Mess with Me by Nicole Helm (3)

Chapter Three

Sam walked the entire length of Main Street twice. It did nothing to burn off the mix of frustration and guilt that had built to bursting inside of him.

He’d handled that badly. Not that he’d expected to handle it well, but that had been worse than his normal gruffness.

Something about the girl caught him off guard. He’d expected . . . Hell, he didn’t know. Someone like Brandon and Will. Strong and capable and comfortable. Instead he’d found a young woman clearly full of nerves and vulnerability.

Damn if that was the absolute last kind of person he wanted to deal with. The absolute last kind of person he wanted to be tasked with training. And, quite frankly, the last kind of person the Evans brothers should trust him with.

What made it worse was an hour of tramping around town, fielding speculative looks from the random residents out and about, wasting his day waiting for this woman to make up her mind.

He sat on the bench outside of Annie’s Used Furniture and Chainsaw Repair shop. It was one of the few businesses in Gracely that seemed to do a steady business. Across from him the only storefront that wasn’t empty was the bakery. Gracely could’ve been any picturesque tourist town in Colorado. With the striking mountains in the background and the cool summer air, still bearable despite its being nearly July, Sam knew this town could be so much more than it had become. It struck him almost every time he came down here.

Which was why he tried to avoid it. Something about the town tugged at him, made him want to do something. A feeling he tried to bury with off-the-grid living.

He had to get out of here. If Hayley wanted to take this ridiculous proposition, she could—

“I called Patty.”

Sam nearly jumped, though he held himself still at the last moment. He must have been staring harder at the buildings across the way than he’d thought, because he hadn’t noticed Hayley arrive.

She slid onto the bench next to him, though she made sure there was as much space between them as possible.

Sam grunted in response.

“She was effusive. Which isn’t like Patty.”

Again, he grunted.

She turned a curious gaze to him. “Is your throat all right?”

“Fine,” he muttered. “So, did you make up your mind?”

She looked down at her hands, and for some reason so did he. She had long, slender fingers, all bare, no rings or bangles. Her nails had been painted pink once upon a time, but most of it had chipped off. It made her seem young, though he knew from her brothers she was twenty-three.

Considerably younger than he was, true, but in the grand scheme of life, twenty-three wasn’t all that young, not with the right life experience.

“I feel like it’s only fair to warn you I don’t have any experience with outdoor adventures. I mean, I’ve been hiking, but—”

“It’s a start. I’d teach you the rest. So, is that a yes?”

She blew out a breath, her delicate dark eyebrows drawing together as she studied him, clearly frustrated. Even aside from her light brown skin color, it was hard to see any similarity between her and the Evans brothers. She was tall, but she was slender, dainty almost. Her eyes were hazel, like her half brothers’, but they glinted a color closer to gold. Like a forest at sunrise.

“It’s just . . . I really wouldn’t have to have any contact with them until I’m ready?”

“I’ve known Brandon and Will since I was eighteen.” They saved my life when they should’ve let me end it. “I’ve never known two more honest or dependable people. If they promise something, they’ll do it.”

“But I don’t know you to trust your judgment.”

“So, don’t.”

She looked at him like he was a little bit nuts, but he was used to that too. Used to being held in a very careful estimation. Even Will and Brandon still looked at him as though he’d never quite returned to the land of the living. They didn’t understand his wanting to be off the grid, and they didn’t understand his time in Alaska, but they also didn’t act like they needed to understand. They gave him space to have the life that he needed to have.

“I’m not sure what you want from me . . .” Should he call her Hayley? Ms. Winthrop? Damn, he hated this. He’d lost the skill where you know what to say to people, have a conversation with them. Engage in small talk instead of saying only what was necessary. He’d had it once, that ability. He’d once been charming, but that person had died right along with Abby.

“Well, I guess that’s fair, because I don’t understand what you want from me. Like, at all. At all, at all.”

“All I need from you is an answer whether you want the job or not. It’s not complicated.”

She laughed, not like she had at her apartment when he’d made the unfortunate rabbit joke. This sound was a little bitter, and it seemed incongruous with the nervous, delicate woman she seemed to be.

“It’s forever complicated. A million complications. None of this is simple, not one little, teeny, tiny bit.”

