Chapter 2 - The Red Ridge Lodge**
Three months earlier, my biggest problem in the world had been an arrogant art professor who hated every single charcoal stroke I put on paper.
“Technically competent, Miss Mercer,” Professor Lang had announced during our senior portfolio review, holding up my latest charcoal study in front of the entire lecture hall as though it were physical evidence from a deeply disappointing crime scene. “But structurally, it is completely emotionally empty.”
The drawing depicted a lone male figure standing against a dark, churning forest background, his face stubbornly turned away from the viewer.
Someone in the back row whispered loudly, “Well, at least she gave him great abs.”
Another voice instantly chimed in, “And apparently a very healthy, rugged self-esteem.”
Half the classroom snickered. I stared fixedly at the scuffed floorboards of the studio until Professor Lang finally put the drawing down and moved on to the next student’s work.
After the bell rang, Mia found me frantically stuffing my charcoal sketchbooks into my canvas backpack with the desperate concentration of someone preparing to fake their own death and flee the country.
“I hate this school,” I muttered, zipping my bag with a violent yank.
“You hate today,” Mia corrected, leaning against the edge of my desk.
“It’s a different thing entirely.”
She dropped into the chair beside me with a dramatic sigh. “Anyway, forget Lang. There’s a massive party tomorrow night at my parents’ ski condo in Vail. You’re coming with me.”
“I can’t.”
Her eyebrows shot up into her bangs. “And why on earth not?”
“Because my mother decided that spring break was the ideal time to spontaneously marry a man I have never met, in a remote mountain town I can’t even pronounce on the map.”
Mia crossed her arms. “Is this a rich mountain town or a murder mountain town?”
“According to her text messages, he builds custom wooden furniture.”
Mia frowned deeply. “That sounds intensely murdery, Chloe.”
“He also has a son.”
Her face instantly transformed from cynical skepticism to intense, matchmaking intrigue. “No.”
“What?”
“You said he has a son.”
“Yes, he works with his father in the local timber industry.”
“How old?”
“Mia, please.”
“I said, how old is he?”
“Twenty-five.”
She grabbed both my shoulders and gave me a little shake. “Chloe, I am desperately trying to find at least one positive silver lining in your family’s impending doom.”
“He is about to become my stepbrother, Mia. That makes it deeply, painfully weird.”
“You didn’t grow up together. You’re adults meeting for the first time.” She grinned wickedly. “That sentence has never ruined a romance novel in the history of fiction.”
Two days later, I found myself gripping the steering wheel of my battered sedan as I drove deep through the winding mountain passes of western Colorado. Heavy wet snow was rapidly gathering along the steep shoulders of a two-lane road that looked like it had been engineered by someone who actively hated guardrails and physics.
My GPS had completely given up the ghost twenty miles back, flashing a blank grey screen and spinning in circles.
My smartphone battery was flashing a dismal one bar of signal.
My mother had texted me three frantic times in the last hour:
*TURN LEFT AT THE OLD RUSTED WATER TOWER.*
*YOU WILL THINK IT IS THE WRONG LOGGING ROAD.*
*IT IS NOT THE WRONG ROAD.*
Those were, objectively speaking, not comforting directions to receive while driving into a blizzard.
By the time dusk settled like a heavy wool blanket over the peaks, the paved highway disappeared entirely, replaced by a rutted dirt track choked with ancient pine trees. The mountains rose like black, jagged monoliths against a violet twilight sky, and every true-crime podcast I had ever binged began playing on an unstoppable loop inside my head.
“This,” I muttered out loud to myself, white-knuckling the steering wheel, “is precisely how independent young women become the subject of six-part Netflix true-crime documentaries.”
Suddenly, something enormous moved through the thick timber just off the shoulder.
I slammed my foot onto the brake pedal. Tires skidded violently across the icy slush before coming to a complete halt.
A dark, towering shape crossed the snowy road directly ahead of my headlights.
A bear.
Not just any ordinary black bear you might see rummaging through a suburban campsite. This was a monster.
