The scent of pine and damp earth was a kind of therapy. Cole, or rather, Cal, leaned the splitting axe against the chopping block and wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow with the back of a leather glove.
He was working his way through the contaminated firewood from the other day, stacking the foul-smelling logs in a quarantined pile far from the main supply. The physical labor was honest and absolute, a welcome antidote to the complexities that had defined his life for the past decade.
Each clean split of wood felt like a small, definitive victory.
For the first time in years, he felt a sense of place. Here, surrounded by the quiet majesty of the mountains, his purpose was simple: fix what was broken, protect the lodge, and maybe, just maybe, earn the trust of the formidable woman who ran it.
He thought of the hike to the waterfall, of the easy way Maya had laughed, the guard in her eyes melting away to reveal a warmth that had taken his breath. He’d told her a story about his grandfather teaching him to fish, a rare, unedited truth from his childhood, and she had shared a heartbreakingly funny tale about her first day as manager, when a moose had wandered into the lobby.
In that shared solitude, the lie he was living had felt both impossibly large and agonizingly necessary. Telling her the truth would be like taking an axe to the fragile bridge they were building between them.
A muffled vibration came from the pocket of his jeans. Not the cheap burner phone he used for local calls, but the encrypted satellite phone he’d brought for emergencies.
The one that connected him to a world of boardrooms, stock prices, and crushing responsibility. He ignored it.
It buzzed again, insistent. He let out a frustrated sigh, pulling off his gloves and fishing it out.
The screen displayed a single name: Evelyn.
His stomach clenched. Evelyn Reed, his COO and the closest thing he had to a confidante in the corporate jungle, would only use this line if the world was on fire.
He glanced toward the lodge. No sign of Maya or Ben.
He pressed the phone to his ear and walked a few paces away from the woodpile, turning his back as if to physically block out this intrusion.
“This had better be a five-alarm fire, Evelyn,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, clipped tone he hadn’t used in weeks. The easygoing drawl of “Cal” vanished, replaced by the sharp-edged authority of Cole Sterling.
“Worse,” she replied, her voice tight with stress.
“It’s Vanguard Consolidated. They’ve launched a hostile takeover bid. A tender offer went out to our major shareholders an hour ago.”
Cole’s blood ran cold. Vanguard.
Predatory, soulless, notorious for acquiring legacy companies and stripping them for parts. They were vultures, and they were circling Sterling Corporation.
“How?” he demanded, his mind racing, already picturing spreadsheets and shareholder portfolios.
“Our Q3 projections were solid. Our stock is stable.”
“They found a vulnerability in the European subsidiary. A patent dispute we thought was settled. They’re leveraging it, creating a panic.
The offer is just high enough to tempt the institutional investors who don’t care about our family’s legacy.”
“Our legacy is all we have,” Cole snapped, pacing now, his boots crunching on the gravel. “What’s the board’s position?”
“Fractured. Peterson is panicking, and you know Henderson will follow the highest bidder. We need you here. We need to call an emergency session, present a unified front.”
“I can’t,” he said, the words tasting like ash. He looked at the quiet lodge, at the smoke curling from the main chimney.
This was his priority now. This place. Her. “I’m not done here.”
“Cole, listen to me,” Evelyn’s voice was stern, pulling him back.
“This isn’t about a new acquisition or a quarterly report. This is an existential threat. If Vanguard gets control, they will liquidate everything your father built. Everything you’ve been trying to protect. Your name will be a footnote in a corporate history textbook.”
The mention of his father was a punch to the gut. He squeezed his eyes shut.
The pressure, the weight he had been so blissfully free of, came crashing back down on him, suffocating him. He was no longer Cal, the handyman.
He was Cole Sterling, the CEO, and his empire was under siege.
“There are no options here, Evelyn. We don’t have the liquid capital to counter their offer without exposing ourselves elsewhere. Stall them. File an injunction. Use the antitrust argument. I don’t care what it takes, buy me time.”
His voice was cold, decisive, a cascade of commands that left no room for debate.
He stopped his pacing, running a hand through his hair in agitation.
