The Grumpy Lumberjack Next Door

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

MARGOT

The cabin looks like it's trying to die.

Not in a charming, rustic, "she needs a little love" kind of way.

More in a "the foundation has given up and the roof is next" kind of way.

The listing photos were taken with the confidence of a used car salesman and the moral compass of a politician, because the structure slumping at the end of this gravel driveway bears zero resemblance to the cozy mountain retreat I emptied half my divorce settlement on.

Princess Buttercup yowls from her carrier in the passenger seat. She's been yowling since Reno. Before that, she was silently judging me, which honestly was worse.

"I know," I tell her. "I see it."

The porch sags to the left. One of the front windows has a crack running diagonally across it like someone drew a line through the glass with their finger.

The gutters hang at an angle that suggests they stopped functioning as gutters roughly around the time I was in college, and the front steps look like they'd collapse under the weight of a strong opinion.

This is what I bought. Sight unseen. With actual money.

My mother's voice echoes in my head. You're having a moment, Margot. My brothers said the same thing, just louder and with more sports metaphors. Everyone in my family thinks driving three hundred miles to a town I've never visited to renovate a cabin I've never seen is a breakdown in progress.

It's not a breakdown. It's a decision. The first real one I've made in a decade that wasn't filtered through Daniel's preferences, Daniel's schedule, or Daniel's vision of what our life should look like.

I grab the bottle of cheap Merlot from the cup holder, take a sip that's closer to a gulp, and get out of the car.

The air hits me first. Cold, clean, pine sharp.

Nothing like Portland. Nothing like the San Francisco apartment I shared with Daniel for seven years, where the air always smelled like someone else's cooking and the fog made everything damp.

Here, the sky is wide and blue and the mountains are close enough to feel like walls.

Protective ones. The kind I actually want.

"Okay." Deep breath. "It has bones."

It has something. Whether those somethings are bones or termites remains to be seen.

Princess Buttercup yowls again, louder this time, rattling her carrier with the fury of a fourteen year old cat who did not consent to this road trip. I open the passenger door, unhook the carrier, and set it on the gravel.

"Welcome home, Your Highness."

She hisses.

Fair enough.

My moving truck won't arrive until tomorrow, so tonight it's me, the cat, a sleeping bag, the wine, and whatever fresh horrors await inside. I haul my overnight bag onto one shoulder, hook Princess Buttercup's carrier over the other, and walk toward the porch.

The first step groans under my foot.

The second one holds.

The third one does not.

My right leg punches straight through the wood up to mid shin, and I pitch forward with a sound that comes out of my mouth as something between a scream and the word fuck.

Princess Buttercup's carrier swings, she shrieks, my overnight bag slides off my shoulder, and I'm stuck.

Literally stuck. My leg is jammed in rotted porch wood up to my knee while the rest of me is sprawled flat across the porch.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

Pulling my leg free doesn't work. The wood splinters but holds. Another try. Pain lances up my shin where a jagged edge is pressing into skin, and I freeze because ripping my own leg open on day one feels like an omen I don't need.

"Okay. Okay, okay, okay." Calm. Professional. Former book editor who once managed a launch party for a bestselling author while simultaneously hiding from her husband's assistant in the bathroom. I can handle a porch.

I brace both hands on the wood and pull. Nothing. Princess Buttercup watches from her carrier with an expression that clearly communicates she expected this.

"Don't. Say. A word."

She blinks.

I'm considering my options, which range from calling 911 to living here permanently, when a voice comes from somewhere to my right.

"You're gonna tear that board worse if you keep yanking."

Male. Deep. Unhurried. Coming from the tree line that separates my property from the one next door.

I don't look up. "I'm fine."

"You're stuck in your own porch."

"I'm aware of my situation, thank you."

Footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, crunching over gravel and then pine needles and then gravel again as whoever this is crosses from his property onto mine. Boots appear in my peripheral vision. Big ones. Brown leather, worn at the toe, caked in mud. Working boots. Real ones.

"Let me get that." A large hand appears near my trapped leg. "If you lean back, I can break the board free without cutting you up."

