Owen Cross sat back against the driver’s seat of his Ford F-250 and prayed for either a time machine or a body double. Sure, he’d already knocked back the sixty tasks that had headlined the Friday edition of his To Do list—after all, he’d been up and at ’em for two hours before the sun had even thought about climbing over the horizon. But there were sixty more things that needed doing before quitting time, and, now that the clock on his dashboard had made three P.M. official, he really needed to get his ass in gear.

Cross Creek Farm wasn’t going to operate itself. And thank God for that favor, because sore muscles and overtaxed body aside, there was nothing Owen would rather do with his life than fulfill the family legacy of running the place with his father, his brother, and his own two hands.

Speaking of which…

Owen reached for the two-way radio clipped to the belt loop of his faded Wranglers, thumbing the button on the side of the receiver and waiting out the hiss of static that went with the action before saying, “Hey, Hunt. I’m out at the hay barn. Gonna start loading up some bales to get them down to Nathan. You comin’?”

More static paved the way for his brother’s answer. “Copy that. I’m helping Dad finish up in the north field. Be there in a minute or two.”

Although it had been on the tip of his tongue to tell his brother to make it sooner rather than later, Owen stuck to a succinct, “Copy. Out.”

Their old man was tough as nails and just as sharp, to be sure. But between the nasty bout of heat exhaustion he’d suffered early last summer and the forty-plus years of operating the farm that had come before it, there was no denying he moved a little slower than he used to. Owen and Hunter had an unspoken agreement by which they both picked up the slack without comment or complaint. That included not putting the screws to each other when one of them was working with their father.

Still, time was time, and, here lately, the stuff was at a massive premium. Getting out of his work-tested pickup, Owen adjusted his equally work-tested baseball hat against the warmth and shine of the afternoon sun. A mild March meant good things for crops and cattle, both of which they had in abundance on their 750-acre farm. Still, the balmier-than-usual temperatures made them busier than they’d normally be at this time of year, and the huge increase in business they’d seen at the end of the harvest last season had barely let up, even over the winter.

CSA shares, local businesses wanting fresh produce, distributors looking for corn feed, companies eager to buy farm-raised cattle, the project to build a fixed-structure farm stand/storefront on their property…the boom in business was great in theory. Hell, it was great in reality, too.

Except for the fact that in addition to the heftier workload, they’d been down a man ever since his youngest brother, Eli, had left Millhaven six months ago to become the journalist half of a hotshot photojournalist team with his girlfriend. Owen would never begrudge his brother the happiness—they might have butt heads a little in the past (okay, a lot. It wasn’t his fault Eli could be a righteous pain in the ass on occasion), but he would have to be legally blind not to see how perfectly the career change suited his brother. Eli deserved to be doing what he truly loved, just like the rest of them.

Even if the last day Owen could remember taking off was Christmas, and he’d still ended up doing a page-by-page review of the blueprints for the soon-to-be-built storefront as he’d downed his egg nog and cookies. He might be happier than a pig in a puddle that Cross Creek’s business had exploded over the last six months, but damn, having half an inch of breathing room wouldn’t suck. He could throw back a few beers with his buddy, Lane. Go fishing down at Thompkins Lake. Or, hell, maybe even meet a pretty woman so he didn’t wake up solo seven days a week.

Unease sent a pang right between Owen’s ribs, causing his chin to jerk a few inches higher into the sunlight. He’d gotten far too good at that last part here lately, much to the dismay of his libido—which was not only as alive and kicking as any other thirty-three year old’s, but also starting to get moderately indignant at being shown the back burner.

Shaking his head, he kicked his boots into motion over the dirt and gravel path leading into the two-story hay barn. He’d never shied away from hard work, and—unlaid or not—he had no room to bitch about being busy. The slow business and strange growing season they’d had a year ago had been a stark reminder that the alternative to a full workload was ten times worse. Anyway, Owen couldn’t deny loving every second of running the farm, even when those seconds stretched into unending hours and backbreaking labor.

Family and farm, Owen. Never forget how important they both are. Never forget…

His mother’s voice, long gone but never forgotten, echoed in his ears, making his heart beat faster. Carrying on the tradition of family and farm might be his birthright as the oldest Cross brother, but he didn’t do it out of obligation. He’d made a promise to his mother before she’d died, and the farm was where he belonged, plain and simple.

No time like the present to work the land that bore his family’s name.

Owen unlatched the barn door, sliding the thing open with a heavy clack-clack-clack. Both the hardware and the tracks that held the rolling, double-wide door had seen better days, and he paused for a visual inventory, making a mental note to fix up what he could and replace what he couldn’t ASAP.

