Page 13 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Behind me, I heard Josh say something low and Dollie laugh, and then Chloe’s voice, carrying across the yard with the easy confidence of someone who had already decided she’d won: “See you tomorrow, grumpy.”

I didn’t look back.

The rest of the afternoon was shot. I couldn’t focus. Every time I picked up a tool, my hands remembered the feel of her skin under my fingers, warm and soft, so different from the wood and metal I spent my days touching. Every time the yard went quiet between cuts, I heard her voice. Shouldn’t I be enough reason?

No. The answer was no. Because reasons to smile were reasons to care, and reasons to care were reasons to lose, and I had lost enough. I had lost Jimmy on a dirt road in Kandahar, lost myself in the years after, lost the ability to exist in the world like a normal person who could accept cookies from a pretty woman without flinching hard enough to knock her down.

Josh found me in the workshop after closing, sanding a table leg that didn’t need sanding.

“So,” he said, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and that look on his face, the one that said he was about to be insufferable. “Chloe.”

“No.”

“I didn’t even say anything yet.”

“You were going to. Don’t.”

“I was just going to say that she seems nice.”

“She seems like a headache.”

Josh grinned. The kind of grin that made me want to throw the sandpaper at him. “She made you blush.”

“She did not.”

“Your ears were the color of a fire truck, Sawyer. I could see it from thirty feet away.”

“Get out of my workshop.”

“She likes you.”

“She doesn’t know me. She likes bothering me. There’s a difference.”

“Is there, though?”

I set down the sandpaper and looked at him. Flat. Direct. The look I used when I needed someone to understand that a conversation was over.

Josh held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I’m going. But for what it’s worth? That’s the most alive I’ve seen you look in three years.”

He left before I could respond, which was probably smart, because I didn’t have a response. I stood in my workshop, surrounded by sawdust and half-finished furniture and the smell of cedar, and I thought about a woman who stuck her tongue out at me in my own sawmill and kissed my cheek like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Then I picked up the sandpaper and went back to work.

The cookies were still on the flat surface where I’d left them. I found them when I was locking up, the paper bag sitting there in the fading light, slightly crumpled and dusted with sawdust.

I stood there looking at them for a long time.

Then I picked up the bag, took it to my truck, and drove home.

I ate them at my kitchen table, alone, in the silence of a cabin that had never felt quite this empty before. The cookies were good. Brown butter and sea salt, sweet with an edge, exactly like the woman who’d bought them.

I ate every single one.

5

CHLOE

One month of bugging Sawyer Cole was the most fun I’d had since moving to Pinewood Ridge.