Chapter 2
KADE
Icouldn’t focus.
The blueprints in front of me might as well have been written in ancient Greek. I’d read the same line about drainage specifications four times now and retained nothing. All because of the woman sitting six feet away, methodically working through my paperwork like she belonged here.
She didn’t belong here. She belonged anywhere but here—somewhere I couldn’t see her, couldn’t smell that vanilla-and-wildflower scent drifting across the cramped trailer every time she shifted in her chair.
Gemma Ellis. Mayor’s office. Here to ruin my Valentine’s Day, apparently, though I hadn’t planned on celebrating anyway.
I forced my eyes back to the blueprints.
Drainage. Right. The southeast corner needed additional grading before we could pour the next section of foundation.
Important stuff. Stuff I should be thinking about instead of the way her sweater clung to curves that had no business being in my line of sight.
Six months. I’d been in Wildwood Valley for six months, and I’d done just fine keeping to myself.
Took the job because it was steady work and the town was small enough to disappear in.
Rented a cabin up the mountain where nobody bothered me.
Kept my head down, did my work, went home to silence and solitude.
It was a good system. A safe system.
Then she walked through my door with her warm brown eyes and her professional smile, and my heart did a thing I didn’t like. A recognition. A pull. Like my body knew something my brain refused to accept.
I’d felt it before—exactly once. When I was nineteen and stupid and thought I understood what love was. That had ended badly. Everything involving feelings ended badly. I had more than a decade of evidence to prove it.
“Question about the timeline.”
Her voice cut through my thoughts. I looked up, schooling my expression into something neutral.
“What about it?”
“The foundation work was supposed to be complete by the end of January.” She tapped her pen against the spreadsheet in front of her. “We’re halfway through February and you’re still pouring.”
“Weather delays.” I leaned back in my chair, putting distance between us. “We lost a week in January to that ice storm. Then the concrete supplier had a backlog. I sent updated projections to the mayor’s office two weeks ago.”
“I didn’t see them.”
“Not my problem if your office doesn’t read its emails.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t take the bait. She just made a note on her paper and moved on to the next question. Professional. Controlled. Not rising to my rudeness.
That annoyed me more than it should have.
We worked through the morning in fits and starts.
She’d ask a question, I’d answer it, and then we’d lapse back into silence while she reviewed documents and I pretended to care about drainage specs.
The space heater rattled in the corner. The coffeemaker gurgled occasionally, keeping the sludge inside warm.
Outside, the February wind picked up, buffeting the trailer walls.
I should have been grateful for the quiet. Instead, I found myself overly aware of every sound she made. The scratch of her pen. The soft rustle of pages turning. The way she hummed under her breath sometimes, so quietly I almost missed it.
“So walk me through what’s left,” she said around eleven, setting down her pen and stretching her neck.
The movement pulled her sweater tight across her chest. I jerked my gaze back to the blueprints so fast I probably gave myself whiplash.
“What do you mean?”
“The project. What’s the sequence from here to completion?”
I studied her for a moment, looking for the trap.
Most people from the mayor’s office didn’t actually care about the details.
They wanted numbers and timelines—checkboxes they could mark complete.
They didn’t want to understand the work itself.
But Gemma was watching me with genuine curiosity, pen poised over her notepad, waiting.
“Foundation’s about sixty percent done,” I heard myself say.
“Another two weeks if the weather holds. After that, framing goes up—that’s a different crew, but I’ll be on-site to coordinate.
Then roofing, electrical, plumbing, interior finishing.
If everything stays on schedule, Dr. Hanson should be able to move in by late summer. ”
“That fast?”
“It’s not a big building. And Wildwood Valley’s motivated. Seems like half the town wants to help with that rescue operation she’s planning.”
Gemma nodded, making notes. “I heard about that. Some kind of puppy mill bust?”
“Hoarding situation, I think. Neighboring county. Dozens of animals that’ll need care.” I shrugged. “The clinic can’t open soon enough.”
