Page 1 of The Mountain Man Lumberjack’s Claimed Bride

CHAPTER ONE

HUNTER

The chainsaw bites into the Douglas fir with a sound that rattles up through my forearms and settles somewhere behind my teeth. Sixty feet of timber, marked for selective harvest three weeks ago, and the notch cut is clean. Textbook. The kind of precision my grandfather would have nodded at once and never mentioned again because that's how the Marsh men communicate approval: through the absence of criticism.

Sawdust sprays in a golden arc against the morning light as the back cut deepens. The tree groans. Shifts. That deep, creaking surrender that says gravity has taken over and physics is doing the rest.

"Timber!" The word rips out of me on instinct, even though there's nobody within a mile to hear it. Habit. My father yelled it. His father before him. Some things don't require an audience.

The fir drops clean, threading the gap between two standing pines without catching a single branch. One hundred and twelve years of growth, laid down in forty seconds. The earth shakesunder my boots when it lands, and a flock of something small and startled erupts from the canopy two hundred yards east.

Silence rolls back in like water filling a hole.

This is the part people don't understand about logging. They think it's about destruction. About men with machines tearing through forests for profit. What it actually is, what my family has done for three generations on this mountain, is surgery. Every tree I mark is chosen because taking it gives the ones around it room to grow. Selective harvesting. Sustainable forestry. The kind of operation that means these woods will still be standing long after my bones are in the ground.

The morning is sharp and clear, early October air carrying the first real bite of the season. My breath comes out in thin clouds as the saw idles down and the forest resumes its usual business of existing without my interference. Blue sky punches through the canopy in ragged patches. Somewhere down the ridge, Sawyer Creek is running loud with last week's rain.

Another morning. Another tree. Another day of exactly the kind of life I built for myself: quiet, orderly, mine.

My phone buzzes in my chest pocket while the engine cools.

Bette. Of course it's Bette. My sister has a sixth sense for interrupting the only moments of my day when the noise in my head finally goes quiet.

"What." Not a question. A statement of acknowledgment that she exists and has called me, which is more than most people get.

"Good morning to you too, sunshine." Her voice carries the particular brand of cheerfulness that means she's done something she knows I won't like. "Are you up on the ridge?"

"Working."

"Right. So, funny story."

Nothing that starts withfunny storyhas ever been funny. Not once. Not in the thirty-eight years Bette Marsh has been myyounger sister and the single most meddlesome human being in the state of Montana.

"I don't want to hear it."

"Too bad." A pause. Then, with the careful casualness of a woman who has been rehearsing this exact sentence: "You're going to get a letter today. From an agency. A matchmaking agency."

The saw is still warm in my hands. My grip tightens around the handle, which is better than tightening around the phone. "Bette."

"Before you get mad?—"

"Already there."

"—just listen. I submitted your profile to a mail-order bride service. A real one, a legitimate one, not some shady website. They vet everyone. Background checks, interviews, the whole thing. And someone matched with you. A woman. She read your profile, she liked it, and she accepted."

The silence that follows is the kind that has weight. The kind that presses down on a conversation the way January snow presses down on a roof until something cracks.

"You submitted," my voice is low and flat, "a profile. To a mail-order bride agency. Using my name."

"Your name, your photo, a description of your property, your hobbies, your?—"

"Without asking me."

"If I'd asked, you'd have said no."

"That's because the answer is no."

"Hunter." Her voice shifts. Softer now. The voice she used after the divorce, and after Dad's back surgery, and every other time she's decided that she knows better than everyone else about what a person needs. "You've been alone for eight years. You eat dinner at a table set for one. You talk to trees more thanyou talk to people. And the last time you came to town was three weeks ago to buy chainsaw oil and a bag of coffee beans."