Chapter 4
Chapter Four
PAIGE
Six stitches. A lecture from Deb at the clinic about rust in lacerations on a working ranch. And a drive home with one arm that gave me too much time to think about how fast a man who prefers solitude covered fifty yards of dead field.
Kidd's already heard. Of course Kidd's heard. By the time I get back to the ranch yard, he's leaning out of his truck window with a paper bag of Sal's sandwiches balanced on his knee.
"Rock Star!" He grins wide enough I can see it from across the lot. "Heard the field ate you."
"Field nibbled."
"Not how Gabe tells it." His grin gets worse, which I didn't think was possible. "Gabe says the new fella came across that stubble at a dead sprint."
Heat crawls up my neck. At twenty-nine, that's embarrassing.
"Gabe's a gossip."
"Gabe's a rancher. Same thing. Less honest about it." He shifts the sandwiches. "Need anything?"
"A time machine and a fence map from 1980."
"Fresh out. Tell your lumberjack the boys say hi!"
"He's not my lumberjack!"
Kidd's already pulling out, one hand waving out the window, cackling.
I drop the truck keys at the barn office, check on Serenity, and stand in the feed room for a solid two minutes staring at a bag of oats while my brain replays hands on my waist and the sound of his breathing against my knee.
Paige Adulsa Thomas.
I know, Mama. I know.
Except I don't, really. Because nothing in Mama's handbook of caution prepared me for a man who shakes after he's done taking care of you. Not during. After. Like the fear only caught up once the danger passed.
That's not a man who doesn't care. That's a man who cares so much it scares him.
Wild mustang. Patience.
But patience has never been my strong suit, which is why, four hours later, I'm on the northeast road with a foil pan of elk chili wedged in a saddlebag and Serenity huffing her disapproval at every pothole.
"Hush. We're being neighborly."
Serenity blows air through her nostrils. Translation, we’re being foolish, and you know it.
"Noted. Keep walking."
The light goes green under the firs. His cabin appears all at once, tucked into the timber. Truck out front. Mill tarped. Axes racked. Whetstone on a stump with the rag folded beside it.
Everything squared away. Everything in its place. The man builds order around himself the way other people build walls. Same purpose. Just neater.
His boots are on the porch. The door's open behind the screen.
I tie Serenity, pull the foil pan out, and knock on the frame.
Footsteps. Then the screen pushes open, and there he is.
Freshly showered. Hair damp, pushed back off his forehead. Beard darker from the water. Bare feet. Gray Henley with the sleeves shoved up his forearms.
My train of thought derails, flips, and catches fire.
"Something wrong?" he asks.
"Yes. You've been eating out of cans."
Those dark eyes drop to the pan. Come back up. Land on my bandage and hold there.
"Six stitches," I tell him, because he's doing the math and I'd rather he have the number. "Deb says thank you to whoever made me come in."
"Six."
"If you say I told you so, I'm taking this chili home."
He doesn't say it. He opens the screen wider and steps back, and I'm inside before he can rethink the invitation.
One big room. Woodstove. A loft over the back. Table with two chairs that some optimist put in here believing a man like this would use them for company. Bed made so tight a coin would bounce off it.
And everywhere, on every flat surface, wood.
Not lumber. Shapes. A block half turned into something with wings sitting on the windowsill. A bowl the size of my palm with walls thin as paper. Curls of shaving swept into a coffee can by the stove. Chisels in a canvas roll, laid out by size, blades old and well-oiled.
The chili goes on the table. The bowl goes in my hand.
Behind me, the room gets very quiet.
It's black walnut. The grain runs through it in a current, and whoever carved it followed where the wood wanted to go instead of forcing it. My thumb fits the inside curve.
"Aiden." I hold it toward the window. The walnut goes red at the thin edges, light bleeding through. "You made this."
"It's scrap." He's across the room in three steps, taking it from my hand without touching my fingers, setting it face down on the shelf. "Leave it."
"That's not scrap. That's a bowl I can see light through."
"Paige."
"Who taught you?"
His jaw does that lock. The one I've memorized over seven days of coffee deliveries. Whatever answer lives behind it isn't coming out tonight.
Fine. Wild mustang. Pull your hand back first. Let him come to you.
"Bowls and cans," I say, unwrapping the foil. "Sit down."
"I've eaten."
"You've eaten what."
Nothing. That's the answer. Whatever was in those cans doesn't count.
"Where are your spoons?"
He gets the spoons.
He eats three helpings. Slow, careful, the same way he does everything, but three full bowls of elk chili and most of the cornbread, and each time he reaches for more, he doesn't look at me.
I let that be. Some things, you don't make a fuss over out loud.
"Elk?" he asks on the second bowl.
"Diego got it last fall. Whole bunkhouse freezer is elk, so there's been a lot of creative cooking happening out of necessity."
"It's good."
"I know."
His eyes come up. Something stirring behind them that makes the back of my neck warm.
"You always this sure of yourself?" he asks.
"Always. You always this convinced anything nice has a bill attached?"
The spoon stops. His face starts to close down, and my stomach drops, because there's a version of this where he thanks me politely and opens the door.
But he sets the spoon down. Looks at me.
"Yes," he says.
Just that. Bare.
Then the sky opens up.
Wild Peak doesn't ease into rain. It dumps. The whole roof goes to roar inside of ten seconds, and the cabin shrinks to just this table and two chairs and a man whose eyes haven't left my face.
I get up and look out the window. The two ruts I drove Serenity in on are already running with water.
"Road washes out at the second bend," he says behind me. "Twenty minutes, it'll be a river."
"I've ridden worse."
