And what’s more, he was sick of keeping it all bottled up.
“The bet is part of it, yeah,” Eli said carefully, because while a little venting might feel really freaking good right now, he also wasn’t going to let loose with all the whys behind his love/hate relationship with his brother. “Owen’s none too happy I picked up the gauntlet Greyson threw in my face, and he’s not shy about reminding me that he’s pissed. I’m sure you’ve noticed he takes the farm real seriously.”
Without even the smallest hitch in her voice or her steps, Scarlett said, “Spoiler alert. Owen’s not the only one who takes Cross Creek seriously. You dragged me all over—what did you call it? Ah, right—hell’s half acre this week, trying to bring in more business. Anyway, you were just standing up for the farm when you took the bet, right?”
“I was, but Owen doesn’t see things that way.”
“There’s another way to see them?”
Eli exhaled in realization. Scarlett didn’t have any brothers or sisters—hell, she’d told him herself how foreign sibling relationships were to her. And as much as his had deep, dark layers he wasn’t about to talk about with anyone, including his siblings, Scarlett had promised they were off the record. Blowing off a little more steam couldn’t hurt.
“There is,” he said. Scanning the picnic areas dotted along the winding path in individual alcoves, he spotted a table farther away from the others, beneath a cluster of oak trees. Scarlett fell into step beside him as he changed course from the neatly paved path to head for the privacy of the alcove, and they covered the grassy, partially wooded space side by side.
“Okay.” She put her gear safely at the other end of the picnic table before settling in on the bench across from him, propping her elbows over the weathered wood. “Explain it to me.”
“Ever since Owen and Hunter and I were little kids, there’s always been this sort of unspoken way of doing things around the farm,” Eli said, making Scarlett’s brows dip in confusion.
“You mean the way you split up who does what?” she asked.
“Sort of. I mean, my brothers and I all know how to do the important stuff, and a lot of that has to be done together.”
She tilted her head, clearly processing. “Like when you harvest corn for the feed distributors.”
“Exactly.” Not even his old man could do the high-caliber tasks like that single-handedly. “But the other tasks and responsibilities fall under this weird sort of umbrella. Owen’s the serious one, and he’s always lived, slept, and breathed for the farm. He’s never made any bones about wanting to run the place when our dad retires.”
Okay, so Eli couldn’t imagine a scenario in which his old man would retire completely, but farming was backbreaking work. At some point, he’d hand over the bulk of day-to-day operations to Owen, just as his old man had done with him. Cross Creek was Owen’s legacy, and always had been.
“I can see that,” Scarlett said slowly, a ray of sunlight catching in her hair as she nodded. “Owen is pretty focused. Plus, he’s obviously devoted to Cross Creek.”
“He’s also the innovator,” Eli said. “Owen loves the farm, but at the same time, he wants to make it bigger and better.”
Her expression balanced between surprise and recognition. “So that’s why he’s always in the greenhouse. He’s working on the specialty produce to help Cross Creek pioneer new territory.”
Eli wrestled the urge to laugh. Of course, Scarlett was sharp enough to make the connection with ease. “And brushing up on new technology. And researching the best soil-to-fertilizer ratios for every plant under the sun. And trying to figure out how to build, staff, and maintain a fixed structure on site that would replace our roadside farm stands. But yeah, you’ve got the idea. If it has to do with Cross Creek, it’s not just on Owen’s radar. It’s in his blood.”
“How about Hunter?” Scarlett asked, and now Eli did laugh.
“Classic middle sibling. Hunt’s the peacekeeper, the guy who we can all count on to split the difference and keep his head on the level.” Christ, Hunter had kept Owen and Eli from knocking knuckles so many times he probably should have been sainted. “He’s just as serious about Cross Creek as Owen, though. He’s never wanted to do anything but work the land. Well, that and be with Emerson.” At Scarlett’s brow lift, Eli added, “They were high school sweethearts.”
