CHAPTER SEVEN
Although Scarlett would rather be raked across a mile-long bed of coals than admit it, farm life was kicking her ever-loving ass. Running a hand over her lower back—which was a lovely shade of tomato, thanks to the fact that she’d missed it with the sunscreen three days ago—she tossed her keys onto the counter in her borrowed kitchen, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge before dragging herself to the couch in the living room.
“Ahhh. Home sweet home for now.” The muscles in her legs let loose with a hallelujah chorus as she flopped back against the cushions, allowing herself a few seconds’ worth of oh-hell-yes relief before reaching for the camera bag at her side. Carefully unearthing Baby from its heavily padded resting spot, Scarlett clicked the camera to life, sharpening her gaze over the display screen on the back as she scrolled through today’s pictures, one by one.
Thoroughly meh. Again.
“Dammit,” she muttered, her gut sliding south. She’d been here in the boondocks for five whole days, actively shooting for the last four straight. Cross Creek was a beautiful farm, with dozens of scenic views and endless opportunities to snap the perfect shot. But for some reason, even the best of her photos were missing that extra something that took them from “pretty” to “utterly compelling.”
Some reason. Right. Make that a cocky, six-foot-four, close-lipped, muscle-packed reason.
Eli Cross was driving her insane without saying a word.
Okay, so technically, he wasn’t giving her the absolutely silent treatment. He’d stuck to his promise of answering every question she’d had about the farm. But he’d also kept to his affirmation that getting personal wasn’t anywhere near his agenda, putting his nose so hard against the Cross Creek grindstone instead that Scarlett had needed to dump all her energy into keeping up with even the small stuff.
Which was problematic, since what she really needed was a huge story concept.
“Okay,” she said, shaking her head to re-cement her determination. Although the light had been iffy, she’d managed to get a few pictures of Hunter early this morning, before the Crosses had met to discuss their agendas over breakfast and then scattered to the four winds of the farm. She might—maybe . . . hopefully . . . please, please, please—be able to turn one of them into a good-enough image for Mallory to use. But before she could take out her laptop to make the best of today’s shots, her cell phone did the jump and jangle from the back pocket of her these-have-been-cleaner jeans.
Scarlett smiled despite her exhaustion—God, Eli hadn’t been kidding about the work being hard to get used to. “Hey, Mal. Please tell me you’re drinking a four-shot soy-vanilla latte, because seriously, at least one of us should be.”
“I’m on my second one in the last six hours,” Mallory confirmed, the words making Scarlett both groan and laugh.
“You sure know how to kick a girl when she’s down.”
“Sorry. It’s been a long day. Anyway, how’s it going over there in the heartland?”
Scarlett’s gut gave up a healthy pang, but she muscled past it. Think positive, girl. “I actually just got back from the farm a few minutes ago. I’m shuffling through the pictures right now.”
“Of course you are.” Mallory laughed, but only for a second. “So, what did you shoot today?”
“Lots of corn. I’m here to tell you, harvesting that stuff is harder than it looks.” She sure had the muscle aches to back that up. But she hadn’t been about to let Eli think she was some inept urbanite who couldn’t hold her own. Scarlett had met every challenge he’d tossed in her direction. Except for getting in his good graces, anyway. “Did you get the photos of the hens and all the information on Cross Creek’s specialty produce I sent yesterday?”
Mallory paused. “Mmm-hmm. I’ve got yesterday’s photos in front of me right now. I finished mocking up the first round of introductory articles today, and they should go live at midnight. The farm looks really pretty.”
The unspoken “but” hung heavy in her voice, and since Scarlett had never pulled punches in her entire thirty years, she gave the word voice. “But?”
“Look, don’t get me wrong,” Mallory said. “The pictures are great—your pictures are always great—and the information is all good. But the shots with people in them are kind of few and far between, and the articles read kind of like a travel brochure. I’m just not getting the really powerful sense of personal connection I’d been hoping for.”
Sure. That was because the powerful connection Scarlett really wanted to make was the one between her foot and Eli Cross’s very sexy, very stubborn ass. “Yeah, the point of contact I spend most of my time with is a little, um. Still a little camera shy.”
