The Grumpy Fire Chief's Holiday Romance (Small Town Grumpy Sunshine #8)

1. Leah

LEAH

The snow started somewhere around the state line, and by the time I hit the switchbacks it was falling hard enough to swallow the yellow line whole.

My hands ached from gripping the wheel. The mountains rose black and close on both sides of the road, pine trees leaning under fresh weight.

Every mile made the world feel smaller and colder.

The U-Haul groaned behind me, packed with fourteen boxes of table linens and a rented dress form, all of it wrapped with more care than it deserved.

The trailer fishtailed lightly on every curve, a reminder that I'd loaded it myself at midnight with more determination than physics.

I turned the radio up and sang along badly to a song about somebody else's heartbreak, because if I stopped singing I'd start thinking.

Thinking was how I'd ended up crying in a motel parking lot the night before, mascara running down my face while I laughed at myself, because honestly, what else was there to do.

"New town," I told the windshield. "New start. You've got this."

I did not have this.

The road curved sharp enough to drop my stomach, and my headlights caught a stretch of asphalt that looked wet and wasn't. The trailer's back end went first. I turned into the slide exactly the way every driving lesson my father ever gave me had warned against, overcorrected, and watched a parked pickup truck grow enormous in my windshield in about one second flat.

The impact wasn't dramatic. It was a soft, insulting crunch, and then two car alarms went off together, loud enough that a raven exploded off a power line somewhere above me.

I sat there with both hands still on the wheel, breathing.

"Okay," I said. "That happened."

I climbed down into four inches of snow wearing boots built for city sidewalks, not mountain roads, and understood immediately that this decision was going to haunt me for the whole winter.

The truck I'd hit was parked outside a coffee shop with a hand-painted sign that read PINEWOOD PERK.

My bumper had left a dent in its tailgate shaped roughly like an apology.

I had maybe four seconds to feel sorry for myself before I heard the siren.

It came from close, too close for a town this size. Before I'd even processed that an actual fire engine was barreling toward my very minor, very embarrassing accident, it was already pulling in behind the wreckage, its squeal cutting off partway through the wail.

A man got out.

He was tall and broad through the shoulders, moving like every wasted second cost him something personal. His jacket had WALSH stitched over the pocket, and his face wore the specific patience of a man doing math he already knew the answer to.

"Are you hurt?" He circled my truck, cataloging the damage without slowing down.

"Define hurt."

"I mean physically. Anything broken?"

"Just my pride. It wasn't in great shape to begin with."

He looked at me the way you'd look at a smoke detector that wouldn't stop chirping. "You don't correct a skid by steering harder into it."

"Noted." I straightened my spine, mostly for my own benefit. "Also, for the record, I'm twenty-eight and not your homeroom teacher."

Something flickered near his mouth, the faintest ghost of a smile. He crouched by the tailgate, ran a hand along the dent like he was checking a wound, then stood.

"I need your license and registration."

"Hang on, they're in here somewhere." I dug through my bag while my U-Haul's alarm finally gave up, leaving just his truck's horn honking in slow, mournful pulses. "This is your truck?"

"Mine. I'm the fire chief."

I stopped digging. "The actual fire chief responded personally to a fender bender?"

"Station's two blocks that way." He said it like the geography explained everything, and honestly, it kind of did. "We heard the alarms."

He studied my license with the focus of a man clearing customs, then looked up at the side of my trailer, where six months ago I'd paid a sign painter in Denver far too much money to letter LEAH BENNETT EVENTS across the door in gold script, with SHE'LL MAKE IT MAGICAL curling underneath like a promise I still fully intended to keep.

His expression didn't change exactly, but something behind his eyes did, the way weather shifts before you feel the wind.

"Magical," he said.

"It's a tagline."

"Sure it is."

"You say that like it's a diagnosis."

"I write incident reports for a living. I don't editorialize." He clicked his pen. "Name."

"Leah Bennett."

"Address."

"Working on it. I've got a lease that starts in about three hours, assuming I don't total anything else between here and there."

That earned the ghost of the smile again, gone almost before I registered it. He wrote in silence, the only sound the wind and my own truck horn finally sputtering to a stop. When he tore off the carbon copy, I braced for a ticket.

"Incident report," he said, "not a citation. No injuries, minor property damage. You'll want to call your insurance before the day's out."

"That's it?"

"You want a ticket?"

"I want to understand why I'm not getting one."

"Because nobody's hurt, and the ice did more damage tonight than you did." His eyes held on me a beat longer than the sentence required. "Drive slower through the switchbacks. They don't forgive much."

"I'll take that under advisement."

"Take it as an instruction."

"You're very bossy for a man who just met me."

"I'm very correct for a man who just met you. That's different." He nodded once at the paper in my hand, like the conversation had reached its natural conclusion. "Welcome to Pinewood Ridge."

"That almost sounded friendly."

"Don't get used to it."

