CHAPTER TEN
As much as it chapped his ass to admit it, Eli was having fun. Which was really saying something, considering there was a not-small amount of cow manure in his immediate future. But ever since he and Scarlett had shot that video segment this morning in the apple grove, then laughed and joked their way through the rest of his enormous to-do list and her even bigger to-shoot list afterward, he’d felt oddly at ease. Granted, the spotlight still wasn’t his happy place, but being in front of the camera hadn’t been the worst thing going—at least not after his defenses had impulsively dared him to dare Scarlett into the frame. Their back-and-forth had made it just easy enough to slide into his cocky comfort zone and relax in front of the camera, and while he was never going to forget that the thing was rolling, at least maybe the segments would make up for the Whittakers’ stroke of good luck this week.
Stupid fucking peaches.
“Okay,” Scarlett said, her smile ushering Eli back to reality as she fell into step next to him on the footpath leading to the horse barn. “What’s next?”
Eli laughed. “You know, it’s a good thing I’ve seen your back, otherwise I’d be tempted to look for the battery pack.”
“First of all”—her blond brows arched, but the smile playing on her lips damn near canceled out her sass—“you really need to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with the pot and the kettle if you’re going to give me a raft of crap for working hard.”
Eh. She kind of had him dead to rights there. At least as far as recent events were concerned, anyway. “Fair enough. What’s second?”
“I’m not all work. I took a break five hours ago, right after we got done in the apple grove.”
Her satisfied, take-that smile lasted for all of a heartbeat before Eli met it with a snort.
“A for effort, but no. Going up to the main house to download and send raw video footage to Mallory totally doesn’t count as a breather.”
“Oh, come on!” Scarlett’s shoes crunched over the gravel as she stepped toward him to nudge his shoulder with her own. “I was in the house for ten whole minutes.”
He returned the favor of the nudge, albeit gently because of her yellow jacket stings. “It was more like eight. Still no.”
Scarlett—being Scarlett—went for round two. “But I had lunch and took a bathroom break while the footage downloaded.”
And Eli—being Eli—met round two with a smirk so good, the thing tasted like cold beer on a Friday night. “Nice try, but no joy. You wolfed down a salad and a protein bar over the kitchen sink,” he pointed out, and she huffed out a sigh that was probably as much concession as he was going to get.
“Okay, so I was excited, and I wanted to get everything to Mallory as soon as possible. But seriously, there’s no way the footage of you talking about apple picking didn’t turn out really well. I think the stills of the grove came out great, too, although I’ll still have to edit those later before I can send them out. And I’ll probably skip e-mailing her the test shots of you scowling.”
“Hey! You said those were just to measure the light,” Eli argued. “And for the record, I don’t scowl.”
He’d meant to deliver the words with conviction, but the soft chuckle that had managed to well up and escape from his chest pretty much trashed the intent. Scarlett’s corresponding laughter filled the warm, dusty air around them along with half the cornfield to their right, sending a handful of sparrows shooting upward from the bright-green stalks. Not that she seemed to care what the sparrows thought of her.
“Pardon me while I call bullshit,” she said, pointing to the equipment around her neck. “The camera never lies.”
Annnnd reality check. Eli’s knuckles whitened over the plastic gallon jug of water and the pair of apples in his grasp, his heart knocking harder against his ribs at the reminder. Time for the old bob and weave. “Right. Well, we’re not done working just yet, but I did save the best for last.”
“There’s something better than picking apples and harvesting sweet corn?” Scarlett asked, and huh, she actually seemed more serious than sarcastic.
“Yup,” he said, slipping his gaze over the faded-yet-sturdy wood-planked horse barn with a grin.
It took all of three footsteps for Scarlett to cave. “Are you going to tell me what it is, or were you hoping I’d sprout mind-reading abilities in the next two minutes?”
Eli fought the urge to flinch at the mere suggestion of her being able to take a look-see into his melon. “Neither.” He measured out a smile and popped his chin at the open entryway to the horse barn. “How about I show you instead?”
Covering the rest of the distance to the horse barn took less than a minute, and he led the way past the double-wide, ten-foot doors and into the blessedly cooler space. Eli slowed his pace for a few steps, both to allow his eyes the courtesy of adjusting to the barn’s well-shaded interior and to take in the musty-sweet scents of hay and feed.
But Scarlett didn’t so much as pause to bat a single platinum lash. “This is the best part of the day?”
“Mmm-hmm. This here is our horse barn.”
“But there’s nothing in it,” she said, stopping in the center of the aisle in front of the first stall to turn a quick circle.
