She wriggled her fingers in a little wave and then, with the air of someone who has just secured a major news scoop, turned and bustled off in the direction of the bake sale planning committee, no doubt to share her photographic evidence.
I stood there, frozen. My near-fall, the catch, the charged moment, Olivia’s question, and now a photo. A photo that, by sundown, would be on the Autumn Grove Community Facebook page, complete with a caption full of winking-face emojis and speculative hashtags. #FallForLove #PumpkinPatchRomance.
A groan escaped my lips. I bent down and started gathering my scattered invoices, mostly to hide my flaming face from the world. My hands were shaking.
This was a disaster. A complete, five-alarm, gourd-fueled catastrophe. I’d spent the last forty-eight hours trying to convince myself—and my family—that my life was perfectly fine without a man in it. Now, thanks to a runaway pumpkin and Mario’s surprisingly fast reflexes, the entire town was about to think I was dating my brother’s broody, gorgeous, F1 race car driver, and utterly infuriating best friend.
I risked a glance at Mario. He was staring after June, a muscle twitching in his jaw. His face was a thundercloud. If he’d been radiating silent disapproval before, he was now emitting waves of pure, undiluted fury. The anonymity he’d come here for had just been blown to smithereens by a meddling neighbor with a smartphone.
He finally looked at me, his dark eyes narrowed. “Flower Girl,” he said, and this time it was not a term of endearment. It was an accusation. “Your town is a menace.”
And then he turned on his heel and stalked away, leaving me standing there amidst my scattered paperwork, my half-built pyramid, and the lingering, phantom warmth of his hands on my waist. My daughter was humming to herself again, applying a final, triumphant layer of glitter to her pumpkin. The air was getting cooler, the sun dipping lower.
All I could feel was the weight of June’s speculative stare, the heat of my own blush, and a deep, sinking certainty that my perfectly organized, man-free life had just become very, very complicated.
CHAPTER4
Mario
I was draggedback to the Sage house for dinner under protest. My protest was silent, of course, a stony refusal to engage that Ben completely ignored. He drove, I stared out the window at the blur of aggressively quaint houses, and the silence in the car was a standoff. He was pretending everything was normal. I was pretending I hadn’t just had my anonymity detonated by a woman named June and a weaponized pumpkin patch.
The fury that had propelled me away from the festival grounds had cooled into something heavier and more familiar: the cold, hard certainty that I had made a catastrophic error in judgment. Coming here was a mistake. Trusting Ben’s assessment that this town was a backwater where I could disappear was the mistake. Existing in the same postal code as his chaotic, camera-happy sister was definitely a mistake.
Every instinct I had screamed at me to get in my car, drive back to the airport, and get on the first flight to anywhere that didn’t smell of dead leaves and treachery. Anywhere but here. But my car was still in a shipping container somewhere in the Atlantic. My ribs still ached with a dull, thrumming beat. And my face, when I’d caught a glimpse of it in the bathroom mirror before dinner, still looked like I’d lost a fight with a bag of plums. I was stuck. A prisoner of good intentions and pot roast.
The moment we walked through the door, the scent hit me—rich, savory, the unmistakable aroma of a slow-cooked meal. It was the smell of home, of family, of everything I systematically avoided. To me, it smelled like a trap.
Margaret was beaming, wiping her hands on her apron. “There you are! Just in time. Mario, dear, I hope you’re hungry.”
Ben clapped me on the shoulder. “He’s always hungry.”
I was a bug under a microscope. A specimen labeled ‘Ben’s Poor, Tragic Friend.’ Every warm smile, every offer of food, felt like a tightening of a net I hadn’t even seen being cast.
Dinner was, impossibly, worse than the pumpkin patch. At least there, I could maintain a physical distance. Here, I was seated at the long dining table, wedged between a talkative uncle who wanted to discuss torque and Ben, who kept nudging me with his foot every time my expression settled into its natural state of grim forbearance.
And Lily. She was seated directly across from me, next to Olivia. She looked as miserable as I felt. Her face was pale, her movements small and tight. She spent most of her time meticulously cutting Olivia’s pot roast into microscopic, identical cubes, her eyes fixed on the task as if it were a complex bomb-defusing operation. She refused to look at me. It was the only thing we had in common right now.
The conversation buzzed around us, a general hum of family news and town chatter. For about ten minutes, I thought I might get away with it. I could just be a piece of furniture that occasionally ate mashed potatoes.
Then Margaret cleared her throat. It was a small sound, but it cut through the din like a starter pistol. The table fell silent. The ambush was about to begin.
“June stopped by this afternoon,” she said, her gaze moving from Lily to me and back again, a slow, deliberate volley. “She showed me the most darling picture.”
Lily froze, her fork halfway to her mouth. A faint pink stained her cheeks.
“From the festival grounds,” Margaret continued, her voice buttery smooth. “Of the two of you. It was so … candid.”
Across the table, Lily’s knuckles were white where she gripped her fork. She looked like she was seconds away from bolting. I knew the feeling.
“Looked like quite the tumble, Lil,” Ben said, leaning back in his chair with a grin. He was enjoying this. I made a mental note to sabotage his car’s ignition system later.
“It was nothing,” Lily said, her voice tight. “I tripped over a pumpkin. Mario was just standing there.”
“Standing there and catching you like a real Prince Charming,” Aunt Carol supplied with a dreamy sigh.
I felt my jaw clench. Every muscle in my body was coiled tight, ready to flee. This was what I’d been running from—the casual dissections of my life, the expectations, the narratives spun by people who knew nothing about me. For years, it had been the press. Now, it was this cozy, suffocating circle of well-meaning suburbanites.
“Well, whatever it was,” Margaret said, her eyes pinning me to my chair, “it’s certainly got the town talking. It’s just so lovely to see Lily with someone. Someone strong. Someone who can, you know, look out for her.” She gave me a smile that was both beatific and deeply terrifying. “What are your intentions, Mario?”
