Owen was late and filthy, although not really in that order. But he’d had no way of knowing the irrigation system in the south field would decide to spaz out just after sunup, or that it would take both him and his old man precious hours and all his clean clothing to get the thing back on track. He was supposed to meet Cate at the main house at—oh, hell—eight o’clock, and judging by the definite later-than-that slant of the sun over the tree line to the east, he was going to have a lot of explaining to do once he hauled himself up the drive.

Provided she was still there, that was.

“Great,” Owen muttered, using one hand to steer his truck over the path leading to the house and the other to yank his dirty shirt over his head. Of course, he’d flung the stupid thing into the hinterlands of the backseat before realizing that’s exactly where the clean one he kept as a spare was, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this couldn’t be any more of a Monday.

Please let her still be here…

Owen had to admit, Cate offering to be the bookkeeper they so desperately needed at Cross Creek had surprised the hell out of him, especially since he’d been borderline rude to her over the cookies. He wasn’t charming like Eli, or even easygoing and friendly like Hunter. He hadn’t intended to jam his boot in his mouth, and he sure hadn’t meant to put a frown on her pretty face over what Lane—the jackass—was still referring to as walnutgate.

Of course, he’d done just that anyway, and damn it. Damn it! If he were her, he wouldn’t kick around waiting for his tardy, ineloquent ass, either.

Pulling up in front of the main house, he put his truck in Park and heaved a sigh of relief at the sight of Cate standing a dozen feet away on the porch. “Hi,” he said, jumping out of the F-250 and slamming the door. “I apologize for being late. It’s been a really crazy morning.”

“Let me guess. You’ve been chasing down shirt gremlins,” she said. One mahogany-colored brow lifted over the rim of her sunglasses, her gaze raking over him palpably, even though he could barely see her shaded eyes.

Everything about Owen froze, except for his pulse. “Oh,” he uttered lamely, because of course he’d forgotten to grab that clean shirt in his haste to get out and apologize. “Yeah. I mean, no. We had a problem with the irrigation system and I…” He forced himself to stop talking and just make a quick grab of the non-filthy T-shirt in the backseat of his truck. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be.”

Cate’s reply barely reached his ears, more of an under-the-breath murmur than anything else, and he looked up in confusion with his arms halfway through their respective holes in the cotton.

“Beg pardon?”

Her spine went straight as an axe beneath her light blue sweater dress. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s really not a problem. The late thing, I mean.”

“Okay,” Owen said, following his answer up with a beat of awkward silence that stretched into two. He’d managed to make himself decent and they’d already agreed on the basics, like her salary, at Clementine’s, so… “I guess we should go ahead and get started, then. Feel free to come in every day on your own when you get here. The regular work day for full-timers is technically eight to five, although we unlock the house as soon as we head to the fields at six or so. No one other than me, Hunter, our father, and Emerson has access without permission. And, well, now you, I suppose.”

His boots thumped over the porch steps, Cate’s shiny black heels clicking lightly in unison. “Eight to five. Eeeeevery day. You got it,” she confirmed.

“We’ve got some paperwork to do to make things official. A W-4 for taxes, an application stating your past work history and qualifications, a few forms for your personnel file. Things like that.”

She blanched a little, following him over the threshold and into the main house, which also held the office that was their operational hub. “Right. My personnel file.”

“You did that for Miss Clementine, too, didn’t you?” he asked, a little confused. The forms were standard-issue for their employees at Cross Creek—contact information, who to notify in case of emergency, and so on. He’d thought they were pretty much boilerplate for any full-timer, but the look on her face suggested otherwise.

Funny, the expression was gone as quickly as it had appeared, to the point that Owen questioned whether he’d been seeing things. “Yep,” Cate said with a smart nod. “Of course.”

“Great. Then we can go ahead and dive in.”

After twenty minutes of check here, sign there, Owen slid the papers she’d filled out into a file folder and gestured to the cluttered space around them. “So, this is the office.”

“Clearly,” she replied, and, wait, was that a smirk playing at the corners of her mouth?

Owen straightened. He took this job more seriously than a heart attack with a triple bypass chaser. He might be desperate for a bookkeeper, but he expected her to do the same. “This will be your work space,” he tried again. “Hunter and my father and I have split the bookkeeping up until this point, and Emerson comes in part-time to do some marketing stuff. Eli handles a decent amount of the marketing, too, but he obviously does that remotely now.”

“Okay.” Cate’s smirk had disappeared, but he couldn’t say he was in love with the frown that had moved in as a replacement. “Can you walk me through the system the three of you use for basic office management?”

