Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Lumberjack

The first text I get on a Tuesday morning is not from my brother.

“I just want you to know that I bought the inappropriate underwear for tonight and I am thinking about you in a deeply unprofessional manner.”
I read it three times. I do not own inappropriate underwear. I am not anyone’s tonight. The number is unfamiliar, and I’m a forty-year-old custom sawyer who lives alone with a dog and a lot of unprocessed grief. I should ignore it.

Instead, I write back: Wrong number.
She writes back: OH GOD.

Then she writes back fourteen more times, each one funnier than the last. By the end of the morning, I’ve laughed for the first time in two years.
Hattie Bloom is a kindergarten teacher in Reno who was trying to text her boyfriend. The boyfriend turned out to be cheating on her with the woman whose number she has now permanently associated with humiliation. She thinks I’m a gruff stranger she’ll never meet. She uses me to vent about her week, her ex, her life.

I don’t tell her I run a custom mill three hours from her city. Don’t tell her I haven’t dated since my wife passed. Don’t tell her I save every text she sends me like they’re evidence of something I lost the ability to feel.

When her car breaks down on a trip to visit her sister, the GPS routes her through Whisper Vale. She walks into the only mill in town to ask about a tow.
She sees my face. Reads the name on my shop sign. Goes pale.

“Oh,” Hattie says. “Oh no.”

Wrong number. Right woman.
And I’m not letting her drive away.

Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Lumberjack is a quick, scorching novella featuring a widowed custom sawyer, the sunshine kindergarten teacher who texted him by accident, and the moment he realized texting a stranger was the only honest thing he’d done in two years. Guaranteed HEA with no cheating.