Page 1 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

Wild Harvest Mountain Man

Lena

I burned out of my kitchen and came here with nothing left to give. Daniel didn't ask me to give anything. He just kept showing up, quiet and steady, with wild mushrooms and no agenda, until I remembered what it felt like to want something again: to want him.

Daniel

I take my time with everything. Always have. Then Lena showed up running on empty, and for the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be in a hurry, to want to get somewhere with someone instead of just enjoying the walk.

Wild Harvest Mountain Man is an instalove mountain man romance with spice, slow healing, quiet devotion, and HEA.

one

Lena

Two mushrooms, orange as egg yolk, pushing up through the needle litter at the foot of a rotting log, and I have the plate built in my head before my knife is out of my pocket.

Dry pan first, because water is the enemy of everything good. Then butter, foaming, going nutty at the edges. Thyme. A smashed clove of garlic I lift out before it colours. If this town has crème fraîche I'll finish with a spoonful, and if it doesn't I'll use good salted butter and a squeeze of lemon and nothing else, because the kindest thing you can do for a chanterelle is get out of its way.

I reach for it.

"I wouldn't."

The voice comes from up the slope behind me, unhurried, like a man commenting on the weather. I don't fall over, which I'd like credit for, because I'm crouched on wet duff in boots two sizes too big with three pairs of borrowed socks bunched inside them.

I gasp and turn on my heels.

He's maybe ten feet above me on the pitch, standing on ground that should not hold anybody, a flat woven basket hanging off one shoulder and a short knife riding his belt. Canvas jacket gone dark at the shoulders from wet branches. Ball cap. Mid-thirties, a week of beard, dark eyes that have already looked at my hands and the log and the two orange caps and come to a conclusion.

He's a big man. Wide and tall and bearded. There's a low catch in my chest, specific as a pilot light taking flame, that has nothing to do with mushrooms and everything to do with how still he is while he waits for me to answer.

I have not felt anything catch in five months. I'd stopped expecting to.

"They're chanterelles?" I ask.

"They're not."

"They're orange."

"So's a traffic cone." He comes down the slope in three steps and crouches beside me without crowding me, close enough that I get woodsmoke off his jacket, and wet earth, and something faintly resinous underneath. He doesn't reach for my mushroom. He points at it with one blunt finger. "Turn it over."

I do. The underside is a fan of thin blades, densely packed, orange going brownish where they meet the stem.

"Those are gills," he says. "Sharp. Thin. Crowded. They come away if you push at them." He nudges one with his thumbnail and it lifts, delicate as a fish bone. "A chanterelle doesn't have gills. It has ridges — blunt, forked, running down the stem, the same colour as the rest of it. You can't peel them off because they're not stuck on. They're the mushroom."

"So what's this?"

"False chanterelle. It's a good liar." He turns the cap in my palm without touching my palm. "Soft. Orange all the way through the flesh. And it's growing on this." He taps the log. "Wood. Rotten wood, duff, old stumps. Chanterelles don't do that. They live off tree roots — Douglas fir, hemlock — so they come up out of soil, on their own or in a loose scatter, never sprouting off a log like a shelf."

"What would it have done to me?"

"Nothing dramatic." A beat. "You'd have spent the night regretting the choices that brought you here."

"I've done that sober."

That gets me a look.

Clearly I do not know enough about wild mushrooms to be foraging. I thought I did.