The Billionaire’s Challenge (Phoenix Ridge Billionaires #4)

CHAPTER 1 – NELLIE

Eleven thousand people were watching Nellie Fuller, Nellie was watching the worst thermos of coffee she’d ever made finally go completely cold, and somewhere on Phoenix Ridge’s northern border, a centuries-old tree was, for the first time in its life, trending.

“So, she’s about four hundred years old,” Nellie said to her phone, which she’d duct-taped to a branch at eye level so she could keep both hands free—or rather, one hand free, since the other was currently attached by a fourteen-gauge chain to the base of Eleanor’s trunk.

“Give or take a decade. Douglas firs are notoriously hard to age without coring, and I’m not about to core her, obviously, because that’s exactly the kind of disrespect that got us all here this morning. ”

She paused to sip the coffee. It tasted like someone had brewed it from despair and then let it sit overnight in a thermos made of more despair.

Which, technically, was exactly what had happened, because she’d made it at four a.m. in her tiny percolator and then forgotten about it while she was mixing the wheatpaste for her sign.

She’d been so pleased with the sign. She was slightly less pleased now that she had to drink the coffee.

The sign was still her best work in months.

She held it up for the camera: ELEANOR IS NOT A BOARD FOOT.

The letters were slightly uneven on account of running out of room toward the end, so BOARD FOOT had been compressed into a font that required a certain amount of squinting and goodwill to decipher, but the sentiment was there.

eleven thousand people watching omg, the chat scrolled. hi from Portland!!! go nellie!!

And then, because the internet was a place of great range and wonder, someone asked, what is a board foot?

“A board foot,” Nellie explained patiently, lowering the sign, “is a unit of lumber measurement. One foot by one foot by one inch. And Eleanor here”—she patted the bark, rough and deeply furrowed under her palm, the texture of something that had survived things she couldn’t fathom—“is estimated at two hundred and eighty thousand board feet. Which is how Alburn Systems has been thinking about her. As a number. As a yield.”

She let that land.

Twenty-two feet around at the breast, Eleanor was more column than tree, the kind of scale that stopped making sense to the human eye and started making more sense intuitively.

Her canopy disappeared into the fog a hundred and fifty feet overhead.

Below the duff, her root system threaded through an acre of understory in every direction, exchanging carbon and water and chemical signals with the rest of the forest in a network so complex that ecologists were still arguing about it in peer-reviewed journals.

Nellie had contributed to one of those journals.

Technically. Her advisor had written most of it and she had written the acknowledgements and a very solid literature review, but the important thing was that her name was on it.

“This forest,” she continued, “all four thousand acres of it, was quietly acquired by Alburn Systems eighteen months ago. No public announcement. The seller had a non-disclosure clause in the sale. And then last month, Alburn filed a development proposal with the county that included the removal of three hundred and twelve old-growth trees.” She held up three fingers.

The chain clinked against Eleanor’s bark.

“Three hundred and twelve Eleanors. The county board votes in one week.”

Her phone buzzed against the branch.

Paloma: you ate breakfast right?

Paloma: Nellie

Paloma: NELLIE

She typed back with her free hand: define breakfast

Paloma: oh my god

Paloma: a granola bar. a piece of fruit. literally anything that has ever been near a nutrient

Nellie: I had coffee

Paloma: that is not breakfast, that is a cry for help

Nellie: it was a very filling cry for help

Paloma: I’m putting granola bars in your emergency kit and you’re going to eat them and you’re going to like it.

The chat had swelled past thirteen thousand people while she was typing.

Questions about the development proposal and where to donate.

A spirited debate in the comments about whether Eleanor needed a last name.

Several people asking about Nellie’s bathroom situation, which was either touching concern or voyeuristic curiosity. Almost certainly both.

“Okay, bathroom questions,” Nellie said, pointing at the camera.

“I have a system, and it’s private. What I will tell you is that it involves a five-gallon bucket, a shower curtain I bungee-corded to two saplings about thirty feet that way, a composting protocol that I am genuinely proud of, and the complete absence of any dignity whatsoever. Moving on.”

this is the content I pay for, the chat said. literally iconic. And, from someone called MountainMammal88: wait she has a BUCKET CURTAIN SETUP?! she’s done this before.

