“You should have let me put some ice on that before we left.”

“Ice wasn’t going to help,” I muttered.

Oscar’s big hand smoothed down my back, light as a feather. “Ice will help with the inflammation, Pinup. You overtaxed your muscles.”

I looked up at him, almost as tall as the sky itself. “Who overtaxed my muscles, Caveman?”

“You did,” he replied, an amused glint in his eye.

“I certainly didn’t throw myself all over the bed this morning,” I grumbled, heat flaring through me as I thought back to a few hours ago.

“I put you on your knees, Natalie,” he whispered, his voice lowering. He lowered, too, dipping down so that his mouth was just a blink away from my ear, his words dark and delicious. “I’d hardly call that throwing you all over the bed.”

A shiver rolled through me, down to my hips, hips that still felt how firmly his hands had grasped me as he did indeed put me on my knees. He’d held me so firmly, in giant warm hands that wrapped around my curves, fit neatly into the small of my back, and pressed me down onto my hands and knees, and tilted my pelvis up so he could thrust inside in one powerful stroke.

I shivered once more. “Whatever. Who threw who, who pushed who, the point is—”

“The point,” he interrupted, planting a kiss on the side of my neck, “is that you need ice. Sooner, rather than later.”

I stood still, looking up at him. With the sun highlighting the little bit of auburn in his hair, his thick chestnut and mahogany hair waved around his face, still mussed from my hands. This guy, this man who resembled some kind of island god that women should be surrounding with tikis and praying to for increased fertility, had just kissed me on the neck in front of half the town . . . and I loved it.

And I knew that I was falling for him in a big way. Whole heart, full butterflies, threatening to burst out of my chest and skywrite my feelings for all the world to see.

This was moving beyond a crush. This was moving beyond a toss in the hay and a grapple in the truck. I was feeling the feels. Which made me so very nervous . . . but I was rolling with it, dealing with it.

But right now, I was only feeling flannel. In my hand, curling into a fist as I tugged him down to me, those lips too full and luscious not to be kissed. I kissed him, and he kissed me, and before I knew it his hands were around my waist, careful of my sore back but still warm and pressing along my singing skin. We kissed slow, and sweet, and deep and scorching, until I felt nothing except every point of contact between us.

And yes, that included the impressive erection against my stomach.

Suddenly, over the quiet sighs from me and the low grumbling groans from him, I heard something else. Something much higher-pitched and—giggling?

“Ew,” a tiny voice said from somewhere much closer to the ground. I pulled my lips away from Oscar’s to investigate. Polly was standing next to us, and Roxie and Leo stood nearby with gigantic grins.

“Don’t say ew, kid.” I laughed, dropping one more kiss on Oscar’s mouth. “You’ll give him a complex.”

“What’s a complex?” Polly asked.

Leo scooped her up and planted her firmly on his shoulders. “Let’s go check out that corn maze, huh?”

And with my hand engulfed in Oscar’s large one, we did just that.

We spent the day together, enjoying all the activities. I entered and won a jack-o’-lantern-carving contest, capturing the exact skyline of lower Manhattan from memory across a pumpkin sky. Polly and Leo ran the three-legged race and lost spectacularly, coming in so very last they were almost disqualified. Roxie easily beat out the competition in the pie contest, and people were fighting to get the last piece of her classic vinegar cream pie, which sounds terrible but was fucking unreal.

But my day in the country was complete when I watched Oscar compete in the butter-churning race.

There are no words. Scratch that. There are words. And some of them are . . .

Pumping.

Up.

Down.

Hands.

Wrapped.

Around.

Wood.

Cream.

Splashing.

Tongue.

Poking.

Out.

Concentrating.

Rhythm.

Thrusting.

Sweating.

Eyes.

On.

Me.

The.

Entire.

Time.

Is.

It.

Hot.

Or.

Is.

It.

Just.

Me?

(This is Roxie . . . it’s not just you.)

If it was possible for someone to spontaneously combust from watching a grown man churn butter, then I’d be the first to do it.

After he won, I managed to tug him behind the stone barn afterward and cop a few good feels, enough skin to tide me over until tonight, at least, when I planned on riding my champion until I’d brought him right across the finish line.

The day was perfect, one that if you could watch from above, could pull back to a wide camera shot and observe, you’d think you were watching an ad for the New York Tourism Board, or at the very least a small-town council’s print ad in a regional magazine. Shiny, happy people—and now we were dancing.

No, really, there was even a square dance in the middle of all this Martha Stewart meets Norman Rockwell visual perfection.

While my sore back kept me from allemanding left and promenading right, Oscar and I did manage to sneak in a slow dance when the bluegrass band played its own version of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” We swayed back and forth under the October sky, eyes seeing only each other, his hands trying his damnedest not to be full of my sweet ass. Every few bars his hands would start to slip down, and I had to remind him that we were on display here, with kids everywhere.

We saw every stall, visited every booth, chatting with everyone I’d come to know in the few short weeks since discovering this wonderful town. Eventually we nabbed a picnic table, filled it with Leo and Polly and Chad and Logan, and Roxie and I headed to a stand to grab hot dogs for everyone.

“You two seem cozy,” Roxie said, bumping my hip on the way to the hot dog stand.

“We do, don’t we?” I replied, feeling my cheeks creak as I grinned for the thousandth time that very day. “I gotta admit, it’s pretty great.”

“That’s obvious.” She jumped into line right before a gaggle of junior high kids beat us to it. “So where is this headed?”