Walk on the Wilder Side by Serena Bell

Excerpt from Wilder With You

Jessa

There should be a special ringtone for calls that suck.

How hard would that be to arrange? After all, most people know when they’re calling to deliver bad news, right? They could enter a special code, giving you those few critical extra seconds to brace yourself.…

Sadly, the call from my friend Kitty doesn’t come with a warning ring tone, just her name and number. I answer it, and Kitty says, “I’m so, so, so sorry. I swore I wouldn’t be this person.”

I’m holding my breath so hard my eyes hurt.

“I can’t come on the trip.”

Nooooooooooo, my baby self howls.

I clutch my phone, standing in the parking area of Wilder Adventure headquarters with a group of people who, like me, are waiting to board the bus that will take us on our wilderness adventure. It’s a three-day trip to learn survival skills in relativeluxury, compared to the more hard-core trips that Wilder Adventures also leads. I’ve been super excited since I heard about it, because after my ex-husband Reuben demolished me and left me for road kill (Kidding. Sort of.), I promised myself I’d get the hell out of my comfort zone this summer, and this is my big leap.

Of course, it was going to be a big leap with Kitty by my side, but that is apparently not to be. It’s just me.

Cue sad emoji and some whiffs of eating alone in the cafeteria in seventh grade.

My big girl self takes a deep, calming breath and exhales for twice as long as the inhale, just in case this turns out to be one of those rare times it actually helps. I need to adult this. Kitty wouldn’t cancel on me unless she absolutely had to. If she’s calling to bail, she has a damn good reason, and the last thing I want to do is make her feel worse than she already does.

And indeed, Kitty’s next words are: “I wouldn’t if there were any other way. But—she’s totally fine, but—Inara’s in the ER.”

I snap instantly out of my self-pity. “Oh, no! What happened?”

“This morning, she put on my fuzzy robe and declared that she was Sisu the dragon from Raya and the Last Dragon. Which, okay, no biggie, right? But then when I was in the shower, she climbed up on the top of the playhouse, and ‘flew.’”

“Nooooo,” I finally let myself say. At the same time, I’m thinking about Kitty’s fuzzy robe and admiring Inara’s costuming accumen.

“They’re ninety percent sure it’s a broken arm, but we’re waiting to get X-rayed. The thing is, I don’t think I can…” Her voice trails off, and my brain fills in.

“No, I get it. I totally get it. Of course you can’t. She needs her mom with her!”

Kitty sighs. “I know I’ll lose the money, but I have to be here for her.”

“Absolutely.”

I mean it. Of course I mean it. I’m just—

I’m still feeling clobbered by this year’s turn of events, including the world’s fastest divorce. And Kitty was going to be my buffer against all the things that are scary about this trip. New experiences, personal challenges, and a big social group.

Also, the trip’s leader, Clark Wilder.

Who is currently standing to the side of the assembled crew, quietly watching me with steady gray eyes.

Shit.

“I’d better go,” I say. “I need to either bail or get with the program.”

“Go. Go,” she says hastily. “I’m so sorry.”

“Please don’t stress about it,” I say. “These things happen. Give hugs to Inara.”

“I will.”

I hang up, just as Clark strides toward me.

I swallow my impulse to duck, hide, or whip out a concealed nerf gun and fire it. I try to hold my ground—and his gaze—but fuck, it’s hard. The man is a brooding Viking warrior, six-foot-three-ish, with a reddish-brown beard and those I-own-you eyes. In my humble opinion, Clark is the hottest Wilder—and possibly the hottest man alive.

He also makes me insanely, tongue-swallowingly, nervous.

“Hey,” he says.

“Um, hey.” Suave, Jessa.

He gestures to my phone. “Was that your friend?”

He knows the two of us signed up together, and he has probably clocked by now that Kitty’s the one missing. Which means I get to break it to him that she’s not coming. “She’s, um, a no-go. Her daughter’s in the ER. Probable broken arm.”

He scowls, and I brace myself to be raked over the coals. Instead he says, “Well, shit. That sucks.”

I can’t help myself; I bite back a smile. “Yeah.”

He raises one eyebrow. Up close, his eyes are at least fifty shades of gray. “You still want to go?”

“I can’t get a refund now, can I?”

He shakes his head.

“Then I might as well get something out of it, right?”

He shrugs. “Up to you.”

Thanks, dude. Way to make me feel welcome.

I desperately want to bail, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to forgive myself if I do.

“I’ll go, I guess.”

He nods and turns away from me, and that’s the end of our conversation. No surprise there. Clark has rendered me speechless since I first met him, and it only got worse when my friend Emma, his late wife, passed away two years ago. Emma and I were in a book club together, so I didn’t know Clark super well, but I knew he didn’t like me. He never met my eyes, smiled, or greeted me with anything other than a grunt.

After Emma died, the book club banded together to support her family and Clark. I brought Clark a pasta bake and tried to hug him, to offer some comfort. He jerked away so abruptly that he dropped the casserole. When we crouched on the floor, scrambling to retrieve it, we bumped heads.

He raised his red eyes to me. “Just go.”

I got out of there as fast as I could, because there are some moments you can’t come back from.

I didn’t hold his gruffness against him—grief and shyness and all that—but when I asked our other book club friends if he’d been like that with them, they said no. They said he was polite and kind and quietly warm.

