CHAPTER SIX
For as stubborn as she was, Scarlett royally sucked at the silent treatment. The whole thing drove her apeshit, really—stewing on your feelings only made it impossible to move on to the next ones. So the last twelve minutes of her life, sitting literal feet but theoretical leagues away from Eli Cross in total screaming silence?
Yeeeeeeah. Pretty much her definition of hell on earth. Not that Eli had been wrong about work being their number one priority, because truly, Scarlett wouldn’t have spent more than half a day out here in BFE unless she was shooting a magazine spread that would help save her best friend’s business. But she couldn’t exactly do that if her entire daily agenda consisted of following him around like a puppy until quitting time, and she definitely couldn’t do it if they didn’t speak to each other.
Unfortunately, calling him a cocky, swagger-happy jackass probably didn’t count.
“Oh,” Scarlett said, her surprise getting the best of her and breaking the stalemate between them as Eli pulled his pickup truck to a stop in the empty gravel lot beside the main house. “Are we the first ones here?”
Eli examined the plum-colored skyline through the windshield. “More like the last.” He shrugged off his seatbelt, although his shoulders still remained high and tight beneath his T-shirt. “My old man is at the back of the property, touching base with the guy who manages our cattle. Hunter’s prepping the harvesting equipment in the barn by the cornfields, and Owen’s in the greenhouse, doing inventory and organizing CSA orders.”
It wasn’t a landslide of engaging personal convo, but at this point, she’d take it. “How do you know?”
“Because unless one of them is missing a limb, that’s where they start every day during the busy season. And unless one of them is missing two limbs, they’re always in ahead of me. It’s already five forty.”
“Wow,” Scarlett said. Pulling Baby out of its resting spot, she double-checked the battery and the memory card even though she knew they were both primed and ready to go, attaching a heavy-duty shoulder harness around the camera’s frame before repeating the process with its twin. “Your father and brothers have some serious dedication.”
Eli’s laugh was as fast as it was humorless. “You have no idea.”
“Bet I do, actually.” After all, her life code was work first, everything else (including food, sleep, and sex, although not always in that order) next. But of those things, work was by far the best, and definitely the fastest paced. Why fuck around, really?
Scarlett scrambled out of the passenger seat with one camera at each hip and her backpack between her shoulder blades, falling into step next to Eli as he headed down the same dirt-and-gravel path they’d taken on their tour the other day. “So where do we start?”
“Henhouse,” he said, although he didn’t elaborate.
After a dozen steps, Scarlett caved. “Doing . . .?”
Eli gave her a sidelong glance that she couldn’t quite read. “I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count.”
Scarlett was less than a millimeter from pointing out—rather icily—that he was supposed to be the expert about that sort of thing when she caught the smirk playing belatedly over his lips. “Oh my God. Are you messing with me?”
“In my defense, you made it kind of easy with that question,” he said, and she couldn’t help it. She laughed.
“Fair enough,” she admitted. “I take it you’re going to feed the chickens?”
Eli nodded, and they paced off another half dozen steps before he asked, “You ever collected freshly laid eggs before?”
“No.” Scarlett’s pulse picked up the pace along with her feet. “You’re actually going to let me help you?”
“You’ll just be under my feet all day if I don’t, right?”
His question held a three-to-one ratio of teasing to legit truth, so she answered with the same. “I hate to break it to you, but it’s my job to be under your feet. A job you asked me to come do, might I add.”
“Mmm.” Eli swiveled his gaze over the flower garden behind the main house, then the fields of whatever the leafy-green stuff was farther in the distance to the right before turning his attention back to their spot on the path to the henhouse. His smirk coalesced into a smile that crept up toward his eyes, and oh Lord, that dimple she thought she’d spied the other day was actually a matched set. “You wanted a hands-on look at farm life. Might as well put you to work while I give it to you.”
Scarlett nodded, tamping down the wake-up call those dimples were sending to her libido. “Okay, but—wait!”
He jerked to a stop on the path next to her, his boots crunching hard against the gravel and his blue eyes wide in the softly breaking daylight. “What’s the matter?”
