Taken by Moonlight: Short Sweet Alpha Male & Curvy Girl Insta-love Romance (Moonlight Ridge Mountain Men Book 3) Read online

  TAKEN BY MOONLIGHT

  Moonlight Ridge Mountain Men 3

  CARLY KEENE

  THISTLE KNOLL PUBLISHING

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EPILOGUE I

  EPILOGUE II

  About the Author

  THANK YOU!!!

  Also by Carly Keene

  Copyright © 2020 Carly Keene. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author. The only exception is that short excerpts may be quoted in a review.

  Cover designed by GraphicDiz at Fiverr.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Radio Quiet Zone and the Green Bank National Radio Observatory are real places. You can’t find Moonlight Ridge on any map, but it’s real in my heart.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Anna

  “Bye, Mr. Graham,” I call to my elderly next-door neighbor as I’m shoving the last of my stuff into my ancient, battered Corolla.

  “Going on vacation?” he calls back as he shuffles toward his apartment door.

  “No, I’m moving.”

  He stops and shuffles back toward the street. “Well, I can’t blame ya. Seems like the winters get colder every year. You moving to Florida or somewhere nice?”

  “Atlanta,” I say. “It’s time for me to give up the street artist gig and get a real job. I hear there’s a big TV station there that’s looking for graphic designers. I could do that.”

  Mr. Graham raises his eyebrows. “But you don’t have a job yet?”

  Worry starts nibbling at me again. I don’t have a job in Atlanta yet. Or a place to stay. Or any friends there. But the truth is, I can’t even swing another month of rent on this crappy studio apartment, and I’ve exhausted the Pittsburgh job market already. Something’s got to give, and it seems that it has to be my dream of making it as an artist.

  “I have faith,” I tell my neighbor.

  “Well, good luck, sweetheart,” he says, and smiles. “Safe travels.”

  I wave. Another worry nibbles at me. Patty, my Corolla, has seen the rear view of 250,000 miles, and I’m actually concerned that at any moment, something will happen to her. I bought her used, and she’s been good to me. But this car, my scruffy wardrobe, and my art supplies and tools are pretty much all I own.

  I didn’t have the best start in life. I bounced around the foster care system after my grandmother died, and I aged out without getting adopted, so I’ve been on my own since I was 18. I’ve worked waitressing jobs to pay the rent, selling my paintings at street-art festivals. But I’m done with that. I’m going to use what I learned in my community-college graphic design class and make some real money.

  Maybe I’ll make enough to live in a place with a pretty view.

  I turn the key and pray, and after a little grinding, Patty starts up. I gas up on my way out of town, and set off toward Atlanta thinking positive thoughts: I am brave. I am self-reliant. I am employable. It’s not long before I’m driving through mountains, and for somebody who’s never been outside Steeltown, it’s quite a show up here. All the trees are that lovely, hopeful, spring green, some of them speckled with white and pinky-purple blossoms, and it’s just almost a dream of beauty.

  I go south on the interstate for hours. But it seems these mountains are hard on my car, because poor Patty seems to be struggling up the inclines. She smells funny, and the heat gauge keeps going into the red.. After the third time a tractor-trailer nearly creams me into the pavement at the bottom of a hill, I decide it might be a better idea to get off the interstate and try some smaller roads. I look up a route on my phone that looks like it’s not too far off my original plan, which was basically to head south until I’m in South Carolina, and then head southwest. Easy, right?

  The trip is going a lot slower than I’d expected. I’m still moving, though. I check all Patty’s fluids when I stop to fuel up at a little gas station in the middle of Nowhere, West Virginia. She needs a little water in the radiator, so I put some in. I give her hood a pat, and cross my fingers. “We’ve just got to get to Atlanta, girl. Hang in there.”

  I start seeing signs for a Radio Quiet Zone soon after that, and then my cell phone stops working. I have no signal, I have no access to Waze, and I just hope like hell I don’t take a wrong turn. It’s a good thing it’s pretty here, because otherwise my worry machine would keep me freaked out. The heat gauge keeps climbing higher and higher. Little wisps of white keep escaping out the sides of the hood—smoke? Steam? I don’t know cars.

  I pass a sign for the Green Bank National Observatory, and Patty keeps chugging to the top of the mountain. And the views up here are so beautiful that I have to stop. I get out and gaze around, amazed at the blue-green mountains, the wildflowers, the sheer peace of the place. After gritty Pittsburgh at the end of winter, this place looks like heaven.

  I allow myself one more wish: that I could live in a place this beautiful. That I could belong there and really know I was part of it.

  Then I sigh and get back into my car and start heading down the mountain. Three minutes later, Patty spews out this huge dramatic cloud of white, makes a horrible grinding noise, and I panic. I need to pull off the road, but there’s nowhere to go. OMG OMG OMG OMG—there! I aim for the wide spot, going slow, but unable to see well because of the white cloud, and I’m suddenly in a ditch with the passenger side considerably lower than the driver’s side.

