Page 31 of Falling for Him (Honey Leaf Lodge #3)

Ben

I didn’t mean to come down to the festival.

In fact, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t.

The plan was simple: sleep in, grab a quiet coffee from the lodge kitchen, and maybe finish the book I’d pretended to start four days ago.

But then I made the mistake of walking past the lobby window.

And there she was.

Fifi.

Wearing a sleeveless chambray dress, hair pulled into some kind of loose knot, with a smear of what looked suspiciously like berry preserves on her cheekbone and a glittery sun sticker on her collarbone like she’d been accidentally branded by a preschooler.

She was darting from one pop-up booth to another with a clipboard, a headset, a smile that should’ve been outlawed, and the unmistakable air of someone holding the entire town together by sheer force of personality.

I didn’t even change clothes. Just grabbed my hoodie and headed toward town before I could stop myself.

The Summerberry Festival was exactly what I expected and somehow still more chaotic. Painted signs. Jam jars stacked like Jenga towers. Children chasing balloons with the kind of unhinged energy that made me step wide.

There were handwoven baskets, strawberry lemonade slushies, someone aggressively whittling near the fudge tent, and a tent with four different kinds of fried cheese curds. I wasn’t sure if that was charming or mildly threatening.

But none of it mattered.

Because the moment I spotted her again, crouching by a vendor table and negotiating with a man in overalls about placement rights for his decorative gnome statues, my chest did this tight, stupid thing I couldn’t quite explain.

She was flushed, laughing, and covered in approximately four types of berry products. Talking with her hands and somehow wrangling order out of chaos without even pausing for breath, and I couldn’t stop watching her.

Fifi Bell was a walking contradiction: a human sparkler with the stubbornness of a thousand mules, who could organize a festival, flirt like it was a blood sport, and make a man like me, who’d come here to escape everything, want to throw away even more to stay.

God help me.

I was falling for her.

Fast. Hard. Recklessly.

She hadn’t seen me yet, which gave me a minute to just… look.

Not in a weird, lurking way.

Okay, maybe a little lurking. But I needed it. That pause. That still moment where I could stand on the edge and admit to myself that something had shifted, and it wasn’t just the location or the sunlight or the jam-scented air.

It was her.

She made everything feel… possible.

Even when she was juggling snack bags and guiding a panicking teenager to the lost-and-found booth and somehow giving me a glance that made my knees weak from thirty feet away.

She spotted me then.

Our eyes locked.

And damn if her entire face didn’t light up like I was exactly the person she hoped to see.

That look?

That smile?

It nearly knocked me on my ass.

She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and jogged toward me, hair bouncing, mouth tugging into a grin that made my stomach flip.

“Hey, stranger,” she called. “You’re not hiding from angry beavers, are you?”

“Not unless one’s manning the cotton candy booth,” I said, eyes trailing down her sun-dappled arms, her scuffed sneakers, the curve of her cheek when she laughed.

“You came.”

“I told you I couldn’t resist glitter and rhubarb.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m seventy-five percent fruit filling at this point. Don’t stand too close or you’ll end up sticky.”

Too late.

I already was.

Sticky. Attached. Wrecked.

I didn’t say that, of course.

Instead, I said, “You look like the mayor of chaos.”

She tilted her head. “Flattering.”

“Meant it to be.”

There was a beat between us then, soft and full of things we hadn’t said yet.

But what I knew in that moment, watching her run this festival, watching her own this town with her laughter and her bossy clipboard and her ability to make every single person feel like they mattered, was this:

Fifi Bell wasn’t a detour.

She wasn’t a vacation distraction.

She was the destination I didn’t even know I’d been heading for.

And I was officially screwed.

Buttercup Lake’s annual Summerberry Festival was nothing like I expected.

Everywhere I turned, people were laughing, sipping from mason jars, holding sticky hands of kids in strawberry-stained shirts.

There were booths lined with handmade jewelry, jam jars glinting in the sun, and women in wide-brimmed hats chatting about pie like they were trading stock tips.

The air smelled like sweet corn and cinnamon sugar.

And somehow, in all this small-town noise, Fifi moved like a conductor in a berry-streaked symphony.

I watched her from just behind the lemonade booth as she double-checked a clipboard, then crouched to pick up a plastic bag that had escaped the trash bin.

Her hair was half-up, the other half tumbling across her shoulders like it had been fighting her since dawn.

She had what looked like glitter on her temple, and her dress had smudges of jam down the side.

None of it dulled her shine. If anything, it made her look more like the sun itself had taken human form and started running a hospitality empire in rural Wisconsin.

I didn’t know how long I was staring when she popped up next to me with a bottle of water.

“Hydration,” she said, handing it over with a grin. “I’m told it’s crucial to surviving glitter-related emergencies.”

“Is this sparkling or still?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”

I twisted the cap open and took a swig. “This explains why I couldn’t find a room anywhere else in town. Big festival.”

The moment I said it, I knew I’d messed up.

