Crossing the Line (The Cross Creek Series Book 2) Read online

  “You have two cameras?”

  “Nope,” she said, her smile going deep and wide and weirdly beautiful. “I’m taking two cameras with me today. And if you think that’s a lot, I don’t even want to tell you how much glass I brought from home.”

  “Glass,” he repeated, and Scarlett gave her head a little shake.

  “Sorry. It’s photographer-speak. Lenses.” She pointed to the kitchen table over his shoulder. “Most people think it’s the cameras that matter, but in truth, it’s the lenses we get all geeky for. Well, unless you’re talking about a Hasselblad or something, but everything about one of those babies is totally outer limits.”

  Eli shook his head, trying to process. “And you just haul all of it around with you?” She couldn’t be a hair over five foot four, for Chrissake.

  Apparently, moxie counted double. “Of course.” Scarlett shifted the bags on either hip, clearly comfortable despite the fact that, judging by the pull of muscles in both her biceps and her forearms, they couldn’t be even close to light. “I’m not about to miss a shot because I couldn’t carry my weight. Literally.”

  “We’re going to be doing an awful lot of moving around,” Eli said, because it was as diplomatic as he could get under the circumstances. Hell, some days in the busy season, it took all he had to drag himself around the farm.

  But Scarlett just laughed. “This isn’t my first rodeo, cowboy. I’ll be just fine.”

  “Great,” Eli mumbled. He crossed the carpet, holding the front door open for her as they made their way over the threshold and across the Twin Pines parking lot. Switching gears, he channeled his mental energy into organizing the tasks in front of him. God, there were no less than a hundred, and that was just what he could come up with off the top of his walnut.

  As if she could see the wheels turning in his brain, Scarlett asked, “So what are we up to today?”

  Eli popped the locks on his F-150, the truck’s running lights flashing bright yellow in the predawn shadows of the parking lot. “There are a handful of daily chores that always have to get done no matter what. Those keep us busy for the first hour or so, and then my brothers and old man and I will hook up at the main house for breakfast to discuss the rest. And I, uh, guess you’ll come, too,” he tacked on.

  What she’d eat would be a mystery, since bacon and eggs were a definite negative on the bound-to-impress-her list. Which was a crying shame, really, because for as much as Eli liked to rattle Owen’s cage, the guy’s culinary skills were seriously on point.

  Scarlett didn’t seem to give it a second thought, though. “Daily chores,” she prompted, pulling an iPad out of one of her camera bags as she got situated in the passenger seat.

  He gave the thing three hours before it overheated or she flat-out busted it, but hey, whatever blew her skirt up. “Checking the henhouse, inventory in the greenhouse. Pulling orders with all the local businesses we supply to prep them for processing. Making sure the equipment and irrigation systems are a go before we harvest hay, soybeans, and corn. Stuff like that.”

  Scarlett’s fingers became a backlit blur over the screen. “. . . annnd hay, soybeans, and corn. Got it.” She sat quietly for a second, sipping her coffee while Eli turned onto the road leading out to Cross Creek. Without looking up from her iPad, she asked, “So how come you don’t live on the farm like everyone else?”

  “What?” Shock made his brain logjam on the question, but Scarlett dove back in without pause.

  “The other night, Emerson mentioned that both Owen and Hunter live in cottages on the property, and that she lives with Hunter. I was just curious as to why you don’t live at Cross Creek, too.”

  Fuck. He needed something stronger than coffee for this.

  Deflect and forget it. Eli dug deep into his arsenal, pulling out his most charming smile. “Because I live here instead.”

  “Yeah, I got that part,” Scarlett said, apparently immune to his smile and hip to his dodging the subject. Figured she’d be as brazen about this as she was everything else. “But you guys have like miles and miles of land, right? Wouldn’t it be easier to build another place at Cross Creek and be done with it?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Eli held steady as he flipped the tables on her in yet another evasive maneuver. “What about you? Do you live near your family?”

  “Oh.” Scarlett blinked through the scant light in the truck, and look at that. He’d managed to throw her. “Well, I’m not actually in New York all that much, but yes. My fathers live in Brooklyn, and I have a place in Manhattan.”

  Thankfully, there was so much about that he could tackle, and all of it would keep her busy talking about herself. “Your fathers?” he asked after a mental coin-flip. “As in, two?”

  “Yes.” Scarlett straightened against the passenger seat, her chin hiking up as she pegged him with a stare he could feel even though his eyes were mostly on the road in front of them. “I was raised by two men, who just so happen to be wildly in love and married to each other.”

  While a small part of him was tempted to take offense at her obvious assumption that he’d disapprove of her family, Eli worked up an answer that was as easy as hers had been defensive. After all, he needed to charm her. If he could keep the focus off his own family dynamic while he was at it? Triple-word score.

  “You say that like you think I’m going to have something against the fact that your fathers are gay.”