Heart pounding, she scrambled for her primary camera, scooping it up and letting the lens cap fly in one deft movement.
“Does the farm look like this every morning?” The deeper blue-black hues of just half an hour ago were quickly giving way to brighter pinks and golden-edged sunlight. Although the wood-planked boards and thick shingles of the henhouse still stood veiled in the heavy early-morning shadows, their textures stood out almost as if they were a relief painting, and no way was she passing this up.
“What, you mean the sky?” Eli asked, tacking on a half laugh. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but that great big shiny thing poking up over the horizon there? ’Round these parts, it comes up every single day.”
“Funny.” But Scarlett didn’t even think about tearing her eyes away from the scene in front of her, not even to roll them at Eli’s sarcasm. Excitement combined with something deeper, something she couldn’t name but knew by heart as she measured the light—click—the depth—click-click—the balance of all the elements—click. She metered her breath and her pulse to the sound of the shutter, everything else falling away except for the colors and nuances and angles of each shot.
This. This was her sanctuary. It didn’t matter where she was, but with a camera in her hands and something new to aim it at, Scarlett was exactly where she belonged.
An idea slammed into her with all the subtlety of the A train at rush hour. “Oh God, you know what would be perfect?” Click-click-click. “Get in the frame.”
Eli huffed out a shocked breath. “You want me in the picture?”
“I don’t want you to jump in and yell ‘cheese!’” she said, unable to keep a leash on her tart laughter as she calculated the variables of the lighting in her mind. “In fact, it’ll be better if you don’t look at the camera.” But with him in the foreground in that white T-shirt and faded jeans, then the henhouse to the side, with that ridiculous sunrise as the backdrop? Talk about flawless composition with an evocative, personal hook. Not to mention click bait on Mallory’s website.
Or it would be as soon as Eli found his internal clutch and got his ass in gear.
Scarlett tore her focus from the Canon. “Eli?”
“No, thanks.” His smile was the polar opposite of the genuine version he’d given her a few minutes ago, although from the look of things, he sure was trying to match them up. “Hunter and Owen already give me crap for being the best-looking Cross brother. Proving it with photographic evidence would just be bragging.”
She paused, her fingers going tight over the body of the camera. Eli had signed the consent waiver to allow her to take photos of him while she was here at the farm—all the Crosses had, and Emerson, too—and taking photos was what she was here for. Hell, it was what she lived for. If she was going to deliver the sort of personal-interest magazine spread that would bring Mallory’s business back to life, she needed to come out swinging for the fences.
“You could just walk in front of me on the path,” Scarlett suggested, framing up the shot in her mind. Not ideal with the scant light, but she was good enough to make it work. “Give up a little profile with a sideways glance. Easy.”
“I’ll pass.”
His arms threaded over the front of his T-shirt in a living embodiment of the “no” he’d just given her, and frustration flared, hot beneath her skin.
“I’m here to take pictures and tell stories,” Scarlett tried again, lifting the camera for emphasis.
“Of the farm.” Eli gestured to the fields she’d just been shooting. “Not of me.”
“Oh, come on. You’re the perfect face for Cross Creek, and these stories are supposed to be personal. Plus, you signed the waiver.”
Judging by the stubborn glint in his eyes, that little point of fact wouldn’t garner any headway. But she’d already jumped in feet first for the penny. She might as well throw whatever she could at the whole damn pound.
Unfortunately for her, Eli threw back. “I signed the waiver,” he agreed. “And if I end up in a shot or two that you take while we get things done, then I guess so be it. But I’ve got far too much work that needs done to play cover model, and I’m already behind. You want shots of the sunrise, or anything else on the farm, be my guest and take a thousand of ’em. I’ll be in the henhouse when you’re done.”
Oh, Scarlett was tempted to push, and push hard. She didn’t just need ho-hum photos of the landscape, as pretty as it was. She needed absolute showstoppers, with kick-ass story ideas to match.
But that was the rub. Eli was her point of contact for the entire time she was here at Cross Creek. She didn’t just need the photos. She needed a connection to the farm. She needed a way to put the photos with stories that Mallory could turn personal and real.
