Chapter Five
Grayson couldn't believe the way things had turned out. Not only had Lori dealt well with the chickens, but she'd also cleaned his house as if she'd been working as a maid at a five-star hotel her entire life. He'd searched every corner for dust, had prayed for so much as a pillow to be out of place, but he hadn't been able to find one single thing to complain about.
And now, based on that stupid deal he'd made with her, he had to let her stay.
He hadn't shared a house with a woman in three years, had been perfectly happy to have the farmhouse to himself, until today, when a beautiful stranger had blown into his life like a hurricane. And now he was going to have to put her up until she found another place...or until she gave up on her ridiculous farmhand dream. Frankly, at this point, he wasn't sure which was going to come first. Hell, he hadn't thought she'd last this long.
He silently cursed as he watched her struggle with her bags and had to forcefully push away the urge to help her. The last thing he needed to do was to make things easy for her. Or, God forbid, let her think he actually wanted her here.
Just because she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, didn't mean that he was softening toward her. The exact opposite, in fact. All that beauty made him wary, made him remember another beautiful woman...
He couldn't go there, couldn't fall back into memories of his wife. Not tonight. Not when he needed to stay completely on his toes to make sure Lori didn't get under his skin any deeper.
The best thing would be to keep his distance from her. Completely. But after the work she'd done all day, he knew he had to at least feed her. Which was going to mean sharing a meal together on top of everything else, damn it.
He heard the water go on in the guest bathroom and scrunched his eyes tight to try to force away the vision of Lori stripping off her clothes and getting into the bathtub. Bad, bad, bad. Those kinds of thoughts were evil. He knew it...and yet he was still a man, with a man's needs. Needs that he'd gone out of his way to ignore for three years, with only a few random moments of stolen pleasure along the way when he'd known there was no chance of any serious connection or lingering attachments to the women he'd slept with.
He was covered in dirt, too, and would have gone in to his master bath to take his own shower, but the thought of being only a wall away from Lori while both of them were na**d did things to him that he couldn't deal with rationally. On a curse, he went back outside to use the outdoor shower he'd installed at the far end of the barn. It was a cold night and showering outside didn't sound even remotely good. But it was either that or slowly lose his mind at every sound he heard while thinking about Lori in the tub with soap and -
Shit. He needed to stop thinking about her like that.
He stripped off his shirt and threw it on the porch, unbuckling his belt as he walked past his animals. Even they seemed to look confused by what he was doing, coming out in the dark to wash off in their space.
How, he wondered as he yanked off his pants and boots and hung them over the wooden wall he'd erected to give the outdoor shower a little privacy, could a person cause so much havoc in just one short afternoon? Was it because she had so many siblings? Was she that afraid of being invisible that she went out of her way to be louder, more stubborn, just plain more there than a normal person?
As he scrubbed himself hard with the bar of soap, keeping the water just this side of cold so that his growing arousal couldn't come fully to life, his stomach started growling. He cranked off the shower and shook his hair out like a dog before grabbing one of the towels he always kept in a nearby container for just such an occasion. He'd been planning on a steak tonight, and grilling up some vegetables with it. If she didn't like red meat, too bad.
When he was fully dry, he pulled his jeans back on and stuck his feet into his boots. He still couldn't believe she'd been running around with bare feet. City girls like her should be afraid to get their feet dirty, to mess up their pedicures, or, God forbid, get a cut from something sharp like the edge of a rock. Pampered girls also shouldn't know how to clean.
The only way he could deal with having Lori around, even just for the short time it would take for her to give up her crazy plan and leave him alone again, was to view her as a spoiled woman out for a lark in the country for a few days.
He wished like hell that it wasn't so hard to ignore the evidence to the contrary.
Dinner. That was what he'd focus on now, rather than the fact that she was probably also drying off from her bath and slathering her toned and smooth legs with lotion.
Grayson took off his muddy boots on the porch, stepped into the kitchen via the side door, and stopped so quickly that it slammed into his back. "What are you doing?"
Lori was supposed to be in her room, damn it, not already out of the bath and in his kitchen looking and smelling better than anything ever had. Her dark hair was still wet, falling past her shoulders almost to her h*ps as she stood at his kitchen island chopping a bell pepper. She'd put on a pair of jeans that did shocking things to her ass, and even though her T-shirt shouldn't have been the least bit sexy, he now realized that anything she wore would be sexy. Hell, he could have given her a burlap sack to wear and he'd still be salivating over the curve of her neck, the bright paint on her toes, the spark that never quit in her big blue eyes.
"Making dinner."
She said it without turning to look at him, clearly still pissed off at their conversation about where she was going to stay. And possibly the fact that he'd been a jerk about not helping her with her bags.
He hadn't expected her to clean his house and make him dinner tonight, but now that she was, he certainly wasn't going to complain. Unless, of course, she didn't actually know how to make a decent meal, and was just doing this to get back at him.
"Do you know how to cook?"
She sighed, deep and long, at his question, seeming to be at least as irritated with him now as he'd been with her earlier. "I wouldn't be making dinner if I didn't." She'd found the steak he'd had marinating and sliced it up, along with the vegetables. "I thought I'd make a stir fry."
When he didn't respond, when he couldn't seem to get his throat to work right, when he couldn't seem to do anything but stand there like a fool in the doorway and stare at her, she finally turned to him.
"Look, I'm starved and I didn't think it would be a problem if I made us din - "
Her words fell away and her eyes widened as she finally looked at him. As her gaze moved over him, she licked her lips and he nearly groaned aloud at the sight of her tongue coming out to wet her gorgeous lips. She wasn't wearing makeup anymore, having washed it all off during her bath, and if anything, she was even prettier than she'd been when her lashes had been darkened with mascara and her mouth had been glossy with lipstick.