“I’ve done this before,” Nellie confirmed cheerfully.

“Eight times, if you’re counting chain actions specifically.

Twelve if you include the non-chain variety, which I personally think deserve their own category because they require a completely different skill set and nobody ever gives them enough credit.

You want to talk about the mycorrhizal network? ”

The chat did want to talk about the mycorrhizal network.

Or at least they were willing to be talked at about it, which was close enough.

Nellie spent ten minutes on the fungal threads running beneath their feet—the way Eleanor was connected to the younger trees around her, mothering them through the soil, parceling out sugars to the ones in shade, sending chemical distress signals when something was wrong.

The part that looked like nothing. The part that was actually everything.

I’m literally crying about a fungus, said someone called perpetually_offline.

“That’s the correct response.” Nellie giggled. “Fungus is awesome! I love fungus.”

The fog had thinned a little by seven. Not enough to call it morning, exactly, but enough to make out the access road cutting through the tree line forty feet to her left and the patrol car parked at the border.

Deputy Haines had been sitting in it for two hours and had not gotten out, which Nellie took as a hopeful sign.

She’d been zip-tied, cited, removed from trees, and briefly detained in four states.

She knew exactly how law enforcement looked when they were about to do something about a situation, and Deputy Haines looked like a woman who had decided, somewhere around hour one, that this was above her pay grade and someone else could figure it out.

She’d also given Nellie a thumbs up when she’d waved at her, which she felt spoke well of her as a person.

Paloma: Alburn sent anyone yet?

Nellie: just county deputy. Haines. She’s fine.

Paloma: fine? you’re chained to a tree in the middle of nowhere and the deputy is FINE?

Nellie: she has a very reassuring thumbs-up

Paloma: …

Paloma: I’m driving up

Nellie: you don’t have to do that

Paloma: I know I don’t have to. I want to. Also I don’t trust any of this. Also you are definitely not eating.

Nellie: I took another sip of the coffee

Paloma: you’re the worst.

Nellie heard the construction crew before she saw them—the low diesel grumble of a truck engine rolling up through the quiet and then two vehicles coming down the access road.

A company pickup and a flatbed. They pulled up at the tree line and idled there for a moment before anyone got out, like they were discussing it or possibly taking a moment to reflect on their life choices.

The foreman was a heavyset man in an orange vest. Dave, according to his vest. Dave had the face of someone who had been in construction for twenty years and had cultivated, as a matter of professional survival, an essentially bottomless capacity for low-grade exasperation.

He walked up to Eleanor, stopped about ten feet out, and performed a slow visual inventory of the scene: the chain, the padlock, the sign, the duct-taped phone, the thermos of terrible coffee, and Nellie herself, who smiled at him with complete goodwill.

“Morning,” he said, in the tone of a man for whom the morning was not particularly good.

“Good morning! I made coffee if you want some. Although I have to warn you it’s genuinely awful. Like, I would not recommend it. I drank it because it’s all I have, but I want you to go into it with realistic expectations.”

Dave looked at the coffee. He looked at the chain again. Then he looked at the sign, squinting hard at the bottom two words. “You ran out of room,” he said.

“A little.”

“On the sign that’s your whole argument.”

“I feel like the spirit comes through.”

Heaving a deep sigh, Dave rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.

Behind him, two crew members had climbed down from the pickup with their arms folded, though it had become somewhat less defensive at the coffee offer.

The younger one was fighting a losing battle with a smile.

The other had his phone out and was clearly filming, which Nellie chose to interpret as allyship.

“We’ve got a work order,” Dave grunted.

“I know you do.” Nellie meant what came next, and she made sure it sounded that way.

“I’m not here to give you trouble. I’m here to make sure the county board understands what they’re voting on before it’s too late.

That’s it. You’re not my problem, Dave, and I’d like to not be yours.

” She’d worked enough of these to know that the crew was never the enemy; they were people with mortgages and kids in school who’d shown up to do a job someone else had created.

