"If you didn't want to spend all that, you should have said." She wrinkled her nose.
It was adorable. I kissed her nose then her mouth.
"I need Sebastian to sell us that company, so enough pumpkins to raise a pumpkin army and enough hay bales to burn down my house are perfectly acceptable," I said, my hands drifting up under her skirt. Her thighs were warm under the tights, and she was even hotter between her thighs.
"Well," she said, kissing my jaw and rocking slightly against my hand. "Since you spent all day wandering around the pumpkin patch, maybe there's another pumpkin patch we could go explore."
"I really want to explore it right now," I said, nuzzling her neck.
"Garrett!" several little voices shouted. "We found you!"
"We're not playing hide-and-seek," I said to them, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice as I released Penny. "You're supposed to find your wayoutof the maze."
"We did, but then we came back!" Oscar said.
"Maybe you can show us the way out?" Penny asked.
My little brothers each grabbed one of her hands, and just like that, they stole her away.
Penny looked over her shoulder and grinned at me. "I guess you're just chopped pumpkin now!"
33
Penny
Garrett had really stirred my pumpkin-spice latte back there in the corn maze.
"Geez," I told him after we'd waved his brothers back onto the school bus. "I thought I was a little too old to be making out in the corn maze. That's what we did when we were teenagers."
"Who were you making out with in the corn maze?" Garrett asked. He didn't sound happy.
"No one, actually," I admitted, following him to our car. "The cool kids—the football players and the cheerleaders—did that. I was the weird foster kid in the back of the classroom. I didn't make out with anyone in the corn maze."
"You have now."
"Look who's smug! Maybe you can take me to one of those places you said would be better for a roll in the hay than the back of a hearse."
He half smiled. "I think I can work something out. You've earned a reward after that record-breaking pumpkin shopping trip."
"Maybe we—" I stopped short. We both stood there and stared at the car. It had been turned completely upside down.
"It's the ghost," I said after a minute.
"Sorry!" Ernest said, huffing over to us. "One of my guys was using a forklift on a fertilizer shipment and didn't put the prongs down."
"This is a brand-new car," Garrett said. He sounded shocked.
"The ghost made it happen," I said matter-of-factly. "You should buy an antique car, Garrett. Morticia and Lilith say that’s what the ghost likes."
"I'm not catering to a ghost," Garrett scoffed. "Wait, what am I saying? There are no such things as ghosts. This is just a horrible coincidence."
"I'll call for a ride," I said with a sigh.
* * *
"When you saidyou were going to call for a ride, I thought you were ordering an Uber," Garrett said as a big black hearse pulled into the gravel parking lot.
Lilith was behind the wheel, silk driving gloves on, round sunglasses covering her eyes. She pulled the hearse alongside Garrett and me. Morticia cranked down the window and looked at us over her sunglasses.
