Page 180 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

Beau

Coward.

I laughed.

Carson

Maybe.

Beau

Night, sweetheart.

I set my phone face down. Meme and Gerald were both staring. “What?”

Meme smiled into her coffee. “Nothing.”

I nodded and ate my forgotten pie.

For once, I didn’t punish myself for being happy. The festival was a little over a week away. Marigold still needed more work than I wanted to think about.

I still had fears waiting for me whenever things got too quiet. But tonight I’d gone to a tavern. I’d laughed with Rosie. I’d watched Meme sit across from a man who made her smile without diminishing the love she’d had before him.

And, I’d told Beau I wanted to kiss him again.

Maybe I didn’t need to know exactly where any of this was going. It was okay to just live in the moment.

Chapter 24

BEAU

With less than one week until the Harvest Festival, I had started measuring my days by how many times Carson Rome found a reason to appear in them.

Some days it was once, usually in the form of a text sent sometime before seven in the morning while I was opening the shop and she had already been awake for hours. I’d learned more about dairy farming through those early morning messages than I’d ever cared to know, mostly because Carson liked sending pictures whenever something went wrong. A cow had kicked over an entire bucket of milk on Monday. Tuesday, Blueberry had somehow opened the latch on her stall and wandered into the barn aisle like she owned the place.

Other days during the week, she’d showed up. Those were becoming my favorite.

The first time she’d brought lunch to Jones Automotive, she’d walked through the open bay doors carrying a paper bag from Sugar and Pine, and claimed she’d accidentally ordered too much food. There had been exactly two sandwiches inside.

Mine had roast beef, provolone, mustard, no pickles—exactly how I ordered it every week.

I hadn’t bothered pointing out that particular flaw in her story because Carson had still been skittish after our kiss, and I was smart enough to know when a woman was giving me an excuse to see her.

The second time, she hadn’t bothered with an excuse.

She’d walked into the garage, dropped a sandwich onto the hood of the car I was working on, and told me I had fifteen minutes before she was leaving to continue her deliveries.

Somewhere between then and now, the line between helping her prepare Marigold Ranch for the festival and simply wanting to be around her had disappeared completely.

I’d still find legitimate reasons to drive out there after closing the shop. There was no shortage of them. One of the old hay wagons needed new bearings. The west pasture fence wasn’t finished. Half the bulbs we’d hung around the dairy barn had been stored in a damp box for five years, and every few nights another strand gave up on life. Dad’s resurrected tractor had started leaking something black.

But lately, I would finish whatever I’d gone there to do and stay.

Sometimes Meme fed me.

Sometimes Carson did.

Sometimes we sat on the porch steps after dark while she complained about vendor applications, and I pretended to understand why the woman selling handmade candles couldn’t be beside the woman selling homemade soap because apparently they’d been feuding since 2019.