Mountain Man SEAL Read online

  Mountain Man SEAL

  Steel Brothers & Heroes Book 1

  Quinn Peachwood

  Quinn Peachwood is the author of the Possessive Alpha Gets What he Wants series of instalove short reads. Whether it’s older man, billionaire or band of brother, these bad boys are perfect when you need a quick pick-me-up of steamy but sweet yummy.

  QP loves a good road trip, sampling local food and cocktails, shopping for vintage to decorate her cottage with, and best of all, meeting readers.

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  A pair of ex-black ops team mates just looking for a quiet life.

  Tank and I almost ran into her, literally. But I’m the one blindsided.

  Whitney calls me a hillbilly and a doomsday prepper. She hates my basic mountain cabin. And Tank, the combat brother I owe my life to.

  But we’re the furthest thing from who or what she thinks. And we take no prisoners.

  She also has a past she’s trying to escape.

  I know I have to claim her. I make fast decisions about what I want and I’m trained to succeed.

  Can you fall for a stranger at first sight? Yes you can. A one in a million chance but if it happens it’s like being struck by lightning, and my old pickup, at the same time.

  She may not realize it yet but I intend to keep Whitney. I’ll keep her safe and protect her from her past.

  With my stealth seduction, one day soon, she’ll beg me to make her mine.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Whitney

  Chapter 2

  Blaze

  Chapter 3

  Whitney

  Chapter 4

  Blaze

  Chapter 5

  Whitney

  Chapter 6

  Blaze

  Chapter 7

  Whitney

  Chapter 8

  Blaze

  Chapter 9

  Whitney

  Chapter 10

  Whitney

  Chapter 11

  Blaze

  Chapter 12

  Whitney

  Chapter 13

  Blaze

  Chapter 14

  Whitney

  Chapter 15

  Whitney

  Epilogue

  Thank you for reading this first in the Steel Brothers & Heroes series

  Also by Quinn Peachwood

  1

  Whitney

  It’s another amazing day here in Hot Springs. The kind of day that makes you forget the lousy stuff that’s happened in your life and makes you catch your breath. Mostly from the shock of such shatteringly clean air.

  Everyone said I wouldn’t survive the move to the ‘wild’ West, having been a big city girl for so long. Well everyone was wrong. No one truly knows your innermost secrets or what you really want. The day I decided to follow my own ideal was the first day I truly started to feel alive.

  Aside from the mountains and lakes, if I just look up at the sky, I’m amazed by how much bigger it seems in the West. And how the light is like a soft glow covering the pretty town lodged in the valley. Most days, when I should be working, I sneak out up into the hills and indulge in a soak in the town’s namesake. The springs contain arsenic, only in tiny amounts, and it does wonders for your skin.

  “What are you smoking right now?” My friend Reese laughs as we FaceTime and I step into the street to cross without even looking for traffic. “You’ve gotten dreamy and ditzy in only three months. Have you lost your edge girl?”

  In less than the month that I’ve been out on my own, I’m already accustomed to there being no cars barreling down the street, honking at any pedestrian who dares to get in the way. The number of close calls I had back in the city doesn’t bear thinking about.

  “Nothing at all. You know that.” I say. The beauty of the natural world by far outweighs the manufactured one. I don’t need that now.

  “Well you sound high for sure.” Reese says, still teasing me.

  “Can we not talk about being high.” I plead, slightly irritated with my friend who knows how tough it’s been on me getting through a month of rehab. I don’t need to be reminded of the pleasures of flying in freedom. “I’m just kind of in awe of the hugeness of the natural world.”

  “Whereas you used to be in awe of Jarke Byron’s biceps.” She says.

  “Yeah, let’s not go there either.”

  Jarke was my first. And my last. Bad boy that is.

  That was my problem encapsulated - being in awe and enamored of a man who wasn’t remotely there for me. He was too involved with his highs and pulled me into a bad scene with him. Nope, I won’t be taking that route again, or any route in fact. I’m not only off the artificial high, I’m also not bingeing on men.

  I’m not supposed to engage in intimate relations, as they delicately referred to hooking up when I was at the facility, for a good twelve months.

  That’s right, no fun for a year. Apparently I can’t even be trusted to choose a man, not with my psychological addictive personality.

  And how can I disagree, based on previous performance? I fell into the chasm that was Jarke when I was seventeen. I was a good enough girl to hold him off until it was legal.

  I think that’s why he stuck around those few months - making him wait only fired his desire to possess me.

  “You will belong to me and only me.” He’d told me from our first meeting, his slightly high-pitched voice was seductive to my ear.

  I thought he was hotter than summer on the equator and that in turn I must also be hot because he wanted me so bad. It was easy enough for him to turn me on to other illusory states of being.

  Call me gullible. Too trusting. Naive.

  “You must open up and trust me completely. I want to know everything about you.” Jarke said. “Your every last thought.”

  I believed him.

  Every love story I’d ever read, all the romantic comedies my girlfriends and I watched on a weeknight implied the same thing. Open up and trust. Give yourself over to a man right down to your brain cells.

