My Mountain Man Muse

The sobs start coming out and I’m hard on ugly crying when my murderer walks over and bends down in front of me.

His brow furrows as he gently touches my ankle. “That’s bad. It looks like it’s broken. Can you move it?”

He wants to know if I’m able to escape.

“Yes,” I lie. “I can run really fast.”

He gives me a strange look and for the first time, I take an actual look at his face. He’s good looking, but then aren’t serial killers usually good looking? I remember my mother’s words of caution in my head: “Sometimes, it’s the clean-cut good-looking ones that you really have to watch out for.”

He’s good-looking, but he’s not clean-cut. He’s sporting a long brown beard that goes to his chest and medium-length brown hair under his gray woolen hat. If there was a director looking for a man to star in a Grizzly Adams reboot, this guy would definitely get the part.

“Where are you staying?” he asks. “At the Miller cabin?”

I swallow hard as I stare back at him. “You know it?”

Oh, God. He knows where I’m staying. I’m toast!

“Yeah, I know it. It’s always full of annoying city folk who won’t shut up.”

“Yeah,” I say with a gulp. “City folk are the worst.”

He looks at my Burberry coat that I got for half-off and frowns.

“I’ll carry you back.”

I shake my head in a panic. “Oh, you don’t have t—Oh! Okay!”

He just bends down and scoops me up, and all of a sudden, I’m cradled in his arms like a leading lady in a romance book that a real writer wrote.

The terrifying man clutches me in his awful—well, actually… this is quite nice.

He has nice muscular arms and smells like pine trees and manliness. He’s holding me to his broad chest and I can feel the soothing beat of his heart against my tingling body. Thump, thump. Thump, thump.

I can feel my cheeks starting to blush as I sneak a peek at his face. It’s so close to mine.

He actually has really nice eyes. They’re a beautiful shade of brown like an old fine leather saddle.

Oh! I can use that for my book!

If I survive.

My hero will have eyes the color of an old fine leather saddle and he’ll hold the heroine to his sexy chest as he carries her back to his house to ravage her on the kitchen tabl—

“What are you looking at?”

I come to and he’s giving me a strange look out of the sides of his eyes. I got a little carried away and didn’t notice that I was practically gawking at his handsome face and long beard that has large flakes of snow clinging to it.

“I’m memorizing your face,” I say, giving him a stern look. “For the police sketch artist, so don’t get any funny ideas.”

He chuckles as his grip on me tightens. “Thanks for the warning.”

I nod, feeling a little silly. “You betcha.”

He carries me all the way to the cabin and then looks at me expectantly as we arrive at the door.

“What?” I ask, looking at him sideways.

“The keys…”

“Oh! Yeah!” I start rooting around in my jacket pockets, but they’re all empty. That’s the problem with designer jackets: no zippers to zip up the pockets. I find my car keys, but not the key for the cabin.

I clear my throat and look at him with my cheeks burning. “I seem to have misplaced them.”

“When you were rolling around like a weirdo in that deep snow?”

I nod. “Precisely.”

He huffs out a breath and my mind races for options.

My ankle is pretty busted up and it’s not like my book was going well anyway, so I might as well just go home and get my ankle checked.

“I’ll just drive home.”

“Your ankle is the size of a grapefruit,” he says, staring at me like I’m crazy. “How are you possibly going to drive home?”

I look around, trying to come up with an idea, any idea.

“Oh! With a stick.”

“A stick?”

“Yes!” I say confidently. “With a stick. I’ll use a long stick to press on the gas pedal.”

He’s staring at me with a blank face. “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

My confident face withers into a frown. “It will work.”

“It may,” he says with a nod as he thinks about it. “Or, you might drive off the road and get stuck in the middle of a snowstorm with only one working leg and no cell phone reception.”

Gulp.

“I guess you could use your stick as a cane and hike the rest of the twenty miles back into town. Oh, and you can also use it to fight off the wolves.”

“Wolves?” I say in a shaky voice.

“And bears.”

“Bears?”

Suddenly my plan seems as appetizing as a kale buffet.

“Or,” he continues, “you can rest your leg at my place and I’ll fix you up a bowl of hot soup.”