Directing anger at Dave helped nobody and made her look unhinged on a stream that was now, according to the counter, approaching fifteen thousand viewers.

Dave absorbed this with slightly raised eyebrows. “How many times you done this kind of thing?”

“Chain actions? Eight or nine.”

Something flickered across his face—not quite respect, but close.

He tipped his head back to follow Eleanor’s trunk up into the fog.

For a moment, the exasperation left him entirely, replaced by the involuntary recalibration that happened when a person genuinely registered the scale of something four centuries old.

He stood there long enough that the younger crew member stopped pretending to look at his phone.

Then Dave sighed again. “I’m going to have to call the site manager.”

“Of course. Do you want any coffee while you wait? The offer stands. Terrible coffee is still technically coffee.”

The younger guy abandoned the sleeve maneuver entirely and just laughed.

Dave shot him a look that had no real heat in it, and pulled out his phone, half-turning away—the posture, Nellie noted, of someone who had just clocked the camera and decided he wanted as little of his face in this as possible.

She turned back to the stream. “That’s Dave,” she told the chat. “Dave, dear, wave for the eleven—sorry, fifteen—thousand people watching.”

Dave did not wave. He did hunch his shoulders incrementally, which Nellie felt deserved some acknowledgment.

“Okay, small wave energy. I’ll take it.”

dave nation rise up, the chat said. we love dave. And, from perpetually_offline again: I would die for dave.

Paloma: fifteen thousand people is not nothing

Nellie: Eleanor is trending

Paloma: DO NOT LET IT GO TO YOUR HEAD

Paloma: Also I’m ten minutes out and I have a breakfast burrito with your name on it

Nellie: I love you

Paloma: I know. Eat the burrito.

The crew settled into that loose, purposeless posture specific to people who’d been told to hold without being told for how long.

Dave paced a slow rectangle. The younger guy sat on the flatbed and gave up pretending to do anything other than watch the stream on his phone, which Nellie found delightful.

Someone produced a thermos of what smelled, from forty feet away, like genuinely excellent coffee—the real kind, dark and properly hot—and Nellie watched longingly while she inhaled as much of the scent as she could drag through her nostrils.

She was walking the chat through the public comment resubmission process, which was less cinematic than chaining yourself to a tree but arguably more useful, when she heard another engine.

Not diesel. Something quieter. It snuck down the access road and pulled slowly to a stop behind the construction vehicles.

Nellie kept talking. She had learned, over years of this, not to react to every development like it was the one that mattered because you’d spend all your adrenaline on the seventeen that didn’t and have nothing left for the one that did.

A door opened.

A woman stepped out.

The coat registered first—charcoal, probably cashmere, full-length.

A coat that probably cost more than Nellie’s chaotically converted van, which she affectionately called Dolores, that was also her home.

City shoes. Dark hair pulled back. The clipped, economical steps of someone who had never once stood somewhere waiting for another person to tell her where to be or what to do with herself.

At the edge of the tree line, she stopped, and she looked at the scene in front of her—the chain, the sign, Dave frozen mid-pace, Deputy Haines scrambling out of her patrol car for the first time all morning—with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing.

Deputy Haines straightened her hat.

Dave stood like someone had installed a new spine.

Nellie’s phone lit up on the branch: Paloma: Please tell me that’s not who I think it is.

Nellie reached up with her free hand and tilted the camera, carefully, just enough to widen the frame.

The woman turned and looked directly at her.

Not at Eleanor or the sign—though Nellie could tell from the brief downward flicker of those eyes that she had clocked BOARD FOOT and formed a private opinion about it. She looked at Nellie. A steely gaze that was conducting a thorough, unhurried, and deeply unimpressed inventory of the situation.

The chat erupted.

IS THAT SAWYER ALBURN?!

WAIT WAIT WAIT

THAT’S THE CEO

SHE CAME HERSELF???

omg omg omg omg

Nellie Fuller, chained to a four-hundred-year-old Douglas fir in the rain, smiled wider than she had all morning.