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.

“You should have let me put some ice on that before we left.”

“Ice wasn’t going to help,” I muttered.

Oscar’s big hand smoothed down my back, light as a feather. “Ice will help with the inflammation, Pinup. You overtaxed your muscles.”

I looked up at him, almost as tall as the sky itself. “Who overtaxed my muscles, Caveman?”

“You did,” he replied, an amused glint in his eye.

“I certainly didn’t throw myself all over the bed this morning,” I grumbled, heat flaring through me as I thought back to a few hours ago.

“I put you on your knees, Natalie,” he whispered, his voice lowering. He lowered, too, dipping down so that his mouth was just a blink away from my ear, his words dark and delicious. “I’d hardly call that throwing you all over the bed.”

A shiver rolled through me, down to my hips, hips that still felt how firmly his hands had grasped me as he did indeed put me on my knees. He’d held me so firmly, in giant warm hands that wrapped around my curves, fit neatly into the small of my back, and pressed me down onto my hands and knees, and tilted my pelvis up so he could thrust inside in one powerful stroke.

I shivered once more. “Whatever. Who threw who, who pushed who, the point is—”

“The point,” he interrupted, planting a kiss on the side of my neck, “is that you need ice. Sooner, rather than later.”

I stood still, looking up at him. With the sun highlighting the little bit of auburn in his hair, his thick chestnut and mahogany hair waved around his face, still mussed from my hands. This guy, this man who resembled some kind of island god that women should be surrounding with tikis and praying to for increased fertility, had just kissed me on the neck in front of half the town . . . and I loved it.

And I knew that I was falling for him in a big way. Whole heart, full butterflies, threatening to burst out of my chest and skywrite my feelings for all the world to see.

This was moving beyond a crush. This was moving beyond a toss in the hay and a grapple in the truck. I was feeling the feels. Which made me so very nervous . . . but I was rolling with it, dealing with it.

But right now, I was only feeling flannel. In my hand, curling into a fist as I tugged him down to me, those lips too full and luscious not to be kissed. I kissed him, and he kissed me, and before I knew it his hands were around my waist, careful of my sore back but still warm and pressing along my singing skin. We kissed slow, and sweet, and deep and scorching, until I felt nothing except every point of contact between us.

And yes, that included the impressive erection against my stomach.

Suddenly, over the quiet sighs from me and the low grumbling groans from him, I heard something else. Something much higher-pitched and—giggling?

“Ew,” a tiny voice said from somewhere much closer to the ground. I pulled my lips away from Oscar’s to investigate. Polly was standing next to us, and Roxie and Leo stood nearby with gigantic grins.

“Don’t say ew, kid.” I laughed, dropping one more kiss on Oscar’s mouth. “You’ll give him a complex.”

“What’s a complex?” Polly asked.

Leo scooped her up and planted her firmly on his shoulders. “Let’s go check out that corn maze, huh?”

And with my hand engulfed in Oscar’s large one, we did just that.

We spent the day together, enjoying all the activities. I entered and won a jack-o’-lantern-carving contest, capturing the exact skyline of lower Manhattan from memory across a pumpkin sky. Polly and Leo ran the three-legged race and lost spectacularly, coming in so very last they were almost disqualified. Roxie easily beat out the competition in the pie contest, and people were fighting to get the last piece of her classic vinegar cream pie, which sounds terrible but was fucking unreal.

But my day in the country was complete when I watched Oscar compete in the butter-churning race.

There are no words. Scratch that. There are words. And some of them are . . .