  At the rehab center, same thing, you must open up and trust us enough to let us in to help.

  “Sometimes a girl can be forced to open up too much.” I say into the phone to my friend. “Sometimes a girl would like to be a clam and keep a few things to herself.”

  “There you go again with the weird talk. Are you quite certain you aren’t on anything?”

  “It’s ten o’clock in the morning here.” I say. “I’m just in the Starlight cafe getting coffee and one of the supersize homemade scones they’re famous for ‘round here.”

  “There you go Darlin’.” The guy wearing the check shirt and long beard at the cash hands me my change. “You have yourself a great day.”

  “Thanks, you too.” I say. His wish seems genuine, not tip-focused insincere like baristas in the city tended to be. Eight bucks for a coffee - what was I thinking back then?

  “Jeez, Whit, you sound so down on city life, you gotta get back here before you go all Star’s Hollow out there.”

  “Don’t say that, we used to love getting on the couch to binge Gilmore Girls.” I laugh at the memory of how nice it was to have a bestie close at hand.

  “But we never thought of being them, living that small town life where everyone literally knows everything you’re thinking. When are you coming home anyway?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” I mutter as I juggle the door to the cafe with my hands full of coffee and pastry.

  “Jarke was asking about
you the other day. Wanting to know where are you? When would you be back?”

  “You didn’t tell him did you.”

  “Um, no.”

  “Reese, promise me. We talked about this. Promise me you didn’t tell Jarke the jerk anything about me or where I am.”

  “I didn’t say anything that would give the game away.” She snips. “Jeez Whit, stop being so uptight would you? You used to be so much fun.”

  Another small flare of irritation sparks in my chest. I step down to cross the street again, retracing my steps and leap back as the sound of a horn blasting shatters my morning. The moving truck came so close I felt the rush of air on my skin.

  As I jump out of the way of the vehicle, I must roll over on an ankle or buckle my knee or something, because I go down on the sidewalk with a jolt. Nothing too terrible.

  I land on my backside, more shocked at the fact someone honked me than injured. No, I’m not hurt but I am wearing half my coffee on the front of my white tee.

  I look up expecting to see the driver getting out of his cab to help me, ask if I’m okay, an apology would be nice, a fresh brew maybe.

  My eyes travel up the side of an old blue pick up, it’s gotta be about a thousand years old. One of those low slung and long vintage vehicles you see all over Instagram. This is no trendy-mobile at a retro wedding however.

  I throw the driver my best hater stare through the windshield. It’s so thickly covered with dust I can’t see much of his face. But if it had just come from the auto-wash I wouldn’t get much more of him since his messy beard looks like it hasn’t been trimmed this century.

  Does every guy around here adopt the same hirsute fashion statement? Apparently so, because my eyes dart to the guy in the passenger seat, same plaid shirt, slightly messier but not so thick beard and his hair tied up in a man bun.

  Instead of telling his buddy that he ought to take some responsibility for dangerous driving, he simply sits in his seat staring at me. With the most amazing and intense eyes I’ve ever seen. The glint in his gaze pierces through the grubby windshield straight into my core. My knees briefly feel like they might give out under me again but for a different reason entirely.

  I’m about to walk around the front of the stalled truck and continue on my way when the driver’s side door opens and the guy gets out. He’s way taller than I expected, with very broad shoulders narrowing to a taut stomach. I don’t permit my eyes to travel lower.

  “Listen, I’m sorry for the close call. And that we’re acting less than honorably right now.” He throws a glare back at his buddy sitting in the cab like a statue. “We’re not quite accustomed to the fast life of town. Wasn’t expecting to see anyone cross.”

  This guy is also knee-bendingly handsome. With dark hair brushed back, dark eyes that dance with flirty appeal and the same, unkempt beard although not so long. It isn’t because of that, not entirely anyway, that I drop my rigid fury.

  “It’s mostly on me.” I say. “I’m not used to the pace of life here either. I tend not to look when I cross the street.”

  “So are you sure you’re okay? No damage aside from the spill?” His eyes trawl my chest and I realize my tee is stuck to my curves.

  “I’m fine. Aside from the spill.”

  “Right, let me grab you a replacement. Looks like a double macchiato from the color.”

  Yeah if he thinks that excuses the way he was checking me out, it doesn’t. He heads for the cafe but first, throws a glare over his shoulder at the rigid guy in the truck. Is he actually alive? because he looks like a corpse propped up in the front seat.

  Despite the overgrowth of facial hair, the guy is plainly the most gorgeous thing walking this planet. Those eyes alone could melt any woman into a puddle at their feet but I also detect a pair of broad strong shoulders. When they told us that any intimacy was off the table for twelve months, they forgot to mention the instructions on how to curb intense attraction.

  And I can sense it coming off the guy in the truck too. I try to peer through the grit to check whether he was maybe in rehab at the same time as me. More likely he just got out, the way he seems so stunned by the world. Yep, that would explain it. I can’t get a good enough look at him. Just the intense stripping down from his eyes. So why is he just staring at me?

