Marley slipped out of her boots on the front porch of the main house and tiptoed her way over the threshold in the dark. The house was perfectly quiet, as if the structure itself was asleep along with everyone else on the property. It had taken her months to get used to how hushed things got around here at night, no city sounds, no sirens or echoes of basslines from the too-loud radios of cars passing by. The quiet was kind of nice, though. It gave her the peace to lose herself in thoughts about what she’d do once the debt to the hospital was paid off, or how she could go about getting her version of Cate’s pound cake recipe just as dense and buttery as the original.
And now she could add dreaming about what it had felt like to have Greyson’s hands on her, and how intently he’d watched her as she’d come undone again…and again…
A soft, yet distinct jingle dropped Marley right back to the reality of the living room. Her feet shushed to a halt, and she knelt down in confusion as Tobias’s dog, Lucy, tap-tap-tapped her way across the hardwood floor.
Guess the old girl was a pretty good guard dog, after all. Still… “What are you doing here?” Marley whispered, scratching the dog behind the ears the way Greyson did with all the animals at the shelter. “You never leave Tobias’s side.”
“You know what they say about old dogs,” came a gravelly voice that made Marley’s heart fly all the way up her windpipe. “I don’t reckon Lucy’ll be learnin’ new tricks anytime soon.”
“Jeez, you startled me!” Marley yelped, clapping a hand over her chest and channeling all of her energy into not tumbling backward onto her ass. Sucking in a breath to counter her slamming pulse, she peered into the shadows, catching the faint outline of the wing chair in the corner where Tobias sat.
“Sorry,” he said, the apology genuine and his voice thick with sleep. “I’ll admit I dozed off and didn’t hear you come in.”
Surprise collided with the adrenaline coursing through her veins, making her blurt the first thing that popped into her head rather than making a defensive retreat. “It’s the middle of the night. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“Well.” Tobias paused, but only briefly. “I reckon because you’re not in bed.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to remind him that she wasn’t some high schooler with a curfew, and that he hadn’t been there to worry over her whereabouts when she had been. But something stopped the protest short.
Tobias would worry if you stayed out all night…
When Marley had been younger and lived at home, her mother had always said she couldn’t truly sleep until Marley had come in for the night. No matter how late she’d decided to stay out with friends. No matter how often she’d texted with an I promise I’m fine.
Tobias might not be her father in any sense other than the biological, but Greyson hadn’t been wrong. She was living in his house. At the very least, she owed him courtesy for that.
“I’m sorry if I kept you up by staying out late. I was”—okay, yeah, she should probably bite her tongue on that one, too—“safe. I just lost track of time.”
“Ah. Well, it’s good to see you back. You must be tired. I won’t keep you,” he said, shifting up out of the chair with more effort than it would take most people. “G’night.”
Tobias headed not toward the front of the house, but the back, and Marley’s brows shot up along with her confusion.
“Aren’t you going to bed?” She stood and pointed to the stairs—he seemed exhausted—but Tobias shook his head.
“I was going to make a cup of warm milk first. Helps get me back to sleep, good and sound.” He paused. “I could make one for you, too, if you’d like.”
Marley shouldn’t, she knew. But the offer had seemed to come without the expectation of a share-fest, and anyway, Tobias didn’t look entirely steady on his feet. She was already going to be a zombie when the sun came up. Five extra minutes to be sure he got safely to bed wouldn’t really hurt.
“Warm milk, huh?” she asked, following him into the kitchen. “Isn’t that a myth?”
He flipped the light switch for the single-bulb fixture over the sink, which cast a gold glow through the deep nighttime shadows that had long since blanketed the room. “Could be. But it’s never failed me yet.”
The circles beneath his eyes suggested he’d seen his fair share of insomnia lately, and the thought made her throat go tight. “Hmm. With a track record like that, how can I say no?”
Tobias smiled, taking two mugs from the cabinet over the coffee maker. Next, he claimed a small saucepan from a shelf beneath the island, then the milk from the fridge, and, lastly, a small dark brown bottle from the pantry.
“You add vanilla extract to it?” Marley asked, mystified.
“Secret ingredient, passed down by my granny Joan,” he said. “Better than the honey most folks use. Sometimes I throw in a little bourbon, too—now, that idea was all mine—but I figure for tonight, this’ll do.”
She couldn’t help it. She wanted to help it. But instead, she laughed. “Now there’s a small-town remedy I can get behind.”
Tobias chuckled, the weariness in his blue-gray eyes fading a fraction. He filled the saucepan partway with milk, sight-measuring a splash of vanilla extract in next before swirling them together with a wooden spoon and clicking the burner beneath the saucepan to life.
“You seemed to fit in right nice today at the market, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so.”
Marley crossed her arms over her chest out of instinct. “I guess.”
“Hunter said it was one of our best days of the season so far, second only to the Watermelon Festival last month,” Tobias continued in that quiet, no-nonsense way of his. “That’s quite somethin’. You should be proud.”
“Me?” Her mouth fell open. “Why?”
