Recluse Lumberjack Heart (Heart of the Mountain #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

HARRISON

The cedar comes down clean.

I watch it fall the way I planned it, hinge holding till the last breath, crown swinging wide of the creek, trunk meeting the clearing floor with a crack that sends a pair of crows screaming off the ridge. Bark dust drifts. The forest settles back into itself.

Nobody tells you the best part of dropping timber is the quiet after. Men chase the noise, the violence of a hundred feet of tree giving up its grip on the sky. I'm here for the silence that lands once it's done.

I pull my ear protection and let the morning back in. Wind moving through the firs. The creek running low. My own breathing, even and slow.

Closest thing to peace I've got these days.

I roll my shoulder, work out the ache that's lived in it since a logging job in '21 went sideways and a widow-maker branch reminded me I'm mortal. Forty does that. Tells you in small ways every cold morning that you used to bounce and now you just land.

The section Gabe wants cleared sits on the northeast end of the property, where the timber thins toward meadow.

Two acres of grade-A pine and cedar standing between Wild Peak Ranch and the grain field they need for the distillery.

My job is simple. Take it down, mill it, give the good lumber back for fence repairs and whatever they're building this season, haul the rest to my own yard.

Clean work. Honest work. Best of all, solitary work.

I gas up the saw and move to the next mark, a fir I scouted yesterday, lean angled toward the open ground. Forty feet of it, maybe more. I drop to a knee and read the base. Check the wind. Picture the fall before I ever pull the cord.

Measure twice. Cut once. My granddad's voice, and the only thing that man left me worth keeping.

The saw bites. Wood screams white and sweet. I cut the face, then move around, and start the back, watching the hinge, feeling for that first soft give in the fibers that tells me she's about to go.

She goes.

I step back along my escape line and let her come down right where I wanted, square across the two cedars I dropped at dawn. Three trees, neat as cordwood already.

Sweat runs into my beard. I drag a forearm across my face and take stock of the morning's work, and a man could do worse than this.

A ranch nobody's heard of. A cabin deep enough in the trees that the only thing knocking is wind.

A truck, an axe, a mill, and not one single soul who knows my last name or my brother's face or the way my mother used to hum in the kitchen back when I still thought family meant something.

Texas is a thousand miles behind me. I aim to keep it there.

I kill the saw and reach for my water jug.

That's when I hear the horse.

Not a vehicle. Vehicles I'd have caught from the gravel road. This is hoofbeats, unhurried, coming up the grade through the treeline, and my whole body goes still because nobody's supposed to be out here. Gabe gave me this stretch. Told me his hands would stay clear and let me work my way.

The horse comes through the firs at an easy walk. A buckskin mare, good lines, well kept. And on her back, looking down at me like she's already decided something about me she doesn't much care for, sits the problem I didn't see coming.

A woman.

Dark hair loose past her shoulders, dark enough it eats the morning light.

A brown felt hat shading eyes I can't read from here.

Denim shirt worn soft, sleeves rolled to the elbow, turquoise at her throat catching the sun.

Belt buckle big as my fist. She rides easy, hips moving with the mare, reins held loose in one brown hand, and she's got the kind of mouth that's been getting people in trouble since the dawn of time.

My body notices before my brain catches up. Heat pools low in my gut, unwelcome and immediate.

I plant the saw on the stump and fold my arms.

She reins up ten feet out and looks at the three downed trees. Then at me. Then back at the trees.

"Huh," she says. "Gabe said you were fast. Didn't say you were rude enough to start without your welcome wagon."

"Didn't ask for one."

"Most people don't." She swings down off the mare, boots hitting dirt, and loops the reins over a low branch without breaking eye contact. "Doesn't stop me coming."

She's small. Top of her head would hit my chin if she stood close, and I find I'm doing the math on exactly that and I make myself stop.

She walks the clearing like she owns it, toeing one of my cedars, running a hand along the cut face of the fir like she's reading it.

She knows what she's looking at. I'll give her that much.

"Clean hinge," she says, half to herself.

"You here for a reason, or just to admire my work?"

"Both." She straightens and tips her hat back, and now I get the full hit of her face.

Strong jaw. A scatter of sun across her nose.

Green eyes, pale and sharp, that land on me and don't waver.

Twenty-something. Nowhere near my forty.

Young enough that the part of me running this attraction ought to be ashamed of itself.

It isn't.

"Paige Thomas." She sticks out a hand. "I'm your manager."

I look at the hand. Look at her.

"My what?"

"Manager. Liaison. Babysitter, depending who you ask.

" Her hand stays out, steady. "Gabe's got you on the books as a contractor, which means somebody's gotta sign off on your clearing plan, log your loads, make sure you're not dropping pine into the creek or scalping a slope the watershed people'll cry about. That somebody is me."

I don't take her hand. "I've been dropping timber since before you could ride that horse."

"Probably." Not a flicker. "And yet here I am."

She lets her hand fall, easy, no insult taken. That bothers me more than if she'd snapped.

"I work alone," I tell her. It's the truest thing about me, and I say it flat so it'll stick.

"Sure you do." She crouches by my gear, picks up my wedge, turns it over, sets it back exactly where it was.

"Worked alone a year myself before I landed here.