Stepping fully into the coolness of the barn’s interior, he gave up a pair of slow blinks to let his eyes get used to the shadows. The musty-sweet scent of hay filled his nose, and one corner of his mouth tugged into a rare half-smile at the slivers of sunlight cutting white-gold paths between the boards making up the far walls. His smile grew as he slowly took in the open, two-story space, then threatened to become an actual grin when he climbed the rough-hewn ladder leading up to the hayloft that spanned much of the barn’s second level.

Right up until his size eleven and a half went through the floorboards.

“Shit!” The abrupt shift in balance threatened to send him yard-saling across the hayloft, and Owen threw his arms wide out of sheer instinct. Thankfully, he connected with one of the support beams angling down from the roof, gripping it with enough purchase to steady himself on the foot that was still above level and yank back the one that had broken through the wooden planks beneath him.

“Owen? You good?” Hunter’s voice, tinged with concern, filtered up from the ground.

“I’m fine,” he answered, although his slamming pulse sure as hell wanted to disagree. “Looks like one of the floorboards up here had a rotten spot.”

Hunter appeared at the top of the ladder, his brows lifting toward the brim of his baseball hat at the sight of the boot-shaped indent a few feet from where Owen now stood. “Oh, yeah. I noticed that the last time I was up here.”

“Thanks for mentioning it,” Owen muttered, capping his reply with a frown.

But if Hunter was put off by the gruff response, he didn’t show it. “The spot wasn’t that bad when I saw it, jackass.” His easygoing grin filed the edge off Owen’s irritation in that way only Hunter could manage. “Otherwise, I would have. Plus, after all that rain we had over the winter, it’s not really a news flash that some of these older boards might not hold up another season.”

Sobering, he darted a glance at Owen’s work boot, which—aside from bearing a few new scratches in the already scuffed leather—was no worse for wear. “Seriously, though. Are you okay?”

Ah, hell. Hunter wasn’t wrong about the floorboards likely needing some TLC, and, once again, Owen had sent his words out with more steel than he’d intended.

“Yeah.” He brushed his palms over the front of his dark gray T-shirt, turning away from the trouble spot. “We’re going to have to check all of these boards from below to be sure it’s safe up here, though.”

Not that they really had the time for that, since their cattle manager, Nathan, was surely waiting on the hay bales they still had yet to move. But the last thing any of them needed was to go tango uniform and fall twelve feet to the hard-packed ground below.

Hunter nodded in agreement. “Yeah. I’ve almost taken a header out of this thing once, myself. I’m not too keen on a repeat.”

“Let’s get to it, then.”

Ten minutes and one careful inspection later, Owen was relieved to confirm that all the other boards were intact. He could deal with the busted-up section later, albeit in time he’d have to manufacture from thin air. For now, they had more pressing issues; namely, cows that would go hungry if they didn’t get fed and distributors who wanted anything other than bony cows.

He backed the trailer hitched to his truck past the barn doors, re-hauling himself up the ladder and studiously avoiding the rotten board as he set his sights on the hay bales in the loft. His muscles squeezed at the motions his body knew by heart, his now-gloved fingers hooking beneath the baling twine to lift the closest bale from the stack beside him. They’d have to put the hammer down to make up for the lost time, so Owen quickly found a rhythm, tossing each bale briskly over the side of the loft for Hunter to load into the trailer, then calling down to make sure his brother was ready for the next one. The exertion he’d welcomed in his muscles only minutes before became a burn far too easily, but he pushed past the discomfort to work up a quick sweat.

“So, I’m going to do a thing,” Hunter said, his voice reaching Owen with ease even though the two of them were separated by over a dozen feet of vertical space.

He hefted another hay bale over the side of the loft, waiting for the thump that marked its arrival on the ground, before answering. “Please tell me this thing involves catching up on invoices and payroll.”

“You haven’t done that yet?” Hunter asked, and Owen’s corresponding laugh was sadly humor-free.

“In what time, exactly, would I have managed to lock myself in the office to tackle the bookkeeping?” There was a mountain and a half of it from this week alone, for Chrissake.

His brother nodded without breaking stride with the job in front of him. “Fair. Now that things are booming and we’re going to break ground on the storefront soon, we really do need to hire someone to take care of the books.”

It was a topic that had come up more than once over the last six weeks, with all three of them in agreement that a new hire was not just in order, but overdue. Busy or not, Owen could handle the labor of running Cross Creek with one arm tied behind his back. But the books? God, he’d never had the patience—or the know-how, to be honest—to manage them with anything other than a metric ton of effort.

