Page 6 of Sparked By the Mountain Man Hotshot

“I slept great. I sleep like a champion. I’m a professional sleeper who moonlights as a chef.”

“Reagan.”

“I lost the job four times before my feet hit the floor, eleven by the time I got here,” I hear myself say, which is the truth and therefore not something I meant to hand a man over an afternoon coffee. I take it back the only way I know how, which is louder. “It’s fine. It’s a numbers thing. Twenty-three-year-old seasonal versus a guy with a following and a pedigree. I’m not the bet you make. I’m second choice. Scraps. Leftovers.”

There. Now he knows how old I am and how doomed I am, all before he’s had his first sip. Efficient.

He doesn’t argue the age. He doesn’t argue the doom. He sets his thermos on the counter and looks at me with that stillness he brought down off the mountain, and asks, “Who taught you to bet against yourself first?”

It’s not a fair question to put to a person on just a few sips of coffee. I take a long swallow to buy time. It buys me nothing.

“Nobody taught me. Self-taught. It’s my one real talent.” I tighten my hold on the cup. “You want the origin story? It’s boring. Older brother got the car and the college fund. I got told I was independent, which passes for a compliment until you’re thirty and realize ‘independent’ means they never had to try. My mom’s exact words when I told her I got into culinary school. ‘That’ll be good for you.’ Not proud. Relieved. One less kid to worry about.”

Reid doesn’t say I’m sorry. I would have hated I’m sorry. Instead, he says, “So you got good at losing before anybody could make you.”

“I got efficient.”

“You keep using that word.”

“It’s a good word. It’s the only kind of winning I get. If I lose first, on purpose, ahead of schedule, nobody else gets to do it to me.” I say it quickly, still trying for a joke, and the terrible part is watching him take it seriously. “You’re not drinking your coffee.”

“I’m not thinking about my coffee.”

“That’s a waste of good coffee.”

“Reagan.” He leaves the coffee untouched and turns, and the cold laminate against my hip is the only thing holding me up. He’s close now. Close enough that I have to tip my head. Close enough that the whole shop shrinks to the eighteen inches between his mouth and mine. “For the record, if I were placing that bet, I’d have put it all on you the second the trout came out.”

“You don’t even know me. It’s been two days.”

“I know you put the whole gold town in the brown butter and dared me to taste it. I know you’d rather crack a joke than take a hit. I know you’ve spent twenty-three years being told you’re the independent one and turned it into a knife you keep pointed at yourself.” His hand comes up, tucking the loose piece of hair behind my ear. His thumb grazes my jaw, and I forget every word I’ve ever plated. “That’s not nothing to know. That’s the important part.”

I should say something funny. It’s my move—the only move I have—and I open my mouth to make it. But nothing comes out but his name.

“Reid.”

He kisses me.

It’s a slow kiss—one hand still at my jaw, the other finding the small of my back and drawing me off the counter until there’s no cold laminate left. Just heat. Just him. The scrape of two-day stubble, the taste of black coffee, something underneath it that loosens the knots in my shoulders one by one.

I make a sound I’ll deny later. My hands find the front of his jacket and hold on. He kisses me with the certainty of a man who came down a mountain knowing exactly what he was driving toward, and for a handful of seconds, I let myself be a person who gets kissed like this. A person good things happen to. A person worth the drive.

Then Thursday walks in.

Not really. Really, it’s my own brain, which can’t leave a nice thing alone, sliding the calendar across the counter. It reminds me that by tomorrow morning, he drives south and Marchetti hands my spot to Denver and I’m standing in Lea’s kissing the single most losable man in Colorado, feeding my own knife a fresh target.

I pull back first. “Okay,” I breathe. “Okay. That was—okay.”

“Reagan.”

“You have an early truck south tomorrow, and I have a doom to attend to.” I’m already reaching for the second coffee—the pretend one, the one for someone else—turning it into something for my hands to do that isn’t him. “Great way to make Thursday worse, by the way. Ten out of ten. Really thought it through.”

“Look at me.”

I don’t. If I look at him, I’ll kiss him again, and if I kiss him again I’ll want it, and if I want it I’ll have handed the universe the exact thing it takes from me every single time.

Also, I just kissed a customer in the middle of Lea’s, in a town where Lea by herself is a broadcast network, two days into the week that decides whether I have a career. If it gets back to Marchetti before Thursday, I’ve given him the excuse he’s been looking for.

“I have prep,” I say, to my own hands, because his face is not a safe place to put my gaze right now. “Thanks for the—for coming down the mountain. That’s a lot of mountain for a kiss you’ll regret by Thursday.”