It's overrated. Lonely's just a fancy word for nobody around to call you on your nonsense.

" She looks up at me from under the hat.

"How long you been on the property now? A week? "

"Eleven days."

"Eleven days." She nods slow, like she's filing it. "And how many of those have you spent talking to an actual human being?"

The answer is none. I've gotten my supplies in town from a kid at the feed store who doesn't make small talk.

Hauled my first load to the ranch yard at dawn when nobody was up.

Eaten what I cooked, slept when the dark told me to, woke at four like always with my heart pounding from dreams I don't discuss with myself, let alone anybody else.

I don't answer.

She smiles. Just a corner of her mouth. And it does something to me I don't have permission to feel.

"That's what I thought," she says.

I pick the saw back up. "You can log your loads off my mill records. I'll leave them in the ranch box. You don't need to be out here."

"See, I disagree." Paige walks back to her mare, but she doesn't mount up.

She digs in her saddlebag and comes out with a thermos and two dented metal cups, and starts pouring like this is her porch and I'm the one who wandered in.

"Gabe assigned me. I take what Gabe gives me serious.

Plus this section's got a spring seep about forty yards downslope that you can't see from up here, and if you drop that big fella" she nods at a wide pine I've already marked "the way your face cut's angled, you're gonna put six tons of it right across the only water those cattle reach in August."

I stop.

I marked that pine to fall east. East is downhill. East is, now that she's said it out loud and my eyes are tracking the grade past her shoulder, almost certainly where a seep would pool.

She holds out a cup of coffee. Black. Steam curling.

"I'd have caught it before I cut," I say, and it's mostly true.

"Maybe." She keeps the cup out. "Or maybe you've been alone in your head so long you've stopped letting anybody check your blind spot. Happens to the best of us."

I take the coffee. Not because she's right. Because my hand's already moving before I've thought it through, and that's a thing that hasn't happened to me in longer than I'll admit.

Our fingers brush on the handle. Brief. Warm.

She doesn't pull back fast. Doesn't make it a thing. Just lets go once I've got it and steps away to lean against a stump, sipping from her own cup, watching me over the rim with those pale eyes like she's got all the time God made.

The coffee's good. Strong. Better than mine.

"It's good," I say, because not saying it would be a lie and I don't lie about small things.

"I know." She tips her face up to the sun, throat working as she swallows, turquoise sliding along her collarbone, and I look away because looking is dangerous and I learned a long time ago what dangerous costs.

A man my age has no business with a heat like this for a woman that young. A man with my history has no business with a heat like this for anybody.

I drink my coffee and stare at the marked pine and run the numbers on the seep so I've got something to do with my mind that isn't her.

"You always show up unannounced," I ask, "or am I special?"

"Oh, you're special." She grins, full this time, and it knocks something loose in my chest I thought I'd nailed shut years back. "Brand new, mysterious, broody as a thundercloud, won't tell anybody where you're from. The whole ranch is dying to know your deal. I drew the long straw."

"Long straw."

"I wanted to. They didn't make me." She shrugs, easy. "I like a puzzle."

"I'm not a puzzle."

"Everybody's a puzzle, Harrison."

My name in her mouth stops me cold. I never gave it to her. Gabe, then. Of course Gabe. She's probably read my file, knows more about me than I'd hand any stranger, and the wrongness of that should have me bristling.

It doesn't. That's the trouble.

I set the cup on the stump. "I've got eight more trees before dark."

"So get to it." She doesn't move. "I'll just watch. Make sure you don't kill the cows."

"You're gonna sit there all day."

"I'm gonna sit here till I'm satisfied you know this land good as you know your saw." She settles deeper against the stump, hat low, ankles crossed, looking for all the world like she's planted. "Could be an hour. Could be a week. Faster you stop fighting me, faster I'm gone."

There it is. The thing I should want. A timeline to her leaving.

I pick up the saw and don't examine why the word week didn't land on me the way it should have.

"Fine," I tell her. "Stay clear of the fall lines. You get hurt out here, it's my hide."

"Aw." Hand to her chest, mocking. "He cares."

"I care about Gabe not firing me eleven days in."

"Sure." That corner-of-the-mouth smile again. "That's it."

I yank the cord. The saw roars to life between us, loud enough to drown her out, loud enough to drown most things, and I turn to the pine and reposition my face cut to drop it north, away from the seep, away from the water, the way she told me without telling me.

She sees it. I feel her see it even with my back turned. I don't look to check.

But I move to the next mark slower than I need to. And when I glance up between cuts, just once, just to gauge the wind, she's still there. Boots crossed. Coffee in hand. Watching me work with a patience that's got nothing to prove and everywhere to be except gone.

The mare shifts. A jay calls. The sun climbs over the ridge and lights the whole clearing gold, and for the first time in eleven days, the quiet I came out here to find has somebody standing in the middle of it.

I tell myself I want her gone.

The saw bites wood. The lie sits heavy in my chest, right next to the warm spot where her fingers touched mine.

Eleven days of nobody. And now this.

I should send her down the mountain.

Down the mountain she stays put, sipping my favorite kind of coffee I didn't know I had a favorite kind of, watching me like she's already decided I'm worth the wait.

I cut the next tree and I let her.