Mallory let out a chirp of surprise. “Seriously? Emerson was so excited when I told her I was sending you. She practically bubbled over with that crazy hospitality thing small-town people do, telling me how happy the Crosses would all be to accommodate the personal-interest angle we wanted to pursue.”
“No, no. Emerson has been great,” Scarlett said in an effort to file the edge off the panic threading through Mallory’s voice. “Everything’s going to be fine. It’s just taken a few days for the Crosses to adjust to having a photographer around.”
Specifically, the one Cross with whom she spent 90-plus percent of her day. Dammit, a tiny handful of iffy shots of everyone else just wasn’t going to be enough. Capturing one really great image either required a truckload full of luck or fifty shots you had to ditch first, and Scarlett was fresh out of both.
A pause extended from Mallory’s end of the phone line. “But you think this guy will start opening up now that you’ve been there for almost a week?”
Crap. Time for a little smoke and mirrors. She could do this. She could. She just needed to figure out how.
“I think I’m going to come up with some more in-depth personal-interest stuff really soon. Look”—Scarlett took a deep breath, glancing down at the camera in her lap—“I managed to sneak in a few good shots of Emerson cutting flowers for the roadside farm stand today. I’ll get them edited and over to you tonight so you can squeeze one or two into the first round of articles if you want.”
“That does sound promising,” Mallory agreed. “I can put those with the pictures of the specialty produce and a few recipes we’ve got in the archives. The photos of the heirloom tomatoes you sent yesterday look really pretty on-screen.”
Hope pushed Scarlett’s pulse a little faster in her veins, locking her resolve back into place. “Perfect. Tomorrow, I’ll focus on shooting the first video segment. I can start with a welcome to Cross Creek sort of thing, nice and laid-back.” At least, it would be, provided she could get Eli to agree to actually do it. But she’d cross that bridge when she got there. She was here to work. To do her best to save Mallory’s magazine. If that meant she had to take more drastic measures to make these stories happen, then so be it.
“Trust me, Mal. The stuff I’m going to shoot tomorrow will be the best yet. You just wait and see.”
Eli slumped against the old wingback chair in the corner of the study-turned-office at Cross Creek’s main house, absolutely convinced he was going blind.
“Is this all of them?” he asked Owen, holding up the list of weekly CSA orders that their ancient printer had just spit out.
His brother looked up from the hunt-and-peck job he’d been doing at their equally ancient desktop computer, his frown answering the question before he even opened his mouth. “Every last one. But just because they’re a little thin this week doesn’t mean we don’t have to fill ’em.”
The orders were more than a little thin—Christ, they were practically malnourished. But saying so would only make Eli the master of the obvious, along with supremely frustrated, so instead, he went with, “Alright. The henhouse is all set, and the last of those hay bales I harvested yesterday are in the loft, waiting to go up into storage. So I can get started on these right now.”
“You’ve been busy today, huh?” Hunter stuck the paperwork for the delivery he’d just made to Clementine’s Diner into the logbook by the door. His brows traveled up in question and curiosity, and Eli’s gut twisted in response. He might not always do as much work as his brothers, but they didn’t have to act so surprised when he was productive.
He covered his frustration with a haphazard shrug. “Like you said, the work needs done.” Not that filling these CSA orders would take Eli long. Dammit, how could business still be lagging when he’d been busting his ass twice as hard as ever? “How are the blackberry fields looking?”
“Not too bad,” Hunter said, although his tone tacked on a nonverbal as long as your gauge for bad is being skinned alive with a spoon. “Probably not enough there to put them in those CSA orders, but with some luck and maybe a good rain, we can likely squeeze in a decent round of pick-your-own early next week. How’s it going with Scarlett?”
“Outstanding,” he said, but the word carried none of the easy charm he’d meant to pin it with. Rolling his shoulders beneath the faded-red cotton of his T-shirt, Eli went for a do-over. “She’s in the kitchen, taking pictures of some of the eggs she collected this morning. Said something about the butcher block being a textural gold mine with the juxtaposition of the late-morning sunlight in there. Or whatever.”