"Not with a stitched-up arm in the dark."
Fair point. I don't give him the satisfaction of admitting it.
"Wait it out," he says. "Half hour, it'll pass."
"You inviting me to stay?"
"I'm telling you the road's gone."
"Sure. That's what you're doing."
He builds up the fire. The temperature's already dropping the way it does in the mountains, fast enough that the heat from the stove feels like a gift. My boots come off. My feet go toward the warmth. He sits back down across from me with his coffee.
The rain doesn't pass in half an hour.
We talk.
He gives it up in pieces, each one costing him something. His granddad's mill. A yellow lab called Sadie who rode the log truck with him for eleven years. The winter he ran a nine-man crew on the Olympic Peninsula and hated every minute of managing people.
I give him mine. Mama's diner in Coos Bay. The regulars who raised me as much as she did. The horse that broke my collarbone at twelve. The elder woman in the tribal office who sat with me all afternoon, showing me how to split cedar bark with my thumbnail.
"You lead with your chin," he says.
"I lead with my whole face."
He shakes his head at his mug, and there's something happening in his beard. Something that might be a smile if he'd let it loose.
My eyes are getting heavy. The fire. The rain. His voice, low and steady, telling me about ponderosa pine and how you can tell a healthy one by pressing your nose to the bark and breathing in.
"I can't believe you smell trees."
"Every lumberjack smells trees."
"That's either the most beautiful or the strangest thing anyone's ever told me."
"Probably both."
I laugh, and my whole body lists sideways in the chair. The rain's still hammering. Serenity's under the porch overhang, dry and unimpressed.
"Take the bed," he says. "I'll stay out here."
"Where do you normally sleep?"
"I don't."
Not a joke. He says it the way he says everything, flat and plain, but the weight of it settles in my chest.
"Aid – Harrison."
"Four in the morning. Every morning. Since about 2018." His thumb traces the rim of his mug, slow circles. "Body decided. Didn't consult me on it."
"What happens at four?"
He watches the fire.
"Nothing happens at four," he says. "That's the whole problem. Nothing to do but sit with your own head."
Seven days. Seven days of grunting and coffee and calling me a waste of time, and now he's three feet away in firelight telling me he hasn't slept through the night in six years. Something turns over in my chest and does not turn back.
Don't push. Do not push.
"Rain's letting up," he says.
It isn't. We both know it isn't.
He walks me out anyway. Down the porch steps, through the wet to where Serenity stands with her ears flat, expressing her feelings about the weather. He gets to my saddle before I do. Checks the girth. Adjusts the stirrup that slips on the left side, the one I haven't gotten around to fixing.
"You noticed that," I say.
"Hard not to. You compensate with your knee every time you mount up."
Nobody notices that. Kidd doesn't notice that. Gabe doesn't notice that. A man who claims he doesn't watch me noticed a stirrup that slips.
"Harrison."
"Take the high side out of the second bend." He's not looking at me. Fussing with the leather like it needs more attention than it does. "Don't ride the left rut. Creek'll be up."
"I know this mountain."
"I know you do."
He steps back from Serenity. Faces me.
Rain's slowed to a mist. The firs are dripping. His Henley's soaked through at the shoulders, clinging, and I am doing my absolute best not to catalog every single thing about the way this man looks in wet cotton, and I am failing.
His hand comes up.
Knuckles. Along my temple. Pushing the loose hair back that's come free of my braid. Slow. Careful. The same hands that took rust out of my arm one flake at a time.
Everything in my body goes still.
"Aiden."
His thumb settles at the edge of my jaw. My pulse hammers against it. I know he feels it. His eyes track down my face to my mouth and stay there, and his breathing changes, and I lean in because every cell in my body is leaning and I can't stop a single one.
He goes rigid.
All at once. Everything locks. The shutter comes down behind his eyes, and his hand drops, and he steps back so fast the wet gravel crunches.
"Drive safe," he says. Except his voice is in pieces. Completely wrecked. "Text the ranch line when you're in."
I stand there with rain misting my face, staring at him, my heart slamming so hard I'm sure Serenity can feel it through the ground.
"Okay," I manage.
He turns. The screen door closes behind him.
Serenity bumps my shoulder. Impatient. Ready to go.
It takes me a full minute before I can get my boot in the stirrup. The left one. The one that slips. He fixed it. It holds.
Mama, don't say it.
Chiggers, baby girl.
I ride down the mountain in the dark with my pulse still going and the place where his thumb sat on my jaw burning, and halfway to the meadow my phone catches signal and buzzes four times.
Gwen
Kidd says you got EATEN by a field
Kidd ALSO says a certain lumberjack ran across said field. Elaborate. Immediately.
Paige.
PAIGE.
A laugh gets loose in the dark. Serenity's ears flick back.
Six stitches. I'm fine. Tell Kidd he has a big mouth.
Gwen
He does. It's his best quality. Where are you rn
Northeast fork.
Gwen
That's nowhere near your cabin
PAIGE ADULSA
Goodnight Gwen.
Gwen
OH MY GOD
I lodged the phone into my pocket.
The left stirrup holds steady the whole ride home.
He almost kissed me. Almost. And then he remembered something that put him back behind that wall so fast I felt the air move.
But he fixed my stirrup.
A man who doesn't care doesn't notice your stirrup slips. A man who doesn't care damn sure doesn't fix it in the rain while pretending he isn't doing exactly that.
Serenity carries me through the meadow gate, and the whole valley smells like wet grass, and I've got a beard burn coming up under my jaw from where his knuckles brushed.
Mama's gonna have words.
I'm fresh out of reasons to listen.