Page 1 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

1

CHLOE

The glitter was never coming out of my hair.

I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror and groaned. Somewhere between the finger-painting station and the goodbye circle, a five-year-old named Marcus had decided my head was the perfect canvas for his “sparkle explosion” art project. Gold and silver flecks clung to my dark blonde waves like the world’s most aggressive confetti, and no amount of finger-combing was going to fix it.

“You look like a disco ball, Miss Matthews,” I muttered to myself, pulling out of the Pinewood Ridge Elementary parking lot.

Teaching kindergarten was not for the faint of heart. Today alone, I had refereed three arguments over who got to be the line leader, mopped up a juice box catastrophe that somehow covered an entire table, convinced a sobbing Lily Patterson that her mom was, in fact, coming back to pick her up, and sang “Baby Shark” so many times that the melody was now permanently fused to my brainstem. My feet ached. My voice was hoarse. There was a mysterious sticky patch on my left elbow that I was choosing not to investigate.

And I loved every single second of it.

There was something about those tiny humans, with their big eyes and their absolute certainty that the world was made of magic, that made everything else disappear. The bills I could barely cover on a kindergarten teacher’s salary. The apartment that was more “cozy” than “comfortable,” which was real estate code for small enough to hear my neighbor sneeze through the wall. The fact that my love life was so nonexistent that my best friend Dollie had started making jokes about setting me up with her boyfriend’s coworkers, plural, like she was running some kind of dating lottery.

None of that mattered when a kid looked up at me with a gap-toothed grin and said, “Miss Matthews, you’re my favorite person in the whole wide world.”

I turned onto Maple Street, the road that wound through the older part of Pinewood Ridge where the streetlights were spaced just far enough apart to create pockets of shadow between the golden pools of light. It was late October, and the sun had already tucked itself behind the mountains, leaving the sky bruised in shades of purple and deep blue. The air that came through my cracked window was sharp, carrying the smell of pine and the faintest hint of chimney smoke from somewhere down the valley.

My stomach growled. I had leftover pasta in the fridge, and if I was feeling ambitious, I might even heat it up instead of eating it cold over the sink like some kind of feral raccoon. Dollie would be horrified. Dollie was horrified by most of my eating habits, actually, which was rich coming from a woman who once ate an entire sleeve of Oreos for breakfast and called it “meal prep.”

I was mentally debating the pasta-reheating question when I saw him.

At first, I thought it was a pile of something. A garbage bag, maybe, or a coat someone had dropped on the sidewalk near the bench outside Murphy’s Bar. But garbage bags don’t groan. And coats don’t have legs.

I slowed the car.

The pile shifted, and I saw an arm, thick and muscular, reaching for the edge of the bench like a drowning man grasping for a lifeboat. The arm missed. The pile slumped back down.

“Oh, come on,” I whispered, gripping the steering wheel. “Not my problem. Not my problem. Definitely not my problem.”

I drove past.

Made it a full thirty feet before I cursed under my breath, checked my mirror, and pulled over.

Because apparently, Chloe Matthews could not drive past a human being lying on a sidewalk in forty-degree weather, even when said human being was clearly just someone who had overdone it at the bar and would probably be fine. Probably. Most likely. Almost certainly.

I grabbed my jacket from the passenger seat and got out of the car, my sneakers crunching on the gravel shoulder. The cold hit me immediately, sharp enough to make my eyes water. I pulled the jacket on and walked back toward the bench, my breath making small white clouds in the air.

Up close, the situation was worse than I’d thought.

He was a man. A large man. Broad shoulders, long legs, dark hair that fell across his forehead in a way that would have been attractive if he hadn’t been face-down on concrete. He was wearing a flannel shirt, no jacket, and his boots were untied. The smell of whiskey hit me from three feet away, strong enough to make my nose wrinkle.

“Hey,” I said, stopping a safe distance back. “Hey, are you okay?”

No response. Just the sound of his breathing, ragged and uneven.

I took a step closer. “Sir? You can’t sleep here. It’s freezing.”

A groan. His hand moved, fingers curling against the pavement. Then nothing.

I looked up and down the street. Empty. Murphy’s Bar had its lights on, but through the window I could see it was nearly cleared out. The few remaining patrons were hunched over their drinks, lost in their own worlds. Nobody was coming to claim this man.

I should call someone. The sheriff, maybe. Or just go home and pretend I hadn’t seen anything. People got drunk. People passed out. It happened. It wasn’t my responsibility to play nursemaid to every guy who couldn’t handle his liquor on a Tuesday night.

I turned to walk back to my car.

“Jimmy.”