Dammit, she needed him.
“Okay,” she said, lowering her Canon back to her side even though the move grated like two-inch fingernails dug deep on a chalkboard. “Lead the way to the henhouse, then.”
The slight lift of Eli’s brows was the only sign of his shock, and it lasted for maybe a nanosecond before he did what she’d asked. After a few dozen more strides, they reached the entryway to the henhouse, and Eli tugged the door open on its squeaky hinges.
“The chores in here are pretty intuitive,” he said, his tone testing the water with her as he flipped the light switch to illuminate the single, bare bulb set high in the center of the rafters. “Cross Creek isn’t a poultry farm, but right now we’ve got about fifty birds here in the henhouse. Every day, they need eyes on them, just to make sure none of them look sick or hurt. We also need to refresh the hay, check the feed, and provide plenty of fresh water daily, along with grabbing whatever eggs have been laid since the last sweep.”
“And you’re going to let me do all of that?” Scarlett peered around the open, two-story structure. In truth, it would be at least another hour before there was enough natural light in here for her to take any usable shots, even with the henhouse door wide open and the overhead light pumping out all ninety of its watts. She might be good, but she wasn’t a magician, and terrifying the poor animals with the camera flash definitely wasn’t on her list of yep yep.
Eli handed her a wooden bucket with a scattering of hay in the bottom in reply. “If you think you can handle it, sure.”
“I can handle it just fine,” she promised, taking the bucket and giving back a smile sweet enough to give him a head full of cavities. Honestly, he must think she was an idiot.
At least, his half smile sure said so. “Then let’s get to it.”
He took a few more steps into the henhouse, and she followed him into the cool, shadowy space. For the most part, the interior looked like that of a small barn. The heady, musty-sweet scent of hay filled her nose, her pulse picking up the pace in her veins as Eli bent down low to scoop up a tawny, butterscotch-brown chicken just as easily as she’d lift her camera bag.
“Uh.” Okay, it was less than eloquent, Scarlett knew. But park-bench pigeons were pretty much the extent of the wildlife she was accustomed to, and even then, she’d never gotten close enough to touch one, let alone pick it up.
Stories. Stories. You’re here for the stories. She squared her shoulders. She’d worked with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists on impossible stories under even more impossible deadlines. Certainly chickens weren’t that hard to wrangle.
Eli sure made it look like child’s play, anyway. “This here is a hybrid chicken, although we’ve also got some Rhode Island Reds and a coupl’a Leghorns thrown in for good measure.”
Ah, wait. She’d need to Google those to make sure any photos she took later were labeled properly. “Hybrid chicken,” Scarlett said, her camera banging awkwardly against her hip as she tried to maneuver her iPad out of her backpack.
The chicken in Eli’s grasp fluttered nervously, clucking her displeasure at Scarlett’s fumbling. “Need some help?” he asked.
“Nope. I’m all set, thanks.” She balanced the finally free iPad over her fingers, tapping the screen to life with one thumb. “Hybrid, Rhode Island Red, and Leghorns. Check. What else?”
But for as quickly as Scarlett wanted to get to the feeding/watering/egg-gathering/fabulous-story part of things, Eli seemed content to slow-roll the tutorial. “You can pet her if you want. Since you wanted to go hands-on, and all.”
“Oh. Okay.” She eyed the hen, who was now chattering happily from her perch beneath Eli’s sun-bronzed arm. Reaching out, Scarlett gave the bird a couple of quick pats on the back before returning her stare to Eli expectantly.
But instead of giving her something she could use, he laughed. “Seriously? That’s what you’re going with? Jeez, didn’t you ever have a dog or anything when you were a kid?”
“I spent the first ten years of my life in foster care and the next eight after that traveling all over the world with my dads while they worked for a humanitarian aid organization,” she said, laughing right back. “So, yeah. That’s a ‘no’ on man’s best friend.”
Eli went bowstring tight from shoulders to shins. “Oh. I, uh . . . didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“That’s okay. You didn’t,” Scarlett said truthfully. “Most of the foster homes were okay, even though I lived in a lot of them.” She’d lost track after the third, or maybe it had been the fourth. “I mean, living with my dads was better, obviously, and things tended to be kind of crowded in foster care. But that’s where I met Mallory, so it wasn’t so bad.”
