Page 37 of The Pumpkin Pie Book Nook

Robyn’s fingers trembled slightly as she turned the bundle over, her thumb brushing the familiar looping handwriting on the first page. Tyler watched the emotion flicker across her face before she tucked it away again.

Without thinking, Tyler stepped closer. His hand found the small of her back, just a light touch, but it drew her subtly toward him all the same.

Robyn looked up at him, and for a moment it was just the two of them and the weight of those pages between her hands.

Elsie, of course, chose that exact moment to raise her phone again. Tyler heard the camera click, but didn’t think anything of it.

Kit stepped out on the inn’s front porch carrying a tray of cocktails in copper mugs, her dark bob swinging under her red bandana. She surveyed the group, the hole in the ground, the canister, and Robyn holding the manuscript.

“Oh, you found it,” she said, as if they’d merely located a misplaced set of keys. She set the tray down on the porch railing. “Good. I made autumn spiced mules to celebrate.”

She handed the first mug to Robyn, then one to Tyler, her dark eyes flicking between them. Tyler’s hand was still resting on Robyn’s back. He hadn’t moved it. He probably should have moved it.

Kit smirked. “Cute,” she said, nodding at the two of them.

Tyler felt his ears go warm, but if Robyn cared she wasn’t showing it. In fact, she leaned against his chest, arm slipping around his back. He held her there, drink in hand, and thought he’d never felt more complete in his life.

Madison broke the spell with a grin. “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I think this calls for another book club meeting.”

SEVENTEEN

ROBYN

After finding the time capsule, Robyn spent the evening tucked away in the loft above the bookshop, letting the day’s excitement settle. Cooking helped. It gave her hands a job and her mind a track to follow.

But tonight her mind kept slipping back to Tyler. She’d be chopping garlic and suddenly she was back on the trail, Tyler’s fingers at her jaw, the low murmur of his voice saying “raincheck.” She’d be stirring the sauce and her thoughts would drift to the back room of the bookstore with the click of the latch, the worn sofa, his eyes going dark behind his glasses.

They still hadn’t been alone. Every moment kept getting interrupted by customers, by the book club. The wanting had nowhere to go, so it just kept building, layering on itself until Robyn could feel it in her fingertips, in the restless way she couldn’t settle, in the way she kept glancing at her phone hoping he’d text.

Mr. Darcy sat on the kitchen counter watching her with an expression that suggested he found the whole thing deeply undignified.

She pointed the wooden spoon at him. “Don’t judge me.”

He blinked slowly. Oh yeah, he was judging her alright.

Robyn scratched his ears and poured herself another glass of wine, trying to enjoy the quiet.

The book club wouldn’t be meeting until tomorrow. Mrs. C. had wanted them to reconvene that night, preferably immediately, but the rest of the club members already had plans, and it didn’t feel right pressing on without them. Thankfully, Mrs. C. grudgingly accepted a photocopy of the second installment as temporary consolation.

“Okay,” Mrs. C. had said, taking the pages from Robyn with the solemnity of receiving a classified document. “But we meet tomorrow.”

Robyn took her pasta to the small table by the window, watching Maple Falls move below her in an autumnal version of a snow globe. The fall colors shimmered under lamplight, and the lamp posts along Oak Way were wrapped in garlands and twinkling strands. Across the road, Anita’s café sat cozy and bright with potted mums outside and hay bales and pumpkins tucked into the alcove entrance.

If Robyn cracked the window, she could catch the scent of roasted almonds drifting up from the vendor who was toasting his last batch of the night, tourists and locals lingering with warm paper cones in hand. Down on the corner, the gas firepits glowed, Adirondack chairs clustered around them with throw blankets tossed over armrests, inviting anyone with a cup of cider—hot, spiced, and maybe spiked if they’d stopped at The Kettle—to sit awhile and pretend the night didn’t have an end.

She thought about checking in with Meg, asking if the buyer who’d walked through yesterday had said anything new, but the truth was she didn’t want to know. Not yet. Sometimes ignorance really was bliss.

She thought about calling her parents, but didn’t really know what to talk about, seeing as she wasn’t currently doing any academic research, and her parents wouldn’t be happy she was dating Tyler. They would see him as a nice guy, and nothing else seeing as he didn’t have a professional title or a string of letters after his name.

Instead, Robyn refilled her wineglass, carried her laptop to the oversized chair where Mr. Darcy was already snoozing contentedly on the back, and let herself slip into the secret identity that reliably made her feel more like herself.

AfterHoursAuthor.

She knew she could have pivoted the story into something gentler for the morning after the last explicit scene she’d written. Something domestic and warm, where the couple made breakfast together in their socks, flirted over pancakes, and argued about who made the better coffee. That would have been the sensible choice, the kind of chapter her readers would still devour with happy sighs and heart emojis.

But the moment her fingertips touched the keyboard, her thoughts snagged, stubbornly and unfairly, on Tyler.

And the scene… shifted.