Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret (Small Town Grumpy Sunshine #1)

Chapter 1

CHLOE

The glitter was never coming out of my hair.

I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror and groaned.

Somewhere between the finger-painting station and the goodbye circle, a five-year-old named Marcus had decided my head was the perfect canvas for his “sparkle explosion” art project.

Gold and silver flecks clung to my dark blonde waves like the world’s most aggressive confetti, and no amount of finger-combing was going to fix it.

“You look like a disco ball, Miss Matthews,” I muttered to myself, pulling out of the Pinewood Ridge Elementary parking lot.

Teaching kindergarten was not for the faint of heart.

Today alone, I had refereed three arguments over who got to be the line leader, mopped up a juice box catastrophe that somehow covered an entire table, convinced a sobbing Lily Patterson that her mom was, in fact, coming back to pick her up, and sang “Baby Shark” so many times that the melody was now permanently fused to my brainstem.

My feet ached. My voice was hoarse. There was a mysterious sticky patch on my left elbow that I was choosing not to investigate.

And I loved every single second of it.

There was something about those tiny humans, with their big eyes and their absolute certainty that the world was made of magic, that made everything else disappear.

The bills I could barely cover on a kindergarten teacher’s salary.

The apartment that was more “cozy” than “comfortable,” which was real estate code for small enough to hear my neighbor sneeze through the wall.

The fact that my love life was so nonexistent that my best friend Dollie had started making jokes about setting me up with her boyfriend’s coworkers, plural, like she was running some kind of dating lottery.

None of that mattered when a kid looked up at me with a gap-toothed grin and said, “Miss Matthews, you’re my favorite person in the whole wide world.”

I turned onto Maple Street, the road that wound through the older part of Pinewood Ridge where the streetlights were spaced just far enough apart to create pockets of shadow between the golden pools of light.

It was late October, and the sun had already tucked itself behind the mountains, leaving the sky bruised in shades of purple and deep blue.

The air that came through my cracked window was sharp, carrying the smell of pine and the faintest hint of chimney smoke from somewhere down the valley.

My stomach growled. I had leftover pasta in the fridge, and if I was feeling ambitious, I might even heat it up instead of eating it cold over the sink like some kind of feral raccoon.

Dollie would be horrified. Dollie was horrified by most of my eating habits, actually, which was rich coming from a woman who once ate an entire sleeve of Oreos for breakfast and called it “meal prep.”

I was mentally debating the pasta-reheating question when I saw him.

At first, I thought it was a pile of something. A garbage bag, maybe, or a coat someone had dropped on the sidewalk near the bench outside Murphy’s Bar. But garbage bags don’t groan. And coats don’t have legs.

I slowed the car.

The pile shifted, and I saw an arm, thick and muscular, reaching for the edge of the bench like a drowning man grasping for a lifeboat. The arm missed. The pile slumped back down.

“Oh, come on,” I whispered, gripping the steering wheel. “Not my problem. Not my problem. Definitely not my problem.”

I drove past.

Made it a full thirty feet before I cursed under my breath, checked my mirror, and pulled over.

Because apparently, Chloe Matthews could not drive past a human being lying on a sidewalk in forty-degree weather, even when said human being was clearly just someone who had overdone it at the bar and would probably be fine. Probably. Most likely. Almost certainly.

I grabbed my jacket from the passenger seat and got out of the car, my sneakers crunching on the gravel shoulder. The cold hit me immediately, sharp enough to make my eyes water. I pulled the jacket on and walked back toward the bench, my breath making small white clouds in the air.

Up close, the situation was worse than I’d thought.

He was a man. A large man. Broad shoulders, long legs, dark hair that fell across his forehead in a way that would have been attractive if he hadn’t been face-down on concrete.

He was wearing a flannel shirt, no jacket, and his boots were untied.

The smell of whiskey hit me from three feet away, strong enough to make my nose wrinkle.

“Hey,” I said, stopping a safe distance back. “Hey, are you okay?”

No response. Just the sound of his breathing, ragged and uneven.

I took a step closer. “Sir? You can’t sleep here. It’s freezing.”

A groan. His hand moved, fingers curling against the pavement. Then nothing.

I looked up and down the street. Empty. Murphy’s Bar had its lights on, but through the window I could see it was nearly cleared out. The few remaining patrons were hunched over their drinks, lost in their own worlds. Nobody was coming to claim this man.

I should call someone. The sheriff, maybe. Or just go home and pretend I hadn’t seen anything. People got drunk. People passed out. It happened. It wasn’t my responsibility to play nursemaid to every guy who couldn’t handle his liquor on a Tuesday night.

I turned to walk back to my car.

“Jimmy.”

The word came out broken, cracked right down the middle like a stone split by frost. I stopped.

“No.” His voice was raw, wrecked, and something in it made the hair on my arms stand up despite the cold. “Please hold on. Don’t die. Please.”

I turned back slowly.

He was still on the ground, but his body had curled in on itself, his knees drawing toward his chest like a child in a nightmare. His hands were fisted in his own hair, pulling, and even in the dim light, I could see the wetness on his face.

“Brother, please.” It was barely a whisper now, choked and desperate. “Don’t leave me. Jimmy, please. Stay with me. I’m right here. I’m right here, just hold on.”

My chest cracked open.

Whatever wall I’d been building between myself and this stranger, whatever rational voice in my head had been listing all the reasons to get back in my car and drive away, it all crumbled.

