Rock Solid

Her voice petered out faster than a stalled engine. She knew the man reaching out to shake her hand was Cashner Aaron McKay, the owner of Silver Mountain. She’d have known his voice from their telephone calls even if the pilot hadn’t identified him, and he’d been so natural and easy to talk with that Lexie had been looking forward to meeting him. Still was. It was just that the blazing sun had first shadowed his face, and from their phone calls, she’d just assumed that McKay would be someone like Jed Harper—someone older. Someone with skin leathered by a hundred million years in the sun who wore cowboy boots. Someone who didn’t slap her snoozing female hormones wide-awake.

But now he was closer. So close the sun wasn’t blocking her vision. So close that she realized two startling things simultaneously. Her host for the next few weeks was the Marlboro man come to life—sans cigarette. The hunk was take-your-breath adorable, tall and lean and blue-eyed and downright edible. And the second thing she realized was that she was standing downhill…which meant that the hand she’d shot out to shake his was coming perilously close to poking the hunk in the crotch.

Faster than lightning she yanked her hand up to an appropriate height. Humor seemed to responsively glint in his eyes—not that she had time to analyze his reactions. They did the handshaking thing, which thankfully gave her throat a chance to swallow some of that saliva before she drooled all over him. She’d already resigned herself to the month of torture ahead…but being able to regularly look at McKay was definitely going to lighten her suffering significantly.

“Lexie…” His gaze was direct, the slow grin friendly, but the callused palm that had so warmly gripped hers abruptly dropped. She never sensed any negative vibes, just that he hadn’t noticed her in any particularly personal way. Possibly he didn’t go for short-haired, sprite-size brunettes with city pale skin. “Glad to finally meet you in person. And I hope you’re going to love our Silver Mountain. We’ll get your gear, get you settled in. Jed, you coming up to the house for an iced tea?”

“You bet. And where’s our favorite hellion?”

Cash let out a low, easy chuckle. “Sammy’s still doing that home-schooling we set up out of Hammond’s…but he’ll be raring home in another hour or so.”

“Sammy?” Lexie asked.

“Sammy’s my son. Well, I guess technically he’s my nephew, but he’s my son in every way that matters. You’ll meet him at dinner, if not sooner…although he’s a little more shy around the women guests. At least you can hope he’ll be shy. Otherwise you’re at risk of his talking your ears off.”

Again, that slow, easy grin. Jed grabbed two of her designer bags and loped on ahead. Cash grabbed four. Neither remarked on the amount or size of her luggage. “That’s it, Lex? Anything else you need carrying?”

“No, no sweat.” Briefly Lexie wondered what he meant by referring to this Sammy-child as being both nephew and son, but right then she stumbled over a gnarled root. There was nothing particularly new there. She’d always been able to trip on thin air—athletics weren’t exactly her strong point—but she really did need to promptly change clothes. Her Italian sandals had been comfortable for flying, but lacked a certain sturdiness for this type of terrain. Worse yet, the hike was all uphill. The strip where the teensy plane had landed was the only flat spot anywhere in sight. A stitch in her side was screaming by the time they’d gone a hundred yards, and the only things she was toting were her purse and laptop. “I’m not too used to exercise,” she huffed.

“That’s okay, no one is when they first come here. That’s the point. That you get a serious break from constant work and the stresses of city life, right?”

“Right.” Although no one had warned her about all this ghastly fresh air.

“Even if you’re not normally into country life, I think you’ll find it grows on you. There are no bottom lines here, no deadlines, no tests to pass…”

She knew all the reasons why she’d signed up to come here, so there was no particular reason to listen. Besides, she could have looked at his back all day. My. At fourteen, she’d thumbtacked posters of hunks on her bedroom wall like every other hormone-driven adolescent girl. Then, of course, she’d grown up and realized that looks were no measure of character or anything else that mattered. By twenty-eight, she’d come to another realization milestone. Maybe heartache was the pits, but just looking was a lot of fun and didn’t cost a dime.

Over the years, she’d tried picking out potential lovers with the same meticulous care she picked stocks—studying assets, start-up costs, long-term growth potential, how long one needed to be patient before seeing a return, that kind of thing. Her analysis methods worked fabulously with stocks. But with men…well, temporarily she’d sworn off gambling with anything so high-risk.

As she told her friend Blair, vibrators were just a whole lot less aggravation.

