Page 17 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

We finished eating. I cleared the plates and was running water in the sink when the sound hit the windows. Rain. Not the gentle, polite rain that tapped and asked to be let in, but the sudden, full-throttle downpour that the mountains delivered without warning, sheets of water hammering the glass like they had a personal vendetta.

I looked out the window. The streetlights had turned the rain into silver curtains, and the wind was pushing the water sideways, sending it streaming down the sidewalk in miniature rivers. Sawyer’s truck was parked three spaces down, already glistening.

“Well,” I said, turning back to him. “That’s not stopping anytime soon.”

He was standing by the table, looking at the window with the resigned expression of a man who had driven through worse but didn’t relish the idea.

“Sleep here,” I said. “I have an extra room.”

He looked at me. Quick, sharp, searching. Looking for the catch, the complication, the reason this was a bad idea.

There were plenty of reasons. We both knew it. This thing between us, whatever it was, was new and unnamed and fragile, and spending the night under the same roof had a way of making things feel bigger than they were.

“I have the spare room,” I said again, keeping my voice light, easy, giving him the space to say no. “Same one as last time. Clean sheets. And you won’t have to drive through that.”

The rain threw itself against the window with renewed fury, as if making my argument for me.

He stood there for a long moment. The kitchen light caught the angles of his face, the hard line of his jaw, the scar, the way his brows pulled together when he was thinking. Then he exhaled. Long and slow, like he was letting something go.

“Fine,” he said.

“Fine?”

“One night.”

“One night,” I agreed. “I’ll get you a towel.”

I got him a towel and a spare pillow and showed him to the room he’d already slept in once, though he’d been too drunk to remember it. He stood in the doorway, filling the frame, and looked at the small bed and the yellow curtains and the paper lantern like he was memorizing them.

“Thank you,” he said.

This time, I didn’t have to ask.

“You’re welcome, Sawyer.”

His name felt good in my mouth. Solid and real, like the man it belonged to. He looked at me when I said it, and something passed between us in the doorway of the spare room, something warm and unspoken that made the air feel thicker.

“Goodnight,” he said.

“Goodnight, grumpy.”

I closed my bedroom door and leaned against it, pressing my palms flat against the wood. My heart was doing something irregular and frankly embarrassing, and my cheeks hurt from smiling.

One month ago, I had dragged a drunk stranger off a sidewalk and into my home. Tonight, he had stood outside my building, scared off another man, and eaten pasta at my kitchen table.

I was in so much trouble.

I fell asleep to the sound of rain on the windows and the knowledge that Sawyer Cole was sleeping twelve feet away, on the other side of a wall so thin I could hear him breathing.

It sounded, absurdly, like the safest sound in the world.

6

CHLOE

The crying woke me.

Not a loud sound. Not the kind that breaks through walls and demands attention. This was quieter than that, buried and muffled, like someone trying very hard to keep it inside and failing. It came through the thin wall between my bedroom and the spare room in fragments, low groans and ragged breaths and something that sounded like a name, repeated over and over until the syllables blurred into a single wounded sound.