Page 6 of The Lumberjack’s Pumpkin Spice Problem

"My dad used to say a man's hands should never be idle," I tell her. Don't know why I say it. The words come out on their own.

Her eyes soften. "Your dad sounds like a good man."

"He was. Complicated, but good."

She nods like she understands what complicated means when it comes to fathers. She doesn't ask for details. I respect that more than she knows.

By evening the field is taking shape. Hay bales arranged in a winding path. Stakes marking where the pumpkin displays will go. String lights she'll hang tomorrow evening to create what she calls "the golden-hour pumpkin glow experience" and what I call "a lot of extension cords."

She's packing up her clipboard when I say, "Stay for dinner."

The words surprise us both. She looks at me. I look at the ground. Bear looks at both of us and wags his tail because he has no sense of timing.

"You cook?"

"I grill. There's steak. You've been out here since six and you've eaten nothing but two granola bars and a handful of pepitas you pulled out of your overalls like a squirrel."

She laughs. Full, bright, from somewhere in her center. The sound rolls across the field and bounces off the trees and lands in my ribcage.

"You were watching me eat?"

"I was watching you work. The eating was incidental."

"Emmett Drake. Was that flirting?"

"It was an observation."

"Sounded like flirting."

"Eat the steak or don't."

She eats the steak. We sit on my back porch with the plates on our laps, watching the sun drop behind the mountains. Bear settles between us, his head on her foot. She tells me about taking over the pumpkin patch from the Andersons, the elderly couple who ran it for fifteen years. How she convinced the bank to give her a loan by bringing a full business plan, three years of financial projections, and a box of her pumpkin spice brownies.

"The loan officer ate four brownies during the meeting. Signed the paperwork with chocolate on his fingers."

"So you bribe people for a living."

"I incentivize. There's a difference."

"There isn't."

She grins. "You're starting to be fun, you know that? Underneath all the flannel and the grumpy, there's an actual personality."

"Don't tell anyone. I've got a reputation to maintain."

We're quiet for a minute. Crickets and wind and Bear's breathing. The sky turns from orange to purple to the deep blue that happens right before the stars show up. She leans back in the porch chair and closes her eyes.

"This is nice," she says.

It is. That's the problem. It's the kind of nice that makes a man want things he put on a shelf a long time ago.

She opens her eyes. Looks at me. The porch light catches the gold in her brown eyes and something shifts between us. Not a decision. More like a door opening that neither of us locked properly.

"Emmett."

"Yeah."

"I'm going to kiss you. If that's a problem, you should probably say so now."