Crossing Hope (Cross Creek Series Book 4) Read online

  Louis processed her logic for the same moment Greyson parsed through all the what-the-hell winging through his brain. “Fine,” the man said slowly. “Evenings and weekends’ll be all right, I s’pose.”

  Marley winced, but the gesture was so quick and her stance so tough afterward that Greyson couldn’t even be one hundred-percent sure his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on him.

  “When, exactly?” he asked, not wanting to lose the chance to get things one step closer to over-with.

  “Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings, four to eight. Then a full eight hours every weekend. Sundays will do.”

  After some quick mental math, Greyson realized that would put them just ahead of the ninety days Judge Abernathy had allowed.

  “Done,” he said. So what if it meant he wouldn’t see a single day off all summer? The sooner they were done with this mess, the faster he’d be back on his farm full-time, the happier he’d be.

  Marley seemed to have reached the same conclusion with regard to the timetable, because she nodded. “Okay by me if that’s as fast as we can do it.”

  “Good,” Louis replied. “I ain’t usually here after five or on Sundays, but you can be rest assured I’ll be givin’ y’all enough work to make sure you do every minute of the time you owe. Speakin’ of which, that yard is waiting. Gate’s unlatched.”

  “Great.” In truth, Greyson meant the word far less sarcastically than he let on. At least now there was an agenda, a set of tasks to keep his body moving and his mind off the fact that he wasn’t at Whittaker Hollow. Hard work, he knew how to do, and what’s more, he didn’t really hate it.

  He followed Marley back through the front door and around to the side of the shelter. A six-foot privacy fence extended outward from the edge of the building, and they reached the gate easily enough.

  “Okay,” Marley said, putting one hand on the rusted handle. “It’s just a little yard work, right? How bad can it really be?”

  If the stench that hit them as soon as she swung the gate on its hinges didn’t answer her question, then the sight that accompanied it sure did.

  “Holy shit,” she gasped, her eyes going wide over the hand she’d clapped over her nose and mouth.

  “Literally,” Greyson muttered as he shook his head.

  Agenda or not, this was going to be one hell of a long day.

  8

  Marley was officially in the small-town equivalent of the fourth circle of hell. As if the lust-hate relationship her libido was currently having with her common sense every time she so much as looked at Greyson wasn’t enough, she was spending her Saturday picking up dog bombs and not getting paid.

  Having to tell her boss at the boutique that she was going to need three nights a week plus every Sunday off for the foreseeable future? That was just the cherry on top of her crap sundae right now.

  Make that a dog crap sundae. Ugh.

  Swiping a forearm over her sweaty brow, Marley scanned the yard as she took a second to catch her breath. She and Greyson had made a decent amount of headway in the past couple of hours, although now that the sun was almost directly overhead and beating down on them like a heavyweight boxer at a prize fight, she already felt herself flagging.

  Not Greyson, though. Nope. He was working just as briskly as he had been the second they’d gotten started. In fact, he’d been the one to come up with a strategy for getting the job done, marching his way (carefully) over to the shed the first minute they’d been out here to turn up a couple of pairs of rubber boots along with two pairs of worn but serviceable work gloves. The semi-rusted shovels that had been hanging on the shed wall worked better than Marley had expected for scooping up the mess in the yard, and the plastic liner Greyson had put inside of the trash bin made it so neither of them had to actually touch anything that qualified as a biohazard. She still hadn’t gotten used to the heat or the smell, or the fact that the yard looked like it hadn’t been properly tended in months, and not one or two. But at least they were making progress, and by the end of the day, she’d be eight hours closer to freedom.

  Never mind the hundred and ninety-two to go.

  “Don’t think about it,” Marley muttered to herself. Returning her attention to the job in front of her, she peered into the section of overgrown grass by her boots, and wait…why was the grass…moving?