He turned and walked back to his truck before I could come up with a comeback. I stood in the snow holding a piece of paper, feeling like I'd lost an argument I hadn't known we were having.

That was when I heard footsteps, fast and uneven, boots slapping through slush, and turned to find a woman sprinting toward me with a thermos in one hand and an expression somewhere between horror and pure delight.

"Oh my god." Maddie stopped in front of me, chest heaving, dark hair escaping its braid in every direction. "You hit Derek Walsh's truck. You've been in this town eleven minutes and you're already famous."

"Infamous, I'd say."

She thrust the thermos at me like it was a medal. "Nobody hits Derek's truck. He parks it like it's a personal statement."

I took the coffee with both hands, grateful for the heat more than the caffeine. "In my defense, the ice hit me first."

"Sure, blame the ice. That's what they all say." Maddie looped an arm through mine, steering me toward the coffee shop like this had all been the plan from the start. "How was the drive otherwise, besides the vehicular violence?"

"Nine hours. I cried through the first four, sang through the next three, and spent the last two convincing myself I hadn't just ruined my life."

"And now?"

"Ask me again once I've stopped shaking."

She laughed, the kind of laugh that came easy to her, and squeezed my arm. "For what it's worth, coming here wasn't a mistake. Denver was the mistake. This is the correction."

"That's generous phrasing for what happened."

"You mean the part where your fiancé and your boss fell in love over the seating chart you spent six months building, at somebody else's rehearsal dinner?" Maddie shook her head. "There's no generous phrasing for that. There's just leaving."

"When you say it like that it sounds almost dignified."

"It was extremely dignified. You threw a centerpiece."

"I set it down forcefully. There's a difference."

"The venue manager filed an incident report, Leah."

"Two incident reports in one lifetime," I said. "I'm building quite a collection."

We reached the coffee shop, warm light spilling out onto the snow, and Maddie pushed the door open with her hip, still talking, the way she always talked.

Inside smelled like cinnamon and wet wool.

Strings of copper lights looped along the exposed beams, and a chalkboard menu promised something called a Snowdrift Latte that I fully intended to order the second my hands stopped shaking.

A couple of regulars glanced up from their corner table, clocked the U-Haul art through the window, and went back to their conversation with the unhurried curiosity of people who already knew they'd hear the whole story by morning.

"So here's the thing," she said, sliding into the booth across from me. "You know how I mentioned the town needs help this year?"

"You mentioned it approximately four times in your texts."

"I mentioned it exactly the right number of times, because it's a genuine crisis.

" She wrapped both hands around her own mug.

"Our Winterfest coordinator packed up and moved to Arizona without so much as a goodbye party.

She left us a binder full of half-finished vendor contracts and a note that literally just said good luck.

The whole committee's in a panic. Judy's threatening to run it herself, and her idea of budgeting is a spreadsheet made entirely of vibes. "

"That sounds like a problem for someone with actual event experience."

"Funny you should mention that."

I looked up from my coffee. "Maddie."

"I'm just saying. You plan events for a living, and you just drove nine hours to get here. The math isn't subtle."

"The math is also that I have zero clients, one leased storefront I haven't even seen the inside of yet, and a business called Bennett Events that currently consists of me, a laptop, and a very confident door decal."

"So you have time."

"I have terror. That's different from time."

"Same thing, really, from where I'm sitting." She grinned at me over the rim of her mug. "Just think about it. That's all I'm asking."

"What's it even pay?"

"Enough to matter, and the whole town would owe you besides, which around here is worth more than money.

You'd meet every vendor, every shop owner, every family that might one day need someone exactly like you to plan their wedding.

" She raised an eyebrow, entirely too pleased with herself.

"It's basically a free advertising campaign that happens to also save Christmas. "

"You say that like saving Christmas is a small ask."

"I have complete faith in you. You once talked a bride out of releasing actual doves at an indoor venue. An overworked committee and one stubborn fire chief should be easy after that."

"You just had to bring him up again."

"I didn't bring him up. You brought him up, with your face, the second I said his name."

Outside, the snow had eased into something softer, drifting instead of falling, catching the streetlights in slow orange spirals.

The fire station sat two blocks down, its bay doors lit up gold against the dark, and somewhere past it a whole life I hadn't started living yet was waiting for me to unpack the first box.

"I'll think about it," I said, and meant it more than I expected to.

Maddie's whole face lit up like I'd handed her a gift. "That's all I needed to hear."

I wrapped both hands tighter around the thermos, letting the heat work its way back into fingers that hadn't fully stopped shaking, and told myself the job offer was the only reason my pulse hadn't settled yet.

It was a good lie while it lasted. Outside, the town went on getting ready for winter one porch light at a time, and for the first time in months I didn't feel like I was watching someone else's life from the wrong side of the glass.

Through the frost creeping up the window glass, I caught his truck one more time at the far end of the street, brake lights flaring red against the snow. For one unmistakable second, his eyes found mine in the rearview mirror before the truck rolled on.

One second. That was all it took to undo me completely.