Crossing Hope (Cross Creek Series Book 4) Page 9

  “Really?” Okay, can’t say she’d seen that coming.

  “Yeah, really. Every once in a while, this charming little town of ours gets a transplant.” Greyson gave her a pointed smirk, then tipped his chin to look past the gap in the fence. “As for the Becketts, it’s just the little girl, Sierra, and her mother, Jade. I think she works in Camden Valley, but I’m not sure. They mostly keep to themselves.”

  “I thought everyone in this town knew everyone else,” Marley said, exasperated. How else was she supposed to figure out how to help Sierra and her mom?

  Greyson reached down and snatched up a board from the stack beside him in the grass. “And I thought you wanted to get this work done as fast as possible.”

  “I do,” she said, proving it by flattening her palms over the board he’d jutted his chin at in a wordless take this, holding it in place while he bent to grab a hammer. “I’m just asking a question.”

  “Why?”

  Marley noticed then that Greyson had moved in behind her, presumably to take over her spot at the fence now that he’d grabbed the hammer he needed to nail the board into place. But instead of reaching out to hold the plank steady so she could duck away from him, he simply stood there—close, close, God, so warm and tempting and close—waiting for her to answer.

  She turned her chin over her shoulder, her lips parting just enough to usher out her exhale. The defenses that had sewn themselves into her fabric over the past nine months warned her—loudly and with zero remorse—to use the scant space Greyson had left between their bodies to sidestep him, board and pride be damned. He was right there, their breath comingling and the heat of his body pressing into her back through the thin cotton of her shirt. Marley could smell the scent of something crisp—his soap, maybe—layered beneath a less definitive smell that was more masculine, more personal, especially as she pulled it inside of her on an inhale and held it. Her instinct told her to shutter herself, to grow spikes and find space. But then, for one bright, unexplainable second, Marley wanted to turn not away, but toward Greyson, so she could let the truth spill out of her like a waterfall.

  The moment was gone as unceremoniously as it had arrived, leaving her with the sharp sting of having been slapped in the face. Was she nuts? She couldn’t tell Greyson the truth about Sierra. She couldn’t tell him the truth about anything.

  She needed him at arm’s length. Right. Now.

  “No reason,” Marley said, sliding neatly aside to hand the board off to him and reclaim the distance between them. “Forget I asked.”

  He blinked once, a slow lower and lift of those dark, see-all eyes. “You got it,” he said, turning away from her.

  But somehow, she knew he wouldn’t.

  9

  After nearly a week of farm/shelter/farm/bed, Greyson had shot right past dog-tired and thudded to a stop just this side of utter fucking exhaustion. Things at Whittaker Hollow were exactly as he’d expected them to be, which was to say he’d been busy with work and short-tempered with his old man. Things at the shelter had met expectations, too; namely that he and Marley had spent two evenings this week completing menial chores while trading as little interaction as possible. Which should’ve been fine by him, really. After all, Greyson had wanted nothing more than to get in, get done, and get out, in that order.

  Except all the silence was driving him ape shit, and the curiosity about Marley that he couldn’t keep from doubling every time he turned around? That was driving him crazy in a whooooole different way. Now more than ever.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, his shoulders slumping against the over-worn driver’s seat of his Silverado. Okay, so maybe he’d pushed a little too hard by stepping in so close when she’d gotten all nosy about the Becketts. But it had been a weird ask, and anyway, he always pushed too hard. Marley hadn’t been expecting it, though. Greyson had been able to tell by the way she’d looked at him, those blue eyes flaring hotly, her mouth parted in surprise so sweet, he’d wanted nothing more than to taste it, long and slow on his tongue.

  She’d moved away, of course, pushing back in response to his push first just as everyone did, and had continued to keep him at arm’s length for the rest of this week. Louis had kept them running all over hell’s half-acre, clearing out storage closets and organizing poorly kept inventory—dog food and grooming tools and crate after crate of things Greyson would bet his left arm Louis hadn’t even known he’d had. He and Marley had yet to actually care for any of the animals they’d seen in the pens in the back of the shelter, but that’d have to change at some point here, soon. The place was only so big, and despite the reputation that everyone in town had painted him with decades ago, Greyson had enough work ethic to get done whatever chores Louis tossed at him, and right quick.

