"Lance Devlin?" A bitter-burnt taste filled Hunter"s mouth, and d.a.m.n, whoever had made the coffee this morning needed to lighten the load with the grounds.
Eli pulled a face only a mother could love, and even then, only at a fifty-fifty shot. "I don"t care how many yards he racks up in a season. If that guy was an ice cream flavor, he"d be pralines and d.i.c.k."
A tiny smile tempted the corners of Hunter"s mouth, but he kept the gesture in check. Emerson had gone all close to the vest the minute he"d mentioned Lance the other day. She didn"t seem the type to come home after twelve long years just to lick her wounds over a breakup, even from a high-profile d.i.c.k-uh, football player. While Hunter suspected there was a whole lot more to Emerson"s return to Millhaven than un-dating Lance Devlin, she was clearly still touchy about the situation. The fact that she and Lance had called it quits shouldn"t make him happy.
Oh, who the h.e.l.l was he kidding? This was a guy who"d recently told the media, "There might not be an "I" in team, but there sure is a "me.""
Emerson deserved better.
"Yeah. I guess I"d better get to the books," Hunter said, ungracefully closing the conversation. But h.e.l.l, between his gimpy shoulder and his brothers" propensity for acting like the farm was some sort of no-holds-barred cage match, Hunter"s status quo had taken enough of a whack this week. Throwing thoughts of Emerson Montgomery and her newly single relationship status on top of all that?
Fuel, meet flame. Better to snuff his feelings out now and move on with the business of healing so nothing exploded, at Cross Creek or in his personal life.
Hunter exchanged a quick "see ya later" with Eli, downing the last of his now-cold coffee as he headed to the main house. Stopping in the kitchen just long enough for a refill, he headed for the main-level bedroom his father had converted into an office about fifteen years ago. He grabbed a handheld radio from the charger out of habit before his stomach clenched with the realization that he really didn"t need the thing since he"d be parked inside all morning. Still, Hunter clipped the radio to the belt loop of his wash-faded Wranglers anyway as he turned to survey the room in front of him.
A large, L-shaped walnut desk claimed center stage on the old red-and-tan area rug spread over the floorboards, its surface covered by a hulking desktop computer and haphazard stacks of papers and file folders. Three metal file cabinets stood sentry in the left-hand corner of the room, the sunlight filtering in from the windows on the opposite wall illuminating the dents and dings in each one. The only thing in the room that made Hunter even consider a smile was the roly-poly black-and-white mutt happily snoring away at the foot of the desk.
"You"re busted, old girl." Hunter placed his coffee next to the computer monitor, bending to scratch Lucy behind the ears. "You gonna keep me from going around the bend today? I sure could use the help."
There was a four-way tie among the Cross men for who hated bookkeeping the most, and their old man"s aversion to technology didn"t smooth the process. But, come on. They were farmers, not number crunchers. Give Hunter complex soil compositions or planting timetables any day of the week and twice on Sunday, and he"d balance "em on a blade of Kentucky bluegra.s.s. Spreadsheets and accounting software and maximizing marketing trends via social media?
The thought alone was enough to give him the f.u.c.king shakes.
Still, the work needed to be done, and as much as he"d rather have a prostate exam than manage the books, Hunter wasn"t about to sit back and play tiddlywinks just because he was injured. Parking himself firmly in the Windsor-back chair his father had liberated from the dining room over a decade ago, he dug into the closest pile of papers.
Three hours, two cups of coffee, and one giant neck cramp later, Hunter was actually filled with relief at the idea of heading into town for his PT session with Emerson.
Emerson, who spoke to him only about his standards of care and the hotter-than-usual weather they seemed to be having. Emerson, whose pretty, ocean-colored eyes flashed with something he couldn"t quite label but that jabbed at his gut all the same. Emerson, whose hands felt way better on him than they should.
On second thought, maybe the d.a.m.ned bookkeeping would be less stressful.
Hunter quickly traded his jeans and work boots for a pair of basketball shorts and cross-trainers, plucking the keys to his F-250 from the table in the front hall and heading for his truck. He kept his windows rolled down, even though it was hotter than h.e.l.l"s doorstep outside, hoping the fresh air would kick his unease to the curb on the short drive into town. But all the weather did was dampen his T-shirt with perspiration, not to mention remind him of everything he"d been missing for the last week straight while he rode the pine down at Cross Creek.
So much for losing his c.r.a.ptastic mood. Now Hunter was hacked off and sweaty, and if the pain cranking through the back of his shoulder was any indication, no closer to healing his way back into action than he had been at the start of this week. Biting down on his irritation, he slid out of the truck, moving past Doc Sanders"s front office to push his way through the door to the physical therapy room.