While Eli tended to agree, he’d been all too happy to leave Scarlett to her own resources for a few minutes while he’d gotten caught up in the office. It had taken everything he’d had to dodge the overzealous click-click-click of her camera shutter over the last four and a half days and focus on drumming up enough strength and energy to keep his foot on the work pedal, full bore.
Not that the work was actually helping to ramp up business.
“Heard the Whittakers hauled in a truckload of peaches this week.” Owen delivered the news with all the enthusiasm of a death knell, and great, now Eli had a cherry for the top of today’s shit sundae. But peaches had always been the one crop they’d struggled to grow at Cross Creek, to the point that even Owen—who had studied every soil composition and complex fertilizer under the sun and stars—had even given up the ghost. Of course, Whittaker Hollow seemed to grow the damned things as easy as weeds. A late-season bumper crop would send everyone in town beelining to their tent at tomorrow’s farmers’ market, no question.
Still, the flavor of the gossip depended on the source, and some were more rotten than others. Especially where the Whittakers were concerned. “Who told you that?” Eli asked.
“Lane,” Owen said, and so much for that. Lane Atlee might be a scary hulk of a dude, but he was Millhaven’s sheriff, not to mention Owen’s best friend, which meant the intel was sadly legit. “He overheard Harley Martin talking about it at the Corner Market yesterday. Apparently Greyson told his sister Kelsey, who told Amber Cassidy, who told everybody with a pulse. But she also posted pictures on both Facebook and Instagram, and their website says they even added special pick-your-own hours yesterday. So it looks like for once, Greyson’s not full of piss and wind.”
Unable to help it, Eli arched a brow. “Oh, I’m sure he still is. Just maybe not about the peaches.”
“Yeah, well you’d better hope we catch a break, otherwise he’s going to be full of piss and wind and bragging rights no one in this town will ever hear the end of. Plus five thousand dollars we don’t have to give.”
Hunter cleared his throat from his spot by the door, slipping into that easygoing let-it-slide thing he always did, right on cue. “Speaking of a few bragging rights . . . the first article went up on FoodE’s website this morning.”
“Yeah?” Eli threw some effort into keeping his increased heart rate far away from his expression. “Are we keeping up with the Kardashians yet?”
Hunter barked out a laugh, and bingo: attention averted. “No, jackass. They were mostly an overview, but Scarlett made the farm look nice. Gave up some Cross Creek history and featured Owen’s heirloom tomatoes from the greenhouse.”
Huh. Can’t say he’d seen that coming. That sounded almost . . . normal. “I’ll have to take a look when I’ve got a sec.” Right about now, that’d be when he was ninety, but hey. He had work to get done, and not a little bit.
Work, it seemed, that Owen was determined to stir up with a monkey wrench. “There’s a great shot of Emerson cutting flowers from the garden and some good ones of yesterday’s farm stand,” he said, his gray-blue eyes narrowing just enough to make Eli’s pulse do the thump-thump-oh-shit in his veins. “But I noticed you’re not in any of the pictures Mallory posted online, and you’re not really quoted in any of the articles, either. You want to tell me why that is?”
Eli’s defenses went on offense, pushing his smile to the forefront. “Because out of everyone on this farm, Hunter’s girl is the only person prettier than me.”
“Eli,” Owen warned. “Just because you think these personal-interest articles are a bad idea doesn’t mean they are. You can’t slack off on this like you do everything else.”
Christ, he needed to beat feet before this conversation turned into quicksand. “Whatever you say, brother.”
“I say you need to make good and sure you don’t piss Scarlett off.”
The words carried just enough edge to send Eli’s molars into a hard grind and Hunter’s chin snapping up. “Owen—” Hunter started, but, yeah, Eli’d had enough.
“Trust me. If Scarlett’s pissed, she’ll let you know. Anyway, since there aren’t enough blackberries for these CSA orders, I’d better hit the apple orchard so I can grab the early Jonagolds and Galas instead. See y’all later.”