  Why do you care what he thinks of you?

  Greyson shook off both the memory and the fresh pinch the question sent between his ribs. He had bigger shit to think on than Louis Kerrigan’s opinion of him, and damn little energy to spare on anything that wasn’t related to Whittaker Hollow. They were about to be up to their elbows in grain, corn, and at least half of their smaller crops of locally grown produce. All the soil analysis and calibration he’d done to the fertilization methods they used on their peach trees had paid off in spades last year, and he was looking to not only repeat that success, but outdo it this season. It’d take all the energy he had, and probably some he didn’t.

  But that didn’t matter. Louis Kerrigan’s opinion of him didn’t matter. The fact that his father would likely be more hindrance than help in getting the work done didn’t matter, either.

  None of it mattered except the land.

  Pulling up to the shelter, Greyson parked next to Marley’s rusty, dusty Toyota—how the thing even ran was honestly beyond him—and hustled up the walkway, then through the front door. Marley stood in the waiting area, flushed and a little breathless, wearing—whoa—a red and black dress with a series of thin, intricate straps draped across her shoulders and a pair of spike-heeled sandals that gave him all sorts of really good bad ideas.

  “Aren’t you a little over-dressed?” The question didn’t come out with nearly as much cockiness as Greyson had intended to pin to it, not that any straight guy over the age of eighteen could fucking blame him under the circumstances. That dress was a goddamned menace. But Marley scowled well enough in reply.

  “I had to leave work early to get here in time as it was. I didn’t even have time to change my shoes, let alone the rest of it.”

  The curiosity Greyson had just sworn off came rushing back to life. Traitorous little shit. “Where do you work?”

  “Sage and Maggie’s,” she said, as if the words were slightly rotten, like milk that was a day past its prime. “It’s a vintage boutique with a modern twist for today’s upscale fashionistas.”

  He would not laugh. He would not laugh. He would not—“Sorry,” Greyson said, his laugh escaping on a big, fat middle finger to decorum. “I don’t have any idea what that means.”

  To his surprise, one corner of Marley’s mouth kicked up instead of curling into a sneer. “It’s basically a shop that sells overpriced, overly trendy women’s clothes. In Lockridge Mall.”

  Christ, there was so much to unpack there. Finally, he decided to go with, “I guess that explains the dress.”

  “Nothing explains this dress. The shoes, even less.”

  “You two done yappin’?”

  Louis crossed his arms and frowned from the spot where he’d appeared in the doorway leading to the back of the shelter, and Greyson wondered if the guy was churlish even in his sleep.

  “Absolutely,” Marley said, turning toward Louis. After a quick trip to the tiny bathroom to trade her dress and heels for a tank top and a pair of jeans that did nothing to stop the flow of bad ideas in Greyson’s head, she reappeared at the front desk. “Okay. What’s on tap for tonight?”

  “Come on,” Louis grunted. He led the way through the door, bypassing the storage closet and the smal
l square of the office in favor of the larger, open space where the animals were. The area was shockingly tidy considering how cluttered and dingy the rest of the place was…or, at least, had been before Greyson and Marley had gotten their hands on it. The animals—seven, no, make that eight, dogs of varying degrees of mutt-dom, and four cats, all looking equally bored—seemed healthy and well-fed, and most of the dogs perked up with varying degrees of eagerness at the sound of Louis’s footsteps and voice as he neared.

  “The pens all need cleaning out. I’d’a done it today but I had to go into Camden Valley to pick up an emergency rescue and help them out a little. Their shelter’s at capacity.”

  “So, you want us to actually take care of them?” Marley asked, the shock on her face plain as she eyed the cages built into the wall, the dogs in one section and the cats in another.

