The silence was a living thing, thick and suffocating, punctuated only by the scrape of Cole’s worn duffel bag being tossed into the bed of his beat-up truck. Each sound was an indictment.
The clang of his toolbox hitting the metal liner was the gavel falling on their shared dream. The slam of the truck door was the final, hollow echo of his betrayal.
Maya stood on the porch steps, arms wrapped tightly around her waist as if to hold herself together. The crisp mountain air felt like shards of glass in her lungs.
She had emptied her rage, screamed her pain until her throat was raw, and now all that remained was a cold, desolate calm. The man she had kissed by the well, the man she had allowed herself to imagine a future with, had been a phantom.
In his place stood Cole Sterling, a corporate predator in handyman’s clothing.
“Maya, please.” His voice was low, stripped of the easy confidence she’d once found so compelling.
Now it just sounded like another calculated tool.
“Just listen for one minute. Jed is the one behind this. He fed you that information to break us apart before we could stop him.”
“Stop him?” She laughed, a brittle, ugly sound that tore from her chest.
“Or stop you? What’s the difference? He wants to take my home, you want to take my home. You just had a more creative strategy. I’ll give you that. The personal touch was a masterstroke.”
He took a step toward her, his face a mask of desperation.
“That was never the plan. That was never me. The man you got to know—Cal—that’s who I am. Who I want to be.”
“Don’t,” she whispered, the word sharp enough to cut.
“Don’t you dare say his name. Cal was a lie. And every moment we shared, every confidence, every touch… it was all part of your due diligence, wasn’t it? Assessing the asset. Well, consider it assessed.”
She pointed a trembling finger down the long gravel drive that led away from the lodge.
“Get off my property. Now.”
His shoulders slumped in defeat. The fight seemed to drain out of him, leaving a man who looked utterly lost. He gave a single, final nod, his eyes holding hers for a moment longer.
In their depths, she saw a world of regret, but she couldn’t afford to believe it. To believe any of it would be to shatter what little of herself she had left.
He turned toward his truck, his hand on the driver’s side door, and that’s when another vehicle rumbled up the drive. It was Ben’s old groundskeeping cart, sputtering to a halt beside them.
Ben climbed out, his face etched with a concern that had nothing to do with the emotional wreckage he’d just driven into. His gaze was fixed on a point over their shoulders, past the lodge, toward the cluster of outbuildings.
“Maya,” he said, his voice tight with an unfamiliar urgency. “What’s that smell?”
Maya tore her eyes from Cole, her own senses finally registering what Ben’s had already caught. A faint, acrid scent tainted the clean pine air.
It wasn’t woodsmoke from the lodge’s great stone hearth. It was chemical.
Wrong.
Her eyes followed Ben’s. A thin, greasy tendril of grey smoke curled into the sky from the roof of the old workshop.
It was a squat, timber-frame building used for storage and equipment repairs, unremarkable except for one critical, terrifying detail.
“The workshop…” Maya breathed, a cold knot of dread tightening in her stomach.
Ben’s head snapped from the smoke to her, his eyes wide.
“The propane tanks. The main supply tanks are right behind that wall.”
The world seemed to tilt on its axis. Two massive, 500-gallon propane tanks were nestled against the workshop’s back wall, feeding the entire lodge—the kitchen, the water heaters, the laundry.
They were the lodge’s lifeblood. And a potential bomb.
Jed. This wasn’t about contamination or scaring away guests anymore.
This was scorched earth. An ‘accidental’ fire.
An explosion that would wipe Whispering Pines off the map, leaving nothing but a tragic headline and a prime piece of real estate for a vulture to pick clean.
“I’ll get the extinguishers from the main hall,” Ben said, already turning back to his cart, his movements brisk and efficient.
“Call 9-1-1. The volunteer fire department is thirty minutes out if we’re lucky.”
He paused, his hand on the ignition, and looked from Maya’s stricken face to Cole, who stood frozen by his truck, his earlier defeat replaced by a sharp, assessing focus. The handyman was back, his mind already calculating angles, risks, and actions.
“You’re going to need help, Maya,” Ben said, his voice leaving no room for argument. “We can’t do this alone.”
Then he was gone, the cart roaring back toward the main building.
The silence rushed back in, but it was different now. It was a vacuum filled with the thrum of impending disaster.
Maya was paralyzed, trapped between the man who had destroyed her world and the fire that threatened to consume what was left of it.
Cole hadn’t moved. He hadn’t gotten in his truck.
He was looking at the smoke, then at her, his expression stripped of all pretense. It was the same look he’d had during the power outage—calm, capable, and ready.
He took a half-step, not toward her, but toward the fire.
“The main water line runs past the east corner,” he said, his voice level, analytical.
“If we can get a hose on it, we can soak the wall by the tanks, keep them cool. But we have to move now before the heat builds.”
Every instinct screamed at her to say no. To tell him to finish what he started and leave.
Let him drive away and watch the lodge burn from his rearview mirror. It would be a fitting end.
Her pain was a physical thing, a raw, gaping wound in her chest, and he was the one holding the knife. How could she possibly turn to him? How could she stand beside him, work with him, trust him with the fate of the only thing she had left?
Her mind flashed back to the email. The corporate headshot of Cole Sterling, smiling coolly from a boardroom.
That man was a stranger. But the man standing before her now… he wasn’t smiling.
His jaw was set, his eyes were locked on the danger, and his body was coiled, ready to spring into action. He was Cal.
The competent, resourceful man who had fixed her water heater, rewired her generator, and held her when she thought she would fall apart.
He was a lie. But his competence wasn’t.
The smoke was thicker now, darkening from grey to a dirty, ominous black. She could feel the heat, or maybe she just imagined it, a phantom warmth on her skin.
She saw the lodge in her mind’s eye: the great room her grandfather had built with his own hands, the porch where her parents had danced on their wedding night, the hundred-year-old pines that whispered its history. It was more than a business.
It was her heart, her legacy, her home.
And it was burning.
Her anger was a wildfire, but this new fire was real, and it would consume everything, including her pride. Ben was right.
She couldn’t do this alone. She needed help. She needed his help.
The choice was no choice at all. It was an act of brutal, soul-crushing pragmatism.
She could lose her pride, or she could lose everything.
She pushed the betrayal down, locking it in a cold, dark box inside her. There would be time for it later. Time for rage and tears and recriminations.
But not now. Now, there was only the fire.
Cole was still waiting, his gaze fixed on her. He wasn’t pleading anymore.
He was simply waiting for a command, ready to obey. He was putting the choice, and the power, in her hands.
She took a deep breath, the acrid smoke catching in her throat. Her voice, when it came, was hoarse and broken, but it was steady.
It was the voice of the manager of Whispering Pines.
She looked straight at him, meeting his gaze without flinching.
“Cole,” she said, the name tasting like ash on her tongue.
“Get the hoses. I’ll meet you at the spigot.”