1
HARTLEY
Three days into what was supposed to be a relaxing girls’ trip, and I was hauling a pink rolling suitcase up a gravel road toward a stranger’s garage apartment.
So much for a “restorative mountain getaway.”
The morning had started perfectly. Brooklyn and I were at the Pancake House—again. Third day in a row. At this point, Lauralie didn’t even ask what we wanted. She just winked and called out, “Two blueberry stacks!” like we were regulars with punch cards.
Paisley, meanwhile, was missing in action.
She’d been slipping out before dawn every morning with her trail maps and GPS coordinates like she was training for some secret wilderness audition. After yesterday, though, she’d vanished entirely. Something about one of the outfitter guys showing her a “bypass trail.” Which sounded suspiciously like code for “abs.”
She hadn’t answered a single text.
Brooklyn wasn’t much more interested in the wilderness portion of this trip than I was. She’d signed up for the scavenger hunt because the grand prize was fifty thousand dollars andbecause she was Brooklyn—she’d enter a competitive goat-grooming contest if there were cash on the line. But so far, her strategy had been to photograph wildflowers from the Pancake House parking lot and hope for the best.
I was halfway through a pancake—blueberries, syrup, joy—when my phone rang.
Bobbi. The innkeeper.
Never a good sign.
A pipe had burst. My room—just mine, of course—was flooded. My things had already been moved to the front desk. She was “so sorry,” but with festival week in full swing, every bed within a twenty-mile radius was taken.
“But don’t you worry,” she’d said in that honey-drizzled voice that could make a tax audit sound festive. “I’ve arranged something lovely. One of the outfitter boys has a sweet little apartment above his garage. Separate entrance. Separate key. You won’t even know he’s there.”
She had the address. The key location. Turn-by-turn directions. Almost like she’d planned this before the pipe decided to explode.
And now here I was, suitcase wheels snagging on rocks, staring up at an exterior staircase that allegedly led to my “sweet little apartment.”Allegedlybecause the stairs were completely blocked. Sawhorses straddled the bottom step, balancing an uncut plank of lumber like some sort of construction shrine. A chainsaw lounged on the fourth step as if it paid rent. The rest of the staircase was buried under tools—a hand axe, a coil of rope, and a plastic bin overflowing with chains and hardware that looked like it had been placed there “temporarily” a few years ago.
I stood at the base of the stairs, key in hand, taking in my new reality. I was an events coordinator. I’d once rerouted a seventy-person corporate dinner around a flooded ballroom in forty-fiveminutes when my boss had been on a plane and left it to me to handle. I could manage a staircase.
Probably.
I reached for the nearest sawhorse.
“I wouldn’t move that.”
The voice came from behind the garage. I turned.
He rounded the corner carrying an armload of split firewood stacked from his waist to his chin, moving like the load weighed nothing. Tall. Broad enough to block the light behind him. Dark hair a little too long, sawdust caught near his temple. A flannel shirt open over a gray T-shirt, sleeves shoved past his elbows, and forearms that looked like they’d been carved from the same wood he was hauling.
He stopped when he saw me. His eyes dropped to my suitcase—a hard-shell roller in dusty rose, currently collecting gravel dust on wheels designed for airport terminals, not mountain driveways.
One eyebrow lifted. “You must be the burst pipe.”
“Hartley. And those are my stairs.”
“Technically, they’remystairs.” He shifted the firewood to one arm as if it were a stack of magazines. “The reason I said ‘don’t move that’ is because the plank’s not secured. You pull the sawhorse, it slides, and you’ve got eighty pounds of white oak coming at your shins.”
“Then maybe don’t store eighty pounds of white oak on a staircase people need to use.”
“Nobody uses that staircase.”
“I use that staircase. As of today.”
He looked at me for a long moment—not annoyed, exactly. More like he was recalibrating something. Assessing. His mouth twitched at the corner, the beginning of a grin he hadn’t committed to yet.