  “Well, you ain’t here for a tea party, are ya?” Louis took a few steps to the stainless steel table in the center of the room. “The cats all need feedin’ once you’re done cleaning out the pens. Instructions are right here, and the food’s in the cabinet over there. Don’t be givin’ ’em anything that’s not on the sheet,” he warned, his stare flattening on Greyson as if surely he’d be the one to break the damned rules even though Marley had committed a crime to land herself in here, just the same as him.

  “I can read,” Greyson said between his teeth, although he purposely didn’t pick up the sheet of paper from the table.

  Marley sighed softly. “Okay, so clean the pens and feed the cats. What else?”

  After a second, Louis loosened his stare from Greyson’s and turned back toward the pens. “These six need to be walked,” he said, gesturing to the cages on the left-hand side of the room. “At least twenty minutes apiece. No less. They ain’t had a chance to run all day, and they need to get around. But this one here”—he pointed to a cage with a medium-sized dog with one front paw heavily bandaged—“can stay in while she heals. I already took her out to do her business, so she’ll be alright.”

  Greyson scanned the pens, his attention snagging on the one in the corner, with something small and shadowy huddled up so tight, he could only see its tail and one wide, watchful eye. “What about this one?”

  “She don’t come out.”

  “Why not?” Greyson pressed, not heeding the warning in Louis’s voice for even a nanosecond. “Is she sick or something?”

  “No. She ain’t sick or hurt. Just don’t mess with her, you hear? You leave her be and take the other six out, you understand?”

  “I’m not going to mess with anything,” Greyson snapped. For crying in a bucket, he might have sharper corners than most, but he wasn’t a dog-harming delinquent.

  Not that the look on Louis’s face said that he was thinking anything but, of course. “Good. Once you do all that, there are boxes in the back hallway that need to be unpacked, and everything in them inventoried and stored. That ought to keep y’all busy ’til eight.”

  “Got it,” Marley said with a nod. “Clean the pens, walk the dogs, inventory the stuff in the boxes. Stay busy ’til quitting time.”

  After a long second and one last dose of side-eye in Greyson’s direction—which Greyson returned in kind—Louis grumbled and headed for the back door. The bang that followed announced his departure, and Greyson turned toward the pens, already formulating a plan to get the work done.

  “Okay. It’ll probably be easiest if we use two of the empty pens here to put the cats in while we rotate through cleaning their cages. Then you can walk the dogs two at a time while I stay here to clean out their pens. That’ll kill two birds with one stone.”

  Cleaning the dogs’ pens was the crappier job of the two, but Greyson didn’t mind the work. It’d get them closer to out of here, at any rate, and Christ, he was tired enough to fall over.

  But Marley grabbed his attention with a quick shake of her head. “You can walk the dogs if you want.” She looked at the cages, an odd expression on her face that Greyson couldn’t quite place, there and then gone. “In fact, go for it. I’ll clean the pens.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her why on God’s green earth she’d forfeit the easier, not to mention more fun, task. But he was tired as hell, and she’d made it clear she didn’t want to socialize, so he shrugged despite his curiosity. “Suit yourself.”

  Stepping toward the closest vacant pen, he sprang the latch to open the door, repeating the process with an adjacent cage occupied by a gray and white cat with large green eyes and a nasty but well-healed scar on one ear.

  “C’mere, you.” Greyson moved deliberately, pausing for a heartbeat to let the cat check him out by way of a series of tentative sniffs before scooping it up. He wasn’t normally a cat guy, but this one was pretty cute, and it snuggled in right quick against the crook of his arm, its purr sounding off like a tractor engine at the height of the harvest. Greyson spared a second to scratch behind its ears, giving the injured one a wider berth just to be on the safe side. The tension that had set up camp in his muscles loosened slightly, and he let a small smile escape.

  “Okay, buddy. Into the pen you go,” he said, giving the cat one last pet, then lifting it easily into its temporary quarters. He caught Marley watching out of the corner of her baby blues, and damn it, he was seriously going to have to do something about his curiosity if he wanted to make it through this community service without a hard-on of epic proportions. Her shoulders rigid, she reached into the cage in front of her and closed her hands around the orange tabby inside. The cat squirmed, its body turning and twisting like a fur-covered Slinky as Marley slid it from the cage and held it at arm’s length, awkwardly cupping a palm beneath the cat’s legs and hind quarters to help usher it into the new cage.