“You’ve known Mallory that long?” Surprise lined Eli’s face, but she met it with a shrug. He might want to go all zip-lipped with his personal details, but she’d never really minded sharing her own. Anyway, maybe if she got the ball rolling, she’d actually loosen him up. At least enough to snap a photo or two with him in the damn frame.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “Her parents were killed in a plane crash when we were both nine. By then I was a total pro at the foster-care thing, so our caregivers at the time put us in a room together. Her adoptive parents ended up being the ones who hooked me up with my dads—they’re all friends. So even after Mallory and I were both placed, we stayed close.”
“So you two are kind of like sisters, then?” Eli ran a hand over the hen’s feathers, and okay, he really did make it look easy.
Scarlett reached out and followed the path of his fingers at a safe distance, surprised at how soft the chicken was on the second pass. “I don’t know about sisters. We talk often, and I love her. But I was turned over to the Office of Children and Family Services when I was twelve hours old. I don’t exactly have a frame of reference for that sort of thing.”
“Wow,” he said, the ensuing silence drawing out for a heartbeat, then another, before he cleared his throat and took a step back toward the henhouse door. “Right. Anyway, each hen usually lays an egg a day, although sometimes they skip a turn here and there.”
Damn. Eli’s defenses: one, Scarlett: zero. Not that she’d be throwing in the towel after one tiny little setback. “And I just need to collect all of them, then make sure there’s food and water?” Seemed pretty easy for her first assignment. She could probably finish in less than ten minutes. “That’s it?”
“Yup,” he confirmed. When he didn’t offer up anything else, Scarlett turned on the heel of her sneaker. A set of wooden cubbies serving as nests spanned the right-hand wall, each hay-lined row stacked three high with a series of ramps and ledges serving as access points to the slots above floor level. Squatting down, she looked into the nest in front of her, which was thankfully unoccupied.
And also empty of anything other than a thick bed of hay and a scattering of honey-colored feathers.
Scarlett pulled back, doing a quick count of the cubbies. Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight . . . okay, so if each chicken delivered the goods once a day, where the hell was the egg?
Refusing to be bested by either a chicken or the cocky smile currently making a comeback tour over Eli’s handsome face, she tried the next cubby. But slot number two, then three, revealed a whole lot of nothing, and finally Scarlett had no choice but to grit her teeth and ask, “Okay, what am I missing?”
“Besides the eggs, you mean?”
She bit her lip, but whether it was to keep from screaming or—worse yet—returning Eli’s insanely contagious smile, she couldn’t be sure. “Yes. Besides those.”
“Nothing. You just have to slow down long enough to see what’s in front of you.”
But rather than being snarky or condescending, his answer was simply matter of fact, and he pushed off from the edge of the rough-hewn doorframe, lowering the hen in his grasp with surprising gentleness before walking over to her.
“There’s no fixed real estate when it comes to the henhouse, and no fixed schedule, either. Not when it comes to laying eggs, anyway.” Gesturing to the hens pecking and clucking their way over the packed dirt floor and out into the wider circle of space past the open door, he said, “Even though we keep them in here at night, these beauties are far more free range than not, which means you never really know where you’re going to find their eggs. Case in point—” Eli nodded down to a mostly empty storage crate on the wall opposite the cubbies.
“Oh!” Unexpected laughter bubbled up on the heels of Scarlett’s surprise at the sight of the three pretty, light-brown eggs tucked into the corner. She bent down to pick them up, but Eli stopped her midreach.
“Here. You’re gonna need these,” he said, dropping a trio of small wooden eggs into her palm.
Oooookay. “Sorry, I thought we were collecting the real deal.”
“We are. But we also want the hens to remember where they’re supposed to do their thing, otherwise the eggs will be scattered to the four winds of the farm. When the hens see the wooden ones here in the henhouse, they figure they’re in the right spot. It’s not a guarantee that they won’t lay eggs wherever they please, but it helps to keep things mostly contained.”