Her voice got more and more high-pitched as she spoke, and Sam found himself leaning away. Hysterical female. Pass.

But then she took a deep breath and rubbed her palms against her jeans. “I guess it’s worth a shot. What do I have to lose?” She said it to her hands, she said it rhetorically.

Or so he thought, but then her intense, vulnerable gaze met his, and it felt as if she was asking him. Which was the worst thing she could possibly do. No one should ever come to him for answers.

“Well, you could get caught in an avalanche and die. Or hit your head on a rock and get amnesia.”

She blinked at him. “Is that a joke, or . . .”

He lurched to his feet, uncomfortable and embarrassed. He wanted to be back on his mountaintop. He wanted to work. He wanted anything other than being forced to have a conversation with someone.

“So, your answer is yes, right?” he demanded, gruff and irritable and probably unfair. She might as well get used to it. He had no plans to be anything else.

She chewed on her lip for a few seconds, and it was oddly mesmerizing, that movement of her full lips, the moisture that glistened there. “Yes,” she finally said on little more than a whisper, her fingers curling around the edge of the bench as though she were holding on for dear life.

“Fine. Monday morning. Six sharp. Wear something appropriate for hiking. Do you have a backpack? One suitable for hiking, that is.”

She stared at him, clearly shocked, and she faintly shook her head.

“Fine. I’ll have one ready for you. You know where the Mile High offices are, correct?”

She nodded mutely, everything about her reminding him of a deer caught in headlights. Frozen and wide-eyed.

“You’ll follow the road past the offices, up the mountain, until it ends.” His hands curled into fists at the thought of this stranger being anywhere near his cabin. Even Will and Brandon rarely encroached upon his space. It was his for a reason.

But training her without tripping over the Evans brothers was going to require meeting somewhere other than Mile High Adventures. He could do it in town, but, hell, he didn’t want to come back here. He’d rather face this slip of a thing on his own turf.

Probably.

“A-and then what?”

He scowled because he’d lost his train of thought. Scowled at the thought of having to lead and teach, and in a different way than he guided people, because he would have to teach her how to guide people. Training would require weeks at the least. Hopefully she wouldn’t last a day.

“You’ll park your car there where the road ends, then walk up the path. Eventually you’ll reach a cabin, and that’s where we’ll begin.”

“At . . . six. In the morning?”

He gave her a curt nod and she let out a shaky breath, still holding on to the edge of the bench as if that would somehow keep her safe.

Well, at least she had the decency to seem afraid.

“I guess I’ll see you Monday morning then,” she said, sounding breathless.

He gave her another nod and then began striding down the street toward his Jeep, parked a ways down, in front of one of the many empty shops.

“Sam?”

Something about her voice and his name caused an odd tensing in his shoulders. Not the tenseness he was used to, the discomfort with people and conversation. This was something different.

He ignored it.

But he couldn’t ignore her, so he turned to face her, stiff and making no effort to hide his irritation.

“Thank you. For . . . That is, I appreciate you stepping in as a . . . What I mean to say is . . . Thank you. Is all.”

“Don’t,” he replied. Gratitude was the last thing he wanted. Especially when it would dry up soon enough. He hightailed it to his Jeep, and he didn’t look back.

* * *

Hayley was a ball of anxiety. So much so she couldn’t sleep, which wasn’t a great start to a morning that would begin at six sharp and involve . . . hiking, apparently.

Hiking with a stranger. All so she could take the coward’s way out and not talk to her half brothers.

She blew out a breath as she rolled out of bed. She had committed to this bizarre proposition, and now she had to see it through.

Hayley gathered her most appropriate hiking gear. She didn’t have much, but she had a pair of boots that had been a birthday gift from James a few years ago. She dressed in her normal running gear and hoped that would do, though she’d bring a sweatshirt for the higher elevations and lower temperatures likely to exist beyond Mile High Adventures.

She wasn’t exactly nervous about the hiking. She’d always enjoyed tagging along with Mack and James on their random outdoor excursions. Though her mother had never gotten into it, Hayley had.

Well, what she’d really done was tried to find somewhere to belong. When her mother married Mack, Hayley had thrown herself into belonging to whatever he and James liked. She’d wanted her stepbrother and stepfather to be everything she’d been missing for the first eight years of her life.

