Page 9 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

The smart thing to do would have been to backtrack. Laugh it off. Say “nothing” and let Dollie drag me away. The smart thing and the Chloe thing, unfortunately, were rarely the same thing.

“I said, you are a bitter grumpy man.” I crossed my arms. “She brought him cookies. Cookies, not a marching band. He’s going back to work in five minutes anyway. Would it kill you to just let people be nice to each other without acting like it’s a personal attack on your operation?”

The yard had gone quiet. Or maybe it hadn’t, maybe the saws were still running and the machines were still humming, but in the space between me and this man, the air had stilled. Josh looked like he was trying to melt into the ground. Dollie’s grip on my arm had reached tourniquet pressure.

Sawyer stared at me. I stared back.

“Don’t you have a love life or something?” I asked. “Maybe that would help with the whole…” I gestured vaguely at his entire person. “This.”

His jaw worked. I could see the muscle jumping beneath the stubble. “I don’t have a plan to get a girlfriend. Especially one who’s too chatty. Like you.”

“Having a chatty girlfriend is not bad, you know.”

And then, because I had apparently lost every single shred of self-preservation I’d ever possessed, I walked right up to him.

He was taller up close. A full head taller than me, which meant I had to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes. This close, I could see the scar on his jaw, the fine lines of sawdust in the creases of his flannel, the way his chest expanded with a breath he was holding. His eyes were even greener up close, sharp and wary, watching me like I was something dangerous, which was hilarious coming from a man who ran a sawmill and looked like he could bench press a truck.

I went up on my toes and kissed his cheek.

It was quick. Barely a second of contact. My lips against the rough scratch of his stubble, warm skin over hard bone, and the faintest scent of cedar and coffee underneath the sawdust.

I dropped back to my heels.

His face was a work of art. His eyes had gone wide, his mouth was slightly open, and a flush had started climbing up his neck, creeping past his collar toward his ears.

“How dare you,” he said, but the words came out strangled, like they’d gotten caught on something in his throat.

I stuck my tongue out at him. Actually stuck my tongue out, like a five-year-old, like one of my kindergartners after a particularly satisfying act of mischief. Then I turned to Dollie, who was standing frozen with her mouth hanging open.

“Let’s go wait somewhere we can sit,” I said, threading my arm through hers. “And maybe a little farther from the negativity.”

I looked back over my shoulder at Sawyer, who was still standing exactly where I’d left him, his hand halfway to his cheek like he was about to touch the spot where my lips had been. He caught himself and dropped his hand, shoving it into his pocket.

“Bye, grumpy,” I said, and waved.

Dollie didn’t speak until we’d rounded the corner of the main building and found a stack of lumber to sit on near the break area. Then she grabbed my shoulders and shook me.

“What was that?” she hissed. “What did you just do? You kissed Sawyer Cole. You kissed Sawyer Cole on the face. In his own sawmill. In front of everyone.”

“On the cheek. There’s a difference.”

“Chloe. Chloe.” She was shaking her head so fast her red hair whipped back and forth. “That man is… he’s… nobody talks to him like that. Nobody. He once made a delivery driver cry because the guy parked in the wrong spot.”

“He needed to hear it.”

“He needed to hear… you called him a bitter grumpy man. To his face.”

“Well, he is one.”

Dollie stared at me for a long moment, then burst out laughing. The kind of laugh that bends you in half and makes your eyes water. She laughed so hard she nearly fell off the lumber stack, clutching her stomach.

“You’re insane,” she wheezed. “You are genuinely insane.”

“I prefer ‘refreshingly direct.’”

When Josh found us during his break, he looked like a man who had just survived an earthquake and was still checking to make sure the ground was solid.

“So,” he said carefully, sitting next to Dollie and immediately wrapping his arm around her. “That was something.”