“You say that like I have a care for manners,” he drawled. “And you aren’t answering the question.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shitshitshit! “I—”
It was on the tip of Marley’s tongue to deny the whole thing, to go brash and bitchy and push him away. Explaining the situation would mean she’d have to explain everything, and Sierra could get into serious trouble. But Greyson had clearly seen Marley leave groceries on that step both times, and as weird as it was, if anyone would understand that things weren’t always what they seemed, it was him.
So she looked him straight in those see-all eyes and said, “I didn’t steal the groceries from The Corner Market on the day I was arrested. Sierra did.”
12
Holy hell. Greyson didn’t know what he’d been expecting when he’d called Marley out for sneaking around and leaving groceries on the Becketts’ back step, but this definitely wasn’t it.
“Wait,” he said, trying like mad to process what she had said. “Sierra stole the groceries and you took the fall? But she’s a kid. Christ, you don’t even know her. Why would you do that?”
“Because.” Marley knotted her arms over her chest, looking far more beautiful than she should with her chin hiked and her blue eyes blazing like the bright-hot core of a candle flame. “It’s a long story.”
Greyson crossed his arms to mirror her stubbornness. Beautiful or not, he wanted answers. “I’ve got time.”
Marley huffed out a breath, the gravel beneath her boots popping softly as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “It’s true that I don’t know Sierra. Not really, anyway. But you do, right?”
“Not as well as I know a lot of other folks in town,” Greyson said slowly. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said Sierra and her mother mostly kept to themselves. “But yeah. I guess I know her and her mom well enough.”
“Right. So you’ve seen how skinny she is.”
Greyson’s stomach tightened. He’d never really given it a mountain of thought before, having only seen the girl here or there at The Corner Market or town events, like Millhaven’s Fall Fling or the Fourth of July parade, but… “Yeah.”
“When I stumbled on her at the market, I caught her stealing groceries,” Marley said. “It was pretty obvious that she was hungry and not some punk shoplifting for the thrill of it. She was going to put everything back, but then the manager saw what was going on, and…”
She trailed off, but Greyson filled in the blanks easily enough. Damn. “You said the bag was yours so she wouldn’t get in trouble.”
Marley bit her lip and nodded, her dark hair shushing over her shoulders. “It was kind of a snap decision. I don’t regret it,” she added, emphatically enough that Greyson believed her. “I guess I just wasn’t thinking I’d get arrested and tossed in jail. Which is dumb, I know. Shoplifting is illegal.”
“It’s not all that dumb,” Greyson countered. Hell, he’d been the same way with his parking tickets. “You thought you’d get into trouble, then get yourself out, right?”
“Yeah.”
Greyson thought about it for a minute, his mind snagging on the one part of the story that didn’t quite add up. “How come you didn’t let Sierra take the blame? I get that she’d have gotten into trouble,” he tacked on quickly. “But she’s a kid, so she probably would’ve gotten a slap on the wrist. Especially if you’d gone to bat for her and said she was going to put everything back. So why not tell the truth?”
“I couldn’t.” For the first time since she’d opened her mouth, Marley hesitated. “Sierra might not have gotten in nearly as much trouble for shoplifting as I did, but if I hadn’t taken the blame, the Department of Family Services would have been notified, and she’d have been taken from her mom.”
The defiant look in Marley’s eyes came back in full force, pulling at Greyson’s curiosity for the thousandth time today. He didn’t know the particulars of Marley’s family life—not anything that could be backed up with actual facts, anyway. God knew there were plenty of rumors churning through the gossip mill about her mother, who had been Tobias Cross’s wife’s best friend and had clearly had an affair with him after Miss Rosemary had died of breast cancer twenty-six years ago. But Greyson knew better than to take rumors at face value, just like he knew that look on Marley’s face meant she wasn’t going to say another word on the subject.
Realizing it was all he was going to get out of her, he tabled the topic. For now. “So, you took the blame for something you didn’t do in order to keep a kid out of trouble. Why tell me?”
