Page 12 of The Lumberjack’s Pumpkin Spice Problem

"Words aren’t my strong suit."

"Out of walnut."

"It's a good wood."

"Emmett Drake, I think I'm falling in love with you."

I set her down. Push her hair back from her face. Look her in the eyes.

"I fell first. Somewhere around the second muffin."

The festival is everything she promised.

Opening morning, the parking lot fills by nine. Families pile out of cars with strollers and wagons. Kids run for the corn maze, which Harper rebuilt in the north section of her property where the ground dried enough to walk. The hay ride departs every thirty minutes. I drive the tractor because Harper's regular driver called in sick and I apparently can't say no to her anymore.

She runs alongside the hayride on foot for the first loop, adjusting pumpkin placement and checking sightlines like a director on a film set. Her clipboard has a checkmark system I still don't fully understand but which seems to involve color-coded stickers and a level of organizational intensity that borders on clinical.

"You're terrifying," I tell her when she climbs onto the tractor to adjust the hay bale seating.

"Thank you," she says, like it's the best compliment she's ever received.

Twelve thousand visitors. Main Street lined with pumpkins from her display. The hayride running through Drake Field, which is what people start calling it by Saturday afternoon. Sage breaks her sales record at Bean and Bloom. Luna sells out her autumn collection at Chapter and Curse by Sunday noon. Venus at Tangled Roots books a full month of appointments from festival visitors.

Harper runs the whole thing from the south field in my flannel and a pair of boots that are slowly dying from the mud. She coordinates vendors, manages volunteers, sweet-talks the cider supplier into an extra delivery, and somehow still finds time to kiss me behind the hay bale display at sunset.

Saturday night, after the festival crowds leave and the string lights are the only thing still shining, she finds me in the workshop.

"Hey, lumberjack."

"Hey, pumpkin girl."

She closes the workshop door. Crosses the floor. Takes my face in her flour-dusted hands and kisses me slow, deep, with a kind of intention that makes my whole body tighten.

"Take me to bed," she says.

I take her to bed.

This time is different from the first. The urgency is still there, the hunger, the raw physical want, but there's something underneath it now. Trust. Tenderness. The knowledge that this isn't a one-time collision but the beginning of something with a future.

I undress her slowly. Flannel. Tank top. Bra. Jeans. Each layer removed like peeling bark from a log, revealing the smooth, warm wood underneath. She shivers when my hands span her waist. My fingers nearly meet at her lower back and the size difference between us makes something primal and protective surge in my chest.

She unbuttons my jeans. Wraps her hand around my cock and strokes, slow and firm, while she looks me in the eye.

"I want you on top of me," she says. "I want to feel all of you."

I press her into the mattress. Kiss her throat. Her collarbone. The soft skin between her breasts. I take my time with her nipples, sucking and licking until she's arching into my mouth and gripping the sheets. My mouth trails down her stomach, across the curve of her hip, to the place where her thigh meets her center.

I eat her pussy like I have all the time in the world. Slow tongue. Long strokes. I part her folds with my thumbs and lick her clit until her thighs are shaking around my head. She comes on my tongue with a moan that fills the entire cabin, and I don't stop until she pushes my head away because the pleasure has turned sharp.

I reach for the condom. She stops my hand.

"I'm on the pill. And I'm clean."

"Clean. Tested last month."

"Then I want to feel you. Just you."

I sink into her bare and the feeling is devastating. Wet, tight, hot skin against skin, nothing between us. She wraps her legs around my waist and I bury my face in her neck and fuck her with slow, grinding thrusts that hit deep.