Page 4 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“You’re awake,” she said, like this was wonderful news. Like finding a strange man conscious in her guest room was the highlight of her day. “Good. I was starting to think I’d have to bring in reinforcements. Have some soup.”

She turned back to the stove and ladled something into a bowl, moving with the easy efficiency of someone who was used to feeding people. When she turned back, she held the bowl out to me with both hands, still smiling.

I didn’t take it.

“Why am I here?” My voice came out like gravel. Raw and rough, scraped clean by whatever I’d been doing to it last night. “What did you do to me?”

The smile dimmed. Not all the way, but enough that I could see the shift, the slight tightening around her eyes, the way her chin lifted just a fraction.

“Well, good morning to you too,” she said. She set the bowl on the small table between us with a careful, deliberate motion. “And to answer your questions: you’re here because I found you passed out on a sidewalk in forty-degree weather with no jacket. What I did to you was drag your very large, very heavy, very unconscious body to my car, drive you here, take off your boots, give you a blanket, and leave water and aspirin by your bed. So, you’re welcome.”

The words hit like small, precise stones. Each one landing exactly where she aimed it.

I stared at her. She stared back. Her eyes were blue, the kind of blue that made you think of summer skies over the mountains, and right now they were steady and unflinching, daring me to say something stupid.

I was good at saying something stupid.

“I didn’t ask for your help.”

“No,” she agreed. “You asked for Jimmy.”

The name went through me like a blade.

Everything locked down. My chest, my throat, my expression. Years of practice kicked in, the automatic shutdown that happened whenever someone got too close to the thing I kept buried. My face went flat. My hands curled into fists at my sides.

She noticed. I could tell by the way her eyes flickered down to my hands and back up. But she didn’t flinch. Didn’t step back. Just stood there in her cat socks and her oversized sweater, holding her ground.

“Calm down,” she said, and her voice had gentled, not in a pitying way, but in the way you’d talk to something cornered and hurting. “I’m not a pervert or something you might think. I just helped you because you were too drunk and crying, and I wasn’t going to leave you there to freeze. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”

Crying.

The word landed in my gut like a fist. I had been crying. On a sidewalk. In public. In front of this woman, this stranger with her string lights and her cat socks, I had broken down like a child and called out for my dead brother.

The shame was instant, total, and suffocating. It rose up my throat and sat there, thick and hot, and I wanted to put my fist through the nearest wall.

I turned toward the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked from behind me.

“Home.”

“Without eating? Without even sitting down? You look like you’re about to pass out again, and I really don’t want to carry you a second time. My back is still recovering from the first.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You’re hungover, you’re dehydrated, and you’re about to walk out into the cold in a flannel shirt with no jacket because your pride is bigger than your common sense.”

I reached for the door handle.

Her hand closed around my arm. Not hard, not aggressive. Just enough to stop me. Her fingers were small against my forearm, and the contact sent something jolting through me that I immediately buried.

“Sit down,” she said. Her voice had shifted again, firmer now, with an edge that reminded me of a teacher dealing with a stubborn kid. “Eat the soup. Take the medicine. If you don’t know how to give gratitude, don’t disrespect me at least. I didn’t have to help you. I chose to. The least you can do is not be a jerk about it.”

The words hung between us.

I looked down at her hand on my arm. Then up at her face. She was serious. Dead serious. And underneath the firmness, underneath the stubbornness that practically radiated off her, there was something else. Something that looked a lot like the kind of decency that doesn’t expect anything back.

The guilt came then, quieter than the shame but more persistent. She’d found me at my lowest and instead of walking past, she’d hauled me into her home, taken off my boots, left me water, and made me soup. And my first instinct had been to bark at her and walk out.