“What?” Marley blinked, and while Greyson might be content to let the rest of it slide, on this, he wasn’t going to budge.
“You feel strongly enough about this to lie to the sheriff and a judge, not to mention I’m assuming your brothers and old man don’t know what really happened.”
“I didn’t exactly lie,” she argued, but at the sharp look he delivered in reply, she said, “I just got really creative with the facts.”
Greyson waved a hand through the air, squinting at her through the lowering sunlight of the yard. “Okay, fine. But you could’ve easily stonewalled me just now, the same way you’ve been doing with everyone else, and I know your brothers. I’m sure they’ve all asked. Why tell me the truth and not any of them?”
“Because I trust you.”
The words were simple. Only four of them, five syllables in total, uttered with less than a full breath. They shouldn’t have made his brain command his feet to close the space between him and Marley, and they damn sure shouldn’t be making his heart squeeze behind his breastbone.
Yet here he was, right up in her personal space with his pulse pounding like a nine-pound hammer, and fuck, she was so pretty, it damn near hurt.
“You trust me.”
His voice came out low and rough, but she didn’t shy away. She had plenty of wide open space to take a step back. God knew she sure was fierce enough to let him know it if he’d gotten too close.
But instead, Marley lifted her chin to meet his stare with just as much heat as he felt pumping through his veins. “Yeah. I do.”
“That’s probably not smart,” he said, and there. There it was, that flare of stubbornness in her eyes that made his cock rock-hard and his brain short out.
“How is it not smart?” she asked. “You’re the one who said I shouldn’t believe everything I heard. You flat-out told me you’re not always as bad as you seem, that it’s mostly reputation, not fact, and…”
She kept arguing, and Greyson’s composure—which had already been questionable at best, thanks—frayed with every sassy word. He knew, in his blood and his bones and in all the other parts of him that he really shouldn’t think about right now, that what he wanted was a monumentally bad idea.
Which is probably why he didn’t think twice about doing it.
Pushing forward, Greyson slanted his mouth over Marley’s to capture her words, mid-sentence. Somewhere, in some far-off passageway in his brain, he realized she’d probably be pissed about that later. She wasn’t the type of woman to take being shushed, and—he realized with a stab of panic—she’d gone still under his mouth.
But then she flung her arms around his shoulders with the sort of urgency that made him go still right back, and the truth slammed into him, hard and fast.
She wasn’t just hungry. She was starving.
Greyson swung her around, walking her backward until she bumped against the nearest flat surface, which just so happened to be his truck. Her mouth was surprisingly soft considering how many arguments she liked to form with it, and he slid his tongue over her bottom lip, coaxing his way inside.
As it turned out, Marley didn’t need any encouragement. Opening in a seamless glide, she deepened the kiss, her tongue meeting his in bold strokes. He reached up to tunnel his fingers through her hair, wanting to hold her right where she was so he could taste every delicious, forbidden inch of her. She arched into his grip, coasting her hands from his should
ers to his chest to his waist, gripping his T-shirt and holding him just as tightly as he was holding her, and he exhaled by way of a low moan.
“You keep doing that, darlin’,” Greyson said, against her lips because no way was he willing to actually part from her now that he’d had a taste, “and I may not be able to mind my manners.”
Marley didn’t hesitate to kiss him harder, taking his mouth like a dare. “I thought you didn’t have a care for manners,” she said, shuddering in his grasp when he trailed a path of hot, open-mouthed kisses from her jawline over her neck. “Oh, God. Don’t stop doing that.”
Greyson’s mouth shaped a smirk on her skin. “There you go, getting bossy.”
“I’m”—Marley paused for a sigh that made him want to lay waste to every stitch of Godforsaken clothing between them so he could sink into her, fast and hard and deep—“decisive.”
“You’re bossy,” he said with a laugh as he kissed his way to her collarbone. “Just like a Cross.”
Every part of Marley stilled save her pulse, which beat wildly against Greyson’s lips. “I’m not a Cross,” she said, pulling away from him so fast, he was momentarily dizzy.
