Page 1 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

Prologue

CARSON

Five Years Ago - September 1st

In Willow Creek, September 1st might as well have been a holiday.

It didn’t matter if it fell on a Monday, a Saturday, or somewhere in between. The night before, the entire town showed up to decorate Main Street for its favorite season.

Halloween.

And yes, I said season.

In Willow Creek, Halloween didn’t last one night. It started on September 1st and didn’t end until November 1st.

By sunrise, hay bales lined the sidewalks, pumpkins crowded every storefront, and orange lights twinkled from every lamppost. Rosie Malone would already be hanging decorations outside the tavern, June Whitaker would be baking pumpkin muffins at the bakery, and Darlene Pike would be making her annual rounds to judge who had the best display before anyone officially asked her to.

The rest of the world had four seasons. Willow Creek treated every season like a national holiday.

September 1st had been my favorite day of the year for as long as I could remember. It marked the end of a brutal Georgia summer and the beginning of my favorite season.

I loved carving pumpkins with Pops and Meme and helping host the annual Willow Creek Harvest Festival every October. But this year, I was most excited about the rodeo in Tennessee. By the end of the weekend, I’d find out if I qualified for the finals.

Pops had gotten me into barrel racing when I was young. He used to say I was a natural-born racer after watching me ride one of his mares when I was four years old. We spent countless hours in the practice pen while he taught me how to weave through barrels and move as one with my horse.

By six, I was competing on my first horse, Whiskey.

As I got older, the wins started piling up. Every ribbon, buckle, and trophy made Pops and Meme prouder than the last. By twelve, I was winning regularly and making a name for myself across the Southeast.

Blueberry had been Pops’s gift to me after I won my first youth championship.

Since then, we’d been unstoppable.

And because of our bond and hard work, 1st place ribbons lined the walls of my childhood bedroom, while more buckles than I could ever wear filled far too many drawers in my dresser. But what mattered more than those ribbons was the email I received this morning.

I read the email three times before I finally believed it.

Then a fourth. And a fifth. Just to be extra sure I wasn’t misreading anything.

Congratulations, Carson Rome.

We are excited to offer you a sponsorship opportunity…

My heart hammered wildly against my ribs. This is what I had been waiting for all these years. A sponsorship.

A real sponsorship.

Not a discount code.

Not free gear.

Not a local feed store wanting a picture for Facebook.

An actual sponsorship with real money.

The kind I’d dreamed about since I was old enough to understand the value of money and everything Pops sacrificed to give me the privilege of being part of the rodeo circuit.

This sponsorship was the kind that meant people were finally noticing me, and it wasn’t just the people in Willow Creek who loved to act like I was a town celebrity.