Eli looked at the rectangular stalls, five on either side of the packed-dirt center aisle. The rafters were a good fifteen feet up, with the wooden half walls dividing each stall measuring in at about his sternum, and for as big as Clarabelle was girthwise, she wasn’t a champ in the height department. Add that to the facts that the cow occupied the very last stall in the horse barn and Scarlett was going at warp speed as usual, and yeah, it wasn’t exactly a shocker that poor Clarabelle had been overlooked.
“There are no horses in here,” he qualified, but again, he didn’t elaborate.
And again, he could’ve counted off Scarlett’s wait time in nanoseconds. “Seems to defeat the purpose of having a horse barn, doesn’t it?”
“We used to keep a few here and there, but horses are expensive to care for, and they don’t serve much functional purpose on the farm like the cattle and chickens. Now we mostly use the space in here to store spare equipment and feed, or to keep a handful of goats from time to time. But the barn isn’t entirely unoccupied.”
Kicking his work-bruised boots into motion, he made his way down the aisle. Although it probably burned her up to no end, Scarlett matched his slow, easy stride, until finally, they reached the last shadowy stall in the barn. Eli’s smile grew at the sight of the cow lazily chewing hay in the corner, and he popped the latch to swing the door wide on its creaky hinges before stepping over the threshold of the stall.
“This is Clarabelle,” he said, turning toward Scarlett.
Only she wasn’t right on his heel, as usual, because she’d screeched to a halt a good five steps behind him.
His heart did a flash-bang in his chest. In truth, Eli hadn’t known how Scarlett would react to the big Jersey brown; after all, if there hadn’t been so much as a goldfish in Scarlett’s past, then she damn sure had probably never clapped eyes on an animal as large as Clarabelle. The cow might be as sweet as Tupelo honey with those huge black eyes and that slow, gentle demeanor of hers, but she wasn’t exactly conventional. Or small. Or . . .
Shit.
“Scarlett?”
A second unglued itself from the clock, then another, and another, and still, Scarlett stood nailed to the dirt floor in front of Clarabelle’s stall. Eli’s brain spun, scrambling for something—Christ, anything even partway decent would do the trick—to back his way out of what had clearly been a spectacular fail of an idea.
And then her entire face lit with pure, uncut happiness, her Christmas-morning smile making a direct hit in the center of his sternum and rendering him 100 percent useless.
“Oh.” Scarlett splayed a hand over the front of her loose black-and-white top, just above where her camera rested over her breastbone. “Oh my God. Eli, she’s so pretty. Can I . . . is it okay if I take some pictures of her?”
Thankfully, Scarlett was so entranced by the sight of Clarabelle that she didn’t seem to notice the fact that his voice box had gone on a complete walkabout with the rest of his faculties. “Uh,” he grunted, and awesome. He was officially a Neanderthal. “Yeah. Yes.” Eli straightened, giving himself one last mental bitch-slap before blinking himself back to the horse barn once and for all. “Of course. She’s actually quite the attention hog.”
As if to prove the claim, Clarabelle shuffled over, lowering her head to brush against his arm in a clear bid for affection, and he had to laugh. “Okay, old girl. Smile for the camera.”
Eli stepped aside, placing the gallon of water in the opposite corner of the stall as Scarlett’s camera sounded off in a series of click-clicks. After a few minutes’ worth of taking photographs from various angles, she straightened, carefully replacing the lens cap and thumbing the power switch to the “off” position. Another couple of moves had her gear stored safely in her candy-apple-red camera bag and the bag placed out of harm’s way on a peg outside the stall.
“I take it we have to feed her and make sure her water and bedding are clean, just like we did with the chickens,” Scarlett said, stepping back over the threshold and tugging the stall door shut.
“Yes and no. Clarabelle spends most of her day grazing in the field adjacent to the henhouse, so she doesn’t need much by way of food or stall cleaning.” Thankfully, their immediate surroundings were remarkably fragrance-free right now, although Eli knew all too well how those circumstances could turn on a dime with nine and a half cents to spare. “But she does need eyes on her every day, along with plenty of water and TLC.”
Scarlett edged closer. “TLC,” she said, and he traded the apples in his hand for the two stiffly bristled brushes sitting on the ledge by his shoulder.
“Yup. You want to help me groom her?”
“Sure.” Reaching out, Scarlett took the brush he’d extended in her direction. “Oh! These bristles are kind of hard. Won’t they hurt her?”
Unable to cage it, he let go of a laugh. “You’ll climb a tree clear to the top with no never mind for your own personal safety, but you’re worried about brushing my cow too hard?”
One platinum-blond brow arched. “Do you want my help or not, cowboy?”