“I know, I just…” He shook his head, his own heartbeat cranking faster in his chest. “I guess in the heat of the moment, I just forgot.”
“Well, don’t.”
She looked angry on the surface, her eyes glinting and her kiss-swollen mouth compressed in a flat line, and even though Greyson could see the deeper, more vulnerable emotion lurking beneath her attitude, his own irritation threatened to rise.
“Look, I get it. Family can be a pain. I’m not real crazy about mine, either. But—”
“Believe me, you don’t get it.”
Greyson’s shoulders stiffened. He didn’t get it? Maybe he hadn’t gone all emo, heart-on-the-floor confessional earlier, but he’d still told her things no one knew. He’d confided in her, and she’d said she trusted him, for fuck’s sake. How had he been dumb enough to fall for that?
No one ever trusted a Whittaker.
Out of pure, unbridled instinct, he pushed. Hard. “Right. Of course I don’t. Anyway, if you’re done distracting me, why don’t we call it a night? I’ve got more important things to do.”
Anyone else would’ve flinched, or at the very least, pushed back. Greyson knew this as well as he knew his own name—in fact, he counted on it.
But as soon as Marley shrugged and said, “Fine by me,” then walked away, he realized his error.
She wasn’t like anyone else.
Two days later, Greyson’s frustration levels had reached an all-time high. His waking hours had been full of backbreaking labor, thanks to the double header of a heat wave and a malfunction of the irrigation system that kept their largest corn field from turning into a wasteland. His nights? Well, those had brimmed over with dark and dirty thoughts of a brash, smart-mouthed brunette who he shouldn’t want and couldn’t have.
I trust you.
“Got those water lines under control?”
His father’s gravel-road voice sent him winging around, and Jesus, he needed to focus.
“Yeah,” Greyson said, giving the field one last look so he wouldn’t have to meet his old man’s non-committal stare. “It was a pain where no pill can reach to fix the damn thing, but the system looks set.” So as not to piss off fate, he added, “For now.”
“Hmm.”
The noise was all his father gave up, and okay, yeah, Greyson needed to be somewhere else on the farm, working the land and getting his hands good and dirty so he could get his head screwed on straight, once and for freaking all. “Anyway. I’m going to check the peach orchard. If I can get things just right for these last two weeks before peak season starts, I think we’ll be looking at our best season yet for produce, especially pick-your-own.”
“Not sure it’s worth the bother,” his old man said with a lift of his shoulder that stopped halfway before listing down beneath his T-shirt, as if it couldn’t be bothered to make the entire trip into a true shrug. “Those damn things have grown themselves the past coupl’a years. Babyin’ ’em seems like wasted effort.”
Greyson’s molars met with a clack. Those peaches had been the crown jewel of Whittaker Hollow’s reputation for the past three years, easy, thanks to Greyson’s ball-busting work. They grew them leaps and bounds better than Cross Creek, to the point that the Crosses had stopped trying to compete, focusing their efforts on their fancy-schmancy specialty produce instead. But nothing grew itself out here, and it was a fact his father damn well knew. One that Greyson was in just enough of a shitty, sleepless mood to point out.
“Actually, they haven’t grown themselves. I’ve grown them, and I’ve done a damned good job of it.”
The implication hung in the humid afternoon air, just as Greyson had intended it to, and his father bit.
“How come you love it so much?” he asked, his voice more contempt than curiosity. But Greyson was sick of all the back and forth, all the little jabs that never amounted to anything other than scrapes and bruises.
This time, he wanted blood.
“How come you don’t? This is your farm. Your legacy. You wanted to run the place once”—he lifted one hand in a pre-emptive effort to stop the protest his father’s expression said he’d been working up—“and don’t tell me you didn’t, because I remember. You and Uncle Steve and I had plans for this farm. Big ones.”
For a second, the hardness his father had worn for nearly a decade faltered, making Greyson’s throat knot. But he’d pushed first, and oh, how his old man was an expert in pushing right back.
