The Mountain Man Lumberjack's Claimed Bride (Mountain Man Sanctuary Season 2 #15)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

HUNTER

The chainsaw bites into the Douglas fir with a sound that rattles up through my forearms and settles somewhere behind my teeth.

Sixty feet of timber, marked for selective harvest three weeks ago, and the notch cut is clean.

Textbook. The kind of precision my grandfather would have nodded at once and never mentioned again because that's how the Marsh men communicate approval: through the absence of criticism.

Sawdust sprays in a golden arc against the morning light as the back cut deepens. The tree groans. Shifts. That deep, creaking surrender that says gravity has taken over and physics is doing the rest.

"Timber!" The word rips out of me on instinct, even though there's nobody within a mile to hear it. Habit. My father yelled it. His father before him. Some things don't require an audience.

The fir drops clean, threading the gap between two standing pines without catching a single branch.

One hundred and twelve years of growth, laid down in forty seconds.

The earth shakes under my boots when it lands, and a flock of something small and startled erupts from the canopy two hundred yards east.

Silence rolls back in like water filling a hole.

This is the part people don't understand about logging.

They think it's about destruction. About men with machines tearing through forests for profit.

What it actually is, what my family has done for three generations on this mountain, is surgery.

Every tree I mark is chosen because taking it gives the ones around it room to grow.

Selective harvesting. Sustainable forestry.

The kind of operation that means these woods will still be standing long after my bones are in the ground.

The morning is sharp and clear, early October air carrying the first real bite of the season.

My breath comes out in thin clouds as the saw idles down and the forest resumes its usual business of existing without my interference.

Blue sky punches through the canopy in ragged patches.

Somewhere down the ridge, Sawyer Creek is running loud with last week's rain.

Another morning. Another tree. Another day of exactly the kind of life I built for myself: quiet, orderly, mine.

My phone buzzes in my chest pocket while the engine cools.

Bette. Of course it's Bette. My sister has a sixth sense for interrupting the only moments of my day when the noise in my head finally goes quiet.

"What." Not a question. A statement of acknowledgment that she exists and has called me, which is more than most people get.

"Good morning to you too, sunshine." Her voice carries the particular brand of cheerfulness that means she's done something she knows I won't like. "Are you up on the ridge?"

"Working."

"Right. So, funny story."

Nothing that starts with funny story has ever been funny. Not once. Not in the thirty-eight years Bette Marsh has been my younger sister and the single most meddlesome human being in the state of Montana.

"I don't want to hear it."

"Too bad." A pause. Then, with the careful casualness of a woman who has been rehearsing this exact sentence: "You're going to get a letter today. From an agency. A matchmaking agency."

The saw is still warm in my hands. My grip tightens around the handle, which is better than tightening around the phone. "Bette."

"Before you get mad?—"

"Already there."

"—just listen. I submitted your profile to a mail-order bride service. A real one, a legitimate one, not some shady website. They vet everyone. Background checks, interviews, the whole thing. And someone matched with you. A woman. She read your profile, she liked it, and she accepted."

The silence that follows is the kind that has weight. The kind that presses down on a conversation the way January snow presses down on a roof until something cracks.

"You submitted," my voice is low and flat, "a profile. To a mail-order bride agency. Using my name."

"Your name, your photo, a description of your property, your hobbies, your?—"

"Without asking me."

"If I'd asked, you'd have said no."

"That's because the answer is no."

"Hunter." Her voice shifts. Softer now. The voice she used after the divorce, and after Dad's back surgery, and every other time she's decided that she knows better than everyone else about what a person needs.

"You've been alone for eight years. You eat dinner at a table set for one.

You talk to trees more than you talk to people.

And the last time you came to town was three weeks ago to buy chainsaw oil and a bag of coffee beans. "

"Sounds ideal."

"It sounds like a man who's given up."

The words land somewhere uncomfortable. Not in my chest, where I could dismiss them. Lower. In the gut, where truth tends to settle when it catches you off guard.

"Send the letter back," I tell her. "Tell the agency there's been a mistake."

"Can't. She's already on her way."

My jaw locks. "What do you mean, she's already on her way?"

"The acceptance was two weeks ago. The agency contacted me because the correspondence address I put down was mine. She's supposed to arrive today."

Today.

A woman I've never met, whose name I don't know, is currently in transit to my property because my sister decided that eight years of solitude is a character flaw rather than a lifestyle choice.

"Today, Bette?"

"Her name is Nora Chambers. She's thirty-one. Former school librarian. She seems wonderful. You'd know all this if you checked your email, which you never do because you're a hermit who thinks 2005 was the pinnacle of communication technology."