Eli’s laugh lingered, and he ran his free hand over the short, wiry hair on Clarabelle’s back. “No, the brush won’t hurt her. Clarabelle’s skin isn’t thin like a person’s, and life can get pretty dirty out in the pasture, so the sturdy brush is a bit of a necessity.”
“Okay.” Scarlett stood across from him, her olive-green eyes missing nothing as she watched him for a minute before mimicking his movements on Clarabelle’s other side. “Like this?”
Clarabelle chuffed out her approval before Eli could answer, angling toward Scarlett, and at least his lapdog of a cow had good taste. “Look at you,” he teased, tipping his chin at Scarlett’s busy hands. “You’re gettin’ the hang of everything around here. Pretty soon you’ll be ready to run the whole farm.”
“Hardly.” Scarlett scoffed, although the sound wasn’t unkind. “Anyway, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly a stay-in-one-place kind of girl.”
“You’re staying here at Cross Creek for a month,” he pointed out. Hell, he’d stayed here his whole life, even though half the time his mind was in other places.
“Which is actually unusual. I don’t normally stay on location—or anywhere, I guess—for quite so long, but Mallory really needed the help.”
Eli paused, midbrush. Surely she couldn’t mean anywhere, anywhere. “I could see how a month-long shoot would be out of the ordinary, but what about in between jobs? Don’t you stay at home in New York for more than a week or two when you’re not on location? Or when you shoot locally?”
He’d finally sucked it up a few nights ago and checked out her website, and hoo boy, Hunter hadn’t been embellishing when he’d brought up Scarlett’s credentials. A photographer of her caliber had to have a forty-foot list of people interested in hiring her for freelance work. Hell, she could probably stay in New York indefinitely if she really wanted to.
Which clearly, she didn’t, because her next words were, “I don’t really do a ton of local shoots. At least not extended ones. And I’m rarely ever not on location.”
“I’m all for going whole hog when it’s necessary,” Eli said, mostly because she was sure to give him a healthy dose of crap if he didn’t. “But don’t you get tired, going so fast all the time?”
Scarlett’s laughter sent a shot of surprise all the way up his spine. “Oh, I get exhausted. That’s part of the thrill, though. There’s never a shortage of places to go snap pictures of, and I love it enough to do it till I drop.”
“And you don’t worry you’ll miss that perfect shot because you’re constantly running around at Mach 3?” Okay, so his brain-to-mouth filter had decided to malfunction on that one. But he’d hung the question out on the line. No sense in trying to back his way out of things now. “I mean, Clarabelle here weighs about twelve hundred pounds and you nearly missed seein’ her.”
“I might move fast, but I’m not blind,” Scarlett said with a shrug. “I’d have found her eventually. What I worry about more is what I’d miss if I weren’t moving at all.”
A smirk twitched hard at the corners of his mouth, and ah, the comeback was too good to pass up. “Sorry, does that ever happen?”
She pressed her lips together, but not before he’d caught sight of the sassy-sweet smile that had bloomed there. “Funny. And while it’s true I might not have seen Clarabelle at first”—Scarlett paused to offer the cow an apologetic smile and an extra pat behind the ears—“if I’d decided to rest on my laurels in New York rather than hauling my cookies down here to Millhaven, I never would’ve seen her, period. That seems like the bigger shame of the two.”
Cue up a whole lot of whoa. “Guess I never thought of it like that,” Eli admitted.
“Most people don’t. But I belong behind the camera. If I have to be busy in order to make that happen . . .”
She trailed off with a fluid lift and lower of one shoulder. Eli knew he wouldn’t get a more seamless shot at a subject change—for Pete’s sake, the ability to dodge and deflect when it came to the topic of belonging was practically stamped into his DNA.
So it was really freaking weird when, instead of dropping the subject like the thermonuclear potato that it was, he asked, “So how did you figure out you belonged behind the camera?”
“Oh.” She blinked, but only once before keeping up the pace with both her brush and his question. “Well, I obviously moved around a lot before I was adopted. All my foster homes were within New York City limits, but I was still in a new place every year.”
“I can’t even imagine that,” Eli said, and Jesus, could he jam his size twelve any farther into his cakehole? “Sorry. It’s just that—”
“You’ve lived in Millhaven your whole life, and the concept of all that moving around without a place to call home seems weird to you?” Scarlett gave up a look so open and honest, he had no choice but to nod. “Believe me, small-town upbringing or no, you’re not the first person to think my circumstances are strange. Don’t worry.”
Eli lifted the hand that wasn’t busy brushing Clarabelle, and Scarlett continued with ease. “When I went to go live with my dads, I had a hard time adjusting. Even though Bryan and Miguel were fantastic—and still are—I didn’t really feel like I belonged with them. Not all the way, anyhow.”