"Wow," Emerson said, looking up from behind the scuffed fake wood veneer of the reception desk. "Tough morning?"
"No. Everything"s great." The default springboarded past Hunter"s lips, although the untruth pinched like a son of a b.i.t.c.h. "Yeah, maybe," he recanted.
"Are you in pain?" A crease of genuine worry formed between her cinnamon-colored brows, but Hunter was quick to shake his head.
"No, nothing like that. I mean, my shoulder"s still pretty sore, but . . ." Remembering their just-business agreement, he started to jam his feelings of frustration back into his rib cage.
But, funny, they flat out refused to go. "I guess I"m not used to sitting on the sidelines at Cross Creek. This morning"s just been pretty rough, is all."
"Ah." Emerson rolled up the sleeves of her light-blue blouse, waving him past the desk. "Well, let"s take a look at your sore spots and see what we"re dealing with in that shoulder."
Right. Just business. Surely she had an exercise or three in her bottomless a.r.s.enal of ways to torture him.
Hunter crossed the threshold of the reception desk, holding still and trying to breathe through the ache while she pressed and prodded his shoulder over his T-shirt.
"Hmm. You"re pretty locked up today. You haven"t been doing any lifting, have you?"
"Nothing other than an inventory clipboard and the desk chair in the office," he said, the reminder filling him with a fresh shot of exasperation.
Her fingers stilled on his rotator cuff, a soft "aha" floating over his shoulder.
"Is something wrong?" His pulse thumped faster in his veins. His day-h.e.l.l, his entire week-had been bad enough, thank you very much. A setback with this injury would obliterate the last shreds of his usually stalwart calm.
"I"m pretty sure I found the source of your problem. Good news is, it should be an easy fix once we get started." Emerson looked up at him, her smile professional and polite. But now that they were separated by less than an arm"s length, Hunter could see the shadows beneath her eyes that she"d done her best to cover, along with the tiny worry lines etched on her pretty face.
But it was the flicker of pure vulnerability, so out of place in the capable, confident stare she"d worn all week, that popped him right in the chest.
"Emerson, are you okay?"
His mouth launched the question before his brain even knew it would fully form, and although the part of him that didn"t go borrowing trouble wished for a rewind, a deeper part of him p.r.i.c.kled in sudden concern.
"I"m fine," she said, her expression growing so smooth that he had to wonder if he"d just been projecting his own fatigue onto her. "How about you? Are you ready for our session?"
Hunter"s worry screeched to a halt on his tongue. He might not have as much c.o.c.ky charm as his brother Eli, but he knew better than to tell a woman she looked tired-h.e.l.l, he might as well plaster himself with four-foot signs that read, "Kick Me in the Junk." Anyhow, Emerson looked fine now, albeit serious, and the way she felt was really none of his business.
"As ready as I"ll ever be, I guess." He shook off the last of the odd feeling and followed her over the linoleum.
"Good. We can start with a few minutes of warm-up on the arm bike." She moved farther into the therapy room before adding, "I"m glad you"re following doctor"s orders. But as far as hating the sidelines goes, you"re preaching to the pulpit."
Huh. Can"t say he"d been expecting that. But anything was better than small-talking their way through the weather report. What the h.e.l.l. He"d bite. "Am I really?"
Emerson turned to deliver a look of brows-up surprise over one shoulder. "Does that honestly shock you?"
"A little, yeah. Not that you don"t have a serious work ethic." h.e.l.l, she"d nearly been the end of him this week with all of her relentless exercises and mobility stretches. "But you just left a job with the hottest football team in the NFL to come back to a town that"s barely on the map, let alone the sidelines."
The curiosity was out before Hunter could trap it, and he stopped short in front of the makeshift exercise area. Emerson had made it clear that sharing wasn"t on her to-do list, and he wasn"t really sure he wanted to get all "k.u.mbaya" with her, anyway. He really should just shut his yap and drop the topic. "Sorry. I"m-"
"Right."
His pulse stuttered along with his words. "I . . . what?"
"You"re right," she said softly, although her expression remained unrattled and unchanged as she motioned for him to sit on the rec.u.mbent bike. "My life was a lot faster paced in Las Vegas. But just because I"m back in Millhaven doesn"t mean I want to kick up my feet and rest on my laurels."
A question formed in Hunter"s brain, and s.h.i.t. If he was going to break the just-business barrier, he might as well go all in. "What does it mean?"
