CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Eli woke up in slow stages. Which wasn’t anything groundbreaking or even beyond the realm of completely normal. But the soft, warm body next to him definitely was out of the ordinary. The fact that said body belonged to Scarlett, who—oh by the way—was not only next to him but also as naked as the day she was born and holding his leather-bound, special-edition copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in her bed-sheet-covered lap?
Screw out of the ordinary. This was downright fucking insane.
And judging by the curiosity in her shrewd, gorgeous stare, all his ugly truths were about to be right in the middle of it.
“Uh,” Eli grunted, his heart pinballing off every last one of his ribs, even as he tried to cover his expression with a whole lot of nothing-doing. “Morning. It is morning, right?”
“Oh hey.” Scarlett smiled through the soft glow of the hallway light, which she must’ve turned on at some point between when he’d finally drifted off a handful of hours ago and now. “It’s about a quarter to five, but I couldn’t sleep. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No. I . . .” He trailed off. He didn’t regret any of the night he and Scarlett had spent together, not laughing with her over a few beers at The Bar, and certainly not the incendiary sex they’d had not once but twice after that. Not even the odd sense of calm he’d felt as she’d finally settled in at his side and fallen asleep had rattled him. But she was at Cross Creek to tell stories, the more personal, the better. If she found out his was the biggest doozy of them all . . .
“We don’t have a whole ton of time before we have to leave for the farm. We should probably just go ahead and get moving.”
“We should,” Scarlett said. Only she didn’t move from her spot beside him. Instead, she gestured to the book in her lap. “I didn’t mean to pry, but this was on your nightstand, along with two journalism textbooks, a writer’s notebook, and a pretty-well-loved copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. They’re kind of hard to miss.”
Eli scraped in a breath. Smile. Cover. Don’t panic. “Doorstops,” he said, tacking a brittle grin over the lame excuse for an explanation.
Of course, she didn’t buy it for a second. “You need two bookcases’ worth of doorstops for the three doors you have in this entire apartment?”
Eli followed her gaze to the pair of low, stuffed-to-the-gills bookshelves lining the wall beside his bed, his gut doing its best impersonation of a corkscrew.
You could tell her.
The whisper came from some hidden place within him. Looking at Scarlett, with her platinum hair framing her face like an untamed halo and her green eyes that seemed not only to see everything but to get everything, Eli knew the voice wasn’t full of shit. He could tell her; hell, a part of him was goddamn dying to let loose with the words. His defenses hadn’t been finely honed for kicks, though, and they forced one shoulder up into a shrug.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
The sheet tucked around Scarlett’s body rustled softly as she turned, not away but closer toward him. “I’m a little torn here. I’d like to help you out if you need a sounding board, and my gut is telling me that you do . . . but you’re not talking. If you want me to back off—”
“They’re mine. The books are mine. The journals, too. They’re . . .” Relief pumped through him, as palpable as any touch. “Mine. All of them.”
“So you’re a writer?” she asked gently, and even though his brain told his mouth to form the words “you know what, forget I said anything,” his gut overrode every syllable.
“You know the way you feel about photography? How you love it and want to be taking pictures no matter what?” At her nod, Eli continued. “Well, that’s how I feel about words. Writing, specifically, but obviously reading, too. I just . . . when I’m writing about what’s going on around me, I feel more like myself than when I’m doing anything else. The words are just it for me.” He heard himself a half second later, and okay, yeah, he’d officially done a double gainer into a great big pool of crazysauce. “Which sounds like I should be hugging it out and getting in touch with my inner light, or whatever, and that sounds epically stupid, I know.”
Scarlett folded her lips together, and if he had to guess, it was to hide the smile that had managed to sneak over her face anyway. “That doesn’t sound stupid at all.”
But man, now that he’d popped the cork on his feelings, they wouldn’t stop flying out. “Maybe not to you.” Eli ran a hand over his crew cut, letting it rest on the back of his head before turning more fully toward her on the bed. “Photography is your passion, and it’s how you make your living. You travel all over the world, and you take pictures. You do what you love.”
“Clearly, you write.” Scarlett gestured to the stack of journals lying on top of the bookshelf nearest to them, and irony pushed a laugh right out of him at her choice of words.
“Not so clearly, I’m afraid.”
Understanding dawned on her face. “Nobody knows.”
Eli closed his eyes. Took a breath. And told her the balls-out truth.
“I’ve loved writing since I was in high school. I spent four and a half years and all my savings getting my BA in journalism online, and I’ve written every last shred of copy for the farm’s marketing and advertising for the last eight seasons under a handful of different guises. But no. Nobody outside of this room knows that.”
