Page 127 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

“I liked him.”

She said it so simply, I almost flinched. The answer should not have surprised me, but it did. There was no heroic language about seeing beyond scars, just fact, pure and simple.

“I won!” a light voice sang. June appeared from the kitchen carrying a pan of cinnamon rolls. Clover glanced at them.

“They’re crooked.”

She laughed as June waved her off and disappeared toward the display case, and I returned to the festival orders, though my mind remained somewhere else.

Hunter had been around the Jones family every time I saw them. Always extremely quiet and choosing to avoid any confrontation. Always beside Clover, but never clinging to her. Walter treated him like one of his sons. Beau talked to him like a man he respected. None of them acted as if Hunter required special handling and now…I wondered if there was more to the man besides some scars.

“Are you okay?” Clover interrupted my train of thought.

I tapped the paper with my pen. “Just trying to decide whether we can handle the cream order.”

Clover watched me for another second. Then let my lie go, which made me like her a little more. We worked through the quantities for almost half an hour. Clover supplied opinions, coffee, and two cookies I hadn’t agreed to eat. By the time we finished, the bakery had begun filling with the late-morning crowd.

Older women claimed the table near the front windows. A mother came in with two children wearing matching pumpkin shirts. Someone ordered six loaves of pumpkin bread to take back to Atlanta. June moved between the counter and kitchen with the efficiency of someone who could run this place blindfolded.

Watching her made me understand what she’d said at the festival meeting.

Willow Creek had changed over the years. There were tourists already coming to town. It wasn’t some lie to make me do the festival, our little corner of the world was becoming a popular destination.

A little girl pressed both hands against the glass display case and gasped at a tray of ghost-shaped sugar cookies. Something squeezed inside me as I remembered how kids used to do that at the ranch. Over everything.

The calves.

Blueberry.

Pumpkins.

Hayrides.

One year, Pops had brought out three newborn goats and spent an entire afternoon complaining that children had named all of them before he got the chance.

I remembered one little boy refusing to leave because he wanted to sleep in the barn. Pops had offered him a job. His mother had not appreciated the joke.

I smiled before realizing I was doing it.

“You’re thinking about the festival,” Clover noted.

I looked to her, she was standing behind the counter, wiping away invisible crumbs. “How do you know?”

“You get this look.”

“What look?”

“Like you’re somewhere else.”

I folded the paperwork. “Maybe.”

“Are you excited at least?” She offered a small smile, like she knew deep down the real answer, but wanted to hear it anyway.

“A little,” I admitted Before she could continue, the bakery door opened. Hunter stepped inside. The change in Clover was immediate. She didn’t run toward him or announce his presence. Her body simply relaxed in a way it hadn’t been tense enough for me to notice before.

Hunter wore dark jeans and a charcoal T-shirt, the short-sleeve leaving his prosthetic right arm completely visible.

I hadn’t seen it before. I hadn’t known that beyond the scars on his face there was more to the injuries he suffered. I had been so lost in my own world that I hadn’t seen what was right in front of me all along.