Page 3 of The Lumberjack’s Pumpkin Spice Problem

Sage:

How bad is it?

Me:

Bad enough that I'm standing in my field crying and hoping no one drives by.

Five years I've poured into this land. Five years of wake-up-before-dawn, fall-into-bed-after-dark, argue-with-the-bank-every-quarter dedication. I left a marketing job in Toronto that paid six figures and made me want to scream into a pillow every night. My parents thought I'd lost my mind. My mother called three times in one week to say pumpkin farming wasn't a career. My father sent a job listing at his accounting firm with the subject line "Just in case." My ex-boyfriend called it adorable.

Adorable. The word still burns like lemon juice on a paper cut. I took my corporate savings, put a down payment on the lease, moved to Crimson Hollow without knowing a single soul, and built a business that tripled its revenue every year for five straight years.

Standing in three inches of water watching that work drown isn't just a crop loss. It's every person who told me this was a hobby smiling in my imagination.

Sage:

Coming over with coffee. Don't argue.

I don't argue. Sage Douglas runs Bean and Bloom and has appointed herself the unofficial emotional support system for every woman in Crimson Hollow. She'll show up with a honey-cinnamon latte, tell me it's going to be fine, and then help me figure out how to make it fine.

The problem is bigger than ruined pumpkins. The Autumn Harvest Festival is in five days. I'm the primary pumpkin supplier. My farm stand provides the decorations for Main Street, the pumpkins for the carving contest, the displays for the hayride, and the supplies for every pumpkin-themed item on every vendor's menu. Without my crop, the festival is a harvest with nothing to harvest.

I could source replacement pumpkins. I already called three farms in the valley, and between them they can cover the volume. But I need a staging area. Somewhere to receive, sort, and display two thousand pounds of pumpkins in a way that makes it look intentional instead of desperate.

Which brings me to Emmett Drake.

Six foot three of flannel-wearing, tree-cutting, grumpy stubbornness who said no to my face this morning while eating my muffins. The man lives on two hundred acres, uses about twenty of them, and treats the south field like it's a national monument instead of an empty pasture growing nothing but grass and resentment.

I did my research before I went over there. The Drake family used to own everything from the timber line to the road. His father sold it off. Emmett kept the house and the south field. He contracts with Ridge Brothers Timber Co., lives alone with a dog the size of a love seat, and has spoken to me exactly four times in five years. Three of those were variations of "morning" and one was "your corn maze is blocking my driveway."

Sage arrives with the latte and a bag of Jamaican patties that I inhale because stress makes me hungry and also because Sage's patties are proof that God loves us.

"So the lumberjack said no," Sage says, leaning against my truck and surveying the damage.

"He said no before I finished explaining."

"That man says no to everything. He's been saying no to my Friday pie specials for two years. Every Friday I put a new pie in the case. Every Friday he comes in, looks at it, orders black coffee, and leaves. The man is at war with joy."

"He ate my muffins though. "

The man ate two pumpkin spice muffins from a woman he'd spoken four words to in five years. Emmett Drake, who won't order anything but black coffee at Bean and Bloom. Who told Sage's pie specials "no" for two straight years. Who once looked at a pumpkin spice latte like it had personally insulted his ancestors.

He ate MY muffins. With eye contact.

Sage raises an eyebrow. "He ate your pumpkin spice muffins?"

"Two of them. While pretending he wasn't enjoying them."

"Girl." She points at me with her coffee cup. "A man who eats your baking while maintaining eye contact is not a man who's going to keep saying no. He's a man who hasn't figured out he's already saying yes."

"That's very poetic for seven thirty in the morning."

"I'm a poet before nine and a businesswoman after. Go back over there."

"He literally just told me no."

"Take more muffins. Different flavor. Show him you listened when he said he doesn't eat pumpkin spice. Make banana walnut or something. The man's weakness is being seen. I've been watching him come into Bean and Bloom for two years, Harper. He orders the same thing every time because nobody's ever bothered to learn what he actually likes."

I look at my flooded field. I look at my phone, where three valley farms are waiting for my confirmation on a pumpkin order I can't receive without a staging area. I look at the south field across the tree line, green and empty and perfect.