Page 2 of The Mountain Man Lumberjack’s Claimed Bride

"Sounds ideal."

"It sounds like a man who's given up."

The words land somewhere uncomfortable. Not in my chest, where I could dismiss them. Lower. In the gut, where truth tends to settle when it catches you off guard.

"Send the letter back," I tell her. "Tell the agency there's been a mistake."

"Can't. She's already on her way."

My jaw locks. "What do you mean, she's already on her way?"

"The acceptance was two weeks ago. The agency contacted me because the correspondence address I put down was mine. She's supposed to arrive today."

Today.

A woman I've never met, whose name I don't know, is currently in transit to my property because my sister decided that eight years of solitude is a character flaw rather than a lifestyle choice.

"Today, Bette?"

"Her name is Nora Chambers. She's thirty-one. Former school librarian. She seems wonderful. You'd know all this if you checked your email, which you never do because you're a hermit who thinks 2005 was the pinnacle of communication technology."

Through the trees, the valley drops away in folds of green and gold, stretching toward the town I avoid and the world I left behind. My cabin sits on the far side of the north ridge. Twenty acres. Half cleared by my grandfather sixty years ago. The rest still standing because I haven't found a reason to take it down.

Nobody comes there. That's the point.

"I'm not doing this." Each word comes out on its own, distinct, like splitting kindling.

"She sold her apartment. She packed two suitcases. She has nowhere else to go, Hunter." A beat. Then, quieter: "Just meet her. One conversation. If it doesn't work, I'll handle the agency. But at least look at her before you send her away."

The phone goes dead before I can respond, which is Bette's signature move: deliver the grenade, hang up, let the shrapnel settle.

My truck is parked a quarter mile downslope where the logging road dead-ends into the ridge. The walk back takes seven minutes, and every one of those minutes is spent constructing a list of things I plan to say to my sister the next time we're in the same room. The list is extensive. Some of it would make a lumberjack blush.

The drive down the mountain takes twenty, winding through switchbacks that drop from timber country into the rolling grassland that borders the eastern edge of my property. The cabin comes into view around the last curve: two stories of timber and stone, floor-to-ceiling windows on the south and east faces, a stone chimney running up the west wall trailing a thin thread of smoke from the fire I banked before dawn. Workshop behind. Woodpile stacked along the north side, neatly split, enough to see me through January.

Everything about this place is exactly the way I want it because every inch of it was built or repaired or maintained by my own hands. The kitchen is stocked. The floors are clean. The coffee is ground fresh every morning from beans I drive forty-five minutes to buy because the store in town doesn't carry the roast I prefer, and there is not a single thing in my life that requires the addition of another human being.

This is what I tell myself while parking the truck.

This is what I'm still telling myself when the unfamiliar sedan rolls up my driveway.

It's a rental. White. Compact. The kind of car a person who doesn't know Montana picks up at the Billings airport thinking it'll be fine on mountain roads. Mud already cakes the wheel wells and there's a fresh scratch along the passenger side where a branch got too familiar on the access road.

The engine cuts. Through the windshield, a shape moves. The driver's side door opens and a boot hits the gravel, followed by a second boot, followed by a woman who straightens up and looks at my cabin the way a person looks at something they've been imagining for a long time and have just discovered is real.

Dark honey hair pulled back in a clip that's already losing the battle. Brown eyes, warm even at this distance. Curves under a practical jacket that says she dressed for function and managed to look like something else entirely.

She's not what I expected.

I didn't expect anything. I didn't ask for this. That needs to be clear.

But she's standing in my driveway, and my hands have gone still at my sides, and the objection I've been rehearsing for the last twenty minutes seems to have misplaced itself somewhere between my brain and my mouth.

She takes in the cabin. The woodpile. The workshop. The mountains rising behind everything like a wall between this place and the rest of the world. Her expression shifts through something I can't quite read. Not disappointment. Not fear. Something closer to recognition, like she's seeing a photograph she was shown once and is now confirming the details match.

Then her gaze lands on me.

Six foot four. Two hundred and thirty pounds. Flannel rolled to the elbows, sawdust in my beard, a chainsaw scar across the back of my left hand, and an expression that has been described by various people over the years as "aggressively uninviting."