“Woman, I just asked for a few seconds of quiet.”
“You asked the wrong girl for that. I don’t mind rules well.”
There was a loaded second in the silent woods, and then he snorted and dropped his head against the back of hers. He let off an explosive sigh. “If I mark you too soon, you won’t choose to stay here on your own. I’m a mess, Remi. You’re a mess, and everyone here is a mess, and I don’t want to fuck this all up. I always do that, and I want you to stick. I want you to pick me in some quiet moment when you are thinking clear. In some proud moment when I do something that makes you know I’m the one, and you smile at me and tell me to do it. Claim you. And if you never get there, that’s okay. But I want you to know the kind of man I am, and tricking you into staying here with me too soon isn’t how I want to win your heart. I want you to give it to me free and clear someday.”
Remi’s lip trembled, and her eyes burned as she focused on the bark of the tree in front of her.
Smart man.
She slid her hands to his forearms that were wrapped around her and squeezed a silent It’s okay. He’d made her place here completely up to her. She couldn’t be angry with him for that. She admired the patient hunter inside of him. He was giving her room to breathe, test this life, and see if it’s what she really wanted.
“When is your shift over?” she asked.
He swallowed hard and murmured against her ear, “An hour and a half.” So he had plans to finish his shift. To finish what he started.
Good man.
She drew his scarred knuckles to her lips and pressed a kiss onto them. And then she told him, “I’ll see you then.”
She offered him a quick smile as she walked away to gather up her clothes, so he wouldn’t see how choked up she was over his thoughtfulness. Over him taking care of her heart in the only way he knew how.
“You sure are a beautiful sight, Remi Novak,” he called as she left, her clothes clutched tight in her hand. “I would’ve come to the city to find you if you didn’t come back here. You should know that.”
Brave man.
There were the butterflies, her companions as she hiked back toward the trailer park. The engine noise of the processor was her soundtrack. And a few minutes later, she found herself staring at the side of 1010 with her mouth hanging open wide enough to catch flies.
The hole was gone.
It had been patched with plywood and painted to match the rest of the trailer.
He’d fixed it for her, even knowing she might never come back.
He’d.
Fixed.
It.
But as she stood there in the waning light of a cool autumn evening, staring at the thing that Kamp had pieced back together, she didn’t know whether the thing she thought of was 1010…or her heart.
She would do as he asked and be patient for a claiming mark, but down to her bones she already knew—she was his and he was hers.
Smart, good, brave man.
Her man.
Chapter Thirteen
Rhett had been hiding a little secret.
A little mountain-sized secret.
He was a thief and a hoarder, apparently, because Remi was staring at a pile of letters in the bottom drawer of the dresser in 1010 where Rhett used to live. And most of those letters were addressed to Grim and Kamp. About half of the letters had red bold words across the front: Open Immediately, Final Notice, and Do Not Discard.
What the hell?
Being the nosey little monster-bear she was, Remi scooped up an armful and tossed them on the bed, and then she picked one out of the pile and ripped into it.
This one was for Grim. It was a spreadsheet of the numbers they were supposed to hit for logging. It was broken down by types of logs, planks, and bundles of firewood. There was a column of the numbers they’d apparently hit for the month of August, and then a column of totals of how much they had missed their quotas by. It was a ridiculous amount.
“Geez,” she murmured, reaching for another one. This one was for the month of July. There was a letter from an unnamed person who apparently owned these mountains, lighting up Grim for failing so epically. The next was how much their wages were being garnished. The next was a threat to fire all three of them. The next two were voided paychecks. The next was a bill for a new machine. The next…was addressed to Kamp, but the handwriting was a chicken scratch she would know anywhere.
“Dad?” This was one letter she couldn’t bring herself to open. It wasn’t for her. The others, okay. She was hatching a plan to get this Crew up and running, and she needed to know how bad off they were. But a personal letter to the man she was falling for? From the man who’d raised her?
Opening it would be stealing.
Shaken, she folded it in half and shoved it in her back pocket, reached for her favorite, worn flannel shirt, pulled it over her black tank top, and made her way outside to wait for Kamp. He would be home any minute now.
Restless, she didn’t settle on the porch stairs to watch the sunset like she’d intended to. Instead, she made her way to the back of the trailer park.
Rhett sat outside in an old green lawn chair leaned up against the shed while he plucked the strings of a guitar. “Here for some of the stash? Sorry, Princess Novak. The Penis Juice is off limits to outsiders.”
“Don’t you have work to do?”
“Don’t have to work. I’m a rich, entitled asshole who can live out my days on the money I have in savings.”
“Are you serious?”
“No. I sell Kamp’s beer on the side and pocket the money.”
“Again…are you fucking serious?”
“Maybe not but probably so.”
“You’re a terrible person.”
Rhett rolled his eyes and sighed an annoyed sound. “I shove his part of the profits in a sock under his mattress. I keep waiting for him to find it, but he never reaches for the Glock he has hidden under there.” He switched easily to another song that sounded familiar. “After a month, the money stash was getting pretty decent, so now it’s fun to see how big I can grow it before he figures it out.”
Huh.
“Where do you sell it?” she asked, taking a seat next to Rhett’s chair.
“In town around the bars. Portland and the billion little towns outside of it. Bars everywhere here. Lots of bikers drinking Pen15 Juice.”
Remi laughed. “You mean Penis Juice.”
“Yep. Speaking of which, I’m taking my truck back. You killed my business for a couple days. I’m supposed to be making deliveries.”
“Your business is in these mountains with your Crew, Rhett. I found your hidden stash of mail.”
She thought he would at least look guilty over being busted, but he shrugged his shoulders and started strumming the guitar again. He was actually really good. And then she figured out from where she recognized those guitar riffs. He was playing an intro to Beck Brothers song. She wondered if he was any good at singing.
“Why do you hide the mail?”
“Because it keeps the stress off Grim. And less stress means we survive the Reaper.”
“You could keep stress off him by actually working, by hitting your quotas, and then you won’t get that mail anymore and you can all keep your jobs.”
“Piss off, Novak. You don’t know how it is around here.”
His anger stung. “I’m trying to figure it out.”
“Well, stop trying,” he gritted out, standing. “Just stop. We all hate each other. You get that much, right? We hate each other. We didn’t choose this Crew, none of us did. We got thrown together because we don’t have anywhere else to go. We aren’t some epic friendship waiting to happen.”
“But you do little things to take care of Kamp and Grim. I see it. Little things to protect them. You keep them from killing each other, you take claw marks to your ribs to take their attention off each other during fights. You hide letters and stock money away for Kamp, and for what? Why, Rhett? I’ll tell you why. It’s because deep down you do care about them.”
“Fuck this,” he muttered, sauntering off. “I don’t care about anyone. Not you, not Kamp, and definitely not you!” he yelled, ramming his finger at Grim, who was sitting against a tree not more than fifteen yards away as if he’d been there the whole time. Creepy. “I don’t give a single shit about anyone or anything, so you trying to find reasons for my actions?” He turned and walked backward, his smile cruel. “You can’t determine the intentions of someone whose lost their mind, Novak.”