“This is a coordinated attack. I want to know who’s leaking information from the inside. And get our security team on it. Quietly. We can’t afford—”
“Cal?”
The voice, soft and questioning, cut through his concentration like a shard of glass. He spun around.
Maya stood ten feet away, a steaming mug in each hand, her expression frozen in a state of bewildered suspicion. He didn’t know how long she’d been there, but from the guarded look in her dark eyes, it was long enough.
She wasn’t looking at Cal, the man who’d fixed her water heater and hiked to her secret waterfall. She was looking at a stranger.
A cold, ruthless executive barking orders into a sleek, unfamiliar phone.
His heart hammered against his ribs. He turned away from her, lowering his voice.
“Evelyn, I have to go. Handle it.” He ended the call without waiting for a reply, shoving the phone deep into his pocket as if he could hide the man he’d just become.
When he turned back, the easy warmth between them had evaporated, replaced by a tense, chilly silence.
He forced a smile that felt brittle and fake.
“Sorry about that,” he said, his voice still holding a faint echo of its corporate edge before he consciously softened it. “Just some… family drama.”
Maya didn’t move. She just stared at him, her gaze analytical, piecing things together that didn’t fit. “Family drama?” she repeated, her tone flat.
“It sounded less like drama and more like a corporate invasion. I heard you mention a board, liquidating assets… That’s some family you’ve got.”
She finally walked forward and set one of the mugs on the chopping block, but she kept the other clutched in her hands, a barrier between them. The simple, friendly gesture of bringing him coffee now felt like an interrogation tactic.
“It’s complicated,” he said, the lie feeling clumsy and inadequate on his tongue. He was a man used to controlling every variable, yet in this moment, he was utterly powerless.
“My sister… she’s going through a messy divorce. Her husband is trying to force her out of their family business. I was just giving her some advice.”
It was a plausible lie, constructed on the fly, but he could see in her eyes that it didn’t land. Maya was too smart, too perceptive.
She had spent weeks observing him, seeing a competent, hardworking man with calloused hands and a quiet demeanor. The man she had just overheard was none of those things. He was a shark.
She took a slow sip of her coffee, her eyes never leaving his.
“The handyman who gives expert advice on hostile takeovers. You’re a man of many talents, Cal.”
There was no accusation in her voice, just a cool, observational distance that was far worse. It was the voice she’d used with him on his first day—the voice of a manager appraising a potential problem.
The small rift the outline mentioned felt like a chasm opening at his feet.
“I used to work in an office a long time ago,” he hedged, hating every word. “Picked up a few things.”
“Right,” she said, the single word dripping with disbelief. She looked from his face to the expensive, out-of-place phone he’d just hidden, and a flicker of something—disappointment, maybe even hurt—crossed her features before being replaced by her customary mask of professional reserve.
“Well,” she said, her tone all business now.
“Ben wanted me to ask if you’d had a chance to look at the wiring in the east wing cabins. Guests in number seven said their lights were flickering again last week.”
The shift was jarring. She was putting a wall back up, brick by painful brick.
The easy camaraderie of the past few days, the shared laughter by the waterfall, the quiet understanding—it all vanished into the cold mountain air.
“Yeah. Of course. I’ll head over there right now,” he said, grateful for the task, for anything to escape her penetrating gaze.
“Good.” She gave him a tight, impersonal nod, then turned and walked back toward the lodge without another word, her back straight and rigid.
Cole stood alone, the scent of pine now seeming sharp and accusatory. The coffee sat on the chopping block, steam ghosting into the air.
He felt the phantom weight of the satellite phone in his pocket, a stark symbol of the two irreconcilable halves of his life. The crisis at Sterling Corporation felt distant and abstract compared to the immediate, gut-wrenching pain of seeing the trust in Maya’s eyes curdle into suspicion.
He had come to Whispering Pines to escape, to find something real in a life that had become a series of strategic maneuvers. He had found it, in the honest sweat of his labor and in the eyes of a woman who was more real than anyone he had ever known.
And now, with one phone call, he had jeopardized it all. The call from the real world hadn’t just reminded him of who he was; it had reminded him of the lie he was living, and the inevitable destruction it would cause when it finally fell apart.