“So, what’s this thing you’re going to do, then, if it’s not number crunching?” he asked, reaching for yet another bale of hay.

“Actually, I was thinking I’d ask Emerson to marry me.”

Owen’s heart went on a line drive toward his sternum. “What?” he asked, the hay bale in his grasp falling clumsily back to the floor of the loft. He knew Hunter and his girlfriend, Emerson, were serious—hell, a person would have to have one foot and both eyes in the grave not to see that they were crazy about each other. But married?

“Yeah.” Hunter looked up at him from the ground, his gargantuan smile telling Owen his brother had done a hell of a lot more than “think” about proposing. “I mean, at the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card, I’ve loved her since the minute I saw her. She’s always been the one, you know? We spent a lot of years apart, but now that we’ve fixed that, it seems dumb to waste any more time not being married to her. So, yeah. I went into Camden Valley and I bought Em a ring and I’m going to propose.”

“Wow.” Owen’s mind spun as he moved toward the ladder, their task momentarily tabled. “Does anyone else know?”

Hunter waited until Owen’s boots had hit the hay-strewn ground before answering. “I talked to her parents last night,” he said. “They gave me their blessing, so I told Dad this morning, and now you know. Eli and Scarlett are in Rome, but I left them a message to call me, and I haven’t had a chance to tell Marley just yet.”

Whoa. Owen took a step back, his brows kicking up. “You’re going to tell Marley?”

“Of course. Whether she likes it or not, she’s still family,” Hunter tried, but Owen met his middle-brother’s peacekeeping ways with a whole lot of oldest-brother candor.

“She’s made it pretty clear she doesn’t like it.”

The half-sister they’d only recently learned of might’ve been living in the main house since coming to town last fall after her mother passed away, but she was an ace at keeping her distance despite all of their efforts to bring her into the fold.

Hunter—being Hunter—tried again. “She’s licking some serious wounds, O. Until six months ago, she didn’t know any of us existed, either, including Dad. Plus, she lost her mother.” The pause that followed reminded Owen that they both knew what that felt like. Not that he needed the memo. “She got that job in Lockridge and she’s getting back on her feet. Maybe we should just cut her some slack in the meantime.”

Owen adjusted his baseball hat and blew out a heavy breath. “Ah, I guess you’re right.” If they wanted Marley to act like family, they’d have to treat her as such. No matter how surly she was in return.

“I know,” Hunter joked, delivering a healthy jab to Owen’s shoulder. “But it’s right nice to hear you say so, you old hardhead.”

“Screw you,” Owen said, but the words lost any heat he could’ve possibly pinned to them as he gave in to his laugh. “Seriously, though. Congrats. Emerson’s great, and I know you two will be really happy together.”

A weird feeling he couldn’t quite label crowded his chest. It was gone by the time Hunter’s palm hit the one Owen had extended, their shoulders coming together for a half-hug that was as close to the real deal as the two of them were going to get.

“Thanks, man. That means a lot to me.”

After a second, they parted, and Hunter sent his gaze up to the damaged boards overhead. “Anyway. We should probably get back to work. Once we’re done loading these up, I can get up there and replace that rotten board, easy.”

He turned back toward the trailer, but Owen stopped him with a quick, “No.” He didn’t wait for Hunter to argue before adding on, “You’re gonna do this proposal thing tonight, right?”

His brother paused. “Well, I kind of have a shitty poker face, especially when it comes to Emerson. So, yeah, that’s what I was planning on.”

“Then go. Get out of here. Do…whatever it is you’re going to do to make it romantic.”

“Are you sure?” Hunter asked. His voice carried his doubt loud and clear, and, Christ, Owen wanted to tell the truth. But since that would involve the word “no” and he was damn certain his brother was only going to propose once in his lifetime, he couldn’t make himself shove the word past his lips.

“Of course, I’m sure.” Owen lasered a stare at the open barn doors to punctuate the sentiment, and Hunter’s grin won out.

“I s’pose I probably could stand to get a few last-minute things in place,” he said. “But only if you’re—”

“Sure,” Owen said. “Don’t make me tell you twice.”

“Okay. Thanks,” Hunter said, shucking his work gloves and amping up his smile. Owen forced his nod and smile combo to last until Hunter had made his way through the barn doors and into his pickup, but as soon as his brother was out of sight, his shoulders slumped.

The only way he’d be able to balance all the work around here was with a miracle.