With only the briefest of pauses to snag one of the two-way radios from the charging stand by the door, he aimed his Red Wings toward the kitchen before either Owen or Hunter could say anything else. But come on. Scarlett might have surprised Eli a little (okay, a lot) by mostly keeping up with the day-to-day stuff, but now more than ever, he needed to be double-timing it to get ahead of the curve. Just like now more than ever, he needed to stay the hell away from Scarlett’s camera. Between her sharp eyes and her even sharper wit, dodge and deflect was his only chance at survival.
He was already the black sheep of his family. He could not, under any circumstances, let her see any glimmer of the fact that he didn’t belong at Cross Creek.
Because the camera never fucking lied, and his entire family—hell, everyone in the entire town—was clearly watching.
Stuffing the thought down as far as humanly possible, Eli cut a path toward the kitchen, where he found Scarlett behind the butcher-block island. Although her body faced his, her attention was lasered in on both the camera in front of her face and the shot in front of the lens, leaving her inevitably unaware of his presence. She hummed softly under her breath as she worked, the slim line of her shoulders strong yet relaxed and her motions fluid, and even without being able to glimpse her face, Eli would have to be a complete ignoramus to miss the reality right in front of him.
She looked perfectly, irrevocably, unapologetically comfortable in her own skin.
And wasn’t that something he’d never once felt at Cross Creek.
“Sorry,” he said, blinking back the nameless sensation slapping him directly in the sternum. “I don’t mean to interrupt—”
Scarlett looked up from the camera, her face bright and her smile huge, and so much for losing that weird feeling that was now making itself nice and comfy between his ribs. “No, no, no. You have perfect timing! Come see.”
Eli’s legs had auto-piloted halfway over the kitchen tiles before his brain could consider any other strategy. “Okay. What am I looking at?”
She answered by way of tapping her way through the display screen on the back of the camera. “Your father just stopped in to grab some more water for him and Lucy before he went back out to get ready to harvest corn with your brothers, and when he was washing his hands at the sink, I had this idea.” After a few more taps, she unlooped the camera strap from its resting spot around her neck and angled the screen so he could see the image she’d pulled up. “What do you think?”
Whoa. Eli leaned in close, his shoulder brushing against Scarlett’s ever so slightly as he bent to look at the digital photo of three pale-green eggs cradled carefully between his father’s callused, sun-burnished hands. The sight seemed like such a normal thing—a thing Eli had probably seen no less than a bazillion times in his life. Yet the way Scarlett had arranged the photograph, with the diffused sunlight all around and the contrast of the fragile eggs against the hardy ruggedness of his old man’s hands, was so simple and at the same time powerful enough to jab him right in the gut.
Scarlett must not have sensed all the “holy shit” taking the fast path through Eli’s veins, because she jumped in with a harder sell. “Don’t get me wrong. The eggs look pretty all by themselves.” She clicked back through the camera roll, and sure enough, the shots she’d taken of the eggs, both on the butcher block and in the hay-lined bucket she’d used to carry them up to the house, were kinda nice. “But I thought if your dad held them like this, with the eggs resting in his palms . . .”
“His hands would mimic a nest.”
“Exactly! The personal element is subtle, but it takes the whole thing from good to perfect,” she crowed, returning her pretty green gaze to the image with a smile.
No, smile wasn’t exactly accurate. Scarlett was giving up a full-blown grin, her eyes sparkling and her nose crinkling in a way that was far sexier than it should’ve been. Eli was close enough to see the dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose, the gold-tipped sweep of her eyelashes, the exact shade of her perfect pink mouth, and heat rushed over him on the heels of his quickening pulse.
She was really beautiful. And if he stood here any longer thinking so, he was going to be really, really screwed.
“Right.” Eli cleared his throat, then did it again for good measure. Christ, all this stress over brothers and bets and peaches was making him loony tunes. “So, uh, how do you feel about picking apples?”
