Page 5 of Cracking with the Mountain Man

We drink coffee in my kitchen for thirty two minutes. He doesn't talk much. But he listens when I talk about the cookbook, about Nani's recipe cards, about the chimney cake disaster. He asks one question about the cardamom in the pie. Whether I toast it first or grind it raw. It's the right question. The question of someone who pays attention to how things are built, even things made of butter and sugar.

At the door, he pauses. His shoulder is inches from the frame. This close, I can see the lines at the corners of his eyes, the silver starting to thread through his hair. He smells like woodsmoke. My head reaches his chin. If I stepped forward, just a little, my forehead would rest against his chest.

I don't step forward.

But I think about it long enough for him to notice.

His eyes drop to my mouth. One second. Maybe two. Then he pulls back, and whatever door cracked open behind those gray eyes closes again.

"I'll bring the gasket up tomorrow," he says.

"You don't have to do that."

"Your oven's broken."

"It's been broken since I moved in. Seven months."

"Then you've been baking wrong for seven months." He steps off the porch. Boone follows. "That pie was good despite the oven. Fix the oven, and there's no telling what you'll make."

He's halfway down the trail before I realize that's the closest thing to a compliment Owen Tate has probably given anyone in years.

Inside, the cabin feels bigger without him. Which doesn't make sense. He took up too much space while he was here, all broad shoulders against my small kitchen. Now that he's gone, the space just feels empty.

My phone buzzes on the counter.

Meera:

Hows mountain hermit life? Met any hot lumberjacks yet?

Me:

He's not a lumberjack. He's a former park ranger who returned my pie plate this morning.

Meera:

PIE PLATE??? You baked for him??? Priya Sharma you moved to that mountain to find yourself not find a man.

Me:

It was a neighborly gesture.

Meera:

Sure it was.

The cursor still blinks on Chapter Seven: Budapest. Picking up a recipe card, the ink faded from Nani's careful hand. Kürtőskalács. Chimney cake. She wrote the temperature in Celsius with a note in Gujarati that translates roughly to patience, beta, patience.

Right. Patience.

The oven is broken. Owen is coming tomorrow to fix it. And I'm going to write this chapter, nail this recipe, and absolutely not spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about the way he looked at my mouth in the doorway.

Patience.

CHAPTER THREE

OWEN

The gasket costs eleven dollars at the hardware store in Crimson Hollow. I buy it on Wednesday morning, which means I drove forty minutes down the mountain for an eleven dollar rubber seal when I could've ordered it online and had it in three days.