“I’ll make sure to bring Lori back safe and sound in a couple of hours.”
Grayson barely kept himself from growling that Eric had better do just that or he’d make sure the other man paid for it.
Lori was just leaving the barn when she suddenly turned around and grabbed the cowboy hat off the nail. When she plopped it back on her head, Eric grinned at her and said, “Great hat.”
“Thank you.” Her smile at his compliment was so bright it could have lit up the entire town.
And as Grayson watched them get into Eric’s truck and then drive away, he wondered what in the hell he was doing sending her off alone with Eric. It wasn’t that he thought the other man would do anything to hurt her or frighten her. On the contrary, Eric was a good-looking young guy. He didn’t have any issues, didn’t have any reasons not to make a play for Lori and hope that she played, too.
* * *
The two hours that Grayson spent working with his hammer on the new cottage roof, so hard and fast that his shoulder ached, didn’t bring him any closer to erasing the way Lori had smiled at Eric. And when Grayson finally heard the truck come back up the drive, he was hard pressed not to yank her out of it and claim her as his once and for all with a kiss that would have both of them forgetting anything but how good they could be together.
Of course, Eric came around and helped her out of his truck like a gentleman. She gave him a hug good-bye and then stood in the driveway and waved as he drove away. Her smile was still intact as she said, “That was so much fun!”
Grayson’s heart swelled in his chest at seeing her so happy, even if he hadn’t been the one to make her that way. But when she finally looked up and realized he was standing by the side of the barn watching her, her smile fell away.
“I can’t believe you don’t do the pick-up here,” she said, evidently no longer giving him the silent treatment. “Your customers are the neatest people and they’re so grateful for the food you grow for them. Don’t you want the satisfaction of seeing how happy they are—or at least give them a chance to say thank you?”
She’d only been back for sixty seconds and already she was laying into him. How could he have been upset about her earlier moratorium on chatting?
Knowing she was going to keep glaring at him until he answered, he told her, “I’m too busy.”
She made a sound of disbelief. A loud one. “You can’t spare two hours once a week to actually interact with your customers and community, but Eric told me you give away free food to people who can’t afford to subscribe to your CSA every single week.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand you at all, Grayson. Not even a little bit.” With that, she headed inside the house and slammed the door.
The sick truth was that he didn’t understand himself, either, didn’t know how he could be feeling what he was feeling for her so quickly. She’d only been with him for a few days, and had pushed every one of his buttons repeatedly—and likely on purpose—more than half the time.
Not only was he torn between wanting to strangle her and wanting to kiss her, but frankly, he wasn’t sure which was going to happen first.
Although when he finally walked back into his house and found Lori curled up on the couch sneezing her head off with Mo on her lap as she tried to coax her to “just take one more teeny-tiny bite of the super yummy liver,” anyone with half a brain would have placed their bets on kissing.
Which was why he immediately grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter and headed straight for the local bar to watch a game he wasn’t interested in and eat a burger that tasted like sawdust, making sure he didn’t return to the house until he could be sure Lori was asleep.
It was long past midnight when he finally headed up his driveway, and when he saw that her bedroom light was still on, he was suddenly hit with the crazy urge to rewind the past six hours—hell, the past several days—so that he could get things right with her this time.
Only, as soon as he got out of his truck, she turned off her bedroom light.
Chapter Ten
Grayson had obviously had breakfast by the time Lori woke up—a little late, due to the fact that she’d been waiting up to make sure he got home safe and sound after the way he’d barged out of the house the night before. She ate quickly, then went outside to feed the chickens and collect their eggs. When she was done, she headed into the pigpen.
“Hey, Chase,” she said to one of her favorite pigs. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
The pigs acted almost like puppies as they snuffled at her new boots and came for pats on the head. There were seven of them, so she’d decided to name them after her brothers and sister. And since Grayson was off somewhere doing secret farmer things that she’d likely have to pry out of him with a crowbar if she was interested enough, she talked to them the way she would have talked with her siblings.
“Pretty amazing how beautiful it is when the sun sets here, isn’t it?” she told the pig she’d named after her photographer brother. “Probably wish your hooves weren’t so dirty so you could pick up a camera and capture it, don’t you?” She could have sworn the pig nodded.
She was refilling the water troughs as the fastest pig raced over for a drink, reminding her of her car-racing brother Zach. “There was the most beautiful classic Ford truck on Main Street yesterday. Wouldn’t it be great to go zipping down the farm road in the middle of the night, under a full moon, pedal to the metal?” Just as her brother Zach would have, he ignored her and kept on drinking.
She grinned as she picked up the bag of feed and the oldest pig of the bunch kept a watchful eye on her, letting the younger ones feed first. “You’re definitely Marcus,” she said, her heart tugging hard as she thought about how much her oldest brother, who owned a winery in Napa Valley, would love the rolling hills of Pescadero. “Maybe you should give some thought to convincing Grayson to put in some grapes out here, too.” The pig simply kept a calm watch over the rest of his motley crew.
Talking to the pigs like this didn’t make her miss her family any less, but it kept her smiling. And she knew that was the most important thing right now. Especially when the only actual person she had to talk to was little better than working and living with a ghost.
She didn’t know how he did it—how he managed to be so big and yet so silent, so domineering and yet invisible, all at the same time. In some ways, Grayson reminded her of her twin sister Sophie. Soph could slip in and out of a room and notice absolutely everything in it without anyone being the wiser.