“The system,” Owen repeated, looking warily at the cardboard boxes jammed with folders, the expandable files full of purchase orders and receipts that littered nearly every flat surface in sight, and the desktop computer that was as old as it was overworked. “We all sort of have our own version of that, actually.”

Her whiskey-brown eyes went round and wide, and he scrambled to answer her question more effectively. “Here are the files for all the vendors we currently have contracts with, and the payment and delivery schedules.”

He pointed to the pair of cardboard boxes on the floor beside the roll-top desk. Owen knew the details of many of the contracts by heart, of course—hell, a few of those agreements were decades old and had been forged on little more than a good, strong handshake in the beginning. Still, demand for cattle, corn, hay, and—his personal favorite—seasonal and specialty produce had damn near doubled from last season. Keeping all the details in his melon just wasn’t feasible.

“Here are the personnel and payroll files, including how many employees we have and all of their time sheets for the past six months,” he continued, although now that he got a good eyeball on the tower of boxes in the corner of the room, he realized the month-count was probably more like nine or ten. They usually put the hard copies of anything from more than half a year out in storage once the information had been put into the system, but…yeah. “Payday is every other Friday. Nearly everybody has direct deposit, but we still have to log all the hours. Profit and expenditure reports are here”—Owen tapped the top of the nearby file cabinet—“and these are all the plans, contracts, budgets, and bills for the storefront we’re breaking ground on in a couple of weeks.”

Cate dragged a hand through her hair, her gaze moving over the boxes in disbelief. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. You don’t do any of your bookkeeping online. At all?”

“We do. Just not a lot of it,” he amended. The Cross men lived to work the land, not the ledgers. Sure, their current system was a little time consuming, but it wasn’t totally ineffective. Cross Creek had been running on it for decades. “We have software right here on the computer.” He paused to pull up the program they used for much of their bookkeeping before adding, “It’s just that none of us are great at using it.”

“So I see,” Cate said after a quick perusal over his shoulder.

Irritation splashed through Owen’s chest. “Our books aren’t that bad.”

The parting of her lips said she was primed and ready to take him to the mat on that count, and damn it, he really didn’t have time to argue with her. “Look, I know it’s going to take some work to get things running smoothly in here.”

“It’s going to take a lot more than that,” she murmured with a shake of her head, and just like that, Owen’s patience redlined.

“Can you do it, or should I find someone else?”

Once again, his words came out gruffer than planned. But before he could even think of cooking up an apology, Cate’s arms had snapped across the front of her sweater dress to form a don’t-mess-with-me knot that was far, far more of a turn-on than it had a right to be.

“That’s what you hired me for, isn’t it? To manage your books effectively?”

“Yes,” Owen answered carefully, still caught between the desire to be annoyed, the desire to apologize, and, well, just plain desire.

“Well, then. Since I have my work cut out for me with a chainsaw, I suppose I should get to it,” Cate said.

After a quick internal debate, Owen nodded. Brash or not, he needed her. More than he cared to admit. “Okay, then.”

She answered by way of pushing up her sleeves and sliding an elastic from her wrist to secure her hair in a knot at the crown of her head. Even with the more casual edge, the powder-blue dress still hugged her curves, her calves flexing and releasing as she moved from one stack of boxes to the next in her heels, and he cleared his throat.

“Just so you know, we’re pretty casual around here. You don’t have to look nice.”

Cate’s cheeks flushed a shade of pink that, while highly pretty, didn’t bode well for him in the mending-fences department. “Good to know,” she said, and holy hell, why did his mouth refuse to cooperate with his brain around this woman?

“Not that you don’t look, uh. Fine like that. All I meant was, you don’t have to get dressed up. Jeans are okay.”

She stared down at the toes of her shiny black shoes, but only for a split second before meeting his stare with her own. “Got it, Casanova. Is that all?”

For just a heartbeat, Owen was tempted to say no, to dig deep into his Neanderthal brain for the right words to tell her she actually looked fucking beautiful. To surrender to the hot demands coming from both his chest and his cock, and cross the room to impulsively kiss her sexy, sassy mouth.

But this was Cate McAllister. His buddy Brian’s widow. He shouldn’t think she was pretty. He shouldn’t wonder if the skin on her shoulders bore the same provocative dusting of freckles as the neck she’d just put on display. And he damn sure shouldn’t be turned on like floodlights at the fire in her eyes that he’d never quite seen before, but seemed to somehow fit her perfectly.

So, he simply said, “Yes. That’s all,” and walked out of the room.

* * *

Cate was going to need a pitchfork and the patience of Job to get through these books. She’d been camped out in Cross Creek’s office for nearly three hours, and she still didn’t even know where to start. Payroll, invoices, bank statements—every time she thought she had a snag untangled, five knottier things took root and did their damnedest to confuse her.

