Jill Shalvis
ISBN 978-0-7582-3127-7
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T.J. Wilder is the perfect package of breathtaking adventure and raw sex appeal. Even better, he’s about to reconnect with the one woman he’s never been able to forget…
Get Your Pulse Racing
To Harley, the landscape around Wishful, California, is exhilarating, untamed, and more than a little dangerous. The same could be said for T.J. Wilder, who’s invited himself along on her trek to study a rare coyote. Harley’s career is riding on this trip, and she doesn’t need a stubborn, incredibly sexy distraction. But T.J. is a professional guide who knows when to stay back and when to provide invaluable expertise—just like he’s done since they were in high school. And Harley, as usual, is torn between throttling him and giving in to the raw attraction that’s been smoldering all these years.
T.J. knows how proud and capable Harley is, but he’s damned sure not letting her put herself at risk when there are illegal hunters in the area. She needs him, with the same soul-stirring urgency that he’s always craved her. And here, in this beautiful place days from civilization, he’ll finally have a chance to prove it—over and over again…
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Prologue
If you asked TJ Wilder to choose between a warm autumn night in the Sierras or a warm woman, he knew that most people would put money on him taking the woman.
And while that might have been true in his wild, unchecked youth, tonight they’d have been wrong.
Not that he didn’t love women. He did. Short or tall. Willowy or curvy. Sweet or hot-as-hell sexy– actually, make that especially hot-as-hell sexy. Over the years he’d loved plenty.
But he loved the Sierras, too. And while it was true that the tall, rugged, remote mountain peaks could be deadly dangerous to both life and limb, the mountains couldn’t break a man’s soul.
At least not without permission.
And TJ no longer let anything break him. He didn’t let anything break him or get to him, period. He was cool, calm, and prepared, always. Cam and Stone had long ago accepted this, that as the oldest brother, TJ just knew things, like which direction to go on the mountain, whether on skis or a bike, or in the helicopter. He knew which of their outdoor expedition company clients would be a pain-in-the-ass, and he could sense trouble a mile away.
Usually.
And then, as he walked through Moody’s Bar And Grill after a quick dinner with Cam and Stone, feeling full and surprisingly content for the moment, something plowed into his chest with the force of a cyclone.
Not something. Someone.
Harley Stephens. AKA the one source of trouble that he’d never managed to avoid.
Absorbing the impact, he managed to keep them both from tumbling to the floor, and as his brain registered how warm and soft she felt in his arms, she lifted her face, the scent of her filling his head. That’s when something else hit him too, the same inexplicable sense that he always got with her, the deja vu feeling that he’d been here before. Not in the doorway of Moody’s with the fiery Indian summer sun setting behind her and the sound of the dinner crowd behind him, loud and rowdy . . . but having her practically wrapped around him.
Which made about as much sense as the head buzzing physical reaction he got from the feel of her against him.
Wishful was a small mountain town. TJ knew every person in it fairly well, and Harley was no exception. He knew her layered blonde hair, silky and straight and not quite touching her shoulders, even as a strand of it caught on the stubble of his jaw. He knew her face, always soft and pretty, though tonight it held more than a hint of fatigue and anxiety as well.
Just like that the sexual punch faded, replaced by concern. “Harley? You okay?”
Twisting free, she turned from him so quickly he was barely able to catch her hand. “Hey. Hey,” he murmured when she fought him, pulling her back into him, his hands on her arms as he bent to look into her face, which did him little good as her eyes were covered by reflective sunglasses.
He pulled them off, exposing her warm chocolate eyes, but whatever expression he’d caught a quick flash of was gone now, carefully and purposely gone.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked, staring at his throat, always so tough on the outside, yet so soft on the inside.
“No, I’m fine. You?”
She wasn’t okay. He could feel the tension of her body against his, in the quick quiver of her limbs, though that might just have been the same unwelcome erotic awareness he’d felt.
Still felt.
With Harley, he’d always felt it, though he’d gotten good at ignoring it since they subscribed to two very different philosophies in life. His being to live as uncomplicated as possible, including romantic entanglements.
Hers being the opposite. She was complicated as hell, and she played for keeps.