I lean back. Not because he told me to, but because my shin is starting to throb.

His hands grip the wood on either side of my leg, and he snaps the rotted plank with zero effort.

My leg comes free with a shower of splinters, and I scramble backward on my hands until I'm sitting on the one solid section of porch, breathing hard.

"Thanks." I brush wood chips off my jeans and finally look up at my rescuer.

My whole body goes cold.

He's tall. Six foot three, maybe more, because he's looking down at me from a height that makes my neck crane.

Broad shoulders in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, forearms roped with muscle and tanned from sun.

Full beard somewhere between honey and brown.

Dark blond hair under a beanie, longer on top, messy because he doesn't care, not because he tried.

Blue eyes. Deep, steady blue eyes that crinkle at the corners from squinting against snow glare, set in a face that was put on this earth specifically to ruin my life.

Because it was.

"Briggs Holloway." His name tastes like battery acid in my mouth.

He's already crouching to inspect the broken step, and his head comes up slowly. Those eyes meet mine, and I watch recognition land. His jaw goes tight. The easy, neighborly expression shifts into something careful.

"Margot."

Margot. No last name. No Vance, which is what he'd have known me as. As if he's been saying it inside his head for fifteen years and forgot to attach the rest.

"What are you doing here." My voice is flat. Not a question. A demand.

He stands. Full height, full breadth, blocking half the sky. "I live here."

"You live here."

"Next door." He jerks his chin toward the tree line. "Holloway Tree Farm. Grew up on it. Took over from my dad about eight years ago."

I stare at him. Briggs Holloway. Ryan Prescott's college roommate.

The man who spent two years making it his personal mission to destroy the happiest relationship I'd ever had.

Who showed up at our dates, who made snide comments about me to Ryan's face, who created friction at every possible opportunity until the pressure cracked us apart.

Ryan ended things senior year, and I spent the aftermath convinced that Briggs Holloway had poisoned the best thing that ever happened to me.

And now he lives thirty feet from my new front door.

"No." I scramble to my feet, ignoring the sting in my shin. "No. Absolutely not."

"Margot."

"I bought this cabin because it was remote. Because it was cheap. Because I have zero connections to anyone in this town. Do you understand? Zero. None. That was the entire point."

"I didn't know you were coming."

"Well, I didn't know you were here." My voice is rising.

Princess Buttercup is growling from her carrier, which means either she senses my distress or she's plotting her own escape.

"Nobody mentioned the neighbor was the six foot three pain in my ass from college who single handedly destroyed my relationship. "

His jaw tightens. His mouth opens, closes, and he exhales through his nose. "That's not what happened."

"Oh, that is exactly what happened." I'm shaking.

Adrenaline from the porch, fury from the past, exhaustion from three hundred miles of highway, all of it flooding my veins at once.

"You made it your personal project to break me and Ryan up.

Every dinner, every party, every time I turned around, there you were, making sure he knew you didn't approve. And it worked. Congratulations."

Briggs doesn't argue. He stands there, six foot three of flannel and silence, watching me unravel on my broken porch with an expression I can't read.

The wind moves through the trees between our properties and carries the smell of pine sap and woodsmoke, and underneath it, something warm and earthy that I refuse to identify as appealing.

"Your porch needs replacing," he says.

"I'm sorry?"

"The whole thing. Not just the step. The joists are gone." He drops his gaze to the wood, nudges a plank with the toe of his boot. It flexes like rubber. "You can't walk on this."

"I'll figure it out."

"Tonight?"

"Yes, tonight. I've been figuring things out on my own for six months. I'm extremely good at it."

He looks at me. Really looks. Daniel used to catalog whether I was presentable. My mother scans for cracks in the composure. This is neither of those. Just a steady, unhurried gaze that moves over my face, reading something he recognizes.

Then he nods once and steps off the porch. "There's a side door around back. Kitchen entrance. Sticks, but it opens. I'd avoid the front until you can get a contractor out."

He's walking away. Across my gravel, through the tree line, back toward his property. His dog, a massive Bernese mountain dog with a holiday themed name I'm too furious to remember, trots out of the trees to meet him.

