Page 25 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“You should have told me.”

“I didn’t want to disturb you. You sounded busy. And honestly, you seemed like you were in a mood.”

His jaw clenched. “I’m always in a mood. That doesn’t mean you don’t call me when you’re sick.”

“I did call you.”

“You called me and then hung up before I could do anything about it. That doesn’t count.”

He pulled me toward the building, his arm coming around my waist to steady me, and I let him because the alternative was face-planting on my own doorstep. We made it inside, up the stairs, and into my apartment, where he deposited me on the couch with a carefulness that contradicted everything about the hard set of his face.

“Where’s the medicine?” he asked.

I held up the pharmacy bag. He took it, read the labels with the same focus he applied to equipment manuals, and poured two ibuprofen into his palm. Then he filled a glass of water and brought both to me.

“You should have just told me straight,” he said, standing over me with his arms crossed. “So I’d know right away.”

“I’m not your responsibility, Sawyer.”

The words came out reflexive, automatic, the same independence speech I’d been giving since I moved to Pinewood Ridge. I was the woman who fixed her own faucets and paid her own rent and ate cold pasta over the sink. I didn’t need someone to take care of me. That was the whole point.

He looked at me for a long moment. His green eyes, usually so carefully guarded, were open in a way that made my breath catch. Then he said, in a voice that was rough and quiet and utterly sure of itself:

“You bugged me for over a month. You showed up at my sawmill with cookies and opinions. You held me through a nightmare and cooked me pancakes and called me grumpy so many times I forgot what my actual name sounded like.” He paused. “You earned my responsibility.”

The room went very still.

The fever was making my eyes watery. That was definitely it. The fever and the medicine and the general state of being sick. It had nothing to do with the fact that Sawyer Cole, the most closed-off, walled-up, emotionally fortified man I had ever met, had just told me I mattered to him in the only language he knew how to speak.

“Should I blush at that?” I asked, and my voice cracked on the last word.

“Just take the medicine,” he said, but the hardness in his face had softened, and when he sat down on the couch next to me, he pulled the blanket off the back and draped it over my legs with a gentleness that made me want to cry all over again.

He stayed.

The entire day. He called Josh and told him to handle the mill. He made soup from the ingredients in my fridge (which wasn’t as good as my soup, but I didn’t tell him that). He refilled my water. He put his hand on my forehead every hour like a human thermometer and reported the results with clinical seriousness. (“Still hot.” “Less hot.” “Better. Drink more water.”)

At one point, I woke from a nap to find him sitting in the armchair by the window, reading one of my paperback romance novels. He was holding it like it might bite him, his brow furrowed in concentration, and when he noticed me watching, he set it down with the casual speed of a man pretending he hadn’t been reading at all.

“Any good?” I asked.

“It’s ridiculous.”

“You were on page forty-seven.”

“I was looking at it. Not reading it.”

“Sawyer, your thumb was marking a page.”

He stood up and went to refill my water glass, and I was pretty sure the tips of his ears were red.

By evening, the fever had broken. I was still weak, still tired, but the dizziness had faded and the world had stopped its aggressive spinning. Sawyer was in the kitchen, washing the soup pot with the methodical thoroughness of a man who cleaned things the way he built things, properly and completely.

“Thank you,” I said from the couch.

He didn’t turn around. “Don’t get sick again.”

“That’s not really how illness works.”