  She paused for a heartbeat, then another, but man, that chin of hers didn’t budge a millimeter. “Some people do.”

  “Well, I’m not one of them,” Eli said, and he meant it. “It’s far better to be curious than judgmental.”

  Her brows shot up for a single second before snapping together in a tight “V.” “Did you just quote Walt Whitman?”

  Eli’s palms went slick over the F-150’s steering wheel, his brain bouncing back and forth between a state of panic and a very strange, very serious shot of arousal. “I dunno, did I?” he drawled, leaning hard on his small-town country accent in an effort to cover his ass. “All I meant was that there’s better stuff to be interested in than other people’s business. Seems simple to me, but maybe . . . who was it? Walt Whitman? Maybe he felt the same.”

  Much to his relief, she shook her head. “Weird coincidence, I guess. And I’m sorry I assumed you’d judge. It’s just that sometimes I get a lot of side-eye from people when I tell them I was adopted by two men.”

  “The only thing I judge a person by is whether or not he’s an asshole,” Eli said, the back of his neck instantly heating at the swear word he’d let slip. He was supposed to be winning this woman over, for Chrissake. “’Scuse my language.”

  Scarlett laughed, the throaty sound filling the truck. “Eli, we’re going to be spending the next four weeks together, so please. Do me a favor. Unless the video camera is rolling, feel free to swear as much as you fucking like.”

  Shock arrowed through his chest, forcing his own laughter up and out. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Oh for the love of . . .” She broke off, her arms threading into a tight knot over the spot where her seatbelt crossed her chest. “Scarlett. My name is Scarlett.”

  He knew—he knew—he should just let her protest go and call her by her first name from now on like she preferred. But something deep in his belly put a mischievous smile on his face instead. “You know, ’round here we call those manners.”

  Eli hung the words with just enough levity, and wait for it . . . wait for it . . .

  Gotcha. Scarlett’s exhale was pure surprise. “You’re not calling me ‘ma’am’ to bust my chops?”

  “Nope.” Okay, so it was only 85 percent true, but he wasn’t about to split hairs. “Calling women ‘ma’am’ is just what we do here in Millhaven, whether they’re eight or eighty.”

  “And no one finds it a little sexist?” she asked. But rather than being pushy or accusatory, her tone was genuinely curious, and hell if that didn’t make Eli stop and
think about the question all the more.

  After a minute, he said, “No. I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I don’t think using ‘ma’am’ is meant to be sexist at all. We tend to throw ‘yes, sir’ around just as much for men, and they’re both terms of respect. Same goes for me not swearing in front of you. It’s not that I don’t think you can handle me dropping the F-bomb.” She was a New Yorker, for God’s sake. He was pretty sure they’d invented the F-bomb. “Guess I just believe language is powerful, is all.”

  Scarlett nodded slowly. “‘Ma’am’ makes me think of mothers. Which is pretty weird, seeing as I’ve never had one.”

  “Everybody’s got a mother.”

  “I don’t,” she reiterated, her words growing steam but not teeth.

  But two could square-dance to that song, and Eli had known the moves since he’d been four years old. “Yeah, you do,” he said, unease strumming its way back between his ribs, slowly sticking him from the inside out. “Everyone comes from somewhere, just like everyone belongs somewhere.”

  Of course, Scarlett didn’t budge. “Not me. I come from nowhere, and I belong all over the place.” She turned to face him a little more fully, and even the small glimpse of her in his peripheral vision slipped right under his skin. “Anyway, what about you? What happened to your mother?”

  Eli’s pulse rushed in his ears, the hard, rapid thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump completely at odds with the sleepy pink-and-purple sunrise coloring the horizon through the windshield. Nope. Absolutely not. He’d suck up a lot of things to get off the Cross Creek hot seat and into Scarlett’s good graces for the PR, but not this.

  He wasn’t about to tell some photographer who was there to show God and everybody with a connection to the Internet that his mother had died of breast cancer at only thirty-seven, devastating his father and leaving the man to raise three young boys on his own, and he damn sure wasn’t going to tell her that the reason for his nondisclosure had more to do with the cold, hard truth than any warm, fuzzy emotions.

  After all, it was tough to talk about a woman you knew you should love but couldn’t even remember.

  Oh, screw this. Eli needed to dodge, deflect, and forget about everything other than showing Scarlett the farm and only the farm.

  He fixed her with a smile, as plain and polite and free of emotion as he could make it. “Where I live and what happened to my mother—hell, what color boxer shorts I pulled on this morning—none of that has anything to do with the magazine layouts you’re going to shoot. We’ll do best if we remember that and focus on what you came here for.”

  Her chin did that stubborn-lift thing again, and for a split second, Eli was certain she’d argue.

  But then she set her shoulders, turning her attention back to her iPad as if the thing were far more fascinating than anything else in the county. “You’re absolutely right. I came here to work. That’s all that matters.”

  They spent the rest of the drive to Cross Creek in silence.

  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.