She paused. "It means I needed a change. But lucky for your shoulder, I"m still here to work hard." Emerson dropped her chin to adjust the hand pegs she"d attached to the upper part of the bike, a swath of hair breaking free from the low ponytail at her nape to cover her eyes. "So Owen and Eli are at each other"s throats, huh?"
"Yeah." Okay, so she was obviously shuffling the subject, but even talking about his brothers" bickering was better than sticking to canned pleasantries like nice weather we"re having and how"s your shoulder pain on a scale of one to ten? "Not a huge deal, really. Just today"s version of an argument that"s about a decade old."
"Wow. That doesn"t seem like no huge deal."
Hunter went to shrug, and s.h.i.t, sooner or later he was going to remember that the move was a bad idea before he did it. "I"m sure you remember they"ve always had totally different personalities, and nothing there has changed. Which is cool in general," he said, leaning forward in the seat to curl his fingers over the hard plastic pegs in front of him.
"But difficult when you"re trying to run a business," Emerson finished. She motioned for him to start pedaling with his arms, but her attention didn"t stray from the conversation.
So Hunter kept talking. "Yeah, and lately, things are only getting worse. We had a rough spring at the farm, and a rough winter before that-lots of bad weather and a few missed predictions on soil compositions, so we lost some livestock and the crops are weaker than usual."
"I"m sorry."
The words were simple, a standard-issue response Hunter might expect from any well-meaning person in pa.s.sing conversation. But something in Emerson"s voice told him she wasn"t just saying them to show off her impeccable manners, and h.e.l.l if that didn"t make him continue to flap his trap.
"There"s a ton of work to be done if we want to rebound," he admitted slowly. "And even though he"d rather be skinned alive than admit it, my father isn"t able to do as much as he used to."
"Oh." A flicker moved through her stare, softening her expression. "How is your dad?"
"He"s okay. Tough," Hunter added, although he couldn"t deny that between the unpredictable weather and the bone-wearying manual labor that inherently went with running a farm, the last few years had done their best to wear his old man out. "Still up with the roosters every day, trying to work circles around the rest of us."
A puff of laughter crossed Emerson"s lips. "Guess you come by that whole hating-the-sidelines thing pretty honest."
He knew he shouldn"t mess with her, but G.o.d, she"d been so b.u.t.toned up all week, it was too good to pa.s.s up.
"Does that honestly shock you?" he asked, unable to keep one corner of his mouth from lifting into a half smile as he recycled her words from a few minutes earlier.
How about that-she smiled back. "I suppose not. You did balance working on the farm with school and football practice when you were barely eighteen. Not exactly something a guy can pull off if he lacks ambition."
"Spoken like a woman who managed to carve out a four-point-oh GPA while waving from the homecoming float," Hunter said. He waited out Emerson"s silence by continuing his rhythm with the arm bicycle, his shoulder not pleased with the exertion, but not quite as p.i.s.sed as it could"ve been.
Finally, just when he figured he"d exhausted his supply of personal conversation with her, she tilted her chin in a wordless fair enough. "Okay, so we both still hate the sidelines. But you had the chance for a faster pace, too. You were scouted by some of the best colleges on the East Coast. Even with that rotator cuff injury senior year, you still could"ve landed one of a half-dozen scholarships, yet you stayed here, anyway."
Okay, now she had him in the surprise department. Hunter had never made any bones about his desire to spend his entire life in Millhaven. Sure, he"d liked playing football. But he loved the farm, from breath to b.a.l.l.s. Always had.
"Did you really think I wouldn"t?" he asked.
Emerson didn"t say no, but the curiosity in her eyes didn"t relent, either. "You said it yourself. Millhaven"s barely on the map, let alone the sidelines. Haven"t you ever wondered what if?"
Hunter paused, letting all the layers of her question sink in. "What if what?"
"I guess . . . what might"ve happened if you"d left for something bigger."
His heart sped up. "You"re forgetting the most important part of the equation."
"Which is?"
"For me, running the farm with my brothers isn"t sitting on the sidelines. It"s not just where I want to be. It"s where I"ve always belonged. As far as I"m concerned . . . there is nothing bigger."
"I didn"t forget," Emerson whispered. For a second, she stood beside him, her eyes wide and her expression wide open, and all of a sudden, Hunter"s pounding heartbeat had nothing to do with the exercise.
He opened his mouth-to say what, exactly, he had no freaking clue. But then she took a step back, the look on her face growing impenetrable once again, and his chance to say anything disappeared like mist at sunrise.
CHAPTER SIX.
