Page 73 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“That is a warning,” the lead man said. His voice was calm. Conversational. Like he was discussing the weather. “Mr. Marshall wants you to understand that this can get much worse. The woman belongs to him. The child is a complication. Walk away, Mr. Cole. While you still can.”

I stood there bleeding in my own sawmill with four of his men on the ground and a hole in my shoulder and looked at this man who had come to my place of work to threaten my family, and what I felt was not fear. It was not pain. It was a cold, crystalline fury that settled into my bones like ice forming on still water.

“Tell Mr. Marshall,” I said, and my voice was steady even as the blood ran down my arm and dripped off my fingertips, “that I will be waiting.”

The lead man studied me for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, like he had gotten the answer he expected. He gestured to his men. The ones who could walk picked up the ones who could not, and they loaded back into the trucks with the mechanical efficiency of people following orders, and the trucks pulled out of the lot and disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust.

My knees buckled. Josh caught me.

“Hospital,” he said. “Now.”

“I am fine.”

“You have a bullet hole in your shoulder, you stubborn son of a…”

“I said I am fine.”

“And I said hospital.”

Josh won. He always won when it mattered, because he was the one person who had never been intimidated by me and never would be. He drove me to the hospital in his truck with a towel pressed against my shoulder and the radio off and his jaw clenched so tight I could hear his teeth grinding.

The emergency room was small. A mountain town hospital with a staff that was accustomed to broken bones and chainsaw accidents and the occasional bar fight, not gunshot wounds. But they worked fast. The doctor, a woman with steady hands and no tolerance for my attempts to leave, cleaned the wound, confirmed the bullet had gone straight through, stitched me up, and wrapped my shoulder in a bandage that immobilized my arm against my chest.

I was sitting on the hospital bed in a room that smelled like antiseptic and fluorescent light when the door opened.

Chloe came through first. Emma was behind her, holding Dollie’s hand, her green eyes wide and scared. But Chloe. Chloe’s face was the thing that hit me. White. Absolutely white. Like all the blood had drained out of her and pooled somewhere at her feet, and her eyes were red and her jaw was tight and she was holding herself together with the kind of visible effort that told me she had been falling apart in the car and had reassembled herself in the hallway for Emma’s sake.

She crossed the room in three steps and wrapped her arms around me. Carefully. Avoiding the shoulder. But her grip was fierce, her face pressed into the right side of my neck, and I felt her body shaking against mine with the kind of tremors that come from fear held too long.

“You are stubborn,” she said against my neck. Her voice was thick. Rough with tears she was refusing to let fall. “I told you not to go, right? I told you it was dangerous. I told you.”

“How can I give my family a good life without work?” I said.

She pulled back. Looked at me. Her eyes were blazing, the blue hot with a mix of relief and fury that only Chloe could produce, the kind of anger that comes from loving someone so much that the thought of losing them makes you want to kill them yourself.

“How can you work if you die?” she said.

I did not have an answer for that. She was right. She was always right about the things that mattered, and the fact that I was sitting in a hospital bed with a hole in my shoulder was proof that her worry had been justified and my stubbornness had been exactly what she said it was. Stubbornness.

Emma climbed onto the bed beside me. She was quiet, which was unusual for her, and her small face was serious in a way that made her look older than six. She leaned against my good side and pressed her hand against my arm.

“Does it hurt, Papa?”

“A little.”

“Is the bad man going to come back?”

“No,” I said. “He is not.”

She nodded. Slowly. Then she tucked herself against me and stayed there, and I put my good arm around her and held her and looked at Chloe over the top of our daughter’s head.

Dollie took Emma to get food from the cafeteria. Something about ice cream being a medical necessity that Emma agreed with enthusiastically. The door closed behind them and the room went quiet.

Chloe pulled a chair beside the bed. She checked my bandage. Adjusted the sling. Poured water into a cup and held it out to me and then pulled it back when I reached for it with my injured arm.

“Your other hand,” she said.

“I know which hand to use.”