side-eye. She’s never liked men. Hated my ex. Peed on the male veterinarian. Moody… but in the cutest way. At least I think so.
She takes after her human.
Gloves on the fender, the muscles in his forearms flexing beneath his pushed-up coat sleeves despite the chill in the mountain air, he works methodically, covering every inch of the engine bay. I find myself staring at those muscles— tight, sinewy, with a light dusting of hair. And the way his largehands move with surprising precision is both admirable and stimulating.
Stop it!The last thing I need right now is to be fawning over the man who’s putting out my car fire. This isn’t the time and this isn’t the place. Plus, he probably doesn’t need this gawk-show either.
But my photographer’s eye has already cataloged so many details. The slight furrow between his brows as he concentrates, the way snowflakes catch in his barely salt-and-peppered hair, the white clouds of his breath in the freezing air. He looks like he belongs here, in this wild and unpredictable place, as essential to the landscape as the pines and the mountains themselves.
After what feels like an eternity but is probably less than a minute, he slides back, surveying his work with a critical eye.
“Should be out,” he says, his voice rougher now, probably from the smoke. “But this engine is shot. You’re not driving this car today or maybe any day now.”
My stomach drops to somewhere around my knees. “What?”
He turns to look at me fully for the first time, and the impact of his direct gaze nearly knocks me back a step. Up close, his eyes aren’t just gray— they’re slateblue. Like the color of the sky before a storm, ringed with a dark navy and framed by laugh lines that suggest he smiles more often than his serious expression implies.
“Looks like the timing belt snapped,” he says, with a run of his hand through his hair, tussling what wasn’t perfect into chaos, but it looks just right. “That caused the engine to overheat, which started melting things that really shouldn’t melt. Even if I could get it started, which I can’t, you wouldn’t make it half a mile before it seized up completely.” He pauses, studying my face with an intensity that makes my skin warm despite the cold. “Where were you heading?”
“Colorado Springs.” My voice comes out smaller than I intended. “To stay with my aunt for Christmas.”
Something flickers across his face— concern, maybe, but more likely disbelief.
“Colorado?” he asks.
I nod.
“Ummm… you’re a long way from Colorado Springs, Colorado.”
“I know.” I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly aware that I ran out of the car withoutgrabbing a coat. Merry stands and slides in close to share her body heat.
I’m wearing only jeans, boots, and an oversized burgundy sweater I’d thrown on this morning in Seattle— before loading up everything I own that matters and pointing my car east.
Running away, my best friend Simone had called it.
Taking control of my own narrative,I corrected her… and then realized she was probably right.
Possibly. Potentially. Actually.
Anyway, I’m stuck in the middle of Montana with a dead car and a rescuer who looks like he’s stepped out of a mountain man charity calendar shoot.
“Here.” The man shrugs out of his jacket, revealing a thermal Henley that does absolutely nothing to hide the solid build beneath. He holds the jacket out to me, and when I hesitate, his eyebrows rise slightly. “You’re turning blue. Please, take it.”
The jacket is still warm from his body heat when I slip it on. It swallows me, the sleeves hanging past my hands, but it smells like pine and smoke and something else, something masculine and clean that makes me want to bury my nose in the collar.
But I won’t do that.
I still havesomedignity left.
Okay, maybe not… but still, I have manners.
I think.
