Page 2 of The Lumberjack’s Pumpkin Spice Problem

"Correct."

"That's the most tragic thing I've ever heard."

"I'll survive."

She sets down the coffee mug. Looks at me with those warm eyes that shouldn't be as distracting as they are. She's curvy in a way that the overalls can't hide, soft where the world keeps telling women they shouldn't be, and she stands in my kitchen like she belongs in it.

That thought needs to get the hell out of my head.

"The Autumn Harvest Festival brings in forty percent of Crimson Hollow's annual tourism revenue," she says. Her voice shifts. Not desperate. Determined. "Every vendor on Main Street depends on that weekend. Sage at Bean and Bloom doubles her revenue. Luna sells more books in three days than she does all month. The hayride goes through my pumpkin display. No pumpkins, no hayride. No hayride, no families. No families, no festival."

She's not wrong. I've lived in Crimson Hollow long enough to know what the festival means to this town. Doesn't change the fact that the south field is mine and I don't share my land.

That field is the last piece of what used to be three hundred acres of Drake property. My grandfather built the original cabin. My father worked the land until he got in over his head and sold everything but the house and the south field to pay off debts. I was sixteen. I watched strangers drive trucks onto land that had Drake carved into the fence posts.

The couple who bought the adjacent parcel from my father's creditors are the same people who started the pumpkin patch. They retired five years ago. Harper took over the lease.

So no. I don't lend out my south field. Not for pumpkins. Not for festivals. Not for a woman with flour on her collarbone and a smile that makes my chest do something I specifically told it to stop doing.

"I appreciate the muffins. Answer's no."

I pick up a muffin without thinking. Take a bite before I can stop myself. It’s good. Dangerously good.

She watches me chew with a smile that says she’s already keeping score.

“No,” I say again, around the muffin.

She nods. Picks up her basket. Gets to the door before she turns around.

"Those muffins are still for you. Even grumpy lumberjacks deserve baked goods." She flashes a smile that hits me somewhere south of rational thought. "And for the record, you're going to change your mind."

"I won't."

"You will. I'm very persuasive, Emmett Drake."

The door closes behind her. My kitchen smells like cinnamon and coffee and the kind of warmth I haven't let in these walls in a long time.

I eat a second muffin standing over the sink like a man who’s definitely not reconsidering anything.

My dog, Bear, a massive Bernese Mountain Dog who has the emotional intelligence of a therapist and the physique of a small horse, looks up from his bed and gives me a look.

"Don't start."

He puts his head back down. The look stays.

I clean up the muffin crumbs. Wash the coffee mug she used. It's a plain blue mug from the cabinet, same as all the others, but it smells like her now. Cinnamon and something warm. I consider throwing it in the trash like a rational person. Instead I put it back on the shelf, in the same spot, angled the same way she left it.

Thirty-nine years old. Two hundred acres. A chainsaw, a dog, and a cabinet full of mugs. And one of them smells like a woman who walked into my kitchen uninvited and left me standing here thinking about dimples.

CHAPTER TWO

HARPER

My pumpkin patch looks like a swamp.

I'm standing at the edge of the south section in my rubber boots, watching the water catch morning light like it's beautiful instead of devastating. Three inches of standing water over two acres of crop. The creek overflow hit Tuesday night while I slept, and by the time I got out here Wednesday morning, the damage was done. Five hundred pumpkins sitting in mud. Some still salvageable, most rotting from the bottom up.

My phone buzzes.