“Ummm, interesting segue,” Scarlett said, tucking a few wayward strands of platinum hair behind one ear as she lowered her camera to the safety of the butcher block. “Apples sound great. Just let me get these eggs put away.”
By the time she was done with the quick pickup and a tuck and slide of the cardboard egg crate back into the timeworn Kenmore in his old man’s kitchen, Eli thankfully had his libido pretty much under control. Reorienting his thoughts, he ushered Scarlett past the back door and out into the yard of the main house.
“So, apples,” she prompted in that both-feet-first manner he was quickly becoming accustomed to, and he kicked into Wikipedia mode as he led the way toward his truck.
“We grow a handful of different varieties, and there are about two hundred apple trees on Cross Creek’s property in all. They’re on the east side, way over by Owen’s place, so we’ll have to drive.”
“Okay.” Although she’d ditched taking notes on her iPad once the thing had overheated enough times on day one to turn it into the world’s priciest paperweight, she still asked a truckload of questions, and Eli braced himself for the barrage that she was surely working up.
Only instead, she just opened the passenger door and climbed into the truck, and okay, yeah, that was officially weird. But since weird was better than death by questions, he pulled himself into the F-150’s driver’s seat, hitting both the automatic ignition and the control to lower the front-seat windows. The weather was still dry and hot—thank you, late August—and the run to the apple orchard wouldn’t take long enough for the AC to cool the truck much.
“So,” Scarlett said as he pulled out onto the dirt-and-gravel road leading away from the house, drawing out the word just long enough to trip his uh-oh sensors. “Now that it’s nice and light out, I was thinking about shooting some video.”
Eli used the entire length of his inhale to temper the slam of his heartbeat before throwing on a cocky smile. “Be my guest, but I have to be honest. That old adage about watching the grass grow is sadly pretty true.”
“And that is precisely why I want to give people something more exciting to watch than the grass.”
His knuckles tightened a fraction over the smooth leather of the steering wheel, and he tried a different tack. “I’m sure Hunter or Owen would be happy to oblige.”
“Okay, but they’re not here and you are,” Scarlett pointed out, and jeez, how could her smile be so pretty and so merciless at the same damned time? “Plus, between all the work Owen does in the greenhouse on the other side of the property and Hunter’s meetings with Emerson to develop marketing strategies, I barely ever see either of them in action, and I need a story today. Now.”
For a brief second, Eli wondered whether Scarlett had a setting other than all-in-right-this-second. But as much as he hated it, he’d known that dodging the camera for the entire month was going to be impossible. Better this than copping to the fact that the reason they barely ever saw his brothers on any given day was that Eli always got the grunt work and extra jobs.
He went for a haphazard shrug. “If you need a warm body in a still shot or two, I guess I can stand in. But no video.”
Scarlett’s smile faltered, and she pushed her windblown hair from her face as he pulled the truck to a less than seamless stop in front of the footpath leading to the apple grove. “Shooting video is easy. All you have to do is talk about how much you love the farm. You can even pretend you’re talking to just me if you want.”
Translation: you can pretend you’re pretzeling the truth for just me instead of the entirety of the Internet. No frigging thanks. “I’ve got too much work for this,” he said, pushing his way out of the driver’s seat and heading to the bed of the truck as a case in point.
Scarlett followed on the other side of the F-150, her falter turning into a frown. “Let’s get something straight. Cross Creek is pretty and all, but I’m not out here for shits and giggles. I have a job to do, too.”
“And I’m not keeping you from it,” Eli reminded her. “All I’m telling you is that if you want someone to play reality TV, you’re going to have to ask Hunter or Owen.”
“But I’m here right now with you. You’re my point of contact, Eli, and—”
Just like that, his frustration tipped. “Scarlett, I’m not changing my mind. I have enough work on my plate to keep three of me running all over hell’s half acre, and believe me when I say that even if by some miracle I can get to all of it, there’ll be plenty more waiting. So could we please stop wasting precious time here? These apples aren’t gonna jump off the trees in surrender.”
