Page 34 of Knot Baked Out For This
His storm-gray gaze finds mine through glass and distance, and his lips curve in something that isn't quite a smile. It's darker. Promising.
Bigger problems indeed.
My arm still tingles where Rowan touched me.
My pulse still races from Luca's stare.
My skin still hums from the combined weight of three Alphas' attention.
"I'm so fucked," I whisper.
Reverie pats my shoulder sympathetically. "Yeah, but at least the view will be spectacular."
Outside, October continues its slow burn toward winter, and the charity event banner flaps like a war flag.
Or maybe a white flag of surrender.
With my luck, probably both.
CHAPTER 6
Pumpkins And Poor Decisions
~ROWAN~
She's going to be the death of me, and she'll probably do it with a fucking cinnamon roll.
The Pumpkin Patch Pop-Up sprawls across Oakridge Town Square like autumn vomited its entire contents and someone decided to charge admission. Orange everything—orange bunting, orange balloons, orange tablecloths that'll be stained brown by day's end. Hay bales stack like fortifications between vendor stalls, already shedding their golden guts across walkways that'll be ankle-breaker territory by noon.
The air reeks of competing scents: apple cider warming in industrial vats, kettle corn popping somewhere to my left, damp leaves rotting under tables, and underneath it all, the sticky-sweet smell of suburban desperation masquerading as community spirit.
And her.
Always fucking her.
Hazel Holloway arrives like she's declaring war on my sanity, hauling boxes that she shouldn't be lifting alone, her auburn hair catching morning sun like copper wire conducting electricity straight to my hindbrain. She's wearing that green cardigan—the one that brings out the gold flecks in her eyes, not that I'm cataloguing her wardrobe choices like some lovesick teenager.
You're thirty-four years old. Get your shit together.
But watching her set up her stall is like watching art in motion, if art involved a lot of muttered profanity and aggressive pastry arrangement. She's draped orange burlap over her table with the precision of someone defusing a bomb, every fold deliberate, every corner squared. Her sign—"Hazel's Hearth & Home"—gets propped at exactly the right angle to catch the light.
She hasn't looked at me once.
Which means she knows exactly where I am.
Three years of nothing, and now she's everywhere. The universe has a sick sense of humor.
I adjust the firehouse fundraiser banner for the fifth time, pretending I'm not tracking her every movement in my peripheral vision. My uniform jacket hangs over the back of my chair—too hot for October, but the chief insisted on "professional presentation." Like anyone gives a damn about professional when there's a gorgeous Omega arranging pumpkin pies ten feet away.
Not gorgeous. Just... Hazel.
Christ, who am I kidding?
She bends to retrieve something from a box, and her jeans pull tight across her?—
"Cambridge! You planning to help or just stand there looking constipated?"
Derek Fischer, my lieutenant and professional pain in the ass, drops a box of fundraiser calendars on our table hard enough to make the whole structure wobble.