“And just look how those plans turned out. Steve got what he wanted. Then the bastard up and died. Now, ain’t nobody gettin’ what they want. Life’s just full of broken promises.”
For a beat, then two, Greyson stood there, paralyzed on the dusty path next to the rows and rows of corn. His heart twisted—he missed his uncle, too, for Chrissake, missed the belly laughs the guy used to give out like Halloween candy, the way his dark eyes sparked with excitement, pure and real, when he talked about the best ways to work the land. Greyson opened his mouth to say so, but his old man beat him to the punch, knocking him down for the count, as always.
“Do whatever you want with the peaches,” he said, turning his back on Greyson as he started back toward the house. “You’re going to anyway, and I don’t give a shit.”
13
Marley stood on the threshold of the shelter in her three-inch heels and ridiculously trendy, faux-leather-trimmed tank dress, and flat-out balked about going inside. She was risking Louis’s wrath, she knew, or at the very least, some top shelf side-eye for being late. It was five past four—this stupid commute was going to make her motion sick, not to mention bat-shit crazy—and Greyson’s dented and dinged truck was already parked in its usual spot in the gravel side lot, the dust settled around it as if he’d arrived a good ten minutes ago. But despite the fact that she’d had to battle an unnerving amount of traffic and nearly break her neck to arrive even close to on time, here she stood, unable to do anything other than not go inside.
You keep doing that, darlin’, and I may not be able to mind my manners…
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Marley muttered under her breath. Okay, yes. So she’d had a weak moment and told Greyson the truth about Sierra, then an even weaker moment when they’d kissed. It’d been just a heat-of-the-moment thing. Consensual, sure. Hot? Oh, hell yes. But not that big a deal. She’d been kissed by plenty of guys. Dozens, even.
Except.
She’d spent the last year of her life keeping everyone at arm’s length, literally. It wasn’t just that Marley shied away from touching other people, although she definitely did avoid it at all costs. But sometimes she felt dread, or even straight-up panic, at the simplest physical contact. Her former landlady folding her into an awkward, cardboard cutout hug when she’d left Chicago. Cate putting a hand over hers to guide her through a baking technique. One
of her brothers offering up a simple shoulder squeeze. Marley hadn’t wanted to touch anyone, or let anyone touch her, for so long, it had become her default.
But she’d wanted Greyson to touch her. No. That wasn’t quite right, she thought, her cheeks heating as she shifted her weight on the sun-baked porch boards. She’d wanted him to learn her with his hands, to kiss her and undress her and explore every last part of her body in slow, intimate strokes. In that moment, Marley hadn’t just wanted his touch.
She’d craved it. And worse was that, for as abrupt as their parting had been and as hard as she’d tried for the last two days, she couldn’t make herself stop.
The whole thing was ridiculous, she thought, turning the damned knob and making her way inside the shelter. Greyson might be hot (so. So. So hot. God, it was almost unfair), but he was also a jerk. He’d talked such a good game about not wanting to be judged by his family, then turned around and called her a Cross, lumping her in with her biological family like nothing-doing? Nope. No way. She should’ve known better than to deviate from her original plan of do the work, get out of Dodge. Do not make friends, do not kiss the hot guy, do not pass “go”, do not collect two hundred dollars.
Marley rushed through the dingy lobby, making her way to the back of the shelter. She’d change her clothes once she let Louis know she was here. He was already going to be pissed.
“You’re late,” he said, proving her right as she arrived in the back room where he stood, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, beside an impossible-to-read Greyson.
“I’m sorry,” she said genuinely. Just because she didn’t want to be here didn’t mean she hadn’t earned the obligation. “I got a little caught up at work. If you want, I can stay a few minutes late tonight to make up for the lost time.”
“Oh.” Louis gave up a slow blink. “Well, as long as you get the work done, I s’pose a few minutes’ll be alright. Just this once, though.”
Crossing Hope (Cross Creek Series Book 4) Page 12
