Page 6 of The Mountain Man Lumberjack’s Claimed Bride

My phone buzzes.

Bette:

How did it go? Is he there? Did he yell? He yells sometimes but he doesn't mean it.

Me:

He didn't yell. I'm staying. One week.

Bette:

ONE WEEK?? Nora that's amazing!! I knew he'd come around. What did he say?

Me:

He told me what time dinner is and where the towels are. That's basically a marriage proposal in mountain man, right?

Bette:

Oh honey. You have no idea. That man hasn't cooked for another person in eight years. If he feeds you tonight, start picking out china patterns.

The phone goes into my pocket. The coffee is still warm, still perfect, and through the window Hunter is splitting wood with an axe, each swing landing with controlled force that sends the halves flying in opposite directions.

His form is flawless. Feet set wide, weight transferring from back leg to front, the axe describing a clean arc that uses gravity instead of fighting it. Economy of motion. No wasted energy. A man who learned this from someone who learned it from someone else, handed down through bodies and repetition until it became part of the blood.

My pulse does something inconvenient.

Fourteen months since the engagement ended. Three years before that, slowly disappearing into a relationship that wanted me to take up less space. Before that, a career I was good at but didn't love. A city that got bigger while my life got smaller. A lease renewed every year because starting over felt harder than staying put.

Until it didn't.

Until the morning I read about a timber man in Montana who built his world with his own hands, and something in my chest recognized something in his words, and before the logical part of my brain could intervene, my fingers were dialing the agency.

This could go badly. Probably will. The man clearly didn't ask for me, doesn't want me here, and is currently working through his feelings about it by assaulting firewood.

But the coffee is perfect. The cabin is clean. The guest room is at the end of the hall, and dinner is at six.

Outside, Hunter buries the axe in the chopping block, straightens, and rolls his shoulders. For one second, his head turns toward the kitchen window. Toward where I'm standing.

Our eyes meet through the glass.

He looks away first.

My suitcases are still in the car. The guest room is waiting. One week to make myself impossible to refuse.

The coffee mug goes in the sink, rinsed clean, set on the drying rack the same way everything in this cabin seems to be done: deliberately, precisely, in its proper place.

Seven days. That's all I asked for.

Something tells me I won't need all of them.

CHAPTER THREE

HUNTER

Four days. She's been here four days, and my cabin smells like bread.

Not store-bought bread. Not the dense, flavorless bricks they sell at the general store in town that taste like sawdust wrapped in plastic. Real bread. The kind my mother used to make on Sunday mornings before church, pulling golden loaves from the oven while the whole house filled with warmth and yeast and something that felt permanent.