Her smile faltered, just a blink, a flicker, but it hit like a gut punch.

She looked at me. Really looked. “Wait… what?”

I ran a hand through my hair, feeling the heat rise in my chest. “I just meant… the festival. That’s why all the other places were booked. I couldn’t get a room anywhere.”

Her voice was soft. “So you… didn’t mean to stay at the Honey Leaf?”

My stomach sank. “No…Fifi, that’s not what I meant.”

She took a tiny step back, arms folding across her chest. Her entire posture shifted from sunshine to storm cloud in two seconds flat. Not angry. Not loud. Just… guarded.

“Then why’d you book with us?” she asked, more cautious than confrontational.

I scrambled. “Because I saw your lodge, and it looked perfect.” I trailed off.

Because the words I needed weren’t coming fast enough to fix what I’d just broken.

Her lips twitched, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“You didn’t mention that before,” she said, carefully.

“Which part?”

“That you tried to book elsewhere.”

“No, it wasn’t when I first tried to book. That’s not what I meant.”

“Wait, you wanted to leave once you got here.”

Oh, no. That sounded even worse.

I shook my head. “No. I didn’t…then everything happened, and I figured… maybe it didn’t matter.”

“Everything, meaning the kiss…or?”

“No, that’s the exact opposite of what I meant.”

She looked down at the gravel path between us, then back up, sharp now. “So was that before or after we slept together?”

The question stopped me cold.

There wasn’t an ounce of flirtation in her voice. Just quiet disbelief, and maybe even something worse—doubt.

I stepped closer, my voice low. “Fifi, I didn’t plan any of this. I didn’t know what was going to happen between us. But I swear to you, it wasn’t about trying to—”

“Get laid?” she finished.

“No,” I said, firm now. “It was never just about that. I stayed in the room because I liked it here. I stayed because you made me feel like I could breathe again. I booked it because it was exactly what I needed.”

She watched me.

A long, aching pause.

And then she said, “I need to get back to the booth.”

My heart thudded. “Fifi…”

“I just need a minute,” she added, already stepping back.

I didn’t stop her.

I wanted to. I wanted to reach for her, grab her hand, say something big and sweeping to pull us back to where we were yesterday on that lakeside porch with pie and possibility between us.

And how, as an attorney, could I completely lose track of all my words?

But I knew that look.

She wasn’t angry.

She was hurt.

And I was the one who did it.

Again.

And this time?

I didn’t know if a pie and a smile would be enough to fix it.

I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.

Hell, I didn’t even hear it the way it sounded until the look on her face took my knees out from under me.

I couldn’t find a room anywhere else in town. As if her lodge wasn’t good enough, or I only stayed to get lucky. It went from bad to worse.

Like I’d wandered reluctantly into the Honey Leaf Lodge instead of practically obsessing over it for weeks.

Good job, Jensen. Truly poetic.

I paced along the outer edge of the festival lawn, trying to shake it off, but my chest felt tight and was coated in that awful aftertaste of screwing something up that actually mattered.

And the worst part?

I loved this lodge and her family.

I loved the creaky porch swing and the way the floors creaked, as if they were whispering secrets. I loved the crooked spice rack in the kitchen and the lavender-scented towels that Fifi pretended weren’t her doing, even though they absolutely were.

I hadn’t wanted to book somewhere else because I didn’t want to be anywhere but here.

I’d looked at other places because I was panicked about how hard I was falling for Fifi…and that was even before the kiss.

And before I knew it.

And it terrified me.

“Wow,” a voice said behind me. “You look like you just ate one of our rescue chickens and you’re waiting to see if someone noticed.”

I turned to find Sienna standing there, sunglasses on her head, holding a tote bag filled with what appeared to be kale and possibly licorice. She looked like she had just judged me, and the verdict was already in.

“I said something dumb,” I admitted.

“Yeah,” she said immediately. “You’ve got that look of someone who stepped on an emotional landmine.”

I huffed a breath. “I made it sound like I only stayed at the Honey Leaf because I had no other options.”

Sienna grimaced. “Oof. Yeah. That’ll do it.”

“She asked me straight up if I meant to book here, or if it was just... circumstance. I tried to explain, but she looked like I smacked her with a stack of eviction notices.”

“She would take that personally,” Sienna said, not unkindly. “That lodge is like her firstborn.”

“I didn’t mean it. I—”

“Foot in mouth. I get it.” She adjusted the strap of her bag and started walking. “Well… good luck with that.”

I blinked. “That’s it?”

She waved a hand over her shoulder. “I’ve seen her mad before. That wasn’t mad. That was wounded. And Fifi only gets wounded when she cares. So, you know, don’t be a jackass twice.”

And just like that, she was gone.

Leaving me standing in the middle of a sea of berry vendors and bubble wands and polka music, wondering how the hell I’d find a way to undo the damage of thirteen careless words.

Because I didn’t want to lose her.

Not over this.

Not when I was finally starting to believe that maybe this could be more than a vacation heartbeat.

Maybe it could be something real.