Page 52 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

By Friday evening I’d tried on the green sweater with three different everything-elses, taken my hair down, put it up, and taken it down again on the grounds that a man who notices a sweater notices hair, and stood in front of my mirror longer than I’ve stood in front of a mirror since prom.

He was cooking for me. Matt Hartford, who irons his flannel, was standing at a stove right now making me his mysterious specialty, and something about that picture—those hands, that focus, aimed at feeding me—had been wrecking my concentration all week.

My mother did not look up from her crossword when I came downstairs Friday evening with my hair down for the second time in one October. She filled in a word, serene, and said, “Don’t hurry home on my account,” and then, as I pulled the front door shut behind me, called out sweetly, “be safe,” so that I drove the whole way into town with my face on fire.

Sweetbriar in late October goes all the way in. Every porch on Alder Street had its mums and its skeletons and its straw bales, cornstalks lashed to the lampposts, a plywood ghost in the Holloways’ maple that has scared me every year since they started putting it up. The whole street glowed orange and amber in the early dark.

And then there was Matt’s house. I’d have known it without the address—white, square, trimmed, the lawn mowed in lines you could grade with a level, sitting in the middle of all that festive fall outdoor decor like a man in a pressed uniform at a costume party. Not one pumpkin. Not even a leaf on the grass, in a town that is nothing but leaves in October. I sat at the curb a second and grinned at it, because obviously. It was so him. If you’d lined up every house in Sweetbriar and asked me to pick his out of the lineup, I’d have pointed at this one before you finished the question.

I was going to fix his porch situation, though. The man was getting a pumpkin whether he liked it or not, maybe three or four.

He opened the door before I knocked, and I forgot my own opening line.

I’d only ever seen Matt Hartford in uniform or flannel, and both of those are fine, both of those are frankly plenty, but nobody had prepared me for off-duty-at-home Matt—jeans, bare feet, and a gray henley that should require a permit, sleeves shoved to the elbow, forearms on full display, a dish towel over one shoulder like the sexiest chef in the world. Warm light behind him. The scent of garlic and simmering tomatoes rolling out the door around him like a welcome mat made of spaghetti. He’d cooked for me. He was standing in the doorway, smelling like a dinner he’d made for me, with his sleeves pushed up, and something low in me pulled tight and said, with great clarity, oh no, we are in trouble now…

“You’re staring,” he said, pleased about it.

“You’re barefoot,” I said, as if that explained anything, and he laughed and pulled me in out of the cold by both hands. “And your sleeves are up. Your arms are—it smells good in there. You need pumpkins, and you rake your yard too much…”

He let out a chuckle. “Come on.”

Inside, the house was so clean I stopped two steps past the door.

“Matt.” I breathed it, looking around.

“Elizabeth.”

“I could perform surgery in here.”

“You could not.” He came up behind me, close, and instead of waiting for me to shrug out of my coat, he took hold of the collar himself and eased it back off my shoulders, slow, deliberate, the backs of his fingers grazing the sides of my neck. “You’d make a mess of the counters. I’ve seen your stockroom.” His hand came up and gathered the hair off the back of my neck, sweeping it gently over one shoulder to free the collar, and I went absolutely still, because after the racket of the farm all day the house had gone so hushed I could hear the furnace tick, and there was nothing in the whole warm room but the heat of him at my back and his hands moving with that maddening care.

“My stockroom is a working system,” I managed, and it came out about half as steady as I’d have liked.

He drew the coat the rest of the way off. And then, before he stepped away, he bent his head and pressed one soft kiss to the bare back of my neck, right where he’d moved my hair, slow and warm and gone in a second, and a shiver went straight down the length of me and took with it whatever clever thing I’d been about to say next. Which had been something. I was fairly sure it had been something.

“Working system,” he agreed, low, near my ear, entirely too pleased with himself, and moved off to hang the coat like a man who hadn’t just scrambled every thought in my head.

“Your stockroom is a crime scene with a loose filing philosophy.” He hung my coat, and he caught me still looking at him and didn’t pretend he hadn’t; the corner of his mouth went up slow, and I had to go inspect his living room before I did something ahead of schedule, like kiss him before we finished dinner.

The living room was sparse and peaceful and squared-away. He had good, high-quality furniture, no clutter, everything at parade rest. Quiet, like the man. It suited him, honestly, the same way the immaculate lawn did. But there were exactly two items on the mantel, dead center, propped up in pride of place like a state medal, and I crossed the room to it and put my hand over my mouth.

The festival awards. Gold satin tails and all. BEST COSTUME and BEST PUMPKIN.

“You display them,” I said.

“They’re the only trophies I’ve ever won.”

“You have an entire wall of commendations somewhere. You win everything. Cade told Harper. Harper tells everyone.”

“Those are certificates,” he said, with grave precision, heading back toward the stove, “for doing my job. That one’s for standing in front of the whole town in your grandmother’s pot while you pinned a ribbon on me and I forgot how to breathe. And the pumpkin award, which should be half yours.” He said it over his shoulder, completely level, stirring his sauce like he hadn’t just taken my knees out at the joint.

Dinner was spaghetti. The sauce was his specialty, from scratch—real tomatoes that he grew in his yard and put up himself back in September, which he mentioned like it was normal, like every cop on the Sweetbriar force cans his own tomatoes—and it had been going low and slow since before his shift ended. The bread was baked in that kitchen from scratch, and he moved through all of it with the easy sureness of a man doing the one task on earth that has never once stressed him out. He was good. Not home-cook-who-tries good. Good good—tasting off the wooden spoon with his eyes half closed, adjusting nothing, trusting his hands—and I sat on his counter stool with my chin in my palm and watched those forearms work and understood that I was not in the normal amount of hot-guy-trouble; I was in a great deal of grown-man trouble.

“Where does a cop learn to cook like this?”

He shrugged one shoulder in answer, and for a second, I thought that was all I’d get. Then he said, without turning around from the stove,

“Dinner at our house wasn’t really a thing. My folks were home, mostly, but not—” He turned his hand over, looking for the word, and gave up on it. “The TV’d be on in another room. Everybody orbiting, nobody landing. So I started messing with the stove. Mostly so the house would smell like something was happening in it.”