But just then, the plate went slipping from her hands and crashed to the floor. She cursed as she quickly bent down to clean up the shards.
Grayson moved to help her, but not quickly enough to stop her from cutting herself on one of the sharp edges of the broken plate. He grabbed her hand as it began to bleed.
“Damn it, Lori, I said I would deal with cleaning up.”
She tried to yank her hand back, saying, “It’s just a little cut,” but he was already pulling her up and running her finger beneath the faucet.
He didn’t care how little the cut was, he didn’t like to see her hurt, or to know that she’d done it to try to prove a point to him about how hard she could work. “You need to be more careful,” he growled as he wrapped a clean dishtowel around her little finger and applied pressure to it, “especially when you’re tired.”
They were standing close enough now that he finally saw the dark smudges beneath her eyes. And given the fact that, for the very first time, she hadn’t come back with a quick retort, he knew she had to be exhausted.
“Go to bed, Lori. I’ll deal with this mess.”
“I’m fine.”
The urge to stroke his hand over her cheek to find out if her skin was as soft there as it was on her hands made his voice more gruff than it needed to be as he told her, “The day starts early here on the farm. You need the sleep.”
Her full mouth tightened down, before she shrugged and said, “You’re the boss.”
She looked at their hands and he belatedly realized he was still holding hers. He took a step back and let her go. Of course, she couldn’t just head to her bedroom, she had to make a pit stop to make a fuss over the cat again, with a promise of making her some “yummy treats” soon. It wasn’t until she started sneezing uncontrollably that she finally wished Mo good night with a kiss to the patchy fur on the cat’s forehead.
He purposely kept his mind blank as he cleaned up the floor, then did the dishes and headed into his bedroom to hit the sack. He could hear Lori banging around in her room, knew she was pissed off at him, and tried not to feel guilty about his behavior. Hell, if she’d have been the male college-aged kid he’d planned to hire, he wouldn’t have been worrying about being nice or trying not to touch his new farmhand. And he sure wouldn’t be practically tiptoeing around in his own bedroom because he was worried about waking her up when she’d obviously been hard hit with the need for rest.
What the hell was wrong with him? How could he have considered letting her stay even for one night? Tomorrow, he decided, one way or another she had to go.
Grayson was just pulling back the covers when he heard something that had him stilling.
Crying.
She was crying, damn it.
Grayson clenched the covers tightly in his fist as his heart—the one he swore he didn’t have anymore—broke for her.
He had no idea what, or who, had hurt Lori Sullivan. But given how strong she’d proved herself to be all day long, he knew it had to be bad if it could force her to the point where she couldn’t hold back her sobs.
Especially since he knew the last thing she’d want would be for him to hear them.
It took every ounce of his self-control not to go to her, and in the end, the only thing that kept him from leaving his room for hers was the absolute certainty that she would hate for him to see her with her walls down, vulnerable and hurting.
And by the time her bedroom finally fell silent a short while later, Grayson knew he wasn’t going to make good on his promise to himself, come tomorrow.
He was going to let her stay.
Chapter Six
So much for everything looking better in the morning.
Because even though Grayson had let her sleep in past sunrise, when Lori got out of bed to deal with the call of nature she was shocked by how much everything hurt. She’d danced for hours every day for nearly her entire life, yet she still ached from the cleaning and stooping and kneeling on the floor. All for someone who didn’t appreciate any of it, and who clearly had never uttered the words “thank you” before.
Why had she ever thought it was a good idea to start over in Pescadero? Instead of renting a car at the airport and driving into the boonies, she could have hopped onto another plane and headed off to Hawaii. She could be lying on the beach right now sipping drinks under an umbrella with the sound of soothing waves lulling away her sadness.
Only, she’d always hated lying around on the beach. Besides, she would have gone absolutely crazy in Hawaii with all of those happy couples on their honeymoons and anniversaries walking hand in hand and kissing in the moonlight.
She hadn’t bothered to blow-dry her hair last night after her bath. She could jump into another quick bath and blow-dry, but why should she when she was just going to get all dirty and sweaty again cleaning and cooking and dealing with chickens? It was much easier just to run a brush through her hair and pull it back into a ponytail. She gave another thought to pulling her makeup bag out of her suitcase, but what was the point of that, either? The farm animals wouldn’t care what she looked like.
And she certainly wasn’t trying to attract Grayson. In fact, it would be better if she didn’t look pretty. That way, he wouldn’t get the wrong idea about her and actually start looking at her as a woman, rather than a farmhand.
Still, it was weird to forgo makeup, considering that even when her brothers had dragged her out camping a couple of times, she’d brought the basics with her. But as Lori studied herself in the mirror, she was surprised to realize that she didn’t look half bad with a perfectly clean face, apart from the fact that her eyes were still a little puffy and red around the edges.
She still couldn’t believe she’d cried last night—that she’d actually lain in the guest bed and sobbed into the pillow to make sure the sound didn’t carry to the rest of the house. Her twin sister Sophie had always been the crier—over sad books or when someone got hurt or even when one of their brothers did something really great like win the World Series or an Oscar—but never Lori.
She’d rather hug or kiss or dance. Anything but cry.
She tried to tell herself that they had been angry tears. Frustrated tears. Exhausted tears. But it was no use, not when she knew there had been plenty of self-pitying tears mixed in, too. And those were the ones that she absolutely wouldn’t stand for.
Lori Sullivan wasn’t someone who felt sorry for herself. She didn’t have time for that nonsense.