The silence was the worst part.
Whispering Pines Lodge, stripped of its guests, was a hollow, echoing version of itself. The cheerful clatter from the kitchen was gone, the murmur of conversation in the great room had evaporated, and the crunch of tires on the gravel drive had ceased.
There was only the whisper of the pines, a sound that now seemed less like a welcome and more like a lament.
Cole, or rather Cal, had been up since before dawn, driven from his bed by a restless energy he couldn’t contain. The memory of the previous night was a brand on his thoughts: the metallic, foul taste of the contaminated water, the crushing weight of Maya’s despair, and the impossible, undeniable feel of her lips on his.
The kiss had been a lightning strike in the middle of a hurricane—a moment of pure, blinding connection in the heart of their shared disaster.
Now, in the cool grey light of morning, it hung between them, a beautiful, terrifying complication.
He’d avoided the main lodge, heading straight for the small pump house tucked into a stand of aspens behind the cabins. Work was the only antidote he knew for a mind that wouldn’t shut off.
He needed to get his hands dirty, to wrestle with something physical and solvable, because the tangle of his feelings for Maya and the guilt of his deception was a problem with no easy fix.
He had the heavy-duty pump hoist rigged and was already wrestling with the first section of slick, cold drop pipe when he heard footsteps behind him. He didn’t have to turn around. He could feel her presence, a warmth that cut through the morning chill.
“I brought you coffee,” Maya said. Her voice was quiet, carefully neutral.
Cole grunted as he secured the pipe section, then straightened up, wiping his muddy hands on a rag. He turned to face her.
She stood there holding two steaming mugs, her expression guarded. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, dark circles smudged beneath her eyes, but she was still the most capable-looking person he’d ever met.
The kiss was there in the space between them, an invisible, charged current.
“Thanks,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended. He took the mug, his fingers brushing against hers.
The jolt was instantaneous, a spark of the same electricity from the night before. They both pulled back a fraction too quickly.
“Any luck?” she asked, gesturing with her mug toward the disassembled wellhead.
“Too soon to tell. I’ve got to pull the whole assembly. My guess is the saboteur dropped something down the well casing—something that would dissolve and contaminate the source. Best case, we flush the system and shock it with chlorine. Worst case…”
He let the thought hang. Worst case, the aquifer itself was compromised, and that was a fix that money—even his kind of money—couldn’t easily solve.
They stood in an awkward silence, sipping their coffee. The professional crisis was a safe island in a sea of unspoken emotion.
“I called the state water board,” Maya said, her gaze fixed on the distant mountains.
“They’ll send a specialist to take samples, but not until tomorrow. Everything feels… slow. Too slow.”
“We’ll get it done faster,” Cole said, the promise coming out with more force than he’d intended. It was a vow. He would fix this. For her.
Maya finally met his eyes, and he saw the conflict warring there—gratitude mixed with a new, raw vulnerability. “Last night…” she started, then hesitated, biting her lip.
Cole’s heart hammered against his ribs. Here it was.
“Maya, I…”
“It shouldn’t have happened,” she said, the words a rush of air.
“Everything was… a mess. We were a mess. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
He felt a sharp, unexpected sting of disappointment. He knew she was right, but he hated hearing it.
“I was,” he said, his voice low. “I was thinking very straight.”
Her breath hitched. She looked from his eyes to his mouth, and for a second, he thought she might step closer.
Instead, she took a half-step back, wrapping her arms around herself as if to hold herself together.
“We can’t, Cal,” she whispered.
“Not now. Not with all this.” She gestured vaguely at the silent lodge, the empty cabins, the mountain of problems they faced.
“I need a handyman. A partner in this… this fight. I can’t… I can’t be distracted.”
“I’m not a distraction,” he said, the words feeling truer than his own name.
“I’m on your side. That kiss doesn’t change that.”
It changes everything, his mind screamed. It makes the lie a thousand times worse.
“Okay,” she said, though she didn’t sound convinced.
“Okay. Just… let’s focus on the well.”
She gave him a tight, unconvincing smile before turning and walking back toward the lodge, leaving him with the cooling coffee and the lingering scent of her perfume.