For a second, she said nothing, simply standing in front of him with her hands on her hips and her mouth flattened into thin, pale line. But then she let out a curt “Fine,” turning toward the sun-strewn path leading to the apple grove, and halle-freaking-lujah. Maybe now she’d stop bugging him, and he could get a jump on this damned bet, once and for all.
Eli hooked a palm beneath the handle of one of the stepladders in the bed of his truck, grabbing a sturdy wooden crate with his other hand before following Scarlett down the path. Although she remained uncharacteristically quiet, he had zero doubt her brain was pinging a mile a millisecond, and that as soon as they reached their destination, both her body and her questions would follow suit.
Because they always did.
Taking a deep breath to nail down his resolve, Eli made his way toward the grove. A soft breeze cut through the sun’s efforts to make the morning unbearable, rustling through the bright-green leaves of the trees in front of him and carrying just a hint of the crisp scent of apples. With the commonsense layout of eight rows of twenty-five trees each, the grove wasn’t much to look at from the scenic standpoint. But the branches were studded with enough fruit to send a shot of fuck-yeah through Eli’s blood, and finally, finally, a check mark for his utterly anemic win column.
He didn’t waste any time crossing the grass and lowering both the stepladder and the crate in his grasp. “Yesssss,” he murmured, 90 percent under his breath but still out loud. Reaching up into the low branches of the tree in front of him, he cupped a freshly ripe Gala in his palm, the skin of the apple smooth and warm from the sunshine hugging its red-gold curves. “So when you pick apples, the most important thing to remember is . . .”
But the rest of his tutorial fell prey to the fact that Scarlett had slipped past him and shouldered her way under the thick of the branches, headed directly to the tree trunk.
“What the hell are you doing?” Eli asked, even though it was painfully obvious that she was A) climbing the tree in front of them, and B) in all probability, insane.
Scarlett didn’t even spare him a backward glance as she maneuvered higher into the network of branches. “I’m playing Tiddlywinks with manhole covers. What do you think I’m doing? If I want a great shot, I’ve got to go get it.”
“You can’t climb to the top to take pictures,” he warned. Okay, so the trees were a few decades old, and the branches weren’t exactly toothpicks. But they weren’t indestructible, either, and even though she’d shrugged out of the backpack and second camera she normally lugged all over God’s green earth, any abrupt shift in weight could spell danger. Not that a little thing like bodily harm would probably deter her.
Case in point. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I can.”
As if to prove her claim, she wrapped her fingers around the branch to her right, planting the sole of one bright-red sneaker, then the other, into a juncture of tree limbs to propel herself even higher into the lush foliage.
Dread crowded Eli’s chest. How had she already made it ten feet off the ground? “I’m not trying to argue semantics, Scarlett. What I meant was—”
“You think it’s dangerous, I could get hurt, blah, blah.” She surprised him with a laugh that was more humor than heat, and for the love of Christmas, this woman’s tenacity knew no bounds. “Seriously, Eli. I know you think I’m some sort of brainless city girl who can’t take care of herself, but trust me. I’ve done far worse than a little tree climbing to get a good shot. And God knows I need to send Mallory pictures of something.”
Fuck if that one didn’t land a direct hit. Still . . . “You need to stop climbing.”
“What I need is to do my job. And I’m perfectly fine. See?” Scarlett turned her chin over her shoulder, her sassy smile holding enough brass for a marching band. “As a matter of fact, I bet if I go a little higher, I’ll be able to clear this branch here and see half the farm.”
Eli saw where she intended to go. Realized a split second later what lay hidden in the leaves directly beside it. And lurched forward with his heart in his windpipe.
“Scarlett, stop!”
The cut-glass tone of his voice must have gotten through her shit-stubborn determination, because—thank fuck—she paused. But in that moment, she must have also heard the soft, insidious buzzing of the yellow jackets in the softball-sized hive now just over her shoulder, because she whipped around, her eyes as wide as dinner plates. The shock on her face lasted for only a time-stopping instant before it morphed into pain. Scarlett yanked her arm from the tree branch with enough force to kill what was left of her already precarious balance.
And in the next breath, she tumbled all the way out of the apple tree.