“Is that why you took this job? To help with that?”
The question caught me off guard. I wasn’t used to people asking about my motivations. Wasn’t used to people asking about me at all.
“I took this job because it pays well and the last contractor quit.” I kept my voice flat. “I’m not here to save puppies. I’m here to pour concrete.”
She smiled at that—a small, knowing curve of her lips that suggested she didn’t believe me. “Sure. You’re a real hardcase.”
“I am.”
“Uh-huh.” She went back to her notes, but I caught the hint of a dimple in her cheek. Like she found me amusing.
Nobody found me amusing. I made sure of it.
The morning crawled on. I learned things about Gemma Ellis despite my best efforts not to.
She’d grown up in Wildwood Valley, one of the few young people who’d stuck around instead of fleeing for the city.
She’d worked at the mayor’s office since graduating from the community college two years ago.
She was meticulous about documentation but not rigid—willing to accept reasonable explanations for discrepancies instead of demanding everything match perfectly.
She laughed at her own jokes. Quietly, like she was sharing something private with herself. And she had this habit of tucking her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating, a gesture so unconscious and endearing that I wanted to reach across the desk and do it for her.
I didn’t, obviously. I wasn’t an idiot. But I noticed. God help me, I noticed everything.
The happy couples in this town had gotten to me more than I wanted to admit.
I saw them everywhere—at the Pancake House sharing breakfast, at the roadhouse dancing on Friday nights, walking hand in hand down Main Street like they’d discovered some secret the rest of us were too stupid to find.
The fire captain and the mayor. The guys on the logging crews and their mail-order brides.
Even my neighbor, Kross, had somehow ended up with a wife and kids in the time I’d been here.
Love was in the water in Wildwood Valley. Everyone was drinking it. I refused to take a sip.
My parents had been in love once. Crazy, passionate, can’t-live-without-each-other love. I’d seen the wedding photos, heard the stories. High school sweethearts who got married at twenty and thought they’d figured out the secret to happiness.
By the time I was ten, I could barely be in the same room with them.
By fifteen, I was the only thing keeping them from divorce—a responsibility no kid should carry.
By twenty, they’d finally split, and instead of finding peace, they’d just found new ways to destroy themselves.
Dad drank. Mom cycled through bad relationships.
Both of them blamed the other for ruining their lives.
Love didn’t build things. Love burned them down and salted the earth afterward. I’d watched it happen. I’d learned.
“You okay?”
Gemma’s voice pulled me back to the present. She was watching me with those warm eyes, a small crease of concern between her brows.
“Fine.” I straightened in my chair, shuffling papers I didn’t need to shuffle. “Just thinking about the schedule.”
“You looked like you were thinking about something a lot heavier than paperwork.”
“I wasn’t.”
She held my gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Then she shrugged and returned to her documents, letting it go. Smart woman. She knew when not to push.
That made her dangerous. The pushy ones were easy to dismiss. The ones who knew when to back off, who left space for you to come to them—those were the ones who got under your skin.
I watched her flip through the invoices, her reading glasses perched on her nose, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she concentrated. That mouth. Full and soft and curved in a way that made me think about things I had no business thinking about.
She glanced up, caught me staring, and raised an eyebrow.
I dropped my gaze to the blueprints. The drainage specs blurred in front of me—meaningless lines and numbers—while my pulse hammered in my throat like I’d run a marathon.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
She was exactly the kind of woman who could make me forget all the lessons I’d learned. The kind who could slip past my defenses without even trying. The kind I could actually fall for, if I was stupid enough to let myself.
Which meant I needed to get through this review, get her out of my trailer, and make damn sure our paths didn’t cross again.
I stared at the blueprints until the lines stopped swimming. Forced myself to focus on drainage and grading and all the safe, boring details that didn’t have warm brown eyes and a smile that could undo years of careful self-protection.
Just a few more hours. Then she’d be gone, and I could go back to my simple, solitary, perfectly controlled life.
I almost believed it.