But that wasn’t to say that she didn’t enjoy looking. On a scale of l to l0, McKay easily had a l0 fanny—and Lexie had always been a fanny type of woman. Still, eventually, she got around to noticing the rest. The flannel plaid shirt looked straight out of L. L. Bean; the boot-cut jeans were old and loose and worn-in like an old friend. His hair was short and as straight as mink fur but tawny, a mix of sun-streaked caramel and butterscotch. Even this early in May, his skin was sun bronzed, that tan incredibly striking against his light blue eyes. He had a man’s-man look all day, his jaw looking cut out of stone, the cheekbones jutting out to give him an even more rugged profile. And there was that cute itsy-bitsy guy butt again—

“Not too far, now, Lexie. The house is just around the corner.”

“No problem,” she sang out. She was loathe to tear her eyes away from the only seriously interesting view—his butt—but around the last curve, the lodge loomed in sight. The big, fat log house stood three stories high, with a wraparound veranda graced with porch swings and wooden rocking chairs. She clumped up the porch steps behind Cash—stumbled on the doorjamb, but thankfully didn’t fall—and then stepped in. Jed had already dropped her two bags and disappeared from sight when the screen door clapped behind her.

Whew. The place made her think of a movie set for a Western oil baron story. The front door led into a square foyer with a giant staircase, but off to the right was a living room with sprawling couches and groups of oversize chairs in forest-greens and honey-leathers. Man-size windows opened on the mountain view, and nests of thick-pile rugs were scattered around. She glimpsed a gaming table in a dark, scarred mahogany. An upright piano. An oil painting on the far wall, almost as big as the wall itself, a mystical painting of the mountains bathed in a morning mist in ghost-whites and whisper-greens and blues.

A stone fireplace dominated the great room, smoke-scarred and full of character. The chestnut floor and oak ceiling beams looked equally well-worn and well loved.

“This is the hangout place in the evenings.” Cash led her through, either because they had to go that way, or to help familiarize her with the layout. “If you’re bored, you can usually find a game of poker or pinochle going on after dinner. Even summer nights, it’s cool enough that we usually light a fire here. Then in here’s the dining room….”

She poked her head in, saw an oblong pine table with a million leaves and a wagon wheel chandelier.

“Meal hours are posted in your room, but if you get hungry other times, you can always raid the kitchen on your own. We’re not running this place like an inn. We want you to feel it’s your home while you’re here…with one little exception. Before we go any further, we need to make a stop.” Past the dining room, he popped a door on another room, this one stashed with the desk and file cabinets of a no-nonsense office. Temporarily he thumped her luggage down. “Afraid you need to strip here, Lex.”

Not that she wasn’t willing—for him—but the suggestion still startled her. “Did you say strip?”

“Uh-huh.” His expression was so deadpan that she almost missed the unrepentant twinkle in his eye. “This room locks up, tight as a bank vault, so you don’t need to worry about anything getting stolen. And I don’t want to have to do a strip search, but I will if I have to.” He waggled his fingers in a come-on gesture. “I’m afraid this is the place where you have to come clean. I want all your loot. Portable computer. Pager. Cell phone. Everything electronic you’ve got.”

She wanted to chuckle at his strip routine—the devil!—and normally she would have. Just then, though, her sense of humor seemed to be suffering a short gasp. “Everything?” she asked weakly.

“Well, if you have to have a pacifier, I guess you can take the cell phone to snuggle in bed with. You can’t get any reception here anyway, so there’s really no harm—but that’s it. Everything else gets locked up. If you just can’t stand it, you can come in and stroke the computer every now and then.” Even the twinkle was unrelenting. And those fingers kept saying “gimme.”

For a moment she stared at him in numb panic. Yes, of course, this was exactly why she’d come. A month forced away from work. A place where she couldn’t do business or get into stress no matter how hard she tried. For that matter, she was paying a near fortune for Mr. Cashner McKay to take charge of her life and boss her around just like this, so it didn’t make any sense to balk. “But you have a TV somewhere, don’t you?” she asked bravely.

“Yup. In my living quarters. But nowhere any of the guests can see it.”

She was reassured that at least some proof of civilization existed and was close by. Still, she gulped again. “I, um, haven’t been separated from my daily dose of the Dow Jones for almost nine years.”

“I understand,” he said patiently. “One of our longtime guests is a doctor who always hyperventilates for the first few days without his pager. The first few days are the hardest, but I promise, it really does get easier after that. If you panic, I’ll let you in here to see your stuff, okay? But I want you to give it a chance.”