A sound left her throat, some combination of disbelief and conviction. “I don’t understand. Your family is close. For God’s sake, you’re knit more tightly than a Christmas sweater. Plus, I’ve read the stories and all the copy on your website, and they’re really good.” Here, her shoulders tightened into a determined line. “Why would you hide something this big from your father and brothers?”
Eli held the urge to laugh between his teeth. Christ, if only it were so easy. “Because what I told you the other day wasn’t bullshit, Scarlett.” The truth—and the reality that went with it—sent his pulse moving through him in a cold rush. “Each one of us has a purpose on the farm, a place. Owen’s the serious one, the prodigy. Hunter’s the middleman, the peacekeeper, and I . . . am the extra. The one with no specific place on the farm.”
“Do you want one? Or do you want something else?”
The question was so honest, so simple as it fell from Scarlett’s lips that Eli answered without thinking.
“No. Not always, but it’s not that easy. And that’s precisely why I just smile and shrug and do enough to get by. I don’t have any other choice but to live up to being the extra. I can’t be anything else.”
“Of course you can,” she said, and funny how a whisper could hold so much certainty. “Just because your passion isn’t farming doesn’t mean you have to be excluded. It’s okay for you to love something different.”
Eli’s laugh held neither humor nor heat as it filled the small space of his bedroom. But this was his truth, and he knew it all too well. “No, it’s not. For three generations, every single Cross has farmed our land. My grandfather did it with his son, just like my old man does it with us. Farming is what we do. That’s our legacy. You asked me the other day about the tension between me and Owen.”
Scarlett nodded but didn’t interrupt, and hell if that didn’t make it even easier to let the words shovel on out.
“Part of it is over the bet with Greyson. But the deeper part stems from the fact that Owen has always thought I’m just a screwup. He’s never thought I take Cross Creek seriously.”
“First of all, that hardly seems true. At least, not from where I sit,” she said, shifting toward him on the bedsheets. “Secondly . . . no disrespect to Owen, but why do you care what he thinks?”
Something that looked a lot like defensiveness glimmered through her olive-green stare, and ah hell, he hated to disappoint. Then again, he’d gotten pretty fucking good at it over the last decade, and anyway, no matter how much he might want to, Eli could no sooner change his reality than rearrange the stars in the night sky.
“Because he’s right. I’m not saying I don’t love Cross Creek, or that I don’t work hard enough at the farm to get by,” he added quickly, because Scarlett’s imminent protest was sunrise-clear in the sudden set of her shoulders. “Because I do. But I just feel comfortable there. Like I’m treading water. My brothers and my old man . . . they feel something else. They love it. It’s their passion, and I don’t feel that way.”
“So you just charm your way past the fact that you don’t feel what they feel.” Her words arrived without judgment, but they bull’s-eyed into his sternum all the same.
Eli blew out a breath to try and displace the squeeze. “Pretty much.”
“Have you ever thought about leaving Millhaven? I mean, you have your degree, right? You could always—”
“No.”
His answer was too fast and loaded with sharp corners, and shit, this wasn’t how he wanted any of this to go.
Taking a second to be sure his voice would stay steady, Eli said, “Look, I know it probably makes no sense to you. You’re awful sure of who you are. But I can’t leave Cross Creek, and I can’t tell my brothers—or worse yet, my old man—that I’d rather be writing than farming. I’m already the outlier.”
Ah, but you candy-coated that one, now didn’t you? Outlier wasn’t exactly accurate. Outlier implied that he was just a few steps away from belonging. That he was happy blending in, that he was content enough to fake his way through a lifetime there, and everything would turn out just fine.
After all, what sort of Cross didn’t belong on the farm at all, even as an outlier, other than the disloyal sort?
“Okay.”
Scarlett’s voice boomeranged him back to reality in an instant, rattling his heartbeat. “Okay?”
“Yeah, okay.” Sliding Shakespeare back to the scuffed oak of the nightstand, she kept the bedsheet tucked beneath her arms and swung one leg over Eli’s waist so he had no choice but to look her directly in the eyes. “Look, I’m not going to cut any corners here, but I don’t think you’re expecting me to. I like you. I like spending time with you, and I like having sex with you.”
Despite the seriousness of their topic of conversation, the fact that she was damn close to being locked over his lap wasn’t lost on Eli. “I like being with you, too.”
Although Scarlett smiled, her expression remained wistful in the soft light filtering in from the hallway behind her. “You’re right. Hiding what you love from your family doesn’t make any sense to me. But I’m not the one in charge of that choice, so frankly, it doesn’t have to. You and I have two more weeks together, and we still have a job to do. As long as you’re straight-up with me, I’d really like to spend that time with you.”
