Page 49 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

I did not stop him.

“You did that on purpose,” he said, low. “In front of everybody. With my knife.”

“I fixed your pumpkin.”

“You told the entire town something.” His thumb moved once along my ribs, and I felt it everywhere. “In front of my sister. In front of your grandmother. In front of a woman with a phone and thousands of followers.”

“I did.”

“Say it to me without the audience.”

My heart was going so hard I was sure he could feel it under his hand. “That you don’t have to be perfect for me or anyone else,” I said. “Not ever. Not once. That’s what I was saying.”

Whatever he’d been holding back gave way all at once, and he made a low sound in his throat and kissed me.

He kissed me the way he does everything, which is completely—one hand sliding into my hair to tip my head where he wanted it, the other spread wide and warm at the small of my back, pulling me up off the post and flush against him. I grabbed his collar with both hands and held on. He tasted like cold air, and the cider somebody had pressed on him at the tables, and when I made a small helpless noise against his mouth he answered it with one of his own and kissed me deeper, slower, the kind of kiss with no destination in it, no hurry, a man who has decided this is where he lives now.

The cold stopped existing. The porch, the farm, everything except for him and me and this perfect kiss—gone.

My hands got up under his open jacket, flat against the warm flannel over his ribs, and I felt him inhale sharply through his nose. He walked me back into the post again, harder this time, and his mouth left mine and went along my jaw and down under my ear, and my head tipped back against the wood entirely without my permission.

“Matt—”

“I know.” His voice had gone to gravel. “I know. Kitchen window.”

“It’s right there. My mother might see.”

“I’m aware of exactly where it is.” But he didn’t stop, not immediately. He kissed the hinge of my jaw, the corner of my mouth, and then found my mouth properly again and took his time about it, both hands framing my face now. I stopped worrying about the window and the light and my mother and the entire population of Sweetbriar and kissed him back with everything I had, up on my toes, both arms sliding around his neck, wanting so much more of him than a porch step could possibly hold.

When we finally broke, neither of us went far. His forehead came down against mine. We were both breathing like we’d run somewhere.

“Okay,” he said, unsteady. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

“I have to leave, or I’m not going to.”

“I know.”

“I want to be very clear that I don’t want to leave.”

“I know,” I said, and laughed, and felt him grin against my cheek.

He pressed his mouth once to my forehead, and then caught my hand on the way down and kissed my knuckles, slow, his eyes on mine the whole time.

“Goodnight, Elizabeth,” he said. And he went off into the dark toward his truck, like a man who’d gotten away with something.

I floated through the front door. I was kiss-drunk and grinning and half frozen.

My mother was at the table with a cup of tea gone cold at her elbow and her Kindle propped in front of her, which she was very obviously not reading. She’d cracked the window over the sink an inch, so the cold came in off the rows smelling of cut field and frost. And she had the expression of a woman who has recently seen a great deal and was deciding, luxuriously, what to do with the new information.

“Don’t mind me,” she said, mildly, tapping the screen forward. “Go on about your evening.”

“Mom.”

“Although if you’re taking notes, in my day the gentleman honked from the driveway.” She tapped forward another page she hadn’t read, serene as anything. “A lit pumpkin on the porch steps. I never.”

“It’s not—” I unwound my scarf the rest of the way, buying time, and hung it up with more care than a scarf requires. “It was a pumpkin delivery. Very routine.”