She hadn’t even made it to lunch and she was in over her head.

Can you do it, or should I find someone else?

Owen’s ultra-serious face appeared in her mind’s eye, complete with that moody, broody scowl that did funny things low in her belly. Okay, so maybe she’d been more blunt with him than was necessary, but the whole showing-up-late thing had knocked her for a loop before he’d even arrived. Cate had been certain—and terrified—that he’d come to his senses and changed his mind about hiring her.

And the whole showing-up-shirtless thing? Sweet Jesus in the manger, that had nearly sent her over the edge. She’d had no way of knowing that not only did Owen possess supernaturally defined abs and a happy trail that had made her lady bits squeal with rapture, but that she’d get an eyeful of both right off the bat. The unexpected, visceral shot of heat in her blood had booted Cate’s already-jumpy nerves into overdrive. Most women stammered or got shy when they were flustered. But not her, oh no. When her nerves hit, she had to go and let her sarcasm flag fly, loud and proud.

It was a wonder Owen—and his fantastically chiseled midsection—hadn’t fired her on the spot. Even if she hadn’t been wrong about his farm’s books being a ten-car pileup.

“Okay,” Cate said, shaking her head to bring her mind back to the present. Having ditched her heels less than thirty minutes in (for pity’s sake, she hadn’t even gotten the dress code for a full-time job right), she examined the boxes labeled “payroll”, figuring it was a good place to start now that she’d sorted everything into piles. Of course, the three cups of coffee she’d slung back this morning chose that moment to let out an oh-hi-there, and, right. She’d need a quick bathroom break before tackling anything else.

Poking her head out of the office, Cate took in the empty hallway. She’d been too nervous to think of asking where the powder room was when she’d arrived, and the office was at the back of the house. There didn’t seem to be anything else back this way, so she tiptoed down the hall until she reached the sun-filled kitchen.

“Oh.” Although Owen had led her through both the living room and the kitchen on their way back to the office this morning, the three-second trip had been little more than a blur in her mind.

Until now. God, the kitchen was the stuff of dreams, all full of space and light. Cate’s heartbeat sped up as her gaze lingered on the white bead-board cabinets and the long expanse of the L-shaped countertop. A no-frills coffeepot sat nestled on the far end of the counter by the sink, the rich, enticing smell of its contents making her mouth water, and—okay, wow—there was even enough room to house a six-person table by the windows.

This kitchen put anything Cate had ever known to shame. Her fingers itched to roll out dough on the butcher block island in the center of the airy room, to fill both ovens with as many cookie sheets as they could handle, to see how many pies she could fit on the sill above the double-bowled stainless steel sink to cool.

A dream like that isn’t for you. Best to wake up and remember that.

“Huh.” An unfamiliar female voice sounded off from Cate’s right, and even though it was neither loud nor threatening, she jumped clean out of her skin anyway.

“Hello.” Cate’s greeting came out far more question than anything else, and she scrambled to figure out why a willowy, sleepy-eyed woman wearing a tank top, pajama pants, and a henna tattoo that covered the majority of one forearm would appear in the Cross’s kitchen.

“Hey,” the brunette said, padding over the kitchen tiles on a straight path to the coffeepot. “Who are you?”

“I’m Cate. The bookkeeper,” she added, although the clarification did nothing to send any recognition over the young woman’s borderline-sullen face. “Owen just hired me.”

A sound drifted past her lips, caught somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “Oh. Well, that figures. He never tells me the important stuff.”

The dots lined up, connecting with a snap a second later. “I take it you’re Marley.”

Even Cate, who studiously avoided anything resembling gossip, had heard about Tobias Cross’s long lost twenty four year-old daughter. Not that anyone in town had ever seen her.

“That’s the rumor.” Marley lifted a too-thin shoulder halfway before letting it drop. Her eyes stayed on Cate’s for a heartbeat longer, and then she took a long draw from her coffee cup. “You don’t have to worry about me being in your hair, or whatever, while you work. I might live here for now, but I won’t for much longer. Anyway, I keep to myself.”

“Unless you want coffee,” Cate pointed out, causing Marley’s lips to part.

Shit. Shit, crap, shit! Her nerves seriously knew no bounds today. Cate raced to come up with something—pretty much anything would do at this point—to soften the sarcasm that had launched from her mouth without permission.

But then one corner of Marley’s mouth tilted into an approximation of a smile, and, whoa, for just an instant, she looked exactly like Owen.

“I guess. Anyway, see you around. Maybe.”

As Cate watched Marley walk back down the hallway with her cup, she couldn’t help but wonder what the hell she’d gotten herself into with this job.