Page 21 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Her face changed. The tiredness was still there, but underneath it, something lit up. A spark, bright and warm, breaking through the exhaustion like sunlight through clouds.

“You’d really do that?” she asked, and the wonder in her voice, the genuine surprise that someone would offer to come to her, made something behind my ribs crack.

The realization of what I’d said hit me half a second late. I had offered to come to her house. Voluntarily. On request. Like a man who did that kind of thing. Like a man who had someone to go home to.

“I’ll go back to work,” I said, pulling my arms away from her.

“Wait.” She caught my hand. Her fingers were cool against my palm, small and certain, and she pressed her phone into my grip. “Put your number in. So I can actually call you. Because I just realized that after everything, after the sidewalk, the soup, the cookies, the nightmare, all of it, we don’t even have each other’s phone numbers. How ridiculous is that?”

She was right. It was ridiculous. Over a month of her showing up at my mill, two nights at her apartment, one of them spent in each other’s arms, and we’d been operating on nothing but the assumption that she’d keep appearing and I’d keep letting her. No safety net. No way to reach each other outside of the sawmill and the sidewalk and whatever accident of proximity brought us together next.

I looked at the phone. Then at her. Then back at the phone.

I typed in my number. Saved it. Handed it back.

She glanced at the screen and grinned, the kind of grin that made her whole face rearrange itself into something dangerously close to joy. “You saved yourself as ‘Sawyer.’ Just Sawyer. No emoji, no last name, nothing.”

“That’s my name.”

“Most people add something. A last name. A little descriptor.”

“I’m not most people.”

“No,” she said, and the grin softened into something warmer. “You’re really not.”

She released my hand, and the absence of her fingers felt like the absence of something I hadn’t known I’d been missing.

“Okay. I’m going home. I’m really, genuinely, about-to-fall-over tired.” She took a step back and swayed slightly, catching herself with a hand on the desk.

“Sit down,” I said.

It wasn’t a suggestion. I pulled the chair from behind the desk, the one with the cracked leather seat that had been here since before I’d bought the place, and pointed at it.

“Sawyer, I just said I’m going home.”

“You can barely stand. Sit.”

She looked at the chair. Looked at me. Then she sat, because even Chloe Matthews had a limit, and she had apparently just found it.

I walked out of the office and found Danny, one of the younger crew members, loading the last of the afternoon cut onto the flatbed.

“Go to Mabel’s,” I said. “Get soup. The chicken one with the thick noodles. And bread. The sourdough, not the rye.”

Danny blinked at me. In three years of working the mill, I had never once asked anyone to make a food run. “You want me to… get soup?”

“Did I stutter?”

“No, sir.” Danny grabbed his keys and practically sprinted to his truck.

When I got back to the office, Chloe was curled in the chair with her legs tucked under her, her head resting against the leather back. Her eyes were half-closed, her breathing slow, and she was watching me through the office window as I crossed the yard.

“Did you just send someone to buy me food?” she asked when I came through the door.

“The crew eats. There’s always a run.”

“There is absolutely not always a run. Josh told me you once made a guy eat lunch in his truck because he took two minutes too long at the microwave.”

I made a mental note to have a conversation with Josh about information security.