  “Ahhh!” Her shriek was pure instinct, the words that followed it pure invective. Dropping her shovel with an abrupt thunk, she slapped her back against the nearest surface, which just so happened to be a gigantic oak tree. The bark scraped against her skin through her muscle shirt, but the adrenaline pumping full steam ahead in her veins turned the sensation into barely a sting as the grass-that-wasn’t-grass continued to move.

  “Problem?” Greyson asked from a few feet away, his tone as slow and easy as syrup on Sunday-morning pancakes.

  She looked at him as if he’d lost his goddamned mind. Which surely he had, because… “That’s a snake,” she said pointedly, even though the creature—gah!—was now slithering over the bald patch of the yard between them, coiling and recoiling as if trying to decide which one of them to devour first.

  Greyson cocked his head for a lazy inspection. “It’s a black racer. They’re harmless.” He lifted a muscular shoulder halfway before letting it fall back into place. “Well, unless you’re a mouse or a frog, I guess.”

  “Are you crazy? How can that”—she jabbed a finger at the snake—“be harmless?”

  “Because its venom won’t kill you?” he asked, and seriously?

  “Oh my God. Do they still bite?”

  He considered the question for what felt like a century. “Pretty much everything bites if you piss it off enough.”

  Marley’s heart tripped faster, fear sliding up her spine in icy fingers. “Greyson—”

  “Okay, okay.” Slowly lowering his shovel, he stepped closer to the snake. “I can’t get any work done with you making such a ruckus, anyway.”

  He crouched down lower to the ground, walking slowly until he was only one stride away from the snake. Marley’s belly squeezed, and she was half mesmerized, half terrified to look. Her awe won out, if only by a fraction, and she watched breathlessly as Greyson extended one arm in controlled increments. Dark eyes watching. Muscles primed. Waiting. Moving closer…closer…and then—

  “Gotcha!”

  Greyson had lashed his hand out and closed his fingers around the back of the snake’s head before Marley’s brain had even registered a single movement. A gasp barged past her lips as soon as the realization sank in, and she stared, unblinking, in total disbelief.

  “No way that’s harmless. That thing is huge,” she blurted. It was hard to tell with all the wriggling, but God, the snake had to be three feet long, at least.

  “It’s actually a baby,” Greyson said, inspecting the animal with the sort of laid-back attention Marley usually put into things like tying her shoes. “They get much bigger when they’re fully grown. But you can tell it’s a racer and not a black snake because its belly is silver. See?”

  He held the snake up, and even though his grip was firm yet somehow still gentle around the back of its head, Marley flattened her back against the oak tree even harder. “I can’t un-see,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

  “You want to pet him before I put him over the fence?”

  It took her a beat, then two, to realize that he wasn’t joking or giving her shit by way of trying to scare her on purpose.

  She frowned anyway. He really was crazy if he thought she was going anywhere near that thing. “I’ll pass.”

  “And here I thought you were fearless,” Greyson said with a smirk, and on second thought, there was the shit-slinging after all.

  Marley planted her hands over her hips, although she didn’t budge from the safety of her spot a few feet away from him and the snake. “I’m also not stupid.”

  “And I’m not a liar,” he countered, a muscle beneath his stubble flexing just enough to betr
ay the tension there. “I told you they’re harmless, and I meant it. I’m not going to let you get hurt.”

  “You’re not?” Marley heard the coarse implication of her words only after she’d spoken them, and she clamped her lips together, too late.

  For a second, Greyson said nothing—even the snake in his grasp seemed to have stilled somewhat. But then he shrugged. “It’d take longer to clean up the damned yard that way, now wouldn’t it?”

  Turning away from her, he walked over to the stretch of fencing that was missing a section of intermittent boards, leaving a gap big enough for him to duck through to free the snake back into the wilderness—or, at least, somewhere farther from the yard. He reappeared a minute later, his expression mostly hidden beneath the brim of his faded blue baseball hat, and Marley bit her lip.