  “Wow,” Greyson said, unable to help it. “No offense, but you kind of suck at this part.”

  “Thanks. That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s said to me all day,” she replied. But her tone held only half of its usual caustic wit, and ah, hell.

  Greyson tried again. “I just meant you don’t seem comfortable around the animals, is all. Didn’t you ever have a dog or a cat as a pet, growing up?”

  “No.” Marley paused. Bit her lip. Examined him carefully for a minute before asking, “Did you?”

  “No.” A memory slammed into him, of a pretty black lab, never far from his uncle’s work boots, but he tucked it aside in favor of the job in front of him. “I’ve been around animals my whole life, though. Cows and chickens and a handful of feral cats who live in our hay barn.”

  “Sounds charming,” she said, and here, Greyson didn’t hesitate.

  “Actually, it is. Living on a farm is way better than any city.”

  A scoff crossed Marley’s lips, but funny, she quickly traded it for a look of curiosity as she reached for the cleaning supplies Louis had left out on the table. “Have you ever been to a city?”

  “We’re not all uncultured out here in the sticks, you know,” he told her, although he didn’t get shitty about it. If she wanted to think cities were better than small towns, then so be it. He didn’t have time to fix her crazy. “I go into Lockridge on the regular, and I’ve been to Richmond a coupl’a times. Washington, DC once. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s no better place than here.”

  “That’s what my brothers say.” She lifted a shoulder before letting it drop. “Even Eli, and he doesn’t live here all the time anymore. But it’s perspective, like you said. I guess mine’s just different.”

  Greyson wanted to push. He wanted to ask where she was from, and what was so great about wherever it was that she clearly wanted to go back, and why she’d even come to Millhaven in the first place, and about a thousand other questions ranging from nonchalant to downright damned nosy. But he stopped himself just shy of launch.

  Every time he’d pushed her, she’d pushed back and clammed up. If he wanted answers, he was going to have to get them another way.

  “Animals can sense when a person isn’t comfortable
around them,” he said. “Kind of like most people can sense it, too. But they rely on instinct, so when they sense that you’re not comfortable, they get uncomfortable back.”

  Reaching up, he unlatched the cage where he’d deposited the gray and white cat a few minutes ago. The animal came to him just as easily as it had the first time, nestling back in at the bend in his elbow as if the spot had been custom-made for it.

  Marley? Not so much. “What are you doing?” she asked, taking a step back on the linoleum and eyeing the cat with a not-small amount of wariness.

  “I’m giving you perspective.” Greyson closed the space between them in a few strides. Shifting to balance the cat with one arm, he extended the other toward Marley. As soon as he made contact, just a businesslike brush of his fingers on the outside of her wrist, she tensed, a bowstring pulling taut.

  “Hey, whoa.” The metronome of his heartbeat tripped into a faster rhythm as he released her and stepped back to widen the circle of space between them. She hadn’t yanked back, hadn’t verbally protested or side-stepped or done anything else, even though he was one hundred-percent certain she’d seen him walking toward her, arm outstretched. The contact had been slight, lasting barely a second, but clearly, he’d made her uneasy.

  “I apologize. I didn’t mean any offense.”

  Marley blinked. “I know,” she said, sounding every inch as if she meant it. A thought occurred to him, too late, and shit.

  “If you’re afraid of cats like you’re afraid of snakes, you could have told me,” he offered.

  More blinking, and Lord, her eyes were as blue as the ocean in a travel brochure. “What? I’m not…I mean, okay.” She took a deep breath, seeming to re-set herself. “I am afraid of snakes. That’s just human. But I’m not afraid of cats or dogs.”

  Greyson waited, even though he had to practically bite a hole in his bottom lip to get the job done. Finally, Marley continued with, “It’s just that I’m not a touchy-feely kind of person, is all.”