Emerson took a step back on the floor tiles, absolutely convinced she"d lost her faculties. Okay, so there had been a method to her madness when she"d bypa.s.sed her strictly business chitchat with Hunter at the start of their session. Emotional stress had direct physiological impact on a lot of injuries, and it never made them heal faster. The way Hunter"s shoulder had knotted up at the mere mention of being out of action at the farm told her all she needed to know about the source of the tightness in his shoulder. Emerson had started their conversation in an effort to get him to relax, knowing it would loosen some of his tension and therefore help him heal.
She hadn"t realized that lowering Hunter"s stress would also lower her guard until it had been too late.
Emerson tucked her hair behind her ear, strong-arming her pulse back out of the stratosphere. The past was over, her decisions made no matter how much her memories stung. Right now she had a job to do, and her only client was in pain. Which meant the tension in Hunter"s muscles and tendons absolutely had to go.
There was only one surefire way to make that happen, and it d.a.m.n sure wasn"t confessing how she"d come within a thin thread of telling him the truth about her family life and begging him to go with her when she"d left for college.
"So tell me more about how the farm runs now," Emerson said.
Hunter"s chin popped up with the force of his surprise. "You want to talk about daily operations at Cross Creek?"
"If you"d like, sure." She realized a beat too late that he might not want to talk to her at all-she had been pretty adamant about keeping things on the straight and narrow this week, and he probably wanted to get personal with her about as much as he wanted a colonoscopy. But then his shoulders loosened just slightly beneath the white cotton of his T-shirt, the small but genuine smile spreading over his face telling her she"d hit pay dirt.
"Some things at Cross Creek are the same as they"ve always been," he said, his shoulders dropping even farther from his neck as he rolled through the motions on the hand bicycle. "We"re still the biggest family-run farm in the Shenandoah. Corn, soybeans, seasonal crops, livestock, although we hired a separate manager for the sheep and cattle about seven years ago."
Interest sparked in Emerson"s mind, so strong she couldn"t resist. "Whatever happened to that brown Jersey cow? The one your brother begged your dad to keep in the barn with the horses by the henhouse?"
"Clarabelle?" Hunter"s laugh was all warmth and rumble. "She"s getting a little long in the tooth, but she"s still around. All eleven hundred pounds of her. And before you ask, yes. Eli still treats her like a puppy. Going on fourteen years old, and that old cow has got the nicest stall in the horse barn. Blankets in the winter, the whole nine yards."
Now it was Emerson"s turn to laugh. "Sounds like a lot of things really are the same."
"Not everything," he countered. "Although most of our livestock and crops are still sold to distributors, in today"s market, a farm the size of Cross Creek needs multiple streams of revenue in order to stay in the black."
"I"m afraid you"re losing me a little." Human bodies, she could fix no problem. She"d even worked with some moderately high-tech imaging and record-keeping systems when she"d been with the Lightning. But running a business with all those moving parts-and one that had to do with things like managing crops and livestock at that? Yeah, that was waaaay out of Emerson"s league.
But if Hunter minded her cluelessness, he didn"t let it show. "Think of it like covering all the bases. Yes, we do most of our business selling our agriculture to companies that process it for different uses. But there"s more than one way for us to utilize our resources to make money."
"So you"re not just selling corn and soybeans and cattle to distributors anymore," she said, and he lifted an index finger from one of the bike pedals to gesture that she"d caught on.
"Exactly. We sell produce to a few local grocery stores and restaurants, and we dipped our feet in the agritourism pond a few years ago."
"Agri-what?" Emerson"s brows lifted as her brain went for a full spin. She"d always known farming was more than seed/feed/sow, but, wow, she"d missed a lot in the last twelve years.
Hunter, however, hadn"t missed a single step. "It"s just a fancy way of saying we added a few things to bring people out to the farm, proper. We"ve got some pick-your-own fields for smaller seasonal crops like strawberries, apples, and pumpkins, and we started a community-supported agriculture program so people can buy produce direct. We"re also trying out some specialty market stuff in the greenhouses year-round. That"s sort of been Owen"s baby for the last couple of years."
Just like that, Emerson"s interest tripled. "Specialty market stuff, huh? Like what?"
"You name it, we"ve tried it. A bunch of different kinds of squash, root veggies, asparagus, some herbs and greens. About twenty varieties of heirloom tomatoes. The list goes on and on."
"Wow. Those tomatoes sound delicious," she said, her stomach seconding the motion with a slightly embarra.s.sing and very toothy rumble.
Hunter arched a chestnut-colored brow. "And your stomach sounds empty."
"Not exactly." Most of the time she was too busy for breakfast-or at least, she used to be-and the meds her new neurologist had started her on a few days ago were wreaking havoc on her stomach, besides. But just because she wasn"t a breakfast person didn"t mean she wasn"t a coffee person.