“Ah. Another thing that makes perfect sense, given how they look at each other.” She paused, shifting her weight on the silvery, weather-worn bench beneath her. “So Owen is the serious one and Hunter keeps the peace. How about you? Where do you fit into the mix?”
Although her movement had been slight, it had closed some of the space between them, with only the scant width of one table board now separating his hand from her elbow. Scarlett leaned forward, her chin on her long, folded fingers, her green eyes honest and wide open and so wildly pretty that Eli edged closer, too.
“Behind my brothers, I’m afraid. Don’t get me wrong. I like Cross Creek well enough,” he said, because fuck, despite it all, he really did. “But being the charming youngest brother has its disadvantages sometimes.”
“I find that hard to believe.” Not a question, but straight to the point all the same.
So that’s just how Eli answered her. “With four men operating the same farm, someone’s got to be the extra.”
A laugh worked its way up from her throat—he could see it forming at the edges of her mouth in the tiny creases around her eyes. But all at once, the gesture crashed to a halt. “Wait . . . you’re serious?”
“Sure.” He should feel vulnerable, he supposed, laying the truth out there like the Sunday paper. But it was the truth, one anyone who spent enough time looking at the Cross family could see.
Ever since Eli could remember, they’d been the patriarch, the prodigy, the peacekeeper . . .
And the pariah.
“You work pretty hard to be an extra, don’t you think?” Scarlett asked, and his defenses kicked his shoulders into a shrug.
“Everything’s hard work when you operate a farm, and the truth is, I don’t love it the way my old man and brothers do. All four of us have got a role. Mine’s just to do whatever no one else is doin’.”
For just a breath, she sat without speaking, an odd sort of confusion flickering through her stare. But then her expression shifted, and she asked, “It’s been just the four of you, then? Since you and Hunter and Owen were little?”
The question surprised Eli just enough to make him pause, and Scarlett bit down on her lower lip hard enough to leave tiny, curved indents on the skin there.
“You know what, forget I asked. You’ve already said you don’t want to talk about it, and I shouldn’t have—”
He closed the space between his hand and her elbow in an instant, her skin so smooth and warm that he couldn’t pull back if he wanted to.
And he didn’t.
“Since I was four,” Eli said, and funny, the words didn’t stick in his throat the way he thought they would. “My mother died of breast cancer.”
Scarlett’s breath pushed out on a whisper-soft puff that he heard as much as he felt on his cheek. “Oh my God. Eli, I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. I am, too.”
The steady thump-thump-thump of his heart turned his pulse into a whoosh of white noise against his eardrums. This was the tipping point—the part of the conversation that always went from zero to sympathy-awkward in less than two nanoseconds. Although Rosemary Cross’s death didn’t come up as a topic of conversation but once in a blue moon, especially around Eli or either of his brothers—or worse yet, their old man—everyone in Millhaven knew the story.
But rather than gloss over the subject with some overused platitude, Scarlett simply dropped one hand to cover his and held on tight to his stare. “She must have been really young if she died when you were only four.”
“She was thirty-seven when she was diagnosed. She died later that same year.” Again, the admission came out mo
re easily than he’d expected. Which was pretty messed up considering how much dust had collected in its corners.
Scarlett’s fingers remained a sweet, steady pressure on his. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sure that was really difficult for you. And, oh.” She broke off. Inhaled. Then whispered, “For all of you.”
The unvarnished words, the pure emotion in her green-gold eyes that matched them, loosened the tension gripping his chest, at least enough to allow him to breathe.
“Screenings back then weren’t nearly as common or advanced as they are now, and my mother’s cancer was extremely aggressive. By the time she and my old man found out how sick she really was, it was too late to even do more than one round of chemotherapy.”
Of course, Eli had learned that bit from Millhaven’s longtime town physician, Doc Sanders, after fifteen years of not being able to call up one single memory of his mother and not having the heart or the balls to ask anyone who shared his last name. The details of her death hadn’t helped him remember her, though—not even in scraps and clips, the way he remembered kissing Missy Tremaine on the playground in the second grade or falling off his dirt bike and breaking his wrist three days before his sixth birthday.
