The Lumberjack and the City Slicker (Woodhaven Mountain Men #2)

Prologue Greyson

The mountain doesn’t care what people think.

That’s the first thing you learn when you trade penthouses and polished smiles for pine sap, wind bite, and a woodstove that pops like it’s laughing at you.

Out here, opinions don’t echo. They die in the trees.

Still, people talk.

Some folks think I ran from the glitter and glamour because I’m a coward.

Others swear I’m hiding something scandalous—some headline-worthy sin that would make the world clutch its pearls and demand my blood as payment for being born lucky.

Let them.

The truth is simpler and messier. It’s the kind of truth that doesn’t fit neatly into an article or a cocktail party whisper.

I was born with money. Inherited a good amount from my parents and their parents. And I wasn’t dumb with it.

No, sir.

I turned that money into more money with a few smart investments and a financial team that’s frighteningly good at making numbers behave.

But that’s neither here nor there.

It’s like playing a video game against myself on a console I own. Like I’m just racking up points for my own amusement—only it doesn’t really amuse me anymore.

The money. The way it cheapens relationships and buys things it shouldn’t be able to like opinions, votes, and loyalty.

When you come from money, life is different.

People are different.

Family is different, too.

In my world, families aren’t loud. They aren’t messy in that warm, human way. They’re curated. Managed. Polished until nothing real shows through the shine.

I have no siblings. No cousins I grew up with. No aunts who pinched my cheeks or uncles who taught me how to throw a ball. No extended family to speak of—just a last name that opened doors and a house so big it echoed when I walked through it alone.

My parents both died before I turned thirty.

You’d think that would be the kind of thing that cracks you open. That turns you into a before-and-after story. But grief… grief requires connection. It requires the kind of closeness that leaves fingerprints.

Now, I’m not a fucking monster.

I showed up at both funerals.

I accepted condolences that weren’t meant for me and sympathy that felt like it belonged to the idea of us, not the reality.

But I didn’t cry at either one.

That’s the part people would judge if they knew. The part they’d twist into something ugly.

Cold. Unfeeling. Rich boy robot.

Except it wasn’t that I felt nothing.

I felt sad. I really did.

After all, they were my parents. And there’s a sadness in that alone—grief for what you’re supposed to have, for what you never got.

Regret for the version of them I kept hoping might show up one day, softened by time, finally ready to see me as more than an inconvenience.

I mourned possibility.

I mourned the fantasy of family.

But I didn’t mourn them the way other people mourn. Because that’s not who they were.

It’s not who we were.

They had no time for me when they were alive.

I wasn’t a child to them. I was a carefully scheduled item.

A problem to be managed.

A name stamped on tuition checks.

A signature on holiday cards written by assistants with handwriting too perfect to be human.

They outsourced my upbringing the way they outsourced everything else—efficiently, expensively, with the belief that money could cover the gaps where warmth should’ve been.

Boarding schools.

Tutors.

Universities.

And when I wasn’t being shuffled from one sterile institution to the next, I was being corrected. Polished. Sanded down.

Punished for not fitting.

Because I’m different.

My brain doesn’t behave the way theirs did.

ADHD, they called it in doctor’s offices with soothing voices and pamphlets.

My parents called it a defect.

An embarrassment.

A thing to hide.

So they hid me.

They kept me away from dinners and meetings and any room where I might speak too fast or fidget too much or forget the script they wanted me to follow.

They didn’t hit me or scream—nothing dramatic enough to make a good story.

They were just quiet. Their disappointment was loud, though.

But me? I got good at pretending.

Good at swallowing every sharp thought, every too-big feeling, every urge to create something messy and alive.

I got good at being acceptable.

And somewhere along the way, acceptable started to feel fake.

So instead, I embraced the distance that always existed between us.

And when they died what broke wasn’t my heart.

What broke was the last thread of obligation.

The last reason to keep performing.

God, that makes me sound like a shit, but it’s the truth.

Yes, I inherited their money.

Their empire. Their expectations—spoken and unspoken.

But I chose me instead of that life.

And I haven’t looked back since.