Because that sound, that raw, animal grief in his voice, that wasn’t a drunk man rambling.

That was a man drowning in something no amount of whiskey could wash away.

I walked back to him and knelt down on the cold sidewalk, not caring that the concrete bit into my knees through my thin pants.

Up close, I could see the details I’d missed.

The scar that ran along his jaw. The calluses on his hands, thick and rough, the hands of someone who worked with them every day.

The way his whole body shook, not from the cold, but from something much deeper.

“Hey,” I said softly, reaching out. I took his face in my hands, both palms against his cheeks, and tilted his head up. His eyes were closed, squeezed shut, and the tears were still coming, silent now. His skin was cold under my fingers. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re okay.”

His eyes opened.

Even red-rimmed and unfocused, they were striking.

A shade of green I’d never seen before, dark and deep, like the pine forests that surrounded Pinewood Ridge after a rainstorm.

They stared at me without really seeing me, lost somewhere between here and whatever hell his mind had dragged him back to.

“Jimmy,” he whispered.

“I’m not Jimmy,” I said gently. “But I’m here. And you’re freezing, and you’re on a sidewalk, and I’m not leaving you here. So you and I are going to have to figure something out, okay?”

He blinked. Once. Twice. The confusion was thick in his expression, layers of alcohol and grief making everything slow and muddled.

“Where do you live?” I asked. “Can you tell me your address? I’ll drive you home.”

Nothing. His eyes drifted, losing focus again, and his head grew heavier in my hands.

“Okay, that’s a no on the address.” I looked around again, hoping someone, anyone, would materialize to help me. The street remained stubbornly empty. “Great. This is great. This is exactly how I saw my Tuesday night going.”

I couldn’t leave him here. That much was certain.

The temperature was dropping, he wasn’t wearing a jacket, and he was in no state to take care of himself.

If I walked away and something happened to him, I’d never be able to live with myself.

I’d be the woman who let a man freeze to death on a bench because she was too tired and too covered in glitter to help.

“All right, big guy,” I said, shifting to get my arm under his shoulder.

“We’re doing this. You’re coming with me.

And I want you to know that I am a kindergarten teacher who weighs a hundred and thirty pounds, so if you could contribute even a little bit to the standing-up portion of this evening, I would really appreciate it. ”

He didn’t contribute much. Getting him upright was like trying to prop up a fallen tree.

The man was solid, all muscle and bone, and he outweighed me by what had to be at least seventy or eighty pounds.

I managed to get him to his feet through a combination of determination, leverage, and what I could only describe as sheer stubbornness.

He swayed against me, his arm draped heavy across my shoulders, his boots dragging on the pavement as we shuffled toward my car.

“You owe me so big for this,” I panted, adjusting my grip around his waist. “I’m talking cookies. A fruit basket. Maybe a handwritten thank-you note. On nice stationery.”

He mumbled something incoherent and leaned harder into me.

“That’s not a thank you, but I’ll take it as agreement.”

Getting him into the passenger seat was its own special adventure.

He was too tall, too broad, and too unconscious to be cooperative.

I ended up sort of folding him in, one limb at a time, like trying to fit an oversized suitcase into an undersized trunk.

By the time I got his seatbelt on and closed the door, I was sweating despite the cold.

I stood there for a moment, hands on my knees, catching my breath. Then I looked up at the sky, where the first stars were starting to appear above the treeline.

“This is a terrible idea,” I told the stars. “You know that, right?”

The stars, unhelpfully, said nothing.

I got in the driver’s side, started the engine, and glanced over at my passenger.

He’d slumped against the window, his breath fogging the glass in slow, rhythmic clouds.

In the glow of the dashboard lights, the hard lines of his face had softened.

The furrow between his brows had smoothed.

He looked younger with his guard down, and sadder, like a man who’d been carrying something heavy for so long that his body had shaped itself around the weight.

“Jimmy,” he murmured one more time, so quiet I almost missed it.

I put the car in drive.

My apartment was exactly as I’d left it that morning: small, warm, and decorated in what Dollie called “Pinterest on a budget.” A secondhand couch with too many throw pillows.

String lights draped across the bookshelf.

A kitchen that was really just a counter, a stove, and a prayer.

But it was mine, and it was clean, and right now it was approximately ten thousand times better than a frozen sidewalk.

Getting him from the car to the front door took another small eternity.

He’d regained enough consciousness to move his feet, which helped, but his coordination was somewhere between “newborn deer” and “no.” I guided him through the door, down the short hallway, and into the spare room, which was really just a glorified closet with a twin bed and a nightstand.

He collapsed onto the bed like gravity had been waiting for this moment. I pulled off his boots, which took an unreasonable amount of effort, and draped the spare blanket over him. His breathing evened out almost immediately, deep and slow, the sleep of the completely and utterly gone.

I stood in the doorway and looked at him. A total stranger, passed out in my guest room, smelling like a distillery and crying about someone named Jimmy.

“What are you doing, Chloe?” I whispered to myself.

I didn’t have an answer. But I went to the kitchen anyway, set a glass of water and two aspirin on the nightstand next to him, and left the door open a crack.

Then I sat on my couch, pulled a throw blanket around my shoulders, and listened to the sound of a stranger sleeping in my spare room until my own eyes grew heavy.

The glitter in my hair caught the string lights and scattered tiny stars across the ceiling.

I fell asleep watching them.