They did, however, remind him all too well that he should be able to remember at least something about her just like everyone else in his family did, and dammit—dammit! Eli needed to throw the brakes on this conversation right now, otherwise Scarlett was going to see the one thing he was desperate to keep hidden.
He wasn’t just the extra. He was the odd man out. He didn’t belong.
And the guilt was eating him alive.
“Right. Anyway, we should probably get to this video, huh?” Eli shifted, fully prepared to slide his hand from beneath Scarlett’s with a cocky smile and an ironclad vow to keep his trap embroidered shut from now on.
Only she curled her fingers over his and refused to let go.
“Don’t. Please.”
It was the please that froze him into place, the soft, small word arrowing all the way through him and stealing any deflection he could possibly put together. For a second—or maybe it was a minute or an hour, because fuck if Eli could feel anything other than the warm, unyielding pressure of Scarlett’s hand on his—he said nothing, sitting perfectly motionless on a picnic bench that might as well have been light-years away.
But still, Scarlett didn’t blink. “I know talking about your mom must be difficult, and we can change the subject if you want. But don’t do that.”
“Do what?” Eli managed past the tight knot in his throat.
“Don’t hide,” she said. “I meant it when I said I like your charming side, Eli. But this”—she paused to draw an imaginary loop between them with the index finger on her free hand—“this side of you is real. It’s honest. And I like it even better. So please, no matter what we talk about, don’t hide.”
Eli knew the words should scare the hell out of him as much as Scarlett’s beautiful, wide-open stare and the sure-and-steady grasp on his hand that marked what she’d said as true.
But they didn’t. So he tightened his fingers around hers right back and said, “Okay.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Scarlett sat back against the well-cushioned love seat in her apartment, her eyes on her laptop screen and her mouth curving up into the world’s most gigantic smile. But as goofy as it was, the expression was warranted.
Five days had passed since the farmers’ market, and each had been better and busier than the one before. The second video clip she and Eli had filmed—along with the accompanying articles on FoodE and the extra content the Crosses had put on the farm’s website—had garnered even more reach than the first. Both FoodE and Cross Creek had seen so much increased business after the segment had gone live that Mallory had needed to reinforce her skeleton crew with a temporary assistant and Hunter had needed to literally run to the cornfields to pick whatever he could by hand in order to restock yesterday’s roadside stand. Scarlett had taken hundreds of new photos to go with this week’s articles, along with pitching in at the farm stand to help Eli with customers and crowd control.
Involuntarily, her cheeks warmed. Although Eli had been his usual cocky self whenever the camera was out or his brothers were around, he’d also kept the promise he’d made to her on that picnic bench. While none of their one-on-one conversations had been quite as personal as that first one—God, Scarlett’s heart still thudded and ached when she remembered the look on his face as he’d talked about his mother—she and Eli had worked together with growing ease, brainstorming ideas for articles and laughing and trading both stories and banter so seamlessly that Scarlett couldn’t deny the truth.
Between his smart observations, his clear devotion to the farm, and that borderline-mischievous smile that kept threatening to reduce her panties to a white-hot afterthought, she liked Eli Cross a lot.
Scarlett’s hands froze over the keyboard perched across her lap. Okay, so Eli was sexy as hell, and quick-witted enough on top of that to flip every last one of her oh hell yes switches. The attraction wasn’t one-sided—last week’s toe-curling kiss was proof positive of that. But she’d come here to take pictures. To save Mallory’s magazine. Hell, as pretty as Millhaven was, she gave herself T-minus any day now before she started to get twitchy for her next adventure, anyway.
She belonged behind the camera. Which meant her time with Eli had an expiration date in the very near future.
