Read sample Falling for Pumpkin Spice

Prologue

Miles

“Don’t get me wrong. You’re hot. But, well … your farm …”

He swallowed as Evelyn’s scornful gaze swept over his beloved farm. “My farm?” he asked, although he already knew the answer and knew he wouldn’t like it.

“Your farm is a shithole.”

Ouch. No matter how often women hurled that at him, it always hurt just as much. Why couldn’t they understand that his farm was anything but a dump? Why did they see only chaos, not the perfect balance of nature? Why—?

“I know what you want,” she said, interrupting his thoughts.

Miles merely raised his eyebrows. He knew what came next, too. She wasn’t the first woman to say these words to him.

“Yes?”

“A slave you can put to work here. Someone who works herself to the bone all day and still spreads her legs for you at night. Preferably someone who’ll have a whole brood of children for you, because two pairs of hands can’t manage all the work here. Then you can enslave them, too. I can’t do all that.”

She turned away.

“You’ll have to find someone else.”

His expression frozen, he watched her march to her car, get in and drive away without another word.

It had happened again. Evelyn was just the latest in a long line of women he’d fallen in love with. Women he’d hoped would be happy to share his life. He’d been wrong. Again.

Something brushed against his leg, and he looked down. His rust-colored tomcat was weaving around his legs with a loud purr. He bent down and scooped him up. Rusty didn’t usually like being held, but this time he allowed it. Perhaps he sensed that Miles needed someone who understood him today.

“You never liked her, did you?” he asked the cat. “Maybe I should have listened to you. You’re a better judge of character than I am.”

Rusty kept purring. Then he grew restless, wriggled free of Miles’s arms and jumped to the ground. Tail held high, he ran toward the barn, meowing. It was time for his evening feed.

Miles allowed himself another moment of self-pity. He looked toward the sun, which was about to disappear behind the ridge, and said goodbye. To the day. To Evelyn.

“Maybe I should just accept that no one wants me,” he muttered quietly.

A meow from the barn reminded him that there were more important things than love. Perhaps it simply wasn’t meant to be …

Spilled Milk … or Coffee?

Piper

Just change course and it will flow smoothly again. Piper gritted her teeth and turned up the music, with hopes that the bass pounding through her earphones would finally drown out her thoughts.

It didn’t.

How could it? There was no other direction to take. A wall loomed ahead. The river of her life was blocked, to borrow imagery from the most stupid, inspirational quote her friend Karen had ever recited. Or should that be former friend? And, to run with the metaphor, the river water kept rising. It was already up to her neck. She was about to drown in the mess her life had become.

No, scratch that. She’d already gone under. Pathetically.

Piper rested her forehead against the window of the intercity bus that was carrying her to the place where she could bury her dreams once and for all. Maplewood.

Maplewood, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire, between the White and Black Mountains. Apart from bears, moose, and hikers, it was home to a handful of stubborn souls who refused to accept there was no future there. A few houses along a country road with barely any traffic, a lane with a handful of little shops, a diner, a community center – that screened films once a month, long after people elsewhere had stopped talking about them – and a small lake that barely deserved the name. That was all there was.

But at least she wouldn’t have to look at the wreckage of her dreams every day.

Her thoughts drifted back to Portsmouth. She pictured herself standing at the window of her home, looking out at the storefront of her business, The Juicy Juice.

Her lip curled. She’d said at the time that the name sounded too childish; their products weren’t for children, after all. They produced highly concentrated liquid vitamin supplements. But Alec had insisted that the name was memorable. Exactly what they needed. And she’d listened to him. Just as she always had.

It was a mistake. She knew that now. Too late.

You learn from your mistakes, Karen’s voice said in her head, followed immediately by, Mistakes are the rungs on the ladder of personal growth.

Piper knocked her forehead against the window to silence that voice. The last thing she needed right now was another of Karen’s inspirational quotes.

Karen had betrayed her, just as Alec had. Perhaps even worse. Alec had simply walked away without a word and left her with their debts. Karen had bought Piper’s apartment at auction – for next to nothing.

That hurt most of all.

No, Piper didn’t want to think about any of it.

Not Karen.

Not Alec.

Not The Juicy Juice.

Not her debts or the emptiness that now faced her like a dark abyss.

She let her head thud against the window again, and suddenly, someone pulled the earbud out of her ear.

“Your music’s so loud the whole bus can hear it,” the woman beside her snapped. “And if you bang your head against that window one more time, you’ll break the glass. I don’t want to have to change buses halfway through the journey just because you can’t get your life together, so stop it.”

Piper stared at her. She’d been so lost in thought that she hadn’t even noticed the woman sit down beside her, let alone taken a proper look at her. She looked now.

The woman had dreadlocks – some dyed green, others decorated with colorful ribbons. Her clothes were a riot of color. None of that would have been particularly remarkable if she hadn’t been at least seventy years old.

“I’m Fay,” the woman said. Her amused expression made it clear that she knew what Piper was thinking. “If you like, I can turn around so you can stare at me from every angle.”