They’d been amazing. They had showered her with attention and love, and let her tag along on hikes and taken her skiing. She certainly wasn’t the most experienced outdoorswoman, but she had done things with them and enjoyed it.

For some reason, it had never been enough to make her feel like she belonged.

How ironic that she was here doing the same thing for some guy who worked with her half brothers.

She forced herself to eat breakfast even though her stomach was a riot of nerves. She filled two water bottles. Tied and re-tied her hiking boots about three times.

Then she had no other choice but to step out into the just barely rising light of dawn and face what she had agreed to do. Insanity. Stupidity. It was her stepfather’s and stepbrother’s voices in her head saying those things, and she couldn’t disagree.

But the bottom line, the most important line, was that she needed to do this. Everyone could tell her that it was stupid or crazy or wrong, but she knew deep in her gut this was her only option right now. She would do everything in her power to use this experience to build the backbone she would need to face not just the Evans brothers, but what she wanted from them.

Family? Money? Legitimacy? She wanted all of those things and none of those things at the same time. Because when Hayley boiled it down, she didn’t know who or what she was. Except searching. Except lost.

“All things Sam will not want to hear about, so get it out of your system,” she muttered to herself as she slid into her junker of a car that she wasn’t quite certain would get her up a mountain.

She started the car and drove through Main Street, which was completely dead at this hour. Except for the light on at the bakery, which didn’t look like it would survive through the summer.

There was something about this town that spoke to her, something about the sort of beat-down resiliency, the way people left and came back, the way those who had always been here kept trying. It touched her on a deep level, and she didn’t want to leave. She liked being a part of this town.

She took the road that led up to Mile High Adventures. She’d only been up here once, for a desperate look at what the Evans brothers did, one strange moment of courage to tell them who she was. Then her normal running away in the aftermath.

She didn’t turn off at the exit to Mile High, but she could see the place clearly in her mind’s eye. The dark brown cabin with pretty green roof. A cozy mountain escape, perfectly placed to overlook the valley and beyond. Everything at Mile High seemed to gleam and sparkle, like a cozy, magical home, even though no one lived there.

But to get to Sam’s, Hayley had to keep driving. Higher and higher into the mountains, even as her car shuddered and protested. Hayley kept a death grip on the steering wheel as she slowly puttered around another curve.

She could tell that the air was different up here. The landscape had changed, the foliage getting thinner, scragglier and lower to the ground. Spindly trees struggled to grow in the rocky soil.

Summer hadn’t reached this far up yet. Spring still held this altitude in its tentatively green grasp. There was something oddly refreshing about that. That even though it was the same exact place on the map, just by going higher, you could change where you were, and what you were.

She shook her head at such a fanciful thought and fearfully tapped the gas pedal a little harder. Her car was making ridiculously crazy noises at this point, but she finally reached the end of the road. Somehow it didn’t surprise Hayley that Sam lived here. She wouldn’t be surprised if he lived in a cave, much like the bears he reminded her of.

Grateful to have made it this far and that her car hadn’t blown up in the process, Hayley pushed her car into park. She got out at the end of the gravel drive and looked around.

She was surrounded by rocks and trees. There were no views from this point. The only hint that there was still farther to go was a little opening in the trees and the subsequent dirt path in between two giant rocks.

That had to be the way to Sam’s. Hayley stood for a few minutes trying to steel her courage. What lay beyond those rocks and trees? What was waiting for her at the end of the path? And, most importantly, why the hell was she doing this to herself?

The thick forest of aspen or some such tree was dark, and eerie. She could hear things rustling in the branches and underbrush. Her heart was beating unsteadily in her neck and chest, every fear response of her body on overdrive. But Mack had always told her that fear was something he walked through. He didn’t lie down.

So Hayley walked. She walked up the narrow dirt path, aware of her surroundings so she didn’t get lost. But it was easy to follow and straightforward. Pretty soon she came to a clearing. Though earlier she had thought she wouldn’t be surprised if Sam lived in a cave, when she saw what he did live in, she was shocked.

It was a rough-hewn, postage stamp–size cabin. Though it was sturdy and very well maintained from the looks of things, it didn’t have that glossy look that the cabins in the national park had. This was no rental cabin, it was no Mile High Adventures headquarters. This was Swiss Family Robinson.