Which really meant she shouldn’t be sitting here fantasizing about what his cocky mouth could do when it wasn’t caught up in a smile.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Scarlett murmured, closing the folder of today’s Cross Creek photos with a heavy sigh. She and Eli had gotten rained out of their chores on the farm this afternoon, so she’d already edited and sent this morning’s shots to Mallory. Still, Scarlett loved her job like most people loved eating and sleeping. She could always find something to crop or edit or sharpen.
Inhaling deeply, Scarlett scrolled through the photo folders on her laptop—no . . . no . . . no . . . a-ha! Although she’d sold the best shots from last month’s film festival to an entertainment magazine, she could still edit a few of the rest. Publicists and agents could always be counted on to want great photographs of their clients. Even if said clients suddenly looked awfully slick and over-polished as they flashed across her laptop screen in their designer tuxedos and $10,000 watches. Whatever happened to a good, old-fashioned jeans-and-T-shirt combo, with broken-in denim hugging a pair of work-muscled thighs and faded cotton clinging to all the right places . . .
A knock sounded off at the front door, sending Scarlett’s pulse through the rafters and a blush tearing over her face. Both sensations, however, were quickly chased off by a hard shot of suspicion. She could literally count the number of people she knew in Millhaven on one hand, and while a glance at the clock told her it was barely past dinnertime, she still wasn’t expecting anyone.
Unease bubbled harder in her chest as the knock came again—you could take the girl out of New York, blah, blah, blah—but the feeling faded instantly at the sound of the voice that followed.
“Scarlett? Are you there? It’s me, Emerson.”
“Oh!” Blinking back her surprise, Scarlett pushed her way up from the love seat, pausing to rest her laptop on the tiny coffee table before padding across the floor to flip the deadbolt and swing the door open.
“Oh, good! You’re home,” Emerson said, offering up a genuine smile. “You remember my friend Daisy, right?”
She gestured to the petite blonde standing next to her on the rain-splattered threshold, and Scarlett’s confusion doubled even as she nodded.
“Yes, of course.” They’d met at the farmers’ market, where Daisy had been selling her homemade beauty products. “Is, um, everything okay at Cross Creek?”
“Are you kidding?” Emerson’s laugh wiped out any possibility of a negative answer, and she gestured to the narrow overhead ledge keeping her (sort
of) sheltered. “It’s been raining for the last four hours. Everything at Cross Creek is coming up roses.”
At the mention of the weather, Scarlett’s flush made a repeat performance. “God, sorry. Come on in.” She ushered the two women into her apartment and shut the door, realizing only after the fact that the living room looked like a hurricane had whipped a path of destruction directly over the carpet. “Sorry it’s kind of, um, untidy. I was catching up on some work.”
But Emerson just shook her head, her auburn curls swishing over her shoulders. “Actually, this looks about the same as when I lived here.”
“She’s not just saying that to be polite, either,” Daisy added with a pixie smile. “Trust me.”
Scarlett laughed, because it was exactly what she’d been thinking, and Emerson lifted her hands to signal guilty as charged.
“Yeah, I can’t lie. I have nothing on Martha Stewart. Anyway, sorry we just showed up on your doorstep. We tried to call you but . . .”
Daisy made a sound suspiciously close to a snort. “We’d have had better luck with smoke signals than cell service around here.”
“Pretty much,” Emerson said. “But we were just hanging out for the evening, and since Daisy lives a few doors down, we figured we’d drop in and see what you’re up to.”
“Oh. That’s awfully nice of you.” Scarlett smiled, although the gesture didn’t last. She wasn’t used to being in the same place for too terribly long, much less having guests wherever said place happened to be. Surely there was some sort of protocol for this kind of thing, right? People talked all the time about girls’ night in like it was gospel. Well, people other than her, anyway. Even Mallory, who was married to her job like Scarlett, mentioned going to her coworkers’ apartments from time to time for Netflix marathons and wine.
Crossing the Line (The Cross Creek Series Book 2) Page 18