  “So, you don’t get along with Louis very well, huh?” she asked by way of a peace offering, the scrape on her back burning slightly as she reached down to pick up the shovel she’d dropped.

  Surprise slid over Greyson’s face, there and then gone. “No one gets along with Louis. He’s pretty much a garden variety jackass,” he said after a minute, tacking on, “Pardon my language.”

  Marley waved off the apology with a tart laugh. “Fairly certain I just said far worse when I saw that snake. And anyway, you’re not wrong. He is sort of a jackass.”

  They fell back into a rhythm of scoop-dump, the pace steady but the silence less uncomfortable than before. Still, Marley’s curiosity had been bubbling for hours, and it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do.

  “Why do you care what he thinks of you?” she asked, her heart skipping faster at the way Greyson’s shoulders snapped around his spine.

  “I don’t.” The handle of his shovel met the edge of the trash bin with a harder-than-necessary bang, and even though the rational part of her brain knew it was probably not a swift move, she didn’t hesitate to push.

  “Uh, news flash. Yeah, you do.”

  Greyson’s black brows lifted as his shoulders went loose beneath his T-shirt. “No, I don’t.”

  Yeah. Still not buying it. Also, still not staying quiet. “Seriously? As soon as he made that comment about you not doing the work, you were ready to jump all over him.”

  Greyson surprised her by not arguing, then surprised her again by saying, “Guess I’m just not real crazy about folks making assumptions, is all.”

  “I get that,” she said, and Greyson stopped, mid-move, to turn and stare at her.

  “You do?”

  The laugh that drifted up from her chest felt far better than it should have, but Marley gave in to it, anyway. “You look shocked.”

  “Not exactly.” He resumed shoveling, his movements looking effortless even though Marley knew full well that they weren’t. “It’s just…I thought that was more of a small town thing, where your reputation precedes you and people make assumptions based on that.”

  She thought about it for a second before answering. “I guess it kind of is. I mean, everyone around here literally knows everyone else. Which I totally find weird,” she qualified with an arch of one brow. “But just because I don’t live here doesn’t mean I don’t get it.”

  “You do live here,” Greyson pointed out. There was a fair amount of “duh” in his tone, which she probably should’ve expected, but it rankled all the same. God, she never should’ve opened her fat mouth in the first place.

  “That’s temporary. I’m leaving as soon as I can.”

  “Yeah?” he asked, trading the sarcasm in his tone for curiosity, and shit. Shit! She wanted to talk about this about as much as she wanted to get a bikini wax on sunburned skin. “Where are you headed?”

  Marley dug her shovel into the ground too hard, bringing up a healthy chunk of grass along with everything she’d intended to scoop up. “Not here.”

  “Okay.”

  Greyson drew the word out on that sexy drawl that was fast becoming her kryptonite, and ugh, she’d been an idiot to start the conversation in the first place. She needed to focus on getting this yard cleaned up so she could go back to the main house at Cross Creek and figure out a way to convince her boss to give her the weekday hours everyone always coveted.

  What’s more, she needed to not focus on the fact that, for a split second, she’d been deeply, hotly, wildly tempted to tell Greyson all the things she hadn’t told anyone else.

  “Look,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest to lock in her emotions and lock down her resolve. “This yard is gigantic, and we’ve barely covered a third of it. We should probably skip the small talk and just get the work over-with so we can get out of here.”

  The surprise that burst over his face made Marley’s cheeks burn, but not as much as the hard frown that chased it. “Fine by me. You’re the one who got chatty in the first place.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” she said, re-gripping her shovel and turning away from him. “It won’t happen again.”

  It took all of four hours for Marley’s words to become a lie. She and Greyson had slogged silently through clearing the entire yard not just of refuse, but also of weeds, fallen branches, and assorted debris that had managed to migrate into the space. They’d exchanged as few words as possible along the way, including the handful that had them standing in front of the section of the privacy fence whose boards had either been knocked askew or were missing outright.

