“Nope,” Oscar said with a stoic look on his face. “Unlike these ladies, I’m a gentleman.”
I snorted. “A gentleman who talks about my ass every chance he gets.”
Oscar’s eyes danced as he held his laughter in check, especially when I started to hear a jingle jangle from the pipsqueak.
“Ante up, Natalie,” Polly said, shaking the mason jar.
“Ante up? Where does she hear this stuff?” I asked Roxie.
“My mother is teaching her poker.”
“Take it out of my dollar, tiny person. Okay?” I said, and she nodded before rushing off. “I just got hustled by a seven-year-old.”
Leo came out of the crowd and snuck his arms around Roxie’s waist, and I pointed a finger at him. “Your daughter just took almost two bucks from us.”
“You must have been swearing,” he replied, planting a kiss on Roxie’s neck. “Can I borrow this big guy a minute?”
“Borrow whoever you want, but I need you back in the big house in twenty minutes to move your mother’s chairs into storage. She’ll kill me if anything gets on them.” Roxie squealed as he kissed her a little more.
“But wait—back to this right here,” she said, pointing at Oscar and me. “When did you get here? You weren’t planning on coming up, were you?”
“I wasn’t, no,” I said, feeling the color coming into my cheeks.
“I’m gonna go help Leo, let you two hens squawk a bit,” Oscar said, seeming to hesitate for a split second, then leaning in to plant a quick kiss on my forehead before walking away with Leo.
Feeling my skin tingle where his lips had just been, I smiled, watching the two of them head into the barn, Oscar punching Leo on the shoulder as he clearly teased him about what just happened.
I could feel eyes on me, and I turned to Roxie, whose grin was even wider than her eyes.
“So . . . ?” she asked, and I could feel my blush deepen.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “So?”
She studied me carefully, watched as I got redder and redder. “I never thought I would see the day—”
“Shut up.”
“—that Natalie Grayson, hater of all things country—”
“Shut. Up.”
“—would fall in love with a country boy.”
Fall in love? Whoa.
“Shut. Up. Now,” I said, heading toward where all the action seemed to be, setting up the stalls for the next day.
“Seriously, Natalie, come back here! Hey!” Roxie yelled as I walked faster. Not easy; with each step I was sinking farther and farther into the wet grass on the way to the barn. She caught up to me fast. “I was just teasing.”
“I know, I know,” I said with a heavy sigh. I turned back toward her, basically pivoting on my left heel, which was stuck thoroughly in the mud. “I just— I don’t really know what this is yet. So let’s not go making a big deal, okay?”
“It’s a big enough deal that you’re up here every damn weekend all of a sudden. I’d say you’re pretty smitten.”
“That’s a good word for it,” I said, watching the scene below. The big stone barn, people everywhere laughing and chatting like they’d known each other for years, pockets of kids running here and there, and in the middle of it all, trying to hold at least six pumpkins in his arms at once, was the guy I was smitten with.
Smitten. Kitten. Mitten. Why did all those words remind me of something warm, and cozy, and safe?
And as I watched Oscar helping out, noticing his quiet strength, his way of staying inside the group but on the edge, I knew I was smitten for sure. Anything more than that, I just didn’t know.
Frankly, anything more than that scared the shit out of me. I always got out of things way before smitten kittens started up.
“When did you know?” I asked Roxie, who was watching the same scene focused on the guy running the show. “I mean, that you . . .”
“Loved Leo?” she asked, her face going soft. “I started falling for him when he first brought me walnuts.” She bit her lip for a moment while she thought. “But I knew I was in love with him when I saw him with his daughter for the first time.”
“How did you know?”
“That it was love?”
I nodded my head.
“Because it scared me to death. And that was new for me.”
Roxie had a lot of the same thoughts about love as I did, although hers stemmed not from a Thomas but from a Trudy. After spending her childhood watching her mother jump from guy to guy to guy, always falling in love and then crashing hard when the inevitable breakup occurred, she’d grown up determined never to fall in love.
That is, until Leo. Then all bets were off.
I watched as Oscar stacked pumpkins around the jack-o’-lantern-carving booth, his body so big, yet moving so gracefully. He set another bunch down, then searched the crowd, looking for . . . me?
Our eyes locked across the yard, and even from this distance I could see the sweetness in his gaze. And the heat.
Smitten. Mm-hmm.
Chapter 17
Halloween in New York City means traipsing up and down the back stairwell to go trick-or-treating on all the floors of your apartment building. Telling jokes to the doorman in return for candy. Riding the subway with no fewer than seven men dressed in dirty brown trousers and red-and-green-striped sweaters, six of whom are officially dressed as Freddy Krueger.
Halloween in the country is made for a horror movie. Rustling leaves, phantom wind blowing through bare scraping trees, cornstalks that beckon like creepy fingers, and roads where headless horsemen ride.
Everyone said it was safe, sure. People who knew all about the secrets of the Hudson Valley, and who keep them. Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be scared of. Unless you strayed too close to the edge of the cornfield. Honestly, if I met one person named Malachi, I’d be back on that train in two seconds flat.
So I was very happy that the Halloween festival started in the daytime, where everything was light, bright, and cheery, full of happy people celebrating the harvest like they always had. Maxwell Farms was the center of the cheery, and after all the work we’d put in the night before, it was like a Martha Stewart magazine come to life. A Martha Stewart magazine with damn good-looking farmers.
It was one of those perfect fall days: the air was crisp and clean, the leaves were fantastically bright, the sky so blue it made me squint to look up. And into all this bright and beautiful clean, I hobbled across the barnyard with Oscar, clutching his elbow.