never figured out the female mind? Maybe if he’d had a normal mother and grandmother, he’d be married with two or three kids by now. Instead, he survived on a series of short-lived affairs with women who seemed perfectly normal at first, but who strangely always ended up unsuitable or unstable.
When Eli finally emerged from the bathroom, dressed in the cargo pants and T-shirt, Annalise was waiting in the hallway with a hot cup of tea. She pulled him along to the kitchen table and shoved a stack of shoe boxes off a chair and onto the floor. “Sit, sit. When Vanessa called, I was so surprised. I wasn’t expecting you. Usually you call.”
“I didn’t really have a chance,” he said, picking up a pair of climbing shoes that she’d pushed aside. “Do these come in my size?”
She smiled. Though she’d reached the half-century mark last year, Annalise Montgomery still had a girlish exuberance that belied her true age. Her slender body, kept healthy by yoga and a vegan diet, moved with a grace and athleticism that made her hard to ignore.
“Richard Baskill?” he said.
“Oh, stop. I don’t need you to tell me who I can and cannot screw.” She sat down across from him and tucked her feet up under her. “It’s just a thing. An undeniable sexual attraction. I’m going through menopause and they say sometimes women just freak out and try to do it with any man who walks by.” She shrugged, a coy grin twitching at the corners of her lips. “So I did. And I’ll have you know, he’s quite an accomplished lover. Besides, there’s nothing left to do about the resort. He managed to buy every politician that could have stopped it. I just figured it was time to go with the flow.”
“So the next best thing was to hop into bed with him?”
She giggled. “We actually haven’t done it in a bed yet. He likes it when I get...creative. I couldn’t beat him with the resort, but I do hold all the power in the bedroom.”
Eli covered his ears. “Too much information,” he shouted, shaking his head.
“All right, all right,” she said, grabbing his hand and lacing her fingers through his. “No more talk about my love life. Let’s talk about yours.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Eli said.
She gave him a sad look and sighed.
“Is there some kind of sexual dysfunction that keeps you from—”
“Stop!” Eli said. “I’m not going to talk to you about my sex life.”
A silence descended and she busied herself braiding a strand of her hair. As much as he loved his mother’s rather mercurial personality, it often made simple conversation nearly impossible. She usually blurted out exactly what was on her mind, without the benefit of a filter. Though, truth be told, Eli had come to the conclusion that she enjoyed shocking people.
“Is there some other topic we might discuss?” Eli asked.
“I suppose your inability to settle down and find a purpose for your life is off-limits as well?”
“The commitment gene is missing in the Montgomery family,” he muttered. “I take after you and Trudie. I make enough money to live my life. That’s all I need for now.”
“Well, in the interest of making money to live your life, I just happen to have a job for you, a good-paying job. They hired me to do it, but now that you’re home, I think you’d be perfect for it.”
“What kind of job?”
“I got a call from a production company in Los Angeles. They’re doing a reality show, a girl-in-the-wild thing where they drop this woman into the wilderness and she has to fend for herself for a year. They wanted to rent Trudie’s cabin because they’re basing the concept on her life on the mountain.”
“You rented out my grandmother’s cabin?”
“You won’t believe what they paid,” Annalise said. “It’s all very professional. This woman they got to host the show, Lucy Parker, she’s read all your grandmother’s books. She’s a huge fan.”
“How old is she?”
“What difference does that make? I was twenty-four when I first climbed Everest. Your grandmother was fifty when she wrote her first book. Age is just another metric that men use to put women down.”
Eli cursed softly. “All right, never mind her age. How long is she going to live there all alone? Two, three months?”
“A year. And she isn’t alone. She has a dog with her.”
“A year? How is a TV personality from Los Angeles going to feed herself? Does she hunt? What about chopping wood? There must be a production crew that’s going to stay with her. They wouldn’t leave her up there all alone.” He stared at Annalise. “Well? Did you ask these questions?”
“Well...no. I’m sure they know what they’re doing.”
“Does she have a radio or a sat phone to call if she needs help?”
His mother shrugged. “I have no idea. You can find out yourself when you hike up there the day after tomorrow. That’s the job. Check up on her once a month. Bring a few supplies to her.” She stood up. “In the meantime, I think we should go out and stuff ourselves with pizza and beer.”
“You don’t eat cheese,” he said. “You’re a vegan.”
“I’ve realized that cheese is quite possibly the most sublime food on the planet. And I only eat organic cheese from grass-fed, humanely pastured milk cows.”
“Next thing you’ll be telling me that you’re eating meat.”
“Bacon,” she said. “I mean, it’s really not meat. It’s fat. And it smells like sex feels. At my age, I just don’t think I should deny any of my urges. Life is short. We have to enjoy every single moment. That’s what Richard says.”
Eli rubbed his forehead, wondering at the sudden knot of tension beneath his fingertips. Maybe a beer—or five—was exactly what he needed right now. It appeared that a lot of things had changed since he’d last been home.
Leave it to his mother to involve them both in some silly reality show. The reality was that life in Trudie’s cabin was hard and lonely and it wasn’t a place for make-believe adventurers. He intended to let Lucy Parker know exactly what she was in for. And once she found out what a winter in the Rockies would be like, she’d want to run right back down the mountain.
* * *
LUCY PARKER ROLLED over on her bunk and winced at the ache in her shoulder. She’d spent the previous day stripping the bark from a tree she’d felled last week. It was backbreaking work, but all part of the process—the process of building her own shelter that would withstand the harsh winter.
She sat up and brushed the hair out of her eyes. This was the life she’d signed on for. A year in the wilderness, a year living life as Trudie Montgomery had. And the first task was to construct a small log cabin. She’d been on the mountain for exactly a month and had managed to gather enough logs for one wall of the ten-by-ten foot shelter she’d planned to build.
Her
