The Bear’s Fixer-Upper Mate (Bear Creek Forever: Thornberg Restaurant #5)

Chapter One – Meryl

Oh boy.

Meryl sat in her car, staring at Pine Cottage, the little house she’d inherited from her great-aunt Hilda. To say it wasn’t what she’d expected, or what she remembered, would be an understatement.

Sure, she’d expected to have to fix things up. But the building in front of her looked as if it was barely standing at all.

It made her sad to see it this way. Hilda had loved this place so much. She’d taken such pride in keeping it up. But the cottage had been empty for some time now, and it showed.

The porch sagged to the left as if it had given up trying to stay level.

Paint peeled from the window frames in long, tired curls.

The three front steps looked as if they should not be stepped on.

And Hilda’s much-loved garden, if you could still call it a garden, had gone completely feral, a riot of woody lavender, knee-high grass, and something thorny that had colonized the path with real commitment.

Meryl let out a slow breath and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

Right. Okay. This was fine. A slightly bigger project than she’d expected, that was all. Different from the sort she usually took on, certainly. Pens and paper were normally her tools of choice. But she could do this.

She had the organizational skills to sort the place out, get the work done, and put it on the market.

She sat there a moment longer than she meant to, engine off, keys still in her hand.

Pine Cottage waited beyond the windshield, leaning and shabby and far worse than she’d prepared herself for. Even so, she had the sudden urge, no, the need, to get out of the car, to feel the air on her skin, to stand in front of the cottage properly without glass between her and it.

The lane behind her was narrow and shadowed by pine trees crowded close on both sides. Beyond the cottage, the mountains rose blue in the distance. It was the kind of place people escaped to. The kind of place Hilda had loved.

For a moment, Meryl could understand why.

Then she looked back at the house and had to swallow. Hilda had adored this cottage. She had kept it neat and welcoming and full of life. Seeing it like this felt wrong.

Better not to dwell on things she couldn’t change.

Instead, she reached for her notebook and pen on the passenger seat, opened the door, and stepped out.

The first thing she noticed was the smell.

Pine, warm earth, and beneath it the faded sweetness of lavender. Not much, but enough to catch her off guard. For a second, it was easy to imagine Hilda out here with her secateurs and a sunhat, muttering at the weeds as if they had personally offended her.

Meryl shut the car door and walked to the gate. It hung open on one hinge, the wood weathered gray and splitting with age.

She jotted down a single note.

Front garden and entry: first priority.

That felt better than listing every little thing. Better than looking too closely at the flowerpot lying on its side in the grass, or the way the path had nearly disappeared beneath moss and weeds.

The cottage looked worse up close, which was saying something. Neglect clung to it. The porch leaned. The paint had gone. The garden had run wild enough to make the whole place seem half-abandoned.

And that was the annoying part.

Because underneath all that neglect, Pine Cottage was lovely.

The stonework still held its warm, honeyed gray.

The windows were generous and deep-set. The cottage sat in its clearing as if it belonged there, backed by dark pines and fronted by what had once been a carefully planned garden.

Someone had placed this house here with care, and time still hadn’t quite managed to ruin that.

Meryl looked down at her notebook.

No room for sentimentality.

She crossed the path and stopped at the foot of the steps. Up close, the wood looked even less trustworthy. She tested the bottom one with her boot. It groaned, but held. The second gave softly under her weight, and she shifted quickly, reaching for the railing to steady herself.

The railing came away in her hand.

Meryl stumbled sideways, caught her balance against the porch post, and stood there holding a length of railing like some kind of weapon.

“Oh, wonderful.”

She set the broken length of railing carefully against the cottage wall and eyed the rest of the porch with deep suspicion. Then, choosing her way with care, she made it to the front door.

The key from the solicitor’s envelope fit the lock, but the door refused to open.

She tried again. Then once more with her shoulder.

Nothing.

“Come on,” she muttered, bracing herself for another shove.

That was when she heard footsteps on the path behind her.

She turned, already preparing the polite but firm sentence she’d use to send whoever it was on their way, and found a man standing at the bottom of the broken steps.

He was tall. That was the first thing she noticed. Tall and broad-shouldered in a way that made the porch feel even more precarious by comparison. Dark hair. Brown eyes. Work boots that looked as though they’d actually done some work.

More than that, he looked as though he belonged here. Not to the cottage exactly, but to everything around it. The trees. The mountains. The quiet.

“Need a hand with that?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Meryl said automatically.

He looked at the door, then at the railing propped against the wall, then at the step she’d skipped. His expression barely changed, but she could almost see him taking stock.

“The door’s probably swollen from the damp,” he said. “The frame’s likely shifted too. If you lift and push at the same time, it’ll give.”

