"Clean hinge," she says, half to herself.
"You here for a reason, or just to admire my work?"
"Both." She straightens and tips her hat back, and now I get the full hit of her face. Strong jaw. A scatter of sun across her nose. Green eyes, pale and sharp, that land on me and don't waver. Twenty-something. Nowhere near my forty. Young enough that the part of me running this attraction ought to be ashamed of itself.
It isn't.
"Paige Thomas." She sticks out a hand. "I'm your manager."
I look at the hand. Look at her.
"My what?"
"Manager. Liaison. Babysitter, depending who you ask." Her hand stays out, steady. "Gabe's got you on the books as a contractor, which means somebody's gotta sign off on your clearing plan, log your loads, make sure you're not dropping pine into the creek or scalping a slope the watershed people'll cry about. That somebody is me."
I don't take her hand. "I've been dropping timber since before you could ride that horse."
"Probably." Not a flicker. "And yet here I am."
She lets her hand fall, easy, no insult taken. That bothers me more than if she'd snapped.
"I work alone," I tell her. It's the truest thing about me, and I say it flat so it'll stick.
"Sure you do." She crouches by my gear, picks up my wedge, turns it over, sets it back exactly where it was. "Worked alone a year myself before I landed here. It's overrated. Lonely's just a fancy word for nobody around to call you on your nonsense." She looks up at me from under the hat. "How long you been on the property now? A week?"
"Eleven days."
"Eleven days." She nods slow, like she's filing it. "And how many of those have you spent talking to an actual human being?"
The answer is none. I've gotten my supplies in town from a kid at the feed store who doesn't make small talk. Hauled my first load to the ranch yard at dawn when nobody was up. Eaten what I cooked, slept when the dark told me to, woke at four like always with my heart pounding from dreams I don't discuss with myself, let alone anybody else.
I don't answer.
She smiles. Just a corner of her mouth. And it does something to me I don't have permission to feel.
"That's what I thought," she says.
I pick the saw back up. "You can log your loads off my mill records. I'll leave them in the ranch box. You don't need to be out here."
"See, I disagree." Paige walks back to her mare, but she doesn't mount up. She digs in her saddlebag and comes out with a thermos and two dented metal cups, and starts pouring like this is her porch and I'm the one who wandered in. "Gabe assigned me. I take what Gabe gives me serious. Plus this section's got a spring seep about forty yards downslope that you can't see from up here, and if you drop that big fella" she nods at a wide pine I've already marked "the way your face cut's angled, you're gonna put six tons of it right across the only water those cattle reach in August."
I stop.
I marked that pine to fall east. East is downhill. East is, now that she's said it out loud and my eyes are tracking the grade past her shoulder, almost certainly where a seep would pool.
She holds out a cup of coffee. Black. Steam curling.
"I'd have caught it before I cut," I say, and it's mostly true.
"Maybe." She keeps the cup out. "Or maybe you've been alone in your head so long you've stopped letting anybody check your blind spot. Happens to the best of us."
I take the coffee. Not because she's right. Because my hand's already moving before I've thought it through, and that's a thing that hasn't happened to me in longer than I'll admit.
Our fingers brush on the handle. Brief. Warm.
She doesn't pull back fast. Doesn't make it a thing. Just lets go once I've got it and steps away to lean against a stump, sipping from her own cup, watching me over the rim with those pale eyes like she's got all the time God made.
The coffee's good. Strong. Better than mine.
