“Our brother is going to be an amazing father,” Lori agreed. Gabe was a firefighter who had met his future wife and eight-year-old daughter when he saved them from a horrible apartment fire a year ago. “Just like you’re a totally amazing mom. Summer is going to be so excited when they finally ‘fess up and tell her she’s going to be a big sister. And Jackie and Smith Jr. will have another cousin to play with.” Suddenly, Lori saw Grayson coming toward her. “I’ve got to go.”
“Back to the farm?” Sophie asked with more than a little incredulity.
“Yes,” Lori confirmed again. “Back to the farm.”
“You’d better call me every day with an update on how you’re doing,” her sister warned her, “because I’m going to worry every second until I hear from you again, and if I don’t know you’re okay, I’m going to have to come after you, whether you want me there on that farm with you or not.”
Everyone thought Sophie was so quiet, so sedate, but Lori knew better than anyone apart from Sophie’s husband just what a powerful force her sister could be. Especially if she thought someone she loved was in trouble.
“Kiss the twins’ cute little faces for me and tell them Aunt Lori misses them and is going to play tickle monster with them soon.”
She hung up her phone and slid it back into her bag just as Grayson rounded the corner and came into full view again. She picked up a pair of red and black boots.
“What do you think of these? Aren’t they cute?”
Instead of answering, he just stared at her, that muscle in his jaw jumping as he took in her new hat. On a deep glower, his gaze finally dropped to the boots she was holding up.
“They’ll do the job,” he said with no appreciation whatsoever for the absolutely gorgeous flame design running up both sides of the cowboy boots. “I’ll be waiting for you in the truck.”
So much for the momentary truce it had seemed they’d come to in his truck on the drive over. Just as she’d predicted, it hadn’t lasted long.
* * *
Grayson clenched his teeth even tighter as Lori walked outside wearing her new boots and hat. God, she was cute...and so damned sexy he’d had a perpetual hard-on since the second she’d stepped out of her car that first day in her ridiculously revealing outfit and heels.
It didn’t help that he was still seeing red at the way she’d told him she would have climbed into a stranger’s car if he’d made good on his threat to drop her off on the road for talking too much. He couldn’t believe she would be that stupid, even if he’d been the one to make the equally stupid threat.
On top of everything else, it was hard to push down thirty-plus years of good manners and not get out from behind the wheel to open the door for her and help her up into the passenger seat. But he was very much afraid that if he did, he would rip the new hat from her head and chuck it into the street, because the last thing he needed was for her to become even more irresistible. Unfortunately, the way she looked in the cowboy boots and hat were threatening to rip what was left of his self-control to tatters.
Especially after he’d overheard her side of a conversation with a person he’d quickly guessed had to be her sister. Lori, he figured, had no idea just how well sound echoed throughout the General Store. Particularly when he was—stupidly—hanging on her every word.
Clearly, her sister was worried about her. And while Lori hadn’t given too much away to the other woman, she had made it clear that she was on his farm to get a break from her real life...and she had promised to head back to it in a “little while.”
The knowledge should have filled him with joy.
But it hadn’t.
For three years, solitude had been his companion and he’d convinced himself that all he’d ever need again were the blue sky, a thousand acres of pasture, and the crashing waves of the ocean. Until, from completely out of the blue, Lori Sullivan had barged into his life...and promptly blown his carefully emotionless world to shreds.
All of the facts, the truths that he couldn’t ignore, made him angry. With her. With himself. And especially with the whole damned world for dropping someone so irritating and irresistible and impossible to ignore at his feet.
As soon as the passenger door clicked shut and she’d buckled her seatbelt, he started the engine. She had a small bag on her lap and, a moment later, she pulled something out of it and held it out to him. “Want one?”
She was holding out something long and sticky and covered in sugar. It was fluorescent green and wasn’t even close to being edible.
“No.”
“Your loss.” She shoved it into her mouth instead and started chewing the candy.