“Of course I’ll give it a chance. In fact, I can’t wait to get started on your whole program.” But she struggled with him for a minute when he tried to take the lizard computer case. It was like being severed from her own, personal, life-giving umbilical cord. “You have a phone somewhere in the lodge—?”

“Of course we do. Several. You’re not really cut off from anything, Lexie. Jed flies in with supplies a couple times a week. Guests come and go. And my private quarters have all the technology you’re used to if we need to contact a doctor or civilization or if relatives happen to need you. Now, are you ready to see your room?”

He took her toys. All of them. Even the palm reader. Even the headset for her disc player.

And then he motioned her toward a back staircase and led the way up. “Last week, the place was full—for us, that means ten guests, the max we can handle at a time. Or the max we want to. For the next couple of weeks, it’ll be extra nice, though, just you and a few others. Come summer, we’ll be extra busy again. Now…the library’s on the third floor in the back, and it’s well stocked. Workout gym, massage room and hot tub are in the square building off the north— Bubba comes in three times a week to do the masseuse thing. You’ll meet him tomorrow, and you’ll meet Keegan at dinner tonight. Keegan’s working on his Ph.D. as a naturalist, and in the meantime trading cooking and some bookkeeping for room and board. And George makes up the last of the staff, he’s the housekeeper…he’s a little on the gruff side, but he gets the job done, comes in around four mornings a week and we cope the rest of the time on our own. You leave the house, let someone know. Or check out at the desk in the kitchen. Lots of great places to wander, but we don’t want you getting lost….”

The more Cash informed her about the lodge setup, the more Lexie kept thinking: lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Maybe this was a mistake. Back in Chicago, coming here had seemed like such a foolproof idea. Since she was too much of a workaholic to force herself to rest, she’d chosen to go where she simply had to. And this place certainly fit that bill, except that she’d never envisioned anywhere so uncivilized that it actually had bears and cougars. And no malls.

“Here, you go.” At the top of the stairs, Cash motioned her inside the first room to the west, then stepped in himself and lined up her luggage as obediently as Catholic school children. After that he pushed open the sash of the far window, letting in another gush of stinging fresh air. “Okay now…the bathroom’s through that door. Dinner’ll be served around six, so you’ve got some time to unwind, unpack, wander around. If you need anything before then—”

“No, honestly, I’m fine.”

“No questions at all so far? You like the room?”

“No questions. And the room’s wonderful.” She saw the four-poster bed and bureau in wild cherry wood, the country quilt and feather mattress. The bed alone could have slept three people her size. Maybe four.

The bedroom window in her Chicago apartment—her $2,000 a month Chicago apartment—viewed someone else’s bedroom in someone else’s pricey Chicago apartment. Here she looked out on mountains that were too damn breathtaking to make a picture postcard. Nobody’d believe they were real. Yet somehow she was the one who felt unreal, just trying to look around and believe she could possibly fit in around here.

“Lexie?” When his hand touched her shoulder, she spun around with a city woman’s instincts honed against getting too close to strangers. His hand jerked back, yet his shrewd blue eyes suddenly rested on her face, something warm and evocative and completely unexpected in his eyes.

Cash had been nothing but kind and friendly from their first phone contact, and certainly since she’d arrived here. Still, his attitude had been exactly what she’d expected and exactly what it should be—completely impersonal. That he might see her differently from the other city slickers who came to his Silver Mountain hadn’t occurred to her…until she suddenly felt his gaze on her face, the connection in his touch.

“You’re feeling like a fish thrown in the desert, aren’t you?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.” There was no point in denying it.

“So did I, once upon a time. But I’ve been in your shoes, Lex, working so hard and so furiously that I didn’t realize I was forgetting to stop and take a breath. And this mountain has magic, I swear. You don’t have to be an outdoor person to get the benefits…you don’t ever have to do anything like this again, either. But we both have the same goal—not to send you back home until you feel rested and recharged again. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and decided then and there that she was in love with him.

Having only known him for less than a half hour, of course, she didn’t exactly mean a death-defying type of love—but she wasn’t looking for that, anyway. She’d come here expecting the next month to be a penance, though, and instead McKay was not only kind and perceptive, but as a bonus, he had a quick sense of humor. Maybe the next few weeks weren’t going to be as terrible as she’d dreaded.

Once Cash disappeared downstairs, she opened suitcases and closets, pushed off her sandals and started settling in. Yet only minutes later, she heard the distant high-pitched squeal of a child, and she wandered over to the window to investigate.