  Shit.

  I cut the engine. The white cloud dissipates, and that makes me think it must be steam and not smoke. Either way, everything about this situation is bad.

  But when I look around me, it’s even worse. Patty is stuck in a ditch on the side of the mountain. If I tip her, she’ll roll down it. Sideways.

  Shit oh shit.

  If I’d gone even a foot further, I’d already be down the side of this mountain—unless I got stopped by running into a tree.

  I get out of the car very carefully, trying not to hyperventilate. Patty’s incapacitated, I’m on a lonely road in the middle of this gorgeous nowhere, I have very little cash on me, and all my worldly possessions are on the brink of disaster. OMG OMG.

  I pull out my cell phone, hoping it will work. But no signal.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wilder

  Another Wednesday, another week of being alone.

  I mean, look. It’s not like being with somebody, anybody, would be better than being alone. I have more self-esteem than that. I like my life—a lot. I’m okay with myself, too.

  It’s just that it would be so much better with the right woman.

  Last time I was at the tavern having a beer with my buddy Wyatt, he told me I needed a woman.

  “No shit,” I said.

  “Well, look around,” he said, waving a hand at the few women in the tavern.

  “I have.” The women in this small town are either too young, too old, or too attached
to consider. I have attractive female colleagues, a few of them engineers like me, but most of them are married. The single ones I’ve all dated at least once, but none of them will do. So yeah, I’m picky.

  “Didn’t you go out with that redhead in Accounting you mentioned?” Wyatt asked, sipping his Moonlight Ale.

  I shrugged. “Stephanie? Yeah. She’s nice.”

  “But no spark?”

  “No spark,” I said, resigned. “I gotta have spark.”

  “Life is too short to not have spark,” he agreed, then checked his watch.

  “What, you on the short leash tonight?” I said, picking on him. He’s happy at home. He met a girl recently, and she actually moved here to be with him. Now she’s the events coordinator at the ski resort.

  Wyatt blushed. “Tia said she’d make it worth my while if I came home a little early.” He didn’t apologize when he left me to go home.

  See, that’s what I want. A worthy woman. Who loves me. With spark. I don’t think I’m asking too much.

  Now I just have to find that worthy woman.

  So this Wednesday, I’m heading home after work, going over the mountain to the cabin I built a few years ago, when I decided that Moonlight Ridge was the place I really wanted to be. I grew up in Chicago, mostly, but I spent my summers helping my great-uncle on his Montana ranch, and I like the country. I like the slower pace of it, the beauty and the space taken up by natural features instead of buildings. I like the way I can go out on my deck at night and look at the stars.

  When I think about it that way, that I’ve found the place where I belong, I have faith that the right woman will come to me. She’ll look around and decide that this is the place for her, too. And we’ll just know.

  I’m almost to the top of Ellett Mountain when I see the wrecked car off the road. I stop my truck, getting it as far over to one side as I can, and cross the road to the battered blue Toyota.

  And that’s when I see her.

  There’s a girl sitting on the ground near the car, and she’s been crying. She’s beautiful anyway: long dark blonde hair in a messy ponytail, and green eyes fringed with wet, spiky eyelashes. A soft pink mouth. Freckles. Soft curves for days, a real armful of woman.

  My dick decides to wake up and say hello, with the most inconvenient timing. I tell it to go back to sleep.

  “Are you okay?” I ask the beautiful girl. “Looks like you’ve got some trouble here.” She looks at me warily, so I hold out my hand. “Wilder Stone. I work at the Observatory and I’m heading home. I’m harmless, I swear.”

  She blushes, and it only makes her prettier.

  “I have a set of chains on the truck,” I say. “I could at least get you out of the ditch.”

  She shakes her head. “I think Patty’s dead.”

  Dead? A passenger? Her dog? I lean over and look down the side of the hill, but all I see are pines and mountain laurel, redbuds and dogwoods.

  “My car,” she adds. “Patty’s my car. I’m Anna.”

  A little shock runs down my spine the minute she says her name. Anna. Somehow I know she’s going to be important to me.

  “Oh, your car. So tell me what happened to the car.”

  She describes her car’s behavior over the past few hours, and it sounds suspiciously like a trashed radiator to me. I make a decision. “Come with me.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Anna

  I’ve been sitting beside the road for more than two hours, and no one has driven by. Not one person. I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this situation at all.

  I’ve just finished telling myself that I have to just keep my hopes up when this big black pickup truck stops, and the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen gets out of it. He’s in khakis and boots and a work shirt, and his dark beard is neatly trimmed, and he looks manly and capable and respectable. His forearms coming out of the rolled sleeves of his shirt are corded with muscle, and my inner sex kitten says hellloooooo there, handsome. I shush her.

  “Can I help?” he asks, and introduces himself. Wilder Stone. He’s an engineer. I like the way he looks at me.The inner sex kitten suggests that he could play around in my engine room anytime, and I tell her to shut up again. He asks about Patty, and I explain.

