Page 30 of Cinnamon Roll Set Up

Georgia: For

Miles: You’re the one who set me up with the Vance Vickers fanatic

Georgia: All right, we’ll call it a draw

Chapter 10

Georgia

Whoever is in charge of decorating Magnolia Ridge’s Harvest Festival is the exact right amount of extra. Every booth is covered in hay bales and corn husks, pumpkins and mums. Even though it’s in the high seventies today, itlookslike a perfect autumn day, and in Texas, that’s close enough.

Miles and I wander through the booths to our station for the afternoon, deftly avoiding the little children running up and down the aisles. There must be some kind of decoration scavenger hunt going on because most of them have paper and crayons, checking things off before they run away again.

In the center pavilion, men in variously colored flannel shirts file across the stage, vying for the day’s trophy. It’s basically a thinly veiled beefcake parade, although a few women are in the lineup, too.

“Aw. If I’d known about the flannel competition, I would have told you to wear one.”

“I don’t need to destroy their egos all at once.” He tosses me the tiniest smirk.

I loop my hand around his arm. “You’re right. Better to humiliate them individually.”

“What’s going on at the community center?”

I follow his gaze. A bunch ofAbandonedsigns are boarded up across the building’s front doors.

“They make it look more run down every week in September, and by October, it will be a haunted house. Wait—you’ve never seen the progression of the Abandoned Manor?”

“I don’t usually come to the Harvest Festival. I didn’t realize the farmers market was this big.”

“They get more vendors every year.” Sam’s sister-in-law, Eliza, is a big advocate for the market. “And next year, they’ll finally add the bicycle bookmobile. Bookcycle?”

He chuckles. “The fabled Dogeared bookmobile. How are things going with that?”

“Really good. Grandpa and Sam worked through the hardest parts of putting the shelves in. Now we just need to add the doors and find a way to strap in the books when it’s in transit. It’ll be ready for the spring market, don’t worry.”

He smiles down at me. “I never doubted you.”

I’ve had two bosses in my adult life: myself and Miles. And of those, Miles is the more supportive one. I can fret over my cover ideas until I’m practically ready to give up illustrating altogether. My negative self-talk game is strong. But Miles always acts like it would be impossible for me to fail.

Is it any surprise I’ve stayed at Dogeared this long?

I give us a wide berth past a stall with grinning scarecrows on either side, shuddering as I go.

“Still a no from you, huh?” he says.

“They’re creepy.”

“They’re smiling.”

“Withstitched-on mouths. That’s horror movie stuff. Scarecrows were literally created to be frightening, and now we’ve collectively decided they’re benign good guys we should put all over our house and yard every fall? No, thank you.”

He turns his head to get a better view of the ones I avoided. “They’ve got Raggedy Ann faces with cherry red cheeks.”

“And straw stuffing falling out of their arms and legs. That’s morbid. Haven’t you seen the movies? Scarecrows are evil, the end.”

His eyebrows hitch up like he can’t possibly reconcile myevilbrand with the cutesy versions we just passed. “I feel like you and I watched different movies growing up.”

“Sam might have let me watch an especially scary show when I was little.” I normally don’t throw my brother under the bus, but the trauma is real. “I still sometimes have nightmares about getting chased through cornfields.”

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