Page 42 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

Matt: I keep thinking about how you looked last night. You’re beautiful, Elizabeth. Just so you know going into your day.

I am not a woman who rattles easily. But as I stood behind that register and read you’re beautiful, Elizabeth, I felt the heat climb my face all the way to my hairline. I was helpless, grinning down at my phone like it had handed me a winning lottery ticket, my chest going warm and enormous and entirely outside my control.

“OH,” said Becca.

I jumped. I actually jumped, fumbled the phone, and caught it against my apron, which only made it worse—the guilty bobble of a woman caught red-handed.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing. It’s June. About a vendor.”

“A vendor.” Becca had abandoned the quarters entirely. She was beaming with satisfaction. “You’re smiling about a vendor like that? Elizabeth. Your face. I’ve known you since we were kids and I have never once seen that face on you. That is not a vendor face. That is a—” Her voice dropped to a delighted hush as she stood straight and pointed at me. “That’s my brother. That’s a my-brother face. Matt texted you, didn’t he?”

“It is a vendor⁠—”

“Show me the phone.”

“No.”

“Show me the phone, Elizabeth Anne. Whip it out. Gimme it.”

“You don’t get to middle-name me. Only my grandmother gets to middle-name me—” I was laughing, which was fatal, because you cannot deny anything while laughing, and Becca was coming around the counter, and I had the phone up over my head like we were kids again.

The bell over the door went off at the exact worst possible moment.

We both froze. Then we spun around as if we choreographed it.

It was Matt.

He had to duck his head a little coming through, broad enough across the shoulders that the doorway always looks built one size too small for him, and he was in uniform. And whatever warm, giddy thing his text had started in me an instant ago didn’t cool—it doubled. My stomach dropped clean through the floor. Heat came up my neck before I could tell it not to, and I forgot, in the space of one breath, that I had a phone in the air and a best friend halfway over my counter and a whole store around me. There was just him, filling the doorway in that uniform, the broad shoulders and the steady eyes and the jaw I had spent the small hours of the night thinking about, and my own went useless—not one word in it, my brain gone entirely offline.

He took in the two of us—me with my phone still in the air, Becca halfway around the counter, both of us flushed and caught—and something moved across his face fast—surprise, then a flash of pure guilt, then the careful blankness of a man who has decided to act normal and was already failing at it.

A smart man would have read the room and retreated. Matt Hartford is a smart man, and yet he did not retreat because he had clearly come in for exactly one reason—me. Standing by the counter, turning scarlet.

“Morning,” he said. To me. Only to me.

And that one word, aimed past his sister and the whole bright morning to land square on me, went through me like a hand closing warm around my heart.

It came out about three degrees warmer than a man says it to just a random Stop & Go employee, and Becca’s head swiveled between us like she was watching a tennis match.

“Officer Hartford,” I said, and my voice cracked directly down the middle on the second syllable, a clean audible break, and I watched the corner of his mouth go up. “Coffee?”

“Please.”

I headed to the pot. I needed something to do with my hands and my face and my entire traitorous body, and I poured his coffee—large, black, no discussion, no variation, a ritual we’d been running since he started getting his coffee here instead of Violet’s—except this morning my hand wasn’t quite steady on the pot, and we both noticed, and neither of us said one word about it.

“Big night last night,” Becca said into the silence, sweet as pie, to the room in general. “The festival. Lot of excitement. The maze.” She let the pause stretch, watching her brother. “Big win for best costume. Very proud of you and your little pot.”

Matt, who had been studying the gum display with the focus of a man whose life depended on the choice between bubble mint and peppermint, cleared his throat. “Becca.”

“I’m just making conversation.”

“You’re making a scene.” He shifted his weight. Hooked a thumb in his belt, unhooked it, picked up a packet of gum and set it back down—a man who does not, as a rule, fidget, fidgeting like a kid called to the principal’s office.

“A scene? In a quiet store? With my brother? Who came in for coffee he can get free at the station.” She said it lightly, but her eyes were shining, and under the teasing was something soft and pleased and nearly tearful.

She was destroying me because she was happy. It’s a Hartford trait. I was learning the whole set of them.

The tips of Matt’s ears had gone red. I had never seen that happen—not fighting a tarp loose off a barn roof in a driving rainstorm, not standing in front of the entire town in a cooking pot—but his little sister got one soft remark in, and the man went pink to the ears and developed a sudden deep interest in the floor.