  “Come with me,” he says.

  I’m no trusting little kid. I know what happens to women on their own who get into vehicles with men they don’t know. But something about him says I’ll be safe.

  “Anything you need out of the car, you better get it now,” he says. “I’ll need to take you into town and get hold of TJ, see if he can tow your car down to Chuck’s Automotive.”

  “They can fix it tonight?” I ask, astonished. I get my backpack out of the passenger seat and make sure my art supplies are still locked in the trunk.

  He shakes his head, and I can see he’s trying not to laugh. “Nope. TJ can probably come get you now because this is a road hazard, but Chuck won’t be in until tomorrow morning. And then he’s going to have to get some parts, which may take a while. We’re kind of remote up here, as you might have noticed.”

  Now I can see his eyes up close: brown, but with little green flecks in them. They feel warm on my skin.

  “That’s all I need for tonight,” I say, and try stepping back up to the road. He reaches his hand toward me, and I take it. It’s warm, too. He pulls me up, and I overbalance forward, falling right into his chest. Inner Sex Kitten purrs, because this feels so nice. He’s big and broad and comfortable to lean against. Comforting. And he smells good, like cedar and lemons. I feel almost delicate next to him, and I am not a delicate girl. I am substantial.

  “Careful there,” he says, and his voice sounds a little rougher than before. “Don’t fall down the mountain.”

  “It’s okay,” I say as he steadies me on the road. “You’d come get me.”

  Then he smiles. “Yeah. I would.”

  I knew it.

  He helps me into the truck before getting in, and then I remember to ask. “I’m on a road trip to Atlanta. So is there a place in town where I can stay?”

  My wallet is going to be screaming before this is over. An extra hotel bill on the road, plus car repairs? I cross my fingers and hope for the best.

  “Well,” he says doubtfully, “there are a couple of motels back toward the Observatory, but that’s twenty miles. Or the ski resort hotel.” I shake my head. “Or I could maybe take you into Covington—that’s thirty-five miles.”

  “Isn’t there a bed and breakfast somewhere?” I ask desperately. “I don’t need much.”

  He shakes his head. Then he turns his head and smiles at me. “I know some people you could stay with. Young couple, they live not too far from me. Or I could call a colleague and see if you could stay with her and her husband.”

  I shiver and try to hide it. This fear of staying in an unknown house probably goes back to my life in foster care; sometimes it was okay and sometimes it was really not okay, but I never knew which it would be. I could usually tell when I walked in the front door.

  “Or,” Wilder says, his voice suddenly quite soft, “you could stay at my cabin. I wouldn’t bother you. I swear. I have a phone, and you’re welcome to use it to call home, call a friend, whatever.”

  The friends I have in Pittsburgh would not drive several hours to come get me. They’re more casual acquaintances than friends, really.

  “I’d sleep on the couch,” he says. “You’d be perfectly safe.”

  I’m not safe and I know it. Not when just looking at him gives me shivers and a hot feeling like a fever, not when looking at his strong hands on the steering wheel makes me think naughty thoughts of how those hands would feel on my body.

  “Your place, please,” I say, and my voice is soft too.

  He turns his head in my directly briefly, and he’s smiling, his eyes crinkled up at the corners. I like that. I like it almost as much as I like his solid chest and his manly forearms and his neat beard and his cedar-lemon smell. Heat ripples
through my body again, and my panties feel like they’re sticking to me. “My place it is.”

  Twenty minutes later, I’m seeing the house he calls a cabin and shaking my head at his description. It’s a real house amongst trees, with a wide gravel drive. Logs and stone. Two stories. Big windows. Long shaded front porch with two rocking chairs. It looks cozy. Homey. When he stops the truck I’m immediately out of it, turning around to see the view across mountains and valleys. An owl swoops from somewhere above us, riding a thermal, and I catch my breath at the beauty of it. I hear his feet crunching on the gravel, and then he’s in my field of vision and I lose my balance, tripping over my feet, because he’s just one more beautiful thing in this beautiful scene. He catches me.

  I can’t tear my eyes away from his. We stare into each other’s eyes for a long, long moment, and then an owl hoots in the woods behind the house to startled us out of our fascination.

  “Let me take that,” he says, reaching for my backpack. “Come in. I’m starving, and I bet you are too.”

  My Cheez-its and Pepsi ran out hours ago, and the mention of food has my stomach growling. I follow him in, noting how nice his ass looks under his khaki pants and how wide his shoulders are under the blue chambray shirt.

  The inside of the house is just as nice as the outside—wood paneling, high ceilings, a curving staircase to the second floor. I sigh at the feeling of a fluffy rug under my ancient Chuck Taylors, and take in the view from the big windows. It smells like food in here, a rich meaty smell. My mouth waters.

  The back of the house has an open deck with short stairs leading down to a fire pit with Adirondack chairs around it. There are flowers around. They look natural, but not like they grew there wild. Somebody put flowers there that decided this was home, and they settled in and grew. I catch my breath again.