"I don't need your help," I call after him.

He doesn't turn around. "Didn't offer any."

And then he's gone.

I stand on my broken porch, bleeding from a shallow cut on my shin, holding a bottle of grocery store Merlot, while my cat yowls from a carrier at my feet.

The mountains rise on every side, indifferent and enormous.

The cabin slumps behind me. The tree line between my property and his is maybe forty feet of pine and scrub, which means every morning I will see his house, his farm, his stupid flannel shirts, and those arms.

Those arms that just snapped a board in half without effort.

I grab Princess Buttercup and go around back to find the side door.

It sticks. Badly. I have to put down the carrier, grip the handle with both hands, brace one foot against the frame, and yank. It gives with a screech of swollen wood, and I stumble into a kitchen that smells like dust and old wallpaper paste.

The kitchen is small. Outdated appliances from at least two decades ago. Countertops that might have been white once but are now the color of weak tea. A window over the sink, cracked open an inch, letting in a draft.

The window over the sink faces his property.

Because of course it does.

From here I can see the edge of his tree farm.

Rows of evergreens in various stages of growth, neat and deliberate against the mountain backdrop.

A larger cabin, well maintained, with a wide porch and warm light glowing from the windows.

An axe stuck in a splitting stump near a woodpile.

And Briggs Holloway himself, standing in his yard with that ridiculous dog, looking back toward my cabin.

He can't see me. It's too dark inside, and the window is grimy. But I can see him. The set of his shoulders. One hand scrubbing over his beard before he turns and walks inside.

My stomach does something I refuse to acknowledge.

I set Princess Buttercup's carrier on the counter, open the door, and she steps out with the cautious dignity of a queen entering a questionable kingdom.

She sniffs the counter, the faucet, the edge of the window, and then she sits directly in front of the glass and stares at Briggs's cabin like she can see through walls.

"Don't even think about it," I tell her.

She ignores me. Obviously.

I pour Merlot into a coffee mug I find in the cabinet, because there are no wine glasses and there won't be until the moving truck comes tomorrow, and I lean against the counter and take stock.

The cabin needs everything. Roof, porch, plumbing, insulation, probably electrical.

The kitchen is a time capsule. The bedroom, which I peek into from the hallway, has peeling wallpaper and a floor that creaks ominously.

But the walls feel solid when I press my palm against them.

The ceiling doesn't sag. The bones, as they say, might actually exist.

And my neighbor is Briggs Holloway.

The universe has a sick sense of humor. I came here to start over.

To build something with my own hands after spending a decade watching my marriage dissolve so gradually I didn't notice until there was nothing left.

Daniel didn't cheat. He just checked out.

Emotionally, physically, presently. By the end we were two polite strangers sharing a mortgage, and when I finally said the words out loud, he didn't even fight me on it.

That might have been the worst part. That he didn't fight.

So I fought for myself. Sold my half of the apartment. Quit my in house editing job, went freelance. Found this cabin on a real estate listing at two in the morning with a glass of wine and an itchy trigger finger, and thought, that one. That's the project that isn't my marriage.

I did not account for the ghost of college past living next door.

Princess Buttercup meows once, soft and pointed, still staring out the window.

"We're not doing this," I tell her. "He ruined my life once. Not again."

She tucks her paws under her chest and settles in to watch.

I take my wine, my sleeping bag, and my phone, and I set up camp in the bedroom. The floor is cold. The walls are thin. Somewhere outside, an owl is doing its thing, and the wind moves through the trees with a sound that is, against my will, beautiful.

My phone buzzes.

Unknown Number:

Hey gorgeous, it's Sheriff Parker's office. Tom Parker here. Heard from the real estate company you were moving in today. Wanted to make sure you got in okay. Welcome to Whisper Vale. You need anything, you call.

Small towns. I text back a thank you, tell him I'm settled, and don't mention the porch.

Then I lie in my sleeping bag on the floor of my fixer upper cabin in a town I've never been to, next door to a man I've hated for fifteen years, and I stare at the ceiling.

You're having a moment, Margot.

Maybe. But at least it's mine.