And that was just the problem. He knew she was right. Because when she did finally decide to leave, it really was going to be his loss.
Somehow he needed to hold his focus on the farm, on the never-ending work that came with owning a thousand acres and more than a hundred animals. “Have you ever worked with crops before?” he asked her.
Around a mouthful of gummy candy, she said, “I used to help my mom with her veggies when I was a little girl. She said I had a green thumb. Why? Is planting seeds next on my list?”
“No,” he told her. “Weeding is.”
He figured she’d groan at that news. Instead, just as she kept doing over and over, she surprised him by saying, “Oh good. I enjoyed helping her plant things, and seeing them grow was cool, but I always liked ripping things out even more.”
He could see the wide grin on her face in his peripheral vision, which was as close as he could get to looking at her right then if he wanted to keep his control from being completely destroyed.
“It’s like the difference between a pirouette and a grand jeté. Both are fun, but sometimes you’ve just got more of an appetite for destruction.”
He’d spent enough years going to the ballet in his previous life to know what she was talking about. He shot a look at her gorgeous legs. Even in her dark jeans, her lithe strength was obvious, and the beautiful way she moved had caught his eye from the first.
Was that her story? Was she a dancer? And if she was, then what the hell was she doing on his farm pretending to be a farmhand when she should be up on a stage somewhere?
Thank God he pulled into his drive before he could do something stupid, like ask her any of those questions. Her questions for him during the ride over had been bad enough.
From here on out, he vowed to keep them loaded up with so much work that neither of them would have time to worry about anything else, starting with the weeds in his asparagus patch for her and the new roof on his cottage for him.
Chapter Nine
Damn it, Grayson thought the next morning as he rubbed down his horse after a particularly grueling ride, he’d all but worked the two of them into the ground the day before, but it hadn’t made a bit of difference.
He still wanted Lori more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. So much that even though she’d made him another fabulous dinner and then breakfast, both times he’d told her he couldn’t stop working long enough to eat with her and that he’d grab the leftovers when he could.
And later, when she’d said that she was worried about the cat not eating much, after he’d told her Mo was lucky to still be here at all, she’d glared at him and turned on her heel without another word.
“Grayson?” Lori poked her head into the stables. She’d been fearless everywhere else on his farm, but she never ventured too close to his horses. “You just got a call from Eric. He said he’s going to need to come an hour early tonight to pick up the boxes of food. What do you need me to do to help with that?”
Grayson barely bit back a curse. So much for avoiding Lori today, too. In order to get all of the food together in time, the two of them would have to work together. And work well.
“I need you to go into the storeroom and pull out the cartons so that we can fill them. Lay them out across the tables inside the barn. You’ll have to stack them two deep.”
“How many should I pull out?”
“I’ve got two hundred and fifteen subscribers, but we’ll make an extra dozen.” People sometimes needed an additional box or two, plus he liked Eric to do a few free drop-offs at the end of every pick-up day with whatever was left.
“Got it.” She turned immediately to take care of the work that needed to be done, but it wasn’t until she was gone that he realized something had been different.
She hadn’t smiled. Or done or said anything to get a rise out of him. She’d simply given him the message, then asked him what needed to be done. It was exactly what he’d told her he wanted from her. And yet, it felt wrong.
He tried to push the crazy thought out of his head, but by the time he joined her in the barn and saw the incredibly fast progress she’d made—along with the slightly dimmer light in her eyes—he couldn’t help but feel like a total ass for not only being so hard on her, but also for going out of his way to avoid her.
Was she upset about having to eat alone? Was she thinking he was an ogre about the cat? Or did it have nothing to do with him at all and she simply missed her family...or whoever else she had run from to come to his farm?
The thought of Lori with another man was like a hard punch straight to the gut. He couldn’t let himself have her, but Lord, he couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else touching her, either. Not when, despite her resilience, he couldn’t help but see the sweet vulnerability in her eyes when she was exhausted enough to accidentally let down her guard.