  “Shouldn’t be too hard to fix,” Greyson said after a quick perusal, and Marley heaved an inner sigh of relief, both at the fact that the task would be easy and that he seemed to intuitively know how to get it done.

  “Okay. Just tell me what you need me to do.”

  He squinted at her through the blazing afternoon sunlight. “You don’t know how to mend a fence?”

  Marley rolled her eyes before averting them, fixing her stare on the panel of wood listing at a near-drunken angle in front of her. “Why would I know how to do that, exactly?”

  “It’s kind of common knowledge around here, is all.” Greyson shrugged, as if fence mending was akin to brushing one’s teeth or knowing that the sun would rise in the east, and score yet another thing that put Marley on the outside looking in.

  “This town is completely backwards,” she mumbled. But, of course, Greyson heard her, and—of course—he just couldn’t let a sleeping dog lie.

  “It’s perspective,” he corrected. “Mending fences is one of those things that comes in handy ’round here, so yeah. Most folks know how to do it.” He paused for a second, as if he wanted to keep pushing, but then he shook his head. “Anyway, we’re going to need a few tools from the shed, along with some replacement boards. I’ll be right back.”

  He pivoted on the heels of the weathered work boots he’d put back on when they’d finished clearing the yard and sauntered away from her. Even his gait was cocky, slow and sure and as easy as one plus one equals two, and Marley forced her eyes away from him even though some of her other parts wanted nothing more than to drink him in until she was good and satiated.

  Sweet baby Jesus, he had a nice ass. Firm. Powerful. Just round enough to grab onto and—

  Whipping her gaze in a complete one-eighty from where Greyson (and his ass) had gone, Marley searched for something—and at this point, anything would do the trick—to distract her so she could regain her fucking grip on reality. She looked through a gap in the fence, focusing on the stretch of land on the other side. A handful of trees dotted the space, thin and long like a shoreline, with a small, scraggly yard and a smaller, scragglier trailer beyond. A young girl stood in the grass, and even though her back was to Marley as she reached into the battered laundry basket at her feet to pull out a T-shirt and clip it to the twine strung over her head, Marley would’ve recognized that blond hair and too-slim stature anywhere.

  It was Sierra.

  Edging back so that she was mostly hidden by the part of the fence that was still standing, Marley peered past the boards, her heartbeat pressing against her eard
rums like a baby bird’s wings, flap-flap-flap-flap-flap. Sierra repeated the laundry-hanging process with a pair of shorts, a sundress that was threadbare enough to be nearly translucent, and a few other articles of clothing. Even from this distance and through the tank top the girl was wearing, Marley could practically see the bones in Sierra’s spine as she bent, then stood, bent, then stood, again and again until the job was done and she headed back toward the trailer, and oh God, she had to do something.

  “You didn’t see that snake again, did you?”

  Greyson’s voice sent Marley’s pulse bottle-rocketing to the moon. “What?” she asked, jerking around to look at him.

  “Your face,” he said slowly, his expression impossible to gauge from beneath the brim of his baseball hat and all that bravado he wore as well as a fingerprint. “You look like someone just walked over your grave.”

  Jesus. In a trillion years, she would never get used to all the totally bizarre sayings people had in this Godforsaken town. “I’m fine. Also, not dead yet.”

  Before he could tell her it was just a saying, blah blah blah, she dialed her voice to its most nonchalant setting and asked, “So, who’s that girl?”

  “What?” He dropped the fence boards he’d propped over one broad shoulder and the toolbox he must’ve turned up from the shed into the grass between them, but oh no. Marley wanted his full attention.

  “The little girl,” she said, stepping into Greyson’s line of sight until he had no choice but to stop what he was doing and look at her. “The family, who lives there in that trailer on the other side of the fence. Who are they?”

  The question had to have caught him off guard, because he answered her both quickly and without snark. “The Becketts. They’ve lived there for a handful of years. One of the few families in Millhaven not to have been born and bred here, actually.”