Cole watched her go, a hollow ache in his chest. He turned back to the well, attacking the work with renewed fury.
He pulled pipe after pipe, his muscles straining, the rhythmic clank of metal a welcome distraction. Hours passed.
The sun climbed higher, warming the cool mountain air. He was covered in mud and grease, his knuckles were scraped raw, but the well pump was finally out, lying on a tarp beside the gaping casing.
Nothing seemed obviously wrong with it.
He knelt by the wellhead, peering down into the darkness, when his hand brushed against something half-buried in the damp soil and gravel. It wasn’t a rock.
It was cold, metallic, and oddly shaped. Frowning, he dug it out.
It was a sleek, specialized tool, about eight inches long, made of brushed stainless steel with a complex, screw-like tip at one end and a hexagonal socket at the other. It was clean, save for the mud he’d just smeared on it.
He’d worked with tools his entire life, from the high-tech equipment in his family’s engineering labs to the worn-out wrenches in his truck. He’d never seen anything like this.
It didn’t belong in a simple pump house. It was too precise, too… clinical.
“What in the hell have you got there?”
Cole looked up. Ben Carter stood a few feet away, his weathered face etched with concern. He’d approached so quietly Cole hadn’t heard him.
“I’m not sure,” Cole said, holding it up. “Found it right here, by the casing. Dropped, it looks like.”
Ben walked over, taking the tool from Cole’s outstretched hand. He turned it over and over, his brow furrowed in concentration.
He squinted at a small, laser-etched serial number near the socket.
“Well, I’ll be,” Ben breathed, a look of dawning comprehension on his face.
“This ain’t no plumber’s tool. Or a mechanic’s.”
“What is it?” Maya asked, rejoining them. She must have seen Ben from the office window.
The awkwardness from the morning was gone, replaced by the sharp focus of a manager facing a problem.
Ben didn’t answer immediately. He ran a thumb over the tool’s sharp, auger-like tip.
“When I was younger, I did a short stint with a crew blasting a new road through the pass. We had geologists all over the place. Surveyors. They were taking core samples, testing the rock strata, the soil density… all that nonsense.”
He held the tool up for them to see, his eyes glinting with grim understanding.
“They used something that looked a hell of a lot like this. It’s a bit fancier now, I’d wager, but it’s the same idea. This is a head for a geological impact sampler. You use it to take soil and rock samples from deep in the ground.”
Cole and Maya stared at the object, the pieces clicking into place with a sickening thud. The faked bear sighting.
The cut power line. And now this.
It wasn’t random vandalism. It wasn’t a disgruntled employee.
A disgruntled employee doesn’t come equipped with high-end geological survey equipment.
“A surveyor?” Maya said, her voice barely a whisper. “Why would a surveyor be sabotaging us?”
“They wouldn’t be,” Cole said, his mind racing.
“But someone scoping out the land for development would. Someone who wanted to know exactly what they were buying—or trying to buy. The mineral rights, the stability of the ground for a larger foundation, the water table…”
The puzzle wasn’t complete, but the shape of it was becoming terrifyingly clear.
Someone didn’t just want the lodge to fail. They wanted the land it was sitting on.
Ben nodded slowly, handing the tool back to Cole.
“This fella wasn’t here to poison a well. That was just a means to an end. This fella was here to see if the ground was worth a fortune.”
The three of them stood in silence around the wounded well, the small, sophisticated piece of steel in Cole’s hand feeling heavier than a sledgehammer. It was their first real clue, a tangible link to their faceless enemy.
It pointed not to a petty grudge, but to a cold, corporate motive.
Cole looked at Maya. The fear was back in her eyes, but it was overlaid with something new: a hard, defiant anger.
The kiss, the complications, the personal turmoil between them—it all fell away, eclipsed by the clarity of the threat. They had an enemy who was methodical, well-equipped, and playing for stakes far higher than they had imagined.
And for the first time since he’d arrived, Cole Sterling felt the familiar chill of the world he’d tried to leave behind. This wasn’t just a fight for a lodge anymore.
It was the kind of ruthless, predatory battle he knew all too well.