Scarlett slipped her hand into the next cubby in the row, her fingers closing over not one, but two eggs. “Is that why these eggs are together?” she asked, and Eli added a lift of his brows to his ice-melting grin.
“Look at you, making the logic leap after only one cup of coffee. I’m impressed.”
She recognized the cocky words as the bait they were. But if he thought for even a nanosecond that she’d get distracted in the face of a little banter, he had another thing coming.
She needed a blockbuster. And she wasn’t going to stop until she got it.
“You might want to raise those standards of yours,” Scarlett said, stepping in toward him even though she had to crane her neck a little extra to fasten him with the full force of her sassy smile. “Because I get a whole lot more impressive as the day goes on.”
Shifting back, she delivered the real eggs to the safety of her bucket, replacing them with the faux version before turning her attention back to the task at hand. Scarlett continued collecting whatever eggs she could locate while Eli took a head count of the chickens and replenished the food and water dispensers at the back of the henhouse. While he didn’t hog the conversation, he didn’t totally penny-pinch it, either, giving her some fairly interesting—if textbook—information on the different breeds of chickens and how they cared for them at Cross Creek. Grappling again with her backpack, she reclaimed her iPad from the spot where she’d stuffed it in the front pocket, squinting to make out the backlit screen against the harsh glare of the sunlight.
Eli tipped his head, his eyes lingering on her as she began to thumb-type. “You don’t like to sit still much, do you?”
“What, so the world can go by me while I watch? No, thanks.” God, the thought alone gave her a case of the shakes. Balancing the iPad in the crook of her elbow to keep it shaded, she tightened her grip on the handle of the bucket, jotting down ideas with one hand while adding to her stash of eggs with the other.
“That thing isn’t going to last out here, just so you know,” Eli said, jutting his chin at her tablet.
Please. This wasn’t even high-level multitasking. “I appreciate the concern, but I’m used to juggling a lot of equipment. I’ll take my chances.”
“Okay.” His dimples flashed for a split second. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“You don’t think my being here is a very good idea, do you, Eli?”
The question popped past her lips before she could alter its brash factor, and even though her pulse thrummed in the wake of her words, she still didn’t take them back.
He gave her a slow up-and-down stare before answering with extreme caution. “We’re all happy to have the opportunity to host you, and I’d be right glad to tell you anything you’d like to know about Cross Creek.”
Oh, screw caution. Scarlett needed a story she could use, not some canned party line or tutorial on the care and feeding of chickens. “So you’ll tell me all about the farm. Just nothing about you personally.”
“Are you going to talk my ear off all day?” Eli asked, dishing up a smile that was pure charm. Which was interesting, really, seeing as it was also pure bullshit. Nobody made a habit of dodging questions with a smirk and a honey-covered drawl unless they had something they didn’t want seen.
“That depends,” Scarlett said. “Are you going to avoid my questions all day?”
His smile slipped, the glint in his eyes cooling to a steely blue in the growing daylight. “If we don’t hurry up and finish in here, we’re going to be late for breakfast.”
A yes if she’d ever heard one. Time to pull out all the stops. “The rest of your family seems perfectly comfortable with me digging into the personal-interest side of farm life. What makes you so different?”
Eli closed the space between them in strides so fast Scarlett had barely registered his movement before he was as close as he could possibly be without touching her. For a second, he said nothing, just giving her a storm-colored stare that sent a bolt of unrepentant heat all the way up her spine. But despite the intensity in his eyes, he also looked far from angry or mean, and she didn’t step back or stand down even though she had plenty of room behind her to do so.
Scarlett’s heart slammed beneath her T-shirt as she tipped her face up to take that stare head-on. Eli’s exhale coasted over her cheek, his voice soft yet serious as sin as he snapped their banter—along with any headway Scarlett had made with him this morning—cleanly in half.
“What makes me different is that I’m the one who’s got to make up for all the time that gets lost standing here yapping instead of working like I need to be. So like I said, if you’ve got questions about Cross Creek, I’m happy to oblige. Other than that, if you want to get personal, you’re gonna have to do it with someone other than me.”