Page 10 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

Jax has always been that way. He’d find something he liked and consume it until there was nothing left to discover. Music, books, restaurants, women. His obsessions burned hot, but rarely lasted more than a few weeks.

Cars were the only exception.

They’d held his attention since the first time Dad let us watch him rebuild an engine on the concrete floor of this very garage. Jax had been eleven. I’d been nine. Neither of us had understood half of what Dad was doing, but we’d sat beside him until dark, passing him tools and soaking up every word.

Nearly two decades later, we were still here.

The garage belonged to us now, at least officially. Dad transferred ownership three years ago and announced his retirement with all the confidence of a man who genuinely believed he could stay away.

He lasted four days.

Now he appeared whenever he felt like it, drank coffee from the same dented thermos he’d carried since I was a kid, and offered unsolicited opinions on repairs nobody had asked him to inspect.

Not that I minded.

Jones Automotive wouldn’t have felt right without him wandering around somewhere.

I leaned farther over the engine bay in front of me and wrestled with a stubborn radiator hose that had apparently fused itself to the fitting out of pure spite. The elderly woman who owned the Buick called twice this morning to remind me she needed it back before her bridge club tomorrow, as though the women would personally exile her from Willow Creek if she went without it.

I didn’t doubt they might.

Outside, rain struck the metal roof in a steady rhythm, competing with the music and the occasional roll of thunder. It started as a light drizzle shortly after sunrise, but the gray clouds hovering over Willow Creek had grown darker with every passing hour.

Poor timing, considering half the town had stayed out well past midnight decorating for September 1st.

Orange lights were already wrapped around every lamp post on Main Street. Hay bales crowded the sidewalks. Rosie Malone had changed the tavern sign before dawn, officially transforming the place into the Spicy Pumpkin Tavern for the next two months, and June Whitaker had probably sold enough pumpkin bread that morning to fund her retirement.

Willow Creek treated Halloween the way most towns treated Christmas.

By tonight, the rain would have soaked the scarecrows and sent decorative pumpkins rolling into the gutters. By tomorrow morning, every shop owner would be back outside fixing it all without a single complaint.

They took the season seriously. But if I was being honest, they took every season too seriously.

Jax cut the music abruptly. The silence that followed was so unexpected that I lifted my head.

“What happened?” I asked. “Bluetooth finally reject you?”

He didn’t answer.

He stood beside the truck with his phone hanging loosely in one grease-covered hand, staring toward the open garage bay.

I followed his gaze.

A woman stood beneath the overhang, barely protected from the rain blowing sideways behind her.

For half a second, neither of us moved.

Water streamed from the ends of her blonde hair and darkened the shoulders of her sweatshirt until the material clung to her body. Her jeans were soaked through, molded to long, visibly strong legs, and streaked with mud nearly to the knees. She held one arm tightly across her stomach while the other gripped a dead phone.

Her entire body shook. Not delicately, either. Her teeth were chattering hard enough that I could hear them from several feet away.

“Holy shit.”

I dropped the ratchet onto the cart and grabbed the jacket I’d tossed over the back of a stool earlier. She looked up as I approached, and for one distracting second, I forgot what I intended to say.

She was beautiful, though not in the polished way that made a person afraid to touch anything. There wasn’t a trace of makeup on her face. Rain had washed strands of hair across her cheeks, framing a light scatter of freckles over her nose and cheekbones. Her eyes were a pale green, made sharper by how pale the rest of her had become.

But it wasn’t her appearance that held me there.