“You’re not going to say anything about me being a writer?”
Scarlett shocked the hell out of him with a laugh. “That would kind of make me an asshole, and while I’m pretty brash . . . I’m not interested in spilling secrets that aren’t mine for the telling.”
Foot, meet mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest—”
She interrupted him with a quick slide of her lips. “Don’t worry about it. You confided in me, cowboy. I know you don’t think I’m a jerk. And for the record, I’m glad you did.”
“Yeah?” Eli asked, and all of a sudden, he realized just how thin his bedsheets were. He lifted his hips just enough to share the knowledge with Scarlett, who let out a throaty murmur. “How glad?”
“Glad enough that if you keep doing that, we’re going to be late,” she said, her eyes drifting shut as he thrust against her again, this time with more suggestion. She might be from a completely different world, a world to which she’d return in fairly short order. But Eli liked her. He trusted her.
They had two weeks. He’d be a goddamn fool to waste a single second.
“Maybe. But we could save a little time if we shower together. Now c’mon, darlin’. Time’s a wasting.”
Eli sat back against the driver’s seat in his truck, wondering how on earth he’d gotten so fucking lucky. Between the Friday-afternoon sunshine streaming down from the cloudless blue sky, the season high for weekly revenue and website hits that Owen had confirmed a couple of hours ago, and the pretty girl sitting beside him as he headed to town, Eli couldn’t deny the truth.
He was happier than a pig in a puddle, and it was mostly Scarlett’s fault.
“So tell me about the co-op,” she said, her bright-blond hair blowing around her face despite the navy-and-white bandana she’d knotted over her crown in an effort to keep it in check. She’d finally broken down this week and invested in a pair of real-deal work boots, although the fact that she insisted on pairing them with cutoffs more often than not still made Eli shake his head. But from the sprinkle of freckles over the sun-kissed bridge of her nose to the plaid shirt she’d stolen from his closet this morning and thrown over her T-shirt to ward off the predawn chill, Scarlett looked perfectly at home in the front seat of his truck.
How about that? His big ol’ idiot grin went for a double. “The co-op is essentially one-stop shopping for farmers. They stock everything from tractor parts to fencing supplies, and whatever’s not on the shelves, they can order for you. The co-op’s also the place to get your fertilizer and feed for pretty much all manner of livestock, plus they carry things like milk replacer for baby animals who have to be bottle-fed.”
“And that’s what we’re going for today?” she confirmed. “Feed, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Eli lifted a hand from the wheel in concession at her raised-brow stare. “Sorry, habit. Yes, we’re picking up feed, along with a few other things. I’ve got a fence to mend out by the apple grove, and your chickens have to eat.”
That brought her smile back. “My girls do get hungry,” Scarlett agreed. At the top of the week, she’d taken it upon herself to commandeer henhouse duty completely. Despite multiple offers to help, Eli had been summarily (albeit kindly) shut down. In fact, other than to put a practiced eye on the birds to confirm that none of them looked sick or hurt as he herded them in for the night, he hadn’t needed to go anywhere near the henhouse at all.
Eli pulled onto Town Street, tilting his head at the rows of brick-and-clapboard buildings on either side of the cobblestone-lined thoroughfare. “It was probably dark when you drove by this last night with Emerson and Daisy. But this here’s Town Street. There’s Doc Sanders’s office, and Emerson’s physical-therapy practice is around back. Clementine’s Diner is right across the way—she makes the best home fries you ever tasted, even if they are cardiologically perilous.”
Scarlett laughed. “I’m guessing they’re not quite vegan.”
Eli resisted the urge to tell her that Clementine’s not-so-secret recipe involved a skilletful of bacon grease and half a cup of hand-churned butter, besides. No sense in sending her over the edge. “Ah, that’s a negative, although if you asked her real nice and offered up some ideas for alternative ingredients, I bet she’d be willing to turn up a new recipe for you.”
“You think so?” Scarlett blinked her surprise through the free-flowing sunlight in the truck. But really, the answer was a no-brainer.
“Sure. Clem’s as nice as they come.” She’d been feeding everyone in Millhaven for the last two decades, just like her mother had before her.
“I’m sure she is, but I’m pretty much a random stranger.” Scarlett paused for a wry twist of her lips. “And I’m likely to be the only vegan in town, besides. Nice or not, I wouldn’t expect her to adjust her menu or her tried-and-true recipes just for me.”