Piper’s cheeks grew hot. “No need,” she mumbled, then looked down at her phone to reduce the volume. She turned back to the window. Forest. She’d see more than enough of that in the days ahead.

Once again, her earbud was pulled out. “Could you help me for a moment?”

Piper pressed her lips together to hold back a rude remark. She didn’t want to help. She wanted to be left alone. She wanted to wallow in self-pity. She wanted—

“It’s not healthy to become a slave to your thoughts,” the woman said. Once again, she’d guessed Piper’s thoughts. It was starting to unnerve her.

“Is it about a man?”

Piper grimaced. “He’s the least of my problems.”

“But part of the problem?”

“You could put it that way, yes. And I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Fair enough. So will you help me?”

Piper shrugged. It wasn’t as if she was busy. “What do you need me to do?”

The woman leaned sideways and pulled a sort of basket out from under her seat. Looking more closely, Piper saw that it had been crocheted from thick wool. Or knitted? What did she know? Either way, it held several colorful hanks of yarn.

“I need to wind these into balls. Would you hold one for me?” Without waiting for an answer, Fay took Piper’s hands and positioned them in front of her. She untied one of the hanks and slipped the loop of yarn over Piper’s forearms. “Now I can wind it without tangles,” she explained. “So, tell me. What did this man who isn’t the problem do?”

Piper sighed. She wasn’t really ready to talk to anyone about it yet. She hadn’t even told her parents what had happened. All they knew was that she was coming home. “For a few days,” she’d said, leaving out the fact that it could just as easily be forever.

“Think of it this way. You don’t know me. If you tell me, it’s more or less like a diary entry, except I’ll actually listen. You can get it all off your chest, and it’ll help pass the time for me. We both win.”

“You’re right, Ms …?”

“Fay. Just Fay. So, what did the man who’s only part of the problem do?” The woman smiled, and the last of Piper’s resistance crumbled.

“He ran our business into the ground and disappeared. Left me with all our debts. My friend,” she said, with air quotes as she referred to Karen, “took full advantage of the situation after fobbing me off with a few inspirational quotes. And now I’m on my way home with no idea what to do with my life.”

“Live it?” Fay suggested innocently.

Piper gave a weary snort. Great. More inspirational quotes. Just what she needed.

But she said nothing. Instead, she kept her arms apart and moved them back and forth to make it easier for Fay to wind the yarn in the cramped space. She looked out of the window.

Forest.

Forest.

Forest.

And in between, trees.

Then came the moment she’d always looked forward to as a child on the way home from a family holiday. The bus crested the treeless hill that overlooked the little town. Welcome to Maplewood, read the weathered sign. And Population: 2,678.

She smiled as a childhood memory surfaced.

In first grade, Piper loved math more than any other subject. She loved that two plus two was always four. She loved that four could also be the sum of one and three, or four and zero. And that it didn’t matter which number came first. Math was something she could rely on. It was clear. Unlike English, where the same sound could be spelled six different ways.

She loved math even more once she learned to read big numbers. Her teacher helped the class explore the decimal system with beads; golden beads that felt wonderfully smooth and gleamed in the light. Piper loved to play with them, letting the long strings slide through her fingers again and again.

Then came the day their teacher introduced them to numbers up to a thousand. It took so many single beads to make rods of ten, and so many rods to make squares of a hundred, before they finally had a cube of a thousand! And what a long chain they made when all those rods and squares were laid out end to end! It reached from the classroom door to the school’s entrance; that’s how long it was.

From that moment on, Piper loved big numbers. Whenever she saw one, she had to stop and read it. Naturally, she spotted the number on Maplewood’s welcome sign and insisted that her dad pull over so she could take her time reading it aloud.

“Welcome to Maplewood. Population: 2,678,” she read. “What does population mean, Dad?”

He explained it patiently, and Piper repeated the number so many times on the way home that she would remember it for the rest of her life.

The next day at school, she went straight for the beads. To represent the population on the welcome sign, Piper needed two thousand-bead cubes, six hundred-bead squares, seven ten-bead rods and eight single beads. That was a lot of beads! And each one stood for a person.

When their neighbor had twins shortly afterwards, Piper pestered Dad until he drove her to the sign. She was bitterly disappointed to find that the number hadn’t changed.

“The mayor has the sign replaced every few years,” Dad explained.

“But that means the number’s wrong.” She couldn’t imagine how the mayor could allow such a terrible lie. Perhaps that was the moment Piper lost her faith in math. After all, one tiny oversight, or one lie, was enough to make all those rules worthless.

By now, she knew that the mayor, Nigel Grey, never gave that number a thought. Even today, the same population was displayed on the weathered sign.

The first houses they passed were weathered, too. The bright colors Piper remembered had faded, and the paint was peeling in places. The porches of the once-pretty Victorian houses were rotten, and weeds had taken over the lawns.

The unease that had simmered in her chest throughout the journey deepened. Returning to Maplewood was an admission of defeat. She had given up. On her bright future. On her dreams. On herself.

