Page 5

Coming from Emmett Drake, that might be the highest compliment I've ever received.

CHAPTER THREE

EMMETT

I've made a mistake.

Not the field. The field is fine. It's dirt and grass, and if letting this woman put pumpkins on it for three days saves the festival, then fine. I can be generous for seventy-two hours.

The mistake is that I'm watching her work.

It's Wednesday, two days before the festival opens. Harper Coleman has turned my south field into a command center. She's got a clipboard, a measuring tape, and a system for pumpkin placement that involves color coding, size sorting, and a map she drew by hand with little symbols I can't decipher. She's been here since six this morning. She showed up with coffee for both of us, set up a folding table under the elm tree, and hasn't stopped moving since.

I told myself I'd stay in the workshop. Let her handle it. My only job was to say yes and stay out of the way.

Instead I'm leaning against my truck watching her direct two delivery drivers like a general commanding a battle. She's in jeans and a flannel she tied at the waist over a tank top, and every time she bends over to inspect a pumpkin, the flannel rides up and shows a stripe of dark brown skin at the small of her back.

Bear sits next to me with his tongue out. He's been following Harper around the field all morning. Every time she pauses, he shoves his head into her hand. She scratches behind his ears without breaking stride. My dog has been claimed. I don't have the heart to tell him she's temporary.

"Emmett!" She waves me over. "I need your truck to move the hay bales from the south gate to the display area. These delivery guys can't get their flatbed through the access road."

I walk over because apparently I'm doing this now. "The access road is fine for my truck. Their flatbed is too wide for the tree gap."

"Can you trim the trees?"

She says this like she's asking me to pass the salt. Can I trim the trees. I'm a timber contractor. Trimming trees is like asking a surgeon if he can put on a bandage.

"I can trim the trees."

"Perfect. Thank you." She reaches up and brushes a wood shaving off my shoulder. The touch lasts half a second and settles into my skin like it's planning to stay. "You had a thing."

"I always have a thing. Occupational hazard."

She smiles. Close range. Those dimples are dangerous from across a room. Up close, they're a threat to my whole damn equilibrium.

We work together through the afternoon. I trim the trees, widen the access road, back my truck up to the south gate, and haul hay bales while she directs placement. She talks the entire time. About the festival, about soil composition, about the specific variety of pumpkin that produces the best-looking jack-o'-lantern versus the one that makes the best pie.

Around noon, she pulls out a cooler. Sandwiches, fruit, bottles of water, and a small container of something orange that she sets aside with the reverence of a woman handling sacred artifacts.

"Pumpkin butter," she explains. "Goes on everything. Toast, pancakes, ice cream, a spoon if you're desperate. Last Wednesday I ate an entire batch of pumpkin spice caramel corn while watching a documentary about soil erosion. My life is exactly as glamorous as it sounds."

"Cinderella pumpkins are for decoration. Sugar Pie pumpkins are for eating. If someone tries to make pie out of a Connecticut Field pumpkin, they deserve the watery mess they get."

"You have very strong opinions about squash."

"I have very strong opinions about everything. It's part of my charm." She hands me a water bottle.

The sun has shifted by the time we stop for a break. The south field looks different with purpose in it. Rows of stakes, coils of string lights, the hay bale path curving through the center like a river. Harper stands at the edge and surveys the layout with her hands on her hips, her face catching the late light.

There's a streak of dirt on her jaw. A hay stalk in her hair. She's been working for eight hours and she looks like she could go another eight. The determination in her body is physical, visible, carved into her posture the way I carve letters into wood. She built this business from nothing and she'll save it with the same stubborn force that got her through the bank's front door with a box of brownies.

Our fingers brush. She doesn't pull away as fast as she should. "You're good at this."

"Hauling things?"

"Working. Building. You see what needs to happen and you do it without waiting for instructions. Most people need a plan. You just look at the problem and start solving it."

Nobody's said anything like that to me in a long time. Most people in Crimson Hollow see me as the quiet guy who cuts trees and minds his business. The grumpy lumberjack at the end of the road. Harper looks at me like I'm someone worth paying attention to, and the feeling that creates in my chest is a problem I don't know how to solve with a chainsaw.