Page 20 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I could feel it in the way the saw dragged, the slight resistance that meant the teeth were losing their edge. A sharp blade sings through wood. A dull one argues with it. I made a mental note to swap it out before the afternoon run and turned my attention back to the lumber order spread across my desk, columns of numbers that should have held my focus the way they usually did.

They didn’t.

Three days since I’d slept in her apartment. Three days since she’d held me through a nightmare I couldn’t remember and spoken about her parents with a gentleness that had undone something in my chest I hadn’t known was knotted. Three days since she’d lain beside me in a bed too small for one person, let alone two, and told me to sleep like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Three days since I’d called her beautiful.

The thought made me grip the pen harder. I’d said it to her back as she walked out of the room, a confession that had slipped past every guard I had, and she’d gone to the kitchen and made pancakes like the world hadn’t just shifted on its axis.

I hadn’t seen her since. Three days without her showing up at the mill, three days without the sound of her voice cutting through the noise of the saws, and the silence was louder than it had any right to be. Before her, I’d gone years without minding silence. Now three days of it felt like a drought.

The thing that bothered me most was that I had no way to reach her. In over a month of her visits, we’d never exchanged numbers. That was by design, or at least by habit. Our entire arrangement had been built on her showing up. She came to me. That was how it worked. I didn’t call, didn’t text, didn’t reach out. I just existed in my space and she appeared in it, like sunlight through a window, and I pretended not to notice how much brighter everything got when she did.

But now she hadn’t appeared for three days, and I didn’t know if she was tired or sick or busy or if the morning after the nightmare had been too much, if holding a man through his worst moment and hearing him cry for his dead brother had finally shown her what she was getting into and she’d decided to get out.

I shoved the thought down and checked the clock. Half past four. The crew would knock off at five, the yard would empty, and I’d have the silence I needed to get my head straight. Silence and work. The only two things that had ever made sense to me.

“Sawyer?”

Josh’s voice came from the doorway of the office, carrying the particular tone he used when he was about to deliver information I didn’t want.

“What.”

“Chloe’s here.”

Something kicked in my chest. I crushed it.

“Tell her I’m busy.”

“I did. She said, and I’m quoting here, ‘Tell him I don’t care.’”

I looked up from the desk. Through the office window, I could see her crossing the yard, and even from a distance, I could tell something was off. She moved slower than usual, her steps heavier, her shoulders rounded in a way that was wrong on a woman who normally walked like the world owed her a red carpet. Her face, when she got close enough for me to see it clearly, was pale. Not her usual warm-honey tone but washed out, drained, with shadows under her eyes that told me she hadn’t slept properly.

She looked exhausted. And she was alone. No Dollie, no cookie tin, no pretense of a social visit. She’d come just for me.

She walked through the office door, past Josh, who stepped aside with the practiced ease of a man who had learned not to stand between Chloe Matthews and her destination, and came straight to me.

And hugged me.

Her arms went around my waist, her face pressed into my chest, and her body leaned into mine with the boneless trust of someone who had reached the end of their energy and was borrowing someone else’s. She was warm against me, small and solid, and the sawdust on my shirt transferred to her hair in tiny golden flecks.

“Don’t complain,” she mumbled into my flannel. “I am way too tired.”

My arms hung at my sides. This was the part where I was supposed to push her back, remind her that this was a workplace, tell her that physical contact in the middle of the sawmill yard was not something I did. My brain knew the script.

My arms didn’t get the memo. They came up, slowly, and settled around her. One across her back. One at the base of her skull, my fingers curving into her hair without permission.

“Then why did you come here?” I asked. My voice came out rougher than I intended, but quieter too, like the volume had been turned down without my consent. “You should have rested.”

She tilted her head up. Her chin pressed into my sternum and those blue eyes, dimmer than usual, ringed with fatigue, looked up at me with an honesty that hit me like a two-by-four.

“Because you’re here,” she said.

The words were simple. Five syllables, basic vocabulary, nothing that should have made the ground shift under my boots. But they did. Because she wasn’t saying it to be clever or to tease or to push my buttons. She was saying it because she meant it. She had dragged herself across town, exhausted and half-asleep, because the place she wanted to be was wherever I was.

I didn’t know what to do with that. I had spent over a month watching this woman walk through every barrier I’d put up like they were made of tissue paper, and she’d done it with a smile and a bag of cookies and the absolute refusal to leave me alone. And I’d let her. I’d let her closer than anyone since Jimmy, and the terrifying thing wasn’t that she was here. The terrifying thing was how wrong the three days without her had felt.

“I could come to your place instead,” I said. The words were out before I could catch them, bypassing every filter I had. “Just call me.”