Miles

“Thanks. See you tomorrow,” Miles said as he took his reusable coffee cup. He winked at Mae, then stepped out of the Maple Mug Café.

It had been a long day, and he’d earned a pumpkin spice latte and one of Mae’s honey cakes. Even if he hadn’t, stopping by the Maple Mug to pick up whatever cake was left had become part of his daily routine. If only so he could check her supplies with Mae. She’d started to forget to order essential ingredients from him more and more often, which left her unable to bake her legendary cakes and stressed her out. Once, she’d become so distressed that she’d been taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack. It turned out to be a panic attack and wasn’t dangerous, but if Miles could stop it from happening again, he wanted to.

Today, they’d discovered that Mae needed more honey. He’d add a few jars of his blossom honey to her usual delivery tomorrow. Hazelnuts, too, were running low. He pulled out his phone to add the nuts to her order, with one hand because his coffee cup was in the other. And that was when it happened.

Something hard and heavy landed right at his feet. He stumbled, and his phone slipped from his hand. At the same time, the contents of his cup spilled down his shirt and over the pile on the ground.

“Damn it, that’s hot!” he blurted, as he pulled his shirt away from his scalded skin. “What the hell?”

He looked up, and it hit him like a bolt of lightning. A vision stood before him. Sparkling green eyes that looked enormous in her pale face, brown curls, strawberry-red lips that formed an O. The woman of his dreams!

“No! No! No! No! No!”

She stamped around the pile of bags and suitcases like Rumpelstiltskin. Who was she, traveling with so much luggage? A celebrity? But why would a celebrity be in Maplewood?

Miles’s mouth opened and closed, although he couldn’t get a single coherent word out.

The woman of his dreams, however, wasn’t lost for words. “My suitcases! My bag! It’s not waterproof! How will I ever get these coffee stains out? You’ve ruined my bag with your stupid coffee! And not just my bag. You’ve ruined everything I own! My whole life is in these bags, and you just pour your stupid coffee all over them!”

Miles could only stare at her.

“Do you have nothing to say? Not even sorry?”

“Sorry,” he said weakly.

She snorted. With one last disgusted look, she gathered her bags and stormed off. Miles stared after her, dazed. Had that really just happened?

A quiet giggle brought him back to reality.

“Someone certainly made an impression on our Miles.”

He turned toward Fay, the giggler. “Well, she certainly left her mark on my shirt.” He pointed accusingly at the still-hot coffee stain on his chest.

Fay giggled again. “I’d say she left more than that.”

“Oh, give it a rest with the matchmaking. Haven’t you realized it’s a waste of time with me?”

Fay, like Mae, belonged to a lively group of older women who loved to sit in their old friend’s café and chat about the people of Maplewood all day. Their favorites, who unfortunately for Miles included him, received special attention in the form of matchmaking. By sheer coincidence, they always invited women of his age to the café, just when he usually dropped by. Women who, by another remarkable coincidence, were single and wanted to find the love of their lives.

Evelyn had been one of those women. For a moment, he thought of her wistfully. Then he remembered her harsh words. No. He wouldn’t pine for her. They hadn’t been right for each other, and that was that.

He had to tell the women to stop. He didn’t want them to arrange his love life. If he fell in love, he wanted it to hit him like a bolt of lightning. As it had just now. Ideally, though, the woman would be struck by the same bolt.

That clearly hadn’t happened with this enchanting woman. Quite the opposite. He’d go so far as to say she might actually hate him.

Well, such was his luck in love.

“Who is she?” he asked anyway, because Fay clearly knew.

“Piper,” she said. “Piper Brown. One of the Browns up on Rose Hill.”

That took a moment to sink in.

“Little Piper” was like a granddaughter to Mae, and the owner of the Maple Mug loved to talk about her at length. About the business she’d built from scratch with her delightful fiancé, her lovely apartment in Portsmouth and the bright future Mae imagined for her. Little Piper was all that Miles wasn’t. Successful, happily attached and … charm personified.

“That’s Little Piper?” At least, that was what Mae always called her. Miles couldn’t begin to reconcile the explosive woman he’d just met with what his best customer had told him about her.

Fay giggled. “Well, everyone’s little next to you.”

She had a point. Miles was nearly six foot seven and powerfully built from the physical work on Fox and Crow Farm. Someone as petite as Piper must look like a pixie beside him.

Without ever having met her, Miles had built up a picture of Little Piper over the years. But the woman he’d imagined bore not the slightest resemblance to the fury whose luggage had just sent his coffee flying.

He gave an amused snort. “Weekend visit to mom and dad?”

Fay shook her head indulgently. “Didn’t you see the luggage?”

“I more or less tripped over it,” he replied.

“Well, there’s your answer.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Is it?”

“She’s back for good.”

“Oh,” he said, unable to stop the thought that flashed through his mind. So where’s this celebrated fiancé?

There was a gleam in Fay’s eyes that Miles didn’t like at all. “Yes. For good,” she said slowly.