Page 27 of Oops I Fell For The Lumberjack Next Door

"It's been on for three days."

"I know."

"That's a lot of electricity, Briggs."

"Worth every watt."

She puts her head back against my chest. Tinsel snores. Outside, the mountain is quiet, the air is cold, and the porch light burns until I get up at midnight to finally turn it off.

She's already asleep when I come back to bed. I pull her close. My arm over her waist. Her back against my chest. She fits. Same as before. Same as always.

Except now, for the first time in fifteen years, I'm not carrying a secret. And she's not carrying a grudge. And the forty feet between us has finally, permanently, closed.

EPILOGUE

MARGOT

TEN MONTHS LATER

The cabin is finished.

My cabin. The one I bought sight unseen with half a divorce settlement, a bottle of grocery store Merlot, and the reckless optimism of a woman at two in the morning who didn't know her neighbor would be a six foot three Christmas tree farmer with a grudge problem and a talent for subflooring.

The porch is new. Solid. Wide enough for two chairs, a side table between them, and a Bernese mountain dog who takes up more square footage than the furniture. Briggs built it with lumber from the farm, milled and planed and sanded until the grain was smooth enough to walk on barefoot. Which I do. Every morning. Coffee in the mug from day one, feet on the boards, watching the tree line that used to separate my life from his.

That tree line is mostly symbolic now.

We live at his place. The farmhouse was always the bigger cabin, the one with the working woodstove and the water heater that doesn't require a pep talk. My cabin became my office three months ago when Briggs suggested it casually over breakfast, then spent the next week building a desk along the south window before I could answer. There's a bookshelf he made from reclaimed barn wood. A reading lamp. The good Wi-Fi router from his cabin, relocated because my freelance editing requires more bandwidth than his tree shearing schedule.

Princess Buttercup has claimed the office's window seat. She sits there every day while I edit, watching the tree farm with the permanent disapproval of a cat who has accepted her circumstances without forgiving anyone for them.

Tinsel has learned not to enter the office. This lesson cost him three scratches across the nose and a shattered ego. He now waits outside the door, chin on paws, whimpering gently until I take a break. At which point both animals pretend they don't know each other while occupying the same six square feet of porch.

It's July. The farm is quiet between seasons. Shearing finished last month. The saplings from spring planting are holding. Briggs spends mornings checking rows, afternoons doing equipment maintenance, evenings on the porch with me and a beer and the kind of silence that comes from two people who've stopped needing to fill every gap with words.

Holly Pearce at Sweet Peaks knows my coffee order. Donna texts me daily. Sheriff Parker waves when I walk to the general store. The woman at the post office calls me honey. I know who plows the access road in winter, where to buy propane, which day the hardware store closes early.

My editing business is thriving. Three regular clients now. Two indie romance authors who send me manuscripts every month, plus a small press in San Francisco that keeps me busy between projects. The office cabin is perfect. Quiet. My own space, twenty feet from the man I love, close enough to see him through the trees when I need a break.

We survived our first cut your own season together in November. Families pouring in from Reno, Carson City, Sacramento. Kids running between rows. Dads hauling trees to cars while moms drank hot cider in the wreath barn. I worked the register. Donna ran the wreaths. Briggs moved through the farm with that quiet competence, answering questions, helping families pick the right tree, carrying the heavy ones to the netting machine with one arm while holding some stranger's toddler with the other.

I watched him carry a tree for a single mother who was trying to manage it alone, and something in my chest locked permanently into place. This man. This life. This town. Mine.

This morning, I'm standing in the bathroom of the farmhouse, staring at two pink lines on a pregnancy test.

The first one came up immediately. The second took thirty seconds. Both are clear, unmistakable, glowing on the white stick with the confidence of test results that have no doubt about what they're communicating.

I do the math. Six weeks. Maybe seven. Which means the weekend he came home from the farm supply run in Reno and found me rearranging his closet in one of his flannels and nothing else. He didn't even get his boots off before he had me against the hallway wall.

That tracks.

Princess Buttercup is sitting on the bathroom counter, watching me hold the test. She tilts her head. Meows once.

"I know."

My hands aren't shaking. My chest isn't tight. The panic I expected to feel, the old pattern of oh God, my life is about to change and a man is involved, doesn't come. What comes instead is warmth. Deep. Spreading from my sternum outward.

Briggs is in the barn. Saturday morning, which means he's servicing the shearing equipment before the next round starts in August. I know his schedule better than my own. Know where he'll be at every hour, what he'll need from town, when he'll come inside smelling like motor oil and ask what's for lunch.