Page 11 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

The words came out harder than I intended. Or maybe they came out exactly as hard as I intended, because the memory of yesterday, her lips on my cheek, the shock of it, the warmth, the way my skin had burned for an hour afterward, had been playing on a loop in my head since it happened. I’d spent the entire night in my workshop, building a bookshelf I didn’t need, trying to sand her out of my thoughts. It hadn’t worked.

She stopped in front of me, unbothered. Completely, totally, infuriatingly unbothered. She held up a small paper bag.

“I just want to give you cookies too,” she said.

“For what?”

“Just for you to feel a little better. You need some sweetness in your life.” She held the bag out, the paper crinkling. “I bought them from Mabel’s. The ones with the brown butter and sea salt. Dollie said they’re the best in town.”

“I don’t like cookies.”

“Everyone likes cookies.”

“I don’t.”

“Have you ever actually tried not being difficult, or is it a full-time commitment?”

I set down the wrench I’d been holding and straightened to my full height, which put a solid ten inches between us. It was a move that worked on most people. Delivery drivers, new employees, the occasional tourist who wandered too close to the equipment. Height plus silence plus a flat stare was usually enough to send anyone backing up with an apology.

She tilted her head up and looked at me like I’d done something cute.

“Please,” she said. “Just take them. I bought them for you. It would be rude to let them go to waste.”

“I didn’t ask you to buy me anything.”

“You didn’t ask me to save you from a frozen sidewalk either, and yet here we are, both alive and having this conversation. Funny how that works.”

Something twisted in my chest. Not anger. Not exactly. Something more complicated, something with too many edges to name.

I started to walk away. Turn around, go back to the mill, put a building and several large pieces of machinery between me and this woman and her paper bag and her smile.

Her hand caught my arm.

It was light, barely more than her fingertips grazing the fabric of my sleeve, but the contact jolted through me like a current. My body reacted before my brain caught up. I flinched, hard, my arm jerking away with the automatic, hair-trigger reflex of a man who had spent too many years in places where unexpected contact meant danger.

My elbow caught her.

Not hard. Not full force. But enough. Enough to knock her off balance, enough to send her stumbling sideways, enough that her foot caught on the uneven ground and she went down.

She hit the dirt with a soft thud and a sharp intake of breath.

The world stopped.

For a full second, everything ceased to exist except the image of her on the ground. Sitting in the sawdust, one palm pressed flat against the dirt, the other braced on her knee. Her face was turned away from me, her hair falling forward like a curtain.

I had done that. I had knocked her down. A woman half my size who had been trying to give me cookies.

The shame was instant and devastating. It flooded through me like ice water, drowning out everything else, the stubbornness, the walls, the careful armor I wore like a second skin. For one terrible moment, I was back in a place I didn’t want to be, a place where flinching was survival and the cost was always paid by someone else.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were wide, but not with fear. With surprise. Raw, unfiltered surprise, like she was processing what had just happened and hadn’t yet decided what to feel about it.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “I won’t push.”

She started to get up, brushing the sawdust off her palms, and that’s when I saw it. Her left knee, visible through a tear in her jeans that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The skin was scraped, a raw, red patch dotted with tiny beads of blood, the kind of wound that stung more than it bled.

I did that.

“Let’s go eat over there, Dollie,” she called out, her voice steady, casual, like nothing had happened. Like she hadn’t just been knocked to the ground by a man twice her size. She picked up the paper bag of cookies from where it had fallen and tucked it under her arm.