The words struck swift and deep, like a sucker punch right to the chin. Cover it up, jackass. “With how much you moved from place to place before they adopted you, I suppose it makes sense you’d have a hard time feeling at home,” Eli managed.
She nodded. “I actually moved around a lot after they adopted me, too. My dads both work for a humanitarian aid organization, so we spent a lot of time in other countries.”
“Wow.” The idea seemed so foreign, yet something oddly exciting turned over in Eli’s chest. “How did you go to school?”
“I was home-schooled. We did most of it on the road. I actually got my high school diploma when we were in Peru,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the universe, and hell if that didn’t explain her obvious wanderlust. Along with her difficulty finding a place to belong. “Don’t get me wrong, I was probably more comfortable traveling all over the place than most kids would’ve been, but I still never felt quite like I’d found a place that was perfect for me. Of course, like most dads, mine worried.”
“They sound like good parents,” he said, and Scarlett’s smile answered before she’d even spoken a word.
“They’re the best. They wanted me to find something I loved so I’d feel like I fit in better, so we went the activities route.”
Ah. Eli ran a palm over Clarabelle’s warm, sturdy body one last time before stepping back to return his brush to the shelf. Pulling a pocketknife from its well-worn spot in his Levi’s, he grabbed one of the apples he’d freed from the stash he and Scarlett had picked earlier, slicing through the fruit with a soft snick.
“Let me guess.” He handed half of the apple to Scarlett, flattening his palm to offer the other half to Clarabelle. “You picked photography.”
“Nope,” came her quick reply, and God, leave it to his partner in crime to keep him on his damned toes. “Actually, at first it was piano, which was a huge crash and burn, then dance, where I discovered my distinct lack of both rhythm and coordination. Should I just feed her the whole thing?” Scarlett dipped her chin at Clarabelle, who had unceremoniously finished the half of the apple Eli had just given her and was nosing her way toward Scarlett in a very obvious search for seconds.
He nodded. “Her digestive system is made to handle the core. Just don’t curl your fingers when you feed her, or she’ll think they’re part of the deal.”
“Got it.” Passing over her brush so she could cradle the apple between both palms, Scarlett extended her hands, and the throaty laugh that worked its way past her lips did nothing to keep his pulse in line or his dick in check.
Eli cleared his throat in an effort to get his brain—and his other, more southerly parts—back online. “I’ve gotta say, I feel you on the no-dancing thing,” he told her, pointing to the spot where his Red Wings met the hay scattered over the floor of the stall. “Even though my boots say otherwise, I’m pretty sure both of my feet are lefties.”
Scarlett stepped back from Clarabelle, tucking a strand of wayward hair behind the row of tiny silver hoops and studs climbing halfway up her ear as she slid back to the topic with ease. “After piano and dance were both a no go for me, I didn’t really want to try anything else. Once bitten, and all. But then when I was thirteen, I picked up a camera, just on a whim. It was just one of those PHD deals—”
At the look of confusion he must have been broadcasting in hi-definition, she added, “Push Here, Dummy. Complete point and shoot, not a whole lot of skill required. Anyway, after two days with that thing, about a hundred and fifty still-life shots of everything from our fruit bowl to our front stoop in Brooklyn, and far too much cash for one-hour developing, I was a goner. I’ve been all in ever since.”
“You were all in at thirteen?” Eli asked, although God, he probably shouldn’t be surprised.
“Oh yeah. I worked my butt and most of my other parts off for all four years to get into the fine arts program at Yale.”
Just when he’d been certain there was no more shock to be had from this woman, his what-the-fuck barometer exploded. “As in, Yale University. In New Haven. The third oldest institution of higher learning in the entire nation.” Christ, no wonder she’d been able to bust him quoting Walt Whitman.
“Mmm-hmm. That’s the one.” If Scarlett’s nod was any sort of gauge, she was completely unfazed by both Eli’s reaction and her wildly impressive Ivy League alma mater. “They have the best photography program in the United States, and I didn’t see any point in anything other than going big.” She paused. “Did you go to college?”
Every last one of his warning bells clanged, and he supersized his smile as he selected his words with near-surgical precision. “Operating a farm is more of a hands-on kind of thing.”
“So none of you have gone?” she asked.
Eli grabbed the out and ran like hell. “Hunter had the chance to go away to college—he was a hell of a running back in high school. He could’ve gotten any one of a half dozen scholarships to about as many schools. But Cross Creek is a family business, and he’s never wanted anything other than to stay here.”