She quickly picked up on his plan for that week’s box and they worked silently together to pick the remaining strawberries, artichokes, asparagus, peas, and squash. After a short while, Lori started to arrange each of the boxes in a way that Grayson had to admit was far more pleasing to the eye than the way he normally laid everything out for his customers. He could only imagine how happy everyone would be when they picked up their produce this week, likely even more inspired to go home and start cooking up and eating the bounty with their families.
Because of Lori.
When he was done picking the fresh fruit and veggies for the week, he moved to the other side of the table to help her put together the rest of the boxes and said, “These are looking great.”
A smile, maybe, or if he was really lucky, some laughter. That was what he’d expected her to respond with. Anything but a head that stayed down as she simply nodded and kept filling boxes.
“Lori—”
Shit, he didn’t even know what he wanted to say to her, just that it had to be something. Anything to bring back the smile he was getting way too used to seeing...and the motormouth that had started to sound better than any symphony he’d ever heard.
Her hands immediately stilled and when she finally looked up at him, he hated the shadows in her eyes.
“What is it, Grayson?”
Four crisp words were all he warranted now. “I wanted to say—” When he paused to try to get a grip, he saw the hope light up in her eyes.
“Go ahead,” she said with a soft curving of her lips that held him entranced. “I’m listening.”
But everything he wanted to say, everything he needed to tell her, got stuck in his throat. And in the end, all that came out of his mouth was, “If you’re tired, I can finish up.”
Just as quickly as she’d opened herself back up to him, she shut down, looking at the artichoke in her hand rather than up at him.
“I’m not tired.” She took off her cowboy hat, then, and hung it from a nail on the wall.
Her taking off the hat felt like an omen, a bad one. Where he’d wanted to yank it off and toss it into the street the day before, now he wanted to pick it up and jam it back down onto her head.
But before he could say or do anything more, he heard the crunch of tires over the gravel on the drive. Eric walked into the barn a minute later. “Hey, Grayson, sorry about the schedule change today.” When he saw Lori, the usually taciturn young farmer broke out into a huge grin. “You must be Lori.”
She grinned at Eric in exactly the way she hadn’t been smiling at
him
as they shook hands. “It’s so nice to meet you, Eric. And thanks for your suggestions about what else to try feeding Sweetpea. I’m going to try the liver tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
What the hell? First she was lighting up for Eric and then it turned out that they’d already swapped cat-feeding tips with each other? Had she also told Eric what an ass her boss had been since the second she’d signed on as his farmhand?
“Wow,” Eric commented when he looked at the boxes of produce, “these look great this week.” His smile was all for Lori. “Must have needed a woman’s touch.”
Without a word to either of them, Grayson started carrying the boxes over to Eric’s truck. Lori and Eric chatted like old friends the entire time, with Eric happily answering each of Lori’s rapid-fire questions. “So how do the pick-ups work? Is there a check-off list? Do you know everyone? Are they all locals or do they come from other towns? Do people bring their kids and pets and hang out or are they just in and out?”
Telling himself this was the perfect way to get her out of his hair, Grayson cut off Eric halfway into his lengthy explanation of how the evening’s pick-up would work. “Go and see for yourself.”
He didn’t have to offer twice, as Eric and Lori immediately grinned at each other and said, “Great!” at the same time.
Grayson’s hands would have fisted had he not been carrying three heavy boxes stacked on top of one another. Eric and Lori were perfect together. Both of them had a ready smile. Both of them could talk your ear off for hours. They even looked good together, Eric blond and muscular next to Lori’s dark-haired grace.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Eric said to Grayson when he finally managed to yank his gaze away from Lori. “A journalist called right before I came over here. He’s doing a story on the popularity of CSAs, but when I told him that I’m just the pick-up guy he asked if you could give him a call back.” Eric reached into the front pocket of his jeans. “I’ve got his number here.”
“I don’t need the number.”