"Grayson." His name was little more than a husky breath from her dampened mouth. "You're not wearing your shirt."
He'd completely forgotten that he only had his jeans on, without the top button even done up, for God's sake. Defensively, he told her, "You weren't supposed to be in the kitchen."
"And you weren't supposed to be walking around without your clothes on!" she shot right back.
He shouldn't like the way she looked at him, as though she was barely able to keep herself from reaching out to touch him. But since he wouldn't be able to hide just how much he did like it for more than the next couple of seconds, he finally got his feet to obey the order to move again and headed for his bedroom.
Damn it, he thought as he barely stopped himself from slamming his bedroom door shut, he needed another cold shower even though he'd just gotten out of one. Fat lot of good it did, though, when all it took was one look at Lori, one breath of her hair, her fresh clean skin, one lick of her tongue across her lips, for him to forget every rule he'd lived his life by for the past three years.
Normally, Grayson made it a point to keep his memories deeply buried. Tonight, he deliberately pulled them out and made himself face them. He'd known his wife, Leslie, since college, had fallen for her on the first day of English Lit in freshman year. They were supposed to be the perfect romance, the ideal fit - the finance major and the elegant girl who had grown up in a world where she'd learned how be the perfect hostess and fundraiser. She was a woman who never said the wrong thing, who was always there for him for whatever he needed.
Their college years were good, but once they'd graduated and entered the real world, both of them had been miserable. Because even though the world of finance wasn't nearly as interesting as he'd hoped it would be - and he missed being outside for more than the hour it took him to do his daily run through Central Park - he'd worked longer and longer hours at his firm to avoid coming home to her false smiles, to perfectly made dinners he had no appetite for, to one event after another full of people he didn't know...and didn't want to get to know.
Somewhere in there, his perfect wife had begun to drink. Of course, she'd hidden it from him. From everyone. Yes, she'd have the requisite bubbly in her hand at her parties, but to the na**d eye, it would look like she'd barely sipped it all night.
A thousand times over, Grayson wished he'd had the balls to make Leslie sit down and talk with him before things got that bad. But she'd been just as good at hiding from the mess of their marriage - and their lives - as he was.
The day the call had come in from the police was forever imprinted in his mind. There had been a crash, just her car on a lonely road. Leslie had been drinking. She'd died on impact. He'd seen a picture of the scene in the paper the next day...and the same bile that had risen in his throat then rose now.
He'd grieved for her, deeply. He was pretty sure they hadn't been in love anymore by the time she'd died. But they'd always been friends, and he'd cared about her happiness, had wished that she'd been able to find some.
Only, so much worse than his grief was the guilt that lingered. Guilt that had never - and would never - go away. If only he'd loved her better, if only he'd been the husband he'd pledged to be, then maybe he would have known about her drinking.
And maybe he could have saved her.
An invisible fist was clenching his gut tightly inside of it, when Lori hollered, "Dinner's on!"
Grayson's memories were a grim weight deep in his chest as he headed out to the kitchen. His stomach growled again, this time at the incredible smell of the stir-fry Lori had put together. She'd set the small white table by the kitchen window, as well, with his simple white plates and some colorful napkins he'd forgotten he had. Now, as he looked at the bright flowers stitched on the napkins, he remembered that they were a farm-warming gift from the family whose property adjoined his. The teenage daughter had stitched them by hand, she'd informed him with pride. But he'd been too dead inside to appreciate her workmanship.
The table - hell, the entire kitchen - felt too small as Lori served them both. Her scent, her beauty, they were everywhere. Even his bad memories didn't seem to be enough to drown them out.
And when he took the first bite of the stir-fry with rice that she'd put on his plate, it was all he could do to stifle a groan of pleasure. For three years he'd been a bachelor, cooking for himself. He was pretty good with a grill, and during the summer he had an endless supply of fruit and vegetables to fill up on, but everything else was simply fuel. It had been years since he'd eaten anything this good.
They both ate in silence and he was more than a little surprised to watch Lori mow through a plate of food that was nearly as big as his own. Then again, she'd worked her perfect little ass off today, hadn't she?
He was reaching for seconds when she finally broke the silence. "Is your stir-fry okay?" Her question had an edge to it, one that clearly said, A thank-you wouldn't kill you, bastard.
But he hadn't asked her to come to his farm. He sure as hell hadn't wanted her to stay. And making dinner hadn't been on her list of chores. So even though her stir-fry was so good that he wanted to drop to his knees and worship at her spatula, all he said was, "It's fine."
She glared at him. "It's not fine. It's great!"
He couldn't help but be struck by how different this dinner was from the ones he'd shared with Leslie. His wife had been a master of small talk, of filling silences with chatter about weather and gossip and the garden. And she hadn't been able to cook, not in the slightest, so they'd had a personal chef supply them with fresh meals.
He was just about to finish his second helping when Lori stood, took her plate over to the sink, and started washing it. Knowing he couldn't stand to be in the same room with her for much longer, Grayson said, "You cooked. I'll deal with the plates."
Instead of taking the hint and going to her bedroom, she shook her head. "I work for you now. It's my job to cook and clean."
God, she was stubborn. But if she wanted to add to her list of chores, he wasn't going to stop her. Of course, he needed to remember not to get too used to meals this good, since he was sure she'd be gone and heading back to her pampered real life by lunchtime tomorrow.
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.