It was easily the largest, most formidable animal I had ever laid eyes on. It stopped dead in the middle of the logging road and slowly turned its massive head to look directly through my windshield.
For a terrifying moment, I completely forgot how to breathe. The bear’s shoulders stood high enough that I could see them towering well over the hood of my sedan. Its thick, shaggy coat was an impenetrable, glossy dark brown, shading into a lighter, silver-tipped grizzled mane around its powerful neck. But it was the eyes that froze me in my tracks—they didn't look wild or mindless; they stared at me with an eerie, startling intelligence that felt entirely human.
“Nice... nice bear,” I whispered into the quiet car, my voice trembling.
The bear slowly tilted its enormous head, as if considering my artistic merits, before it melted seamlessly back into the dark shadows of the pine forest.
Ten minutes later, a heavy-duty pickup truck pulled up behind me, its high beams cutting through the falling snow. My mother’s new fiancé stepped out, wearing a thick flannel coat and looking entirely unbothered by the freezing weather.
Gavin Hale was in his early fifties, broad-shouldered, with silver hair touching his temples and the kind of calm, grounded face that instinctively made you lower your voice.
He tapped gently on my driver’s side window. I rolled it down, shivering.
“Chloe?” he asked with a warm smile.
“Please tell me there is civilization and indoor plumbing somewhere ahead.”
He laughed, a deep rumbling sound. “Well, that entirely depends on your personal definition of civilization.”
“You must be Gavin.”
“I am.”
“My mother drastically undersold how terrifying this mountain road is.”
Gavin chuckled, stepping back. “She did that entirely on purpose. Builds character.”
He guided me another mile through the winding forest trails until the dense timber suddenly parted. I stepped out of my car and stared in absolute speechlessness.
The “cabin” my mother had casually described over the phone was actually a magnificent, three-story timber-frame lodge surrounded by sprawling workshops, heavy stone stables, and expansive stone terraces that looked out across an entire hidden mountain valley glowing warmly beneath the amber light of evening.
“You told me you made furniture,” I accused Gavin later that night as we carried my suitcases inside.
Gavin smiled, unzipping my heaviest bag. “I do.”
“You neglected to mention that you apparently own half of the Rocky Mountains.”
“I don’t own half,” he replied deadpan.
“Then how much?”
“Just enough to give your mother daily anxiety about how much time I spend in the workshop.”
Before I could fire back a sarcastic retort, my mother came racing down the grand timber staircase, her face glowing with a ridiculous, unguarded happiness I had never seen in all the years following my father's death. Watching her run toward Gavin, I realized with a jolt that she had spent years pretending she was fine alone, but this man had completely ruined her for anyone else.
She threw her arms around my neck, hugging me fiercely.
“You made it through the pass!” she gasped.
“Barely. On the way up, I encountered a grizzly bear large enough to register to vote and pay property taxes.”
Gavin paused mid-stride.
It was only for a fraction of a second, but I caught the sudden, sharp stiffening of his shoulders.
“Whereabouts?” he asked quietly.
“About two miles down the upper logging trail.”
Gavin exchanged a brief, unreadable glance with my mother. “Probably just an old boar passing through the ridge.”
There were no other bears for miles, and Gavin knew it. That should have been my very first clue that the Red Ridge Lodge was hiding secrets much deeper than fine oak cabinetry.
The wedding took place the following morning beneath a magnificent cedar arbor that Gavin and his son had hand-carved themselves.
It was small, intimate, with perhaps thirty guests in attendance. Unfortunately, an alarming number of those guests looked like mountain men who could bench-press commercial refrigerators and possessed the kind of intense, unblinking stares that made you want to check your locks twice at night.
I had just finished carefully adjusting the lace back of my mother’s vintage ivory dress when a deep, rich voice spoke directly behind my shoulder.
“You’re standing on the hem of my jacket.”
May you like
I spun around abruptly, my heart giving a strange, violent lurch.
And in that single instant, every clever, sarcastic sentence I had ever memorized completely evaporated from my brain.