“I get that. This is where his passion is,” Scarlett said. She waited until Eli had emptied the gallon of fresh water into the trough on the far side of Clarabelle’s stall before adding on, “Most people feel like they belong in a place, I think. I’m just the odd man out because my place doesn’t stand still.”
His heart went for broke in his chest. He needed to shut up, or wink or smirk or dish up some flirty little innuendo. Most of all, he need not to ask . . . “Doesn’t being the odd man out make you doubt what you picked?”
A tiny crease appeared between her brows, but only for a second. “Not really, no. I’m used to making my own normal, and while I love my dads, the only place I’ve ever felt really, truly at home is behind the camera. So while I might have come from all over the place, it’s cool. I belong all over the place, too.”
In that moment, with Scarlett standing in a patch of sunshine filtering in from the high, glassless window behind her and giving up a completely unvarnished smile, Eli almost forgot how to breathe. But then her smile shifted, becoming a self-deprecating version of itself, and she stepped back with a soft laugh.
“Anyway. I’m sure that probably sounds really hokey to you, having been born and raised here at Cross Creek. Of course you belong in one place.”
The admission that he’d never felt like he belonged on the farm was right there on the tip of his tongue, brashly begging for release. Before he could let the words loose, both Scarlett’s cell phone and the two-way radio at his hip went ballistic.
“Oh!” she murmured at the same time Eli came out with a muttered curse.
“What the . . .” With his heart in his windpipe, he unlatched the door to Clarabelle’s stall and ushered Scarlett to the main space of the barn, not wanting the chatter or the static from the two-way to spook the poor animal. “This is Eli. Everything okay?”
“Copy that. Everything is fine.” Emerson’s voice threaded past the white noise hiss of their radio channel. “But did you place some kind of ad for apple picking that I don’t know about?”
If there was a blue-ribbon medal for the world’s most bizarre question, Emerson had just won the thing, hands-frickin’-down. “No,” Eli managed past his confusion, moving closer to the empty stalls in the heart of the barn to give Scarlett some privacy to continue her call. “I only just realized we’d be good to go for next week’s pick-your-own this morning. Why?”
“Because there’s been a ton of buzz about it on the Cross Creek Facebook page over the last couple of hours. Everybody and their mother wants to know when they can come pick apples, and our website hits have gone through the roof since lunch. People keep talking about some video of you.”
“But that’s impossible.” Eli stared at the two-way in his hand, his brain chock-full of say what? But the sensation took a backseat to the press of his pulse against his ears as he looked across the barn and caught sight of the shell-shock taking over Scarlett’s pretty features.
After a quick “over and out” to Emerson, he covered the packed-dirt floor between him and Scarlett in only a half dozen strides. “Scarlett? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, I . . .” She held up her cell phone. “That was Mallory.”
“Okay,” he led, and for once, he was grateful for Scarlett’s jump-right-in tendencies.
“She thought the video footage was great. Really great. In fact, she loved it so much that she didn’t want to sit on it until Tuesday, when the next set of articles was supposed to go live. So she did the editing and went ahead and posted the segment a couple of hours ago.”
Eli’s jaw unhinged. “Damn, that was fast.”
But before Eli could rewind enough to come up with something more eloquent, Scarlett said, “Yeah, hold that thought. Apparently, Mallory felt the biggest personal connection came from the part of the video where you and I were both in-frame together. I had no idea she would even consider doing anything with that footage other than scrapping it, but—”
“That’s the part she put online? With me and you, goofing around?”
Scarlett nodded. “Yes. And believe it or not, that isn’t even the most shocking part of what she said.”
When all he could do was stare, she continued. “I guess some food blogger with a pretty big following happened to catch the link to the video when Mallory posted it on FoodE’s Twitter page. The blogger retweeted the link, and then some other people in her network retweeted it, too, and Mallory said the video is getting, um, a lot of traction.”
People keep talking about some video of you . . . “Wait,” Eli said, his heart beginning to pound in earnest. “How much traction are we talking about, exactly?”
Scarlett lifted the phone still pressed to her palm, a smile starting to maneuver past the stunned expression on her face as she held the thing out to show him a screen shot of FoodE’s Twitter page. “I don’t have specific numbers, but it looks like as of ten minutes ago, we were officially trending.”
“Are you . . .” Eli trailed off, unable to shove the rest of his thoughts past all the shock having a hoedown in his gray matter.
“Absolutely serious,” Scarlett answered without skipping so much as a breath or a beat. “The video of you and me picking apples is pretty much going viral, Eli. We may have done it inadvertently, but it looks like we found our blockbuster.”
Her smile became a full-fledged bubble of laughter, and she pushed up to her toes to throw her arms around his neck.
And out of sheer instinct, he kissed her.