Settled into this small clearing in the middle of rocks and trees, there weren’t any grand views to explain why on earth there was a cabin here. The yard consisted of rock and brush. The cabin itself almost blended in with the surroundings of craggy gray and white aspen.

The only source of color was the way the still-rising sun caught the glass of the front windows. The roof was made of panels, which she had to assume were solar, and there was a little miniature turbine attached to the top of the roof.

The front door, the same faded gray as the rest of the cabin, swung open and out stepped Sam. The light was dim enough she couldn’t see him in perfect detail, and yet something about the man, his size or his grizzly exterior, made her heart thump uncomfortably in her chest. Something akin to fear, but not quite that. Foreboding, but not bad. She didn’t know. She was almost certain she didn’t want to know.

Either Sam didn’t see her, or he wasn’t going to immediately acknowledge her existence. He stood on the little stoop to his cabin and he stretched. Long, powerful-looking arms reaching up to the sky and then backward.

His shirt rode up and exposed a strip of stomach. She stepped forward, oddly drawn by the sight.

Which was when she realized that Sam had not known that she was there. Because he immediately tensed, his eyes zeroing in on her. Even though she couldn’t see that intense blue from across the yard, she knew his gaze was on her. She felt it like a punch.

“Good morning.”

“You’re early,” he said in that gruff, seldom-used voice.

“My stepfather always said if you weren’t fifteen minutes early, you were actually late.”

“Disagree,” he grumbled, still standing on the porch, eyeing her suspiciously as she slowly picked her way across the hardscrabble yard.

“I can go stand in the woods for fifteen minutes if you’d rather.”

He grunted—whether it was just a noise or an actual word, she couldn’t tell. He turned and walked back inside his cabin.

Hayley didn’t know if that was some sort of invitation to come inside, or if he was saying she should go wait in the woods for fifteen minutes.

But he left the door open, so she assumed that was as much of an invitation as she was going to get from a man like Sam.

She stood at the bottom of his stoop, trying to ignore the little tremor of nerves that ran through her. You’re seeing this through. Keep moving forward. And so, that’s exactly what she did.

Stepping inside Sam’s cabin was like walking into some other place in time. Or maybe like something out of one of the Instagram accounts she’d followed before she’d had to give up her smartphone because a cheapo burner was about all she could afford.

Braided rugs of brown and tan covered what appeared to be a stonework floor. The walls were the same rough-hewn logs as outside, and the windows reminded her of the old pioneer-style cabins she’d visited on school field trips at random historical sites. The glass didn’t fill up the whole square, instead there was exposed wood all the way around the window, enough so someone might fit knickknacks or sun catchers on the sill. Not Sam of course. The rough sills were empty.

Despite the roughness of all those elements, it was all somehow inviting. The cozy kitchen area had one of those old-fashioned stoves with a pipe that went up through the roof and a row of wooden shelves that held meticulously organized kitchenware.

The opposite wall seemed to house all of the bedroom accessories, including a narrow twin mattress with dark green-and-brown sheets and blankets on top. A set of drawers that looked ancient even in this strange, old-timey space.

It was like a magazine in its organized efficiency. But like a magazine, there was a certain lifelessness to it. There were no dirty clothes on the floor, no pictures on the walls. No knicknacks or clutter. It was a clean, organized, tiny space.

Whatever Sam did here—live or make creepy shrines or build things, God only knew—it had to be something kind of soulless. The energy was blank.

For as gruff and grumpy as he seemed, the last thing she would’ve picked Sam for was soulless. He was the kind of man who obviously had a lot going on under the surface.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she finally said into the terse silence.

“Very few people have.”

He turned away and she got the feeling he didn’t mean that in a general sense. Very few people had seen this cabin. Inside these walls. It was silly to feel like it was some sort of privilege, but that’s exactly how she felt.

“We’ll start with a lesson on how to pack a backpack.”

Just like that she remembered that she was, at best, a nuisance to him. And, at worst, the absolute last thing Sam wanted to deal with.

Which poked at her in ways she didn’t particularly care for, but this was something she had to do. She’d made that decision, and she might be a coward, but once she made a decision, she didn’t back down. Regardless of how Sam treated her, she would not go back. Not until she figured out what she wanted.