So apparently Clark Wilder doesn’t like me a whole lot.

That’s okay. He’s still exceptionally nice to look at. I’ve always been a sucker for the intense type. That’s probably why I fell for Reuben, because even if he wasn’t actually that deep, he was good at playing the part of the brooding literary artiste— basically, he was one step away from jackets with elbow patches.

Clark’s objectively way better looking than Reuben, though, if you’re into the mountain man type. I think the eye candy could be decent consolation for losing Kitty’s company.

I’ll just have to make sure I’m behind Clark on the trail.

“Load ’er up!” calls an authoritative voice. Clark. He stands to the side of the under-bus cargo area and supervises as we thrust our backpacks and other belongings into the hold. When it’s my turn, I fumble, the backpack straps catching on the edge, halting progress. Clark grabs my backpack like it weighs a quarter of what it does and shoves it into the bay. He’s wearing a thin base-layer shirt and a pair of hiking pants that look like they were made for him, and the sight of him bent over and working breaks my brain. I’m still gawping when he turns around, and I have to close my mouth and wipe away the drool.

Not really, but it feels like it.

I board the bus, find myself an empty seat halfway back, and stare out the window, trying to gather my courage. It’s not like I’m on one of the primitive survival adventures. This is the Gilderness Adventure—the glamping version of survival. And even though I’m way more at home helping brides find their perfect dress or spec-ing wedding favors, I’m not notably uncoordinated or bad at the outdoors.

Well. I do have a lot of trouble working a compass or reading a map, but the description for this trip assured us we wouldn’t be on our own with any of that this time around.

I take a deep breath.

Being uncomfortable is kind of the point, isn’t it? If you’re outside your comfort zone, it’s not supposed to feel easy.

The bus pulls out of the Wilder Adventures parking area. It’s being driven by Not Clark Wilder. I wish I could be more specific, but whenever someone introduces me to a Wilder brother, I’m too dazzled by his gorgeousness to remember his name. I think this one is Kane—one of the younger ones—but I wouldn’t put money on it. He has red-and-gold-streaked brown hair and pale blue eyes, and although I’m more of a fan of the Clark Wilder Norse God build, he’s a yummy, athletic specimen.

Just as we hit road speed, a walkie talkie crackles a few seats in front of mine. “Clark?”

“Yeah?” Clark’s voice replies.

There’s too much static to make out the conversation that follows, but whatever it is, Clark calls something to the driver, and Probably Kane pulls over to the side of the road.

Two people trot up alongside the bus, climb the front steps, and appear in the aisle.

And my heart withers and dies and consumes itself in a crematory blaze.

Okay, I may have exaggerated a tiny, tiny bit.

But it’s not good.

Facing me is a woman with lovely honey colored hair, pulled back in a ponytail. She’s packed her perfect, tidy C-cup-ideal bod into a set of expensive-looking hiking pants and a form-fitting base layer. She’s the female version of Clark, a fantasy of what an outdoorsy woman should be.

(I wonder if she consulted Pinterest?)

Her name—which I know—is Corinna.

I know her name because she’s sleeping with the man standing directly behind her, and has been since well before his divorce.

The man standing directly behind her is my ex-husband, Reuben. He has grown a beard and is wearing a bandana around his head, in a misguided effort to transform himself from artist to hiker. Mostly he just looks like a hack writer with a scraggly beard.

Sometimes, when you’re confronted with information your brain can’t handle, it goes into super slow-mo mode. That’s what’s happening to me right now. It’s like this:

Corinna (who Reuben cheated with) is on the bus.

Reuben (my ex-husband) is also on the bus.

Corinna and Reuben are…

…going …

…on…

…this…

trip.

Together.

With me.

With just me.

No Kitty.

Noooooooo! my baby self howls.

Although once again, I make no sound, because the only thing worse than the present situation would be drawing attention to myself.

Corinna and Reuben slide into a seat near the front of the bus.

I could get off. There’s probably a rear exit. And surely even a benevolent god testing my resolve about going on this trip wouldn’t actually expect me to stick this out.

I test this theory using the technique taught to me by my divorce counselor: If you were someone else, would you judge her for getting off the bus?

Hell, no.

However. I can see from where I’m sitting that the rear exit of our bus is equipped with an emergency alarm. Which means that if I bail out through that door, the bus will stop, everyone will turn around, and it will be painfully obvious that I’ve fled.

Corinna and Reuben will see me, and even if they don’t, Clark will tell them. (“Oh, yeah, that was Jessa Olsen who went out the back. I have no idea where she’s going, but who needs her, anyway?”)

Then it would be obvious to Reuben that I didn’t have the courage to stick this out. And given what he’s already taken from me, he doesn’t deserve that satisfaction.

I slink down in my seat and hide, wishing I could disappear, but the best superpower I’ve got at this moment is a snack bar in my jacket pocket.

Need more? You can preorder Wilder With You right now, and it’ll drop onto your e-reader as soon as it’s available.

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Steamy, small-town rom-com.Take a beach vacation with delicious enemies-to-lovers business shenanigans in my Tierney Bay series.

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Real, sexy, emotional romance.Laugh, cry, and hug your e-reader with these four soldiers as they find family, love, and meaning after war in my Returning Home series.

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