My lip twitched. “Well, I hope you get a seat… just so you can stop harassing me.”
“Next, please,” the boarding agent called, and I tore my eyes from the stranger and moved forward.
She scanned my ticket under his watchful eye.
“Have a safe flight,” he called after me as I moved toward the jet bridge. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
“You too… if you ever get one,” I called back.
If he replied, I didn’t hear it. The sound of the airplane’s engine was loud, and I was focused on finding my seat. Even as I settled into my shitty middle seat, the stranger stayed on my mind.
Chapter Two
Jasper
The area in front of my cousin Kara’s cabin looked like a summer camp.
There were about a dozen people, all in various stages of khaki, standing around in hiking boots staring at the trees.
I was supposed to have arrived yesterday but they’d oversold my damn flight. It was a connecting flight, so I wasn’t even near home. Instead, I had to spend the night in the airport and catch a shitty five a.m. flight.
If I’d been in my twenties, missing a night of sleep would have been no big deal, but I was north of forty now and my eyes were gritty from my shitty night.
I wasn’t in the mood for a crowd.
It didn’t help that I’d gotten into an argument with a woman at the check-in desk. I hadn’t meant to be an asshole. The ticket agent said she had the last ticket. What was I supposed to dobut ask her for it?
I felt bad about it afterwards, watching the flight take off with me still in the airport glaring after it. Maybe I should have tried the whole ‘catch more flies with honey than vinegar’ thing. It wouldn’t have been hard to be nice to her. She was hot. A petite blonde with lithe muscles on her arms and an ass that demanded attention.
The icing on the cake of the whole trip was that once I finally got to Colorado, my luggage didn’t appear on the conveyor belt. Everyone else’s bags went around and around until there was nothing left.
Luckily, I had put some clothes, including what I needed for the wedding, in my carry-on. Unfortunately, what wasn’t in my carry on was my hiking gear.
“You made it!” Kara said when I stepped out of my rental car. She ran down the steps of her front porch and I pulled her into a hug.
I had never been to her cabin before. It had belonged to Kara’s uncle, Walt, before he passed, but I was on the opposite side of her family so I’d never met Walt.
I took a deep breath of the mountain air, willing it to wake me up. Some days coffee just didn’t cut it.
A tall, broad man with a barely concealed scowl stepped out the door behind her, a big dog at his side. If he could have shot lasers out of his eyes, everyone on the property would have been dead by now.
“Grant, come meet my cousin, Jasper.”
The man, Grant, apparently, stepped forward and stuck out his hand. I shook it and we each gave a tight-lipped nod.
“There, see? Getting along already. Grant isn’treally a people person,” she said, putting air quotes around the last two words. “Now you two go ahead and bond—”
“Bond?” Grant cut in.
“Yes,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “Bond. But likemanlybonding,” she added quickly. “Grant is a lumberjack, Jasper, you work search and rescue. Surely you can swap tales of the outdoors, or whatever while I get this thing going.”
She went up on her tiptoes and gave Grant a kiss that immediately turned heated. I turned my back, not wanting to see my cousin making out with her fiancé, and scratched the dog behind the ear.
The dog melted into my touch and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. I smiled down at him.
“That’s Tuck,” Grant said, gesturing to the dog once he’d unglued his lips from Kara.
I gave Tuck one more pat, then looked around again. “What’s going on here by the way? I thought the wedding wasn’t for a few days.”
