Page 14 of Billionaire Lumberjack's Bargain

This woman will doanythingto protect her son.

Even fire that gun if she has to.

I run a hand back through my sweaty hair and release a heavy sigh. The last thing I want to do is ask this, but I have to know—for her sake and my own. “I need to ask you something that might be uncomfortable.”

She glances away, her eyes darting across the darkening property, as if she can somehow avoid whatever I’m about to ask by simply not looking at me.

“When your husband died, did you talk to my grandfather?”

Her gaze snaps back to me, her brows rising. “What?”

Apparently, not what she was expecting…

“Did you radio my grandfather when your husband died? Did he come up here and speak with you after?”

She wraps her arms around herself and shakes her head, sending a chunk of dark hair falling against her cheek. “No, I radioed the sheriff. He took care of everything with—” She swallows thickly, her eyes glazing over with unshed tears that make my throat tighten. “You know.”

I give her a nod. “So, he hasn’t been up here at all?”

“No.”

Shit.

“Has he been collecting the rent?”

Pink crawls up her neck and across her pale cheeks as she averts her gaze again, chewing on her bottom lip. “I haven’t seen your grandfather since well before Dave died.”

Fucking hell.

* * *

CAMILLE

Dalton runs a hand over the light stubble on his jaw, his emerald gaze holding mine with an intensity that makes me squirm. “I want to apologize again for not being up here earlier, for not checking on you. My grandfather has been a little…”—he trails off, his jaw tightening—“forgetful lately. He never mentioned to me that your husband died, and I didn’t know that he hadn’t been up here himself to check on you.”

The pure emotion in his voice tells me he’s being candid, and it carries a waver when he talks about his grandfather, but something about his final words rankles me.

They stir that part of me that has always striven to survive on my own, to do everything I can not to be reliant on anyone else. Even after seven years with Dave, I fought when he tried to help me with things I might have struggled with. He always called it my “stubborn streak” and joked it would get me in trouble one day.

Maybe that’s now.

I pull my shoulders back and stand straighter, like that might somehow change my small stature or the fact that Iamlimited in what I can do in my condition with Davey running around underfoot all the time. “I don’t need anyone to check on me.”

My words come out with more of a bite than I intend them, but I have to hand it to the young man in front of me—he barely reacts to the incredulousness in my tone.

If anything, he looks sympathetic to my plight and resistance.

“I understand your reluctance, Camille. You don’t know me.” His lips press into a tight smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “And I’m going to tell you something you’re probably not going to want to hear.”

My shoulders tense as I brace for what I know is coming—for what I’ve known for the past two months as I’ve struggled relentlessly to keep things going here.

The animals alive and healthy.

The garden growing during the only months I have any hope of actually harvesting what could get us through the winter.

The memory of Dave alive for his son who is so young I’m afraid he won’t remember him…

Dalton scans the darkness around us, as if he’s picturing it how it appeared in the daylight when he arrived. “I didn’t have a lot of time to examine the homestead, but from what I did see, I can tell you’re in trouble.”

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