Meryl looked at him. He hadn’t moved from the bottom of the steps. Hadn’t tried to come up. Hadn’t crowded her. He was just standing there, being annoyingly calm and, apparently, useful.

“And you are?” she asked.

“Spencer Thornberg.” He said it like that ought to mean something, then seemed to realize it probably didn’t. A beat later, he added, “Sorry. I live nearby.”

“That explains the dramatic entrance.”

His gaze flickered briefly to the broken railing. “I’m not sure dramatic is the word.”

“No?” Meryl shifted the piece of wood with her foot. “I thought it had a certain flair.”

That brought the smallest change to his expression. Not quite a smile, but close.

“I was just passing and saw the car,” he said.

The lane she’d driven in on led to Pine Cottage and, as far as she could tell, nowhere else. Just passing was optimistic at best. But he didn’t elaborate, and his face gave nothing away.

Meryl weighed her options. She could keep shoving at the door alone and end up with a bruised shoulder and a worse temper than she already had.

Or she could accept help from a stranger who seemed to know exactly why old doors got stuck and had appeared at the precise moment she needed somebody who did.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’d appreciate the help.”

He nodded once and came up the steps, avoiding the second one without being told. The porch groaned under his weight in a way that made her tighten her grip on the notebook, but he didn’t seem bothered.

Up close, he smelled faintly of sawdust and clean air, as if he’d come straight from work.

He moved to the door, set one hand flat against the upper panel, lifted slightly on the latch with the other, and pushed.

Nothing happened.

For the first time, he looked faintly annoyed with the door.

Meryl folded her arms. “You make it sound very straightforward.”

“It usually is.”

“Comforting.”

That almost-smile appeared again, there and gone.

He shifted his hold, braced one boot more firmly on the porch, and tried again. This time, the door gave with a scrape and a grudging shudder, releasing a breath of stale air and old wood.

“There,” he said.

“Show-off.”

His head turned toward her. “I had to preserve my reputation.”

“You told me your name. I’m not sure that counts as a reputation.”

Something about that seemed to catch him off guard. He glanced at her properly then, as if reassessing her. “Fair point.”

“Right.” Meryl tightened her hold on her notebook and peered past him into the dim hallway beyond. “So the front door wasn’t the problem. Good to know.”

His mouth shifted again, almost, but not quite a smile.

The hallway was narrow and shadowed, the light from the open door reached only a little way across the floorboards before fading. She could make out the foot of a staircase, a small table against the wall, and the vague shape of something draped in a dust sheet farther back.

Meryl stepped over the threshold.

The board beneath her foot dipped.

She stopped.

Spencer’s hand came out, not touching her, just bracing lightly against the doorframe beside her as if to stop her without quite doing it.

“I’d be careful,” he said. “If the porch is that far gone, there’ll be more inside.”

Meryl glanced up at him. He was close enough now that she could feel the heat from him. Close enough that the hallway suddenly felt smaller than it had a second ago.

“I can manage,” she said.

“I’m sure you can.” His voice stayed even. “Still doesn’t mean the floor won’t drop you into the crawl space.”

That was irritatingly fair.

She looked back at the hallway, then down at the board beneath her boot, then at the notebook in her hand with its neat lists and tidy categories and growing collection of bad news.

Exterior. Porch. Door. Floors, apparently.

This was no longer a cosmetic job. It wasn’t even a straightforward one. Pine Cottage wasn’t a quick inheritance to sort out and move on from.

And Spencer Thornberg, standing there all quiet competence and maddening calm, was not helping.

She stepped back onto the porch and looked at him properly.

Solid. Quiet. Watchful.

He stood like a man who understood old timber and mountain weather and houses with more problems than they first admitted to.

Like he might understand this one, too.

Which was inconvenient.

Deeply inconvenient.

“Let me guess,” she said, tucking the notebook against her chest. “You know a contractor.”

A flicker crossed his face.

“I do,” he said.

“Of course you do.”

That faint line appeared between his brows, as though he wasn’t entirely sure whether she was making fun of him.

“I can give you his number,” he said.

There it was again, that slight awkwardness, as if he was more comfortable with warped doors than with conversation.

Meryl, against her better judgment, found that oddly reassuring.

She looked past him at the lane, at the dark line of the trees, then back at the dim hallway yawning open behind the crooked front door.

She had arrived in Bear Creek expecting a house that needed updating.

Instead, she had inherited a money pit, a structural nightmare, and a far too capable local man who had appeared out of nowhere and was already proving difficult to ignore.

Perfect.

From somewhere deeper in the cottage came a low creak, as if the house were settling around them.

Or making its opinion known.

Meryl tightened her grip on the notebook and stepped back over the threshold, more carefully this time, far too aware of the man beside her and the old house opening up around them.

Whatever she had expected from Pine Cottage, it wasn’t this.