Her lips twitched but she bit back her smile before it could form.
I turned and started up the ridge. She followed, crunching through the snow, muttering under her breath every time the wind shoved her sideways.
We finally reached the crest. The valley spread below us, open, quiet, and glowing under the winter sun. Morgan stopped next to me.
“It’s even prettier from up here,” she said, her voice full of the soft kind of awe I still felt when I came up here.
“Gets into your bones,” I told her.
She glanced up at me. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. So I didn’t. Instead, I took a few more steps and nudged snow away from the disturbed ground. The survey marker glinted again.
She sucked in a small breath. “What’s that?”
“Something that shouldn’t be here.”
She crouched, studying it, her eyes sharp. Then she pulled her phone out of her pocket and muttered something to herself. When she looked up at me, her expression set off warning bells in my chest. “Slade, this marker predates the official Kincaid settlement records.”
“Yeah. I figured.”
“This could change everything.” She snapped a few pictures then stood.
“Or it could change nothing.”
“We need to look into it.”
“We don’t need to do anything.”
“But—”
“Not now,” I said, cutting her off.
Her mouth closed, but the fire in her eyes didn’t dim.
I didn’t know what the marker meant. Not yet. But I knew it wasn’t the kind of information that stayed hidden. And even though we’d just met, I could tell already that Morgan Carter wasn’t the type to let anything stay buried.
She brushed snow from her gloves. “This is going to get messy, isn’t it?”
“It already is.”
She nodded. “Well. Then I guess we’ll deal with it.”
We? There was no “we” when it came to Morgan Carter and me. Not when she’d blown in with her rules and her big-city confidence like she understood this land better than the people born on it.
She stepped next to me anyway, brushing snow off her sleeve like she hadn’t stumbled through half a mile of terrain she had no business climbing. Her chin lifted, proud and defiant. Like she was ready for a fight she didn’t even fully understand. And damn if something in me didn’t tighten at the sight.
Whatever storm this marker was about to unleash, it wasn’t going to be simple. It wasn’t going to be clean. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be friendly.
Morgan wasn’t here to make my life easier. She was here to challenge every inch of what I thought I knew about this mountain. I didn’t like the way she looked at the ridge… like it was territory she intended to claim, one ordinance at a time.
I let out a low exhale. I might not be facing this alone, but I sure as hell wasn’t facing whatever trouble that would come out of this with her. We were adversaries circling each other, playing nice until things got mean and ugly.
And hell help the mountain when the two of us finally collided.
CHAPTER 2
MORGAN