Eli let the nope winging around in his brain make an appearance on his face. “First of all, you’re not a stranger anymore. Secondly, just because you wouldn’t expect Clementine to fix you something special doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be happy to do it.”
“Really?”
“Really. Vegan cuisine might be a little out of Clem’s wheelhouse.” Okay, so that was probably a euphemism and a half. The only thing Scarlett hadn’t been wrong about was the likelihood that she was the only vegan within a thirty-mile radius of downtown Millhaven. Maybe more. “But it’s diner policy that if you come into the place hungry, she’s not gonna let you leave that way.”
“Oh,” Scarlett said, her pretty smile matching the equally pretty flush spreading over her cheeks as she sat up taller in the passenger seat. “Well, then. Vegan home fries it is. What else has Town Street got?”
Eli barely had to look through the windows to know every last inch of their surroundings, and he gestured to the pair of storefronts ahead. “The Hair Lair is right there, home of hair dye and fresh gossip, both served up by Amber and Mollie Mae Van Buren. Oh, and there’s the barber shop, where I betcha Curtis Shoemaker and Harley Martin are sitting right out front on the bench, trading stories about the good old days.”
He tapped the F-150’s brakes, slowing just enough to tip his baseball hat at the two older men, who were more reliable than Old Faithful.
Scarlett’s brow-lift was back in all its sweet-and-sassy glory. “Do you know everybody who lives in this town?”
“Yeah,” Eli said, painting the word with the tone equivalent of well duh. “You’re either born and bred and buried in Millhaven, or you beat feet the minute your high school diploma hits your hand, and you never come back. No in-betweens.”
“None at all?”
“You didn’t learn the definition of ‘no in-betweens’ at Yale?” He let out a chuckle, unable to keep from ribbing her. “I hate to break it to you, but you might have gotten robbed just a little on that one.”
Jesus, even with her mad face on, Scarlett was still freaking cute. “Ha-ha. What I meant was that it’s just a little tough for me to wrap my head around staying in one place, forever and ever, amen.”
Eli’s fingers tightened over the smooth leather of the steering wheel, but he managed to keep his smile intact. “You feelin’ antsy to leave us already, bumblebee?”
“Actually, no,” she said, looking as weirdly surprised at her answer as he felt. “The farm is beautiful, and there’s a lot more to this job than I expected. Slowing down, at least a little”—she qualified with a sheepish shrug—“in order to get both FoodE and Cross Creek closer to where they deserve to be has been pretty great.”
“Yeah. It has.” Eli tamped down the flicker of unease sparking in his gut. He hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck. He knew damn well Scarlett couldn’t stay in Millhaven, just as he knew he couldn’t leave. There was no sense in dwelling on the things he couldn’t change.
And so he didn’t. Reorienting himself with the here and now, Eli spent the next few minutes finishing his rundown of Millhaven’s landmarks, answering the rapid-fire string of questions he’d not only come to expect from Scarlett but also grown an odd sort of affection for. Not even the sight of Greyson Whittaker’s Silverado in front of the co-op could put a damper on his mood. Eh, mostly, anyhow.
Eli tugged open the glass-and-chrome door to the farm center, letting the bells strung across the top of the frame do their thing before gesturing Scarlett over the threshold. Her head was on a swivel less than two seconds later, taking in the oversized bags of fertilizer and top soil and seed stacked around the perimeter of the place, along with the shelves of smaller equipment and supplies forming four aisles running front to back. His shoulders tightened ever so slightly at the sight of Greyson leaning against the front counter—did the guy seriously not have anything better to do with his day than jaw with Billy Masterson?—but he took a deep breath to loosen them as he stepped forward.
“Hey, Billy, how’s it going? I need to grab fifty pounds of chicken feed, plus a dozen five-and-a-half-foot T-posts if you’ve got ’em.”
“Sure thing,” Billy said, but he didn’t back up the words with any movement to speak of, choosing to gape at Scarlett like a fresh-caught bass instead, and hell. For as much as Eli wanted to grab what he’d come for and get the hell out of Dodge, not making a round of introductions at this point would be skirting the boundaries of rude.
“Billy, this is Scarlett Edwards-Stewart. She’s spending some time with us at Cross Creek.”
Billy’s head moved up and down on his beefy neck as Scarlett reached out to shake his hand. “So I hear.”
“So everyone hears,” muttered Greyson, and the breath Eli pulled in this time was a whole lot sketchier than its predecessor.
Scarlett, however, didn’t bat so much as a single eyelash, even though she’d certainly heard Greyson just as well as the rest of them had. “Pleasure to meet you, Billy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, prompting her to give up a genuine laugh.