Through the trees, the valley drops away in folds of green and gold, stretching toward the town I avoid and the world I left behind.

My cabin sits on the far side of the north ridge.

Twenty acres. Half cleared by my grandfather sixty years ago.

The rest still standing because I haven't found a reason to take it down.

Nobody comes there. That's the point.

"I'm not doing this." Each word comes out on its own, distinct, like splitting kindling.

"She sold her apartment. She packed two suitcases. She has nowhere else to go, Hunter." A beat. Then, quieter: "Just meet her. One conversation. If it doesn't work, I'll handle the agency. But at least look at her before you send her away."

The phone goes dead before I can respond, which is Bette's signature move: deliver the grenade, hang up, let the shrapnel settle.

My truck is parked a quarter mile downslope where the logging road dead-ends into the ridge.

The walk back takes seven minutes, and every one of those minutes is spent constructing a list of things I plan to say to my sister the next time we're in the same room.

The list is extensive. Some of it would make a lumberjack blush.

The drive down the mountain takes twenty, winding through switchbacks that drop from timber country into the rolling grassland that borders the eastern edge of my property.

The cabin comes into view around the last curve: two stories of timber and stone, floor-to-ceiling windows on the south and east faces, a stone chimney running up the west wall trailing a thin thread of smoke from the fire I banked before dawn.

Workshop behind. Woodpile stacked along the north side, neatly split, enough to see me through January.

Everything about this place is exactly the way I want it because every inch of it was built or repaired or maintained by my own hands.

The kitchen is stocked. The floors are clean.

The coffee is ground fresh every morning from beans I drive forty-five minutes to buy because the store in town doesn't carry the roast I prefer, and there is not a single thing in my life that requires the addition of another human being.

This is what I tell myself while parking the truck.

This is what I'm still telling myself when the unfamiliar sedan rolls up my driveway.

It's a rental. White. Compact. The kind of car a person who doesn't know Montana picks up at the Billings airport thinking it'll be fine on mountain roads. Mud already cakes the wheel wells and there's a fresh scratch along the passenger side where a branch got too familiar on the access road.

The engine cuts. Through the windshield, a shape moves.

The driver's side door opens and a boot hits the gravel, followed by a second boot, followed by a woman who straightens up and looks at my cabin the way a person looks at something they've been imagining for a long time and have just discovered is real.

Dark honey hair pulled back in a clip that's already losing the battle. Brown eyes, warm even at this distance. Curves under a practical jacket that says she dressed for function and managed to look like something else entirely.

She's not what I expected.

I didn't expect anything. I didn't ask for this. That needs to be clear.

But she's standing in my driveway, and my hands have gone still at my sides, and the objection I've been rehearsing for the last twenty minutes seems to have misplaced itself somewhere between my brain and my mouth.

She takes in the cabin. The woodpile. The workshop.

The mountains rising behind everything like a wall between this place and the rest of the world.

Her expression shifts through something I can't quite read.

Not disappointment. Not fear. Something closer to recognition, like she's seeing a photograph she was shown once and is now confirming the details match.

Then her gaze lands on me.

Six foot four. Two hundred and thirty pounds. Flannel rolled to the elbows, sawdust in my beard, a chainsaw scar across the back of my left hand, and an expression that has been described by various people over the years as "aggressively uninviting."

She doesn't flinch. Doesn't step back. Doesn't do any of the things people typically do when they encounter a man who looks like the forest itself decided to take human form and have a bad day.

Instead, she reaches into the passenger side of the rental and pulls out a folded piece of paper. Crosses the gravel toward me with the steady, unhurried stride of a woman who has already made every decision that matters and is now simply carrying them out.

She stops six feet away. Close enough for me to see the freckles across the bridge of her nose and the way the mountain light turns her eyes from brown to something warmer, something that reminds me of late sun through bourbon.

"Hunter Marsh?"

My name in her mouth sounds different than it should. Like a word I forgot I knew.

"Who's asking?"

A small smile. Not nervous. Not performative. The kind of smile a person gives when they've been traveling for a long time and have finally found the right door.

"Nora Chambers." She holds up the letter. "Your agency matched us. I'm told you're looking for a wife."

The letter flutters slightly in the mountain breeze. Behind her, the last of the morning mist is burning off the valley, and the peaks to the west are catching light that turns them gold and rose and impossible.

"I'm not looking for anything."

The smile doesn't waver.

"That's okay," she says. "I wasn't looking for a mountain. And here we are."