  Tall, dark and wowza comes back and hands me a fresh coffee, breaking the spell of the staring contest between me and his friend.

  “Thanks.” I say.

  “No problem. And about the shirt….”

  He looks like he’d be prepared to have me take it off right here.

  “It’s fine.” I snip, feeling all sticky bothered by the two slightly strange hunks.

  For a moment both men continue to stare at me so I feel like asking whether they’ve ever seen a member of the opposite sex or did they just land from an alien planet.

  Then Wowza pulls his act together, walks to the driver’s side and pulls himself up into the seat using his arms. Like he’s bench-lifting. Needless to say I’m impressed. He grins so I guess he knows it. He fires up the engine and then, turning the steering wheel to ensure a wide berth around me, still rooted to the spot, they’re gone.

  2

  Blaze

  “Dude what the hell was that?” Tank snarls as he floors the gas and drives off. “I thought you wanted her. You just sat there like a Lubbock.”

  “It was the wheels screeching, the swerve around her. I dunno what happened, I just froze.” I say, trying to put it into words and also not putting it out there. I’m shaking like a little girl and I hare myself for it.

  I don’t need to verbalize the details. Tank was there. He knows what I mean. To some extent he knows what I’m going through. I’ve seen him drift off into the past, his eyes get glazed and then - that short jolt as he pulls himself back out of the memory hole.

  When we came out of the op, the small band of us that returned all seemed to have changed into different men than we were when we went in. We were a small special ops unit attached to the MEU, tasked with going in first and stabilizing the area. Only seven of us came out.

  The strange thing about coming home, which I’d imagined would be like returning to the GarTANK of ETANK or some other paradise on earth, is that it’s messed up.

  I don’t know where I fit in. I don’t know who I am in this world. And the others around me, us, just carry on like it’s all normal. But none of it is. Not one thing.

  The city drove me insane, everyone rushing around like a hamster on a wheel. I moved to a town then a smaller town, then a far flung mountain town. And finally came up to a cabin on a hilltop, the sort of place you’d set up emplacement, an observation point. I know there are no insurgents coming for me, I guess you could say I just don’t like people of any creed.

  “Yeah sorry about that.” Tank is saying as he drives. He still drives like a car is a getaway vehicle and he’s about five double whiskies over the limit. That’s how come he picked up the nickname Tank - he rolls through all obstacles like one.

  “I didn’t expect her to step out on the street when I went to pull up next to her.” He adds. “Man, I coulda really done her some damage.”

  I don’t want to think about that. Before I put a halt to the convo, Tank yanks on the steering wheel to take a sharp turn down the only side street in town. He floors the brake and stops. Then rests his head on his forearms on the wheel. He’s breathing heavily.

  “Maybe we should just go home.” I grit out through clenched teeth.

  “No way man. We came down to town to get something and we’re gonna complete the mission.”

  I wish he wouldn’t use that kind of talk. Military talk. Let’s just forget all that and try to get back to normal. Whatever semblance of normal we can manage.

  “I can’t leave you here alone.” Tank says, lifting his head. His jaw is flexing heavy. I can tell he’s fighting his body and mind to get a hold of himself. So he focusses his effort on me, his bud. “Living up the mountain by yourself isn’
t doing you any good.”

  I’m about to snark back that roaming around the fifty states on his hog, nowhere to go, no one to care, isn’t exactly doing him any good but I repress the urge and say; “Maybe you’re right but I can’t just jack some girl off the street.”

  “How else you gonna meet her?”

  “Maybe she goes to Nate’s.” I say, mentioning the only bar in town. Not that I go out to bars so I’m not likely to run into her there. “We know she gets coffee.”

  “And she wears it well.” Tank smirks. My palm curls into a fist and I have to force myself to let it go. He’d better not continue talking about her that way though. “And there’s the hot springs.”

  “I dunno about that. I can’t just get in there with her. Some rando dude with a people problem?”

  “You do not have a problem.” Tank insists.

  Right. Like it’s normal to feel like you’re an alien from another planet, completely out of step with this world. And for the inhabitants to feel the same about you.

  I just say; “You think I could sit there in that water like a lemon in a tequila shot? It’s not natural.”

  “It’s not natural to spy on her there through the trees.” Tank laughs.

  “It’s not like that. I’m not a stalker or a peeper. I just wanted to see her again.”

  I’ve told Tank all this already. How I went out hunting deer ready to lay in meat for the winter. This was before he came riding up the mountain to drop in on his old buddy. On the way back to my cabin, with the carcass wrapped around my shoulders like a freaking shawl, I saw an absolute goddess.

  There’s a hot spring pool quite high on the mountain, a circle of rocks where the mineral water bubbles up out of the ground. Always deserted far as I can tell, I wasn’t expecting to see this angel lowering herself into the water. I approached from behind her and was stopped in my tracks, frozen as the deer had been when he whiffed my scent on the breeze.