“Please. Just Scarlett,” she said, and Eli had to give her credit. Her smile stayed sweet as spun sugar when she turned toward Greyson. “And you must be Greyson Whittaker.”
His surprise showed in one brief, dark glint. “Didn’t realize I was wearin’ a name tag.” One corner of Greyson’s mouth kicked up into a half smirk that made Eli want to bury his fist in something (liiiiiike that half smirk, for example), but Scarlett simply shrugged.
“Just a lucky guess. Billy, is it okay with you if I take a few pictures?” She lifted the camera from the front of her T-shirt that read OKAY, BUT FIRST COFFEE in big, bold letters, gesturing to the sun-filled aisles to her right. “If any of them run online, I’ll credit the co-op, of course.”
“You want to take pictures of the co-op,” Greyson confirmed, his black brows shooting high enough to do a disappearing act beneath the brim of his Harley-Davidson baseball cap.
Scarlett paused, already checking the light meter and fiddling with the settings on her camera. “Sure, why not?”
“Seems a little . . . basic for a famous photographer, is all.”
Both Greyson’s tone and his expression were far too close to impolite for Eli’s liking. Adrenaline bloomed in his veins, urging him to remind Greyson what manners looked like.
But once again, Scarlett remained steady. “Ah, basic is in the eye of the beholder.” She left her eyes on Greyson’s for a full beat to let the subtlety of the barb sink in, then returned her smile to Billy. “So, am I cool to take a few shots?”
“Oh, ah, yes, ma’am,” Billy managed past a laugh he looked to be doing his best to try and swallow. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks so much.”
Eli let himself watch her move halfway down the aisle before allowing his grin to step up to the plate. “Guess she’s got you all figured out, huh?”
“You know, I’ve gotta hand it to you, Cross.” Greyson knotted his arms over his chest just tightly enough to bare the edges of the tattoo beneath the left sleeve of his T-shirt. “You played me pretty good.”
A hard pang of irritation spread out in Eli’s chest. “What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t play you.”
“Right,” Greyson spat, his dark eyes flashing as they followed the path Scarlett had just taken down the aisle housing all the canning supplies. “Because you had no idea some big-deal photographer was gonna come blow up the Internet with pictures of Cross Creek when you put your co-op tab on the line.”
Oh for Chrissake . . . “I didn’t, actually, but that’s really beside the point, since you’re the one who threw down the bet in the first place. Anyway, Scarlett and I have a deal. All her coverage is on Cross Creek, and Cross Creek only. If word of the bet gets online, it won’t be because she or I hung it out there.”
“Why would you make a deal like that?” Greyson asked after a pause.
Eli, however, didn’t hesitate so much as a nanosecond in response. “Because. Not that you’re familiar with the concept, but I intend to beat you fair and square,” he said. “And I’ve got no interest in you crying foul when I do.”
Greyson’s momentary silence said he was clearly sidestepping the insult in order to process the intel, and Eli had to give the asshole a sliver of credit. At least he wasn’t stupid 24/7.
Till he opened his cakehole again, anyway. “I see. And is that the only deal you’ve got with Miss Fancy Pants? Or are you getting in her fancy pants, too?”
Eli’s mind flashed back to the night he’d spent with Scarlett and the sexy-sweet promise she’d made to spend the next two weeks with him, but only for a second. “That falls square under the category of none of your damned business, now doesn’t it?” he bit out, stepping just a hair closer to Greyson than was cordial.
Of course, Greyson pushed off the counter to meet him halfway. “That’s a no,” he snorted. “If you were tapping that, you’d be hoarse as a crow from the bragging.”
Anger snapped, hot and vicious in Eli’s chest, tempting him to plow his fist right into the center of Greyson’s face. His fingers twitched, his muscles coiling with just enough tension to turn the thought into action.
But instead, he loosened his fists and exhaled. “Do yourself a favor,” he said, notching his voice to its lowest, meanest setting. “Stop talking about Scarlett and walk away from me. Right. Fucking. Now.”
Greyson’s black brows winged upward, sending Eli’s gut toward his knees and his adrenaline to a full percolate. But just when he was sure Greyson would push his luck and they’d end up fixin’ to kick each other’s asses once and for all, the douchebag took a step back.
“Whatever. Bring in all the highbrow city girls you want. Whittaker Hollow’s making a killing, just like we have been all season. We’re still the better farm, and in two weeks, everyone in town—and now, all over the Internet, besides—will know it.”
“We’ll see,” Eli promised, his molars still locked together even after Greyson had given up his back and walked away.