“Why not?” he asked, so nonchalantly that Marley blinked in surprise. “Seems to me you put in more than your fair share today.”
“Well, I did, but so did—”
Tobias waved the wooden spoon at her. “Ah, no ‘buts’. You did your part of the work, plain and simple. No harm in bein’ proud of that.”
She opened her mouth to push back by default, but then she closed it with a start.
She’d just cautioned Greyson against pushing so hard, and he’d pointed out—smartly—that she could still be here at Cross Creek and not be her father’s daughter. Today had proven it.
Marley might not be able to be part of Tobias’s family, or hell, even come close. But her mother wouldn’t have begged her to come to Millhaven for nothing, and Greyson had been right.
She didn’t have to push so hard to keep the arm’s length she needed. She could still do her part and not belong here, like her brothers and their significant others. She and Tobias could be civil—they could hold conversations like this one, even—and it wouldn’t make him her father. Her family.
It couldn’t.
“I know I’ve been…kind of difficult these last few months,” she started, and after a beat of surprise, Tobias shook his head.
“Your momma passed. Loss like that can hit a person hard.”
It occurred to her that he was speaking from experience. Miss Rosemary had been young, only in her thirties when she’d died of breast cancer and left him a widower with three young boys to raise. In the days before she’d died, Marley’s mother had told her all about the woman who had been her best friend, although she hadn’t spoken much of Tobias. You’ll learn who he is for yourself, she’d said. At the time, and for a long time, Marley had thought she might’ve meant it as a warning. But sitting here, now, taking in his tired eyes and slumped shoulders, she realized it might have been hopeful.
She swallowed hard. “It can. But I guess I’ve just been angry that you never tried to find me. I know my mother said she didn’t want you to when I was young, but after I turned eighteen, you could have reached out. Called or sent me an email, or something. And…”
“I didn’t,” he agreed. “You’re right, Marley. As much as I want
ed to honor your mother’s wishes when you were a child, I should have done better by you once you were old enough.” Taking the saucepan off the burner and quieting the stove, he turned toward her, his expression as serious as it was honest. “I told myself I didn’t because it’d disrupt your life, comin’ out of the woodwork like that, and that it wasn’t fair to you for me to just turn up, like an old penny. But the truth is, I was scared. As hard as that is for this old man to admit.”
“You were scared?” Marley echoed. Her heartbeat pushed faster in shock. She’d always assumed he’d been non-committal, so happy with the life he’d cultivated here with his farm and his sons, that he hadn’t cared about her, the extra. The outcast. The forgotten child, swept under the proverbial rug.
He nodded, sheepish. “Reckon I was. Thought maybe you wouldn’t want to know me. Us. Your momma and I, we weren’t…”
“In love with each other. I know,” Marley said. Her mother had been graceful with the details, and Marley would spare Tobias the awkwardness of rehashing them. He and her mother had been desperate to erase their grief after Miss Rosemary had died. The woman had begged them both to be happy, to look after one another and comfort each other. Neither of them had expected they’d end up how they had, together for one night, then faced with having a child.
“I told her I’d do right by you both, and I meant it. But leaving town was what she wanted,” Tobias said. “I could have fought her harder, but I didn’t. And for that, I have regrets.”
Marley’s heart beat faster, but her words came out steady and calm. “You shouldn’t. I come by my stubborn streak honestly, although I’m sure you already know that. She wouldn’t have given in. And we were happy.” Her eyes burned with a sudden sneak-attack of grief, but still, she said, “I never wanted for anything.”
“I’m glad. And I’m glad you’re here, now. To be truthful, I thought”—Tobias paused, not as if searching for the words, but as if deciding whether to say them at all—“well, after this mornin’, I thought maybe you’d decided you’d had enough of us here and that you’d gone.”
“You thought I’d left town without saying goodbye?” Marley asked, stunned.
“You haven’t made any bones about not stayin’ for good, and you were none too happy when I saw you this morning at the market,” Tobias said, dividing the cooling milk between both mugs and handing one over to her. “So, yes. It did cross my mind.”
She thought of her brothers, of Cate and Scarlett and Emerson. Of the day she’d spent working with them. The night she’d spent with Greyson.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Marley said, backtracking as her defenses thumped out a warning against her breastbone. “Not without saying goodbye, I mean. I’m really not staying here in Millhaven. I just, ah. I have a lot of bills to pay from when my mom was sick, so I can’t just up and leave yet.”
Damn it, now he was looking at her with concern. “That’s a lot to carry on your shoulders. If you need help with medical bills, I can—”
“No.”
The word leapt out, loaded with sharp corners, and she shook her head in an effort to at least sand the edges down. “She was my mom. My family. The bills are my responsibility, and I refuse to be a burden to you.”
“Marley,” he started again, but nope. On this, she was absolutely not going to budge.
“Tobias, please. I’ve spent this whole time feeling like an obligation, someone you sent money to every month. If we’re going to get to know each other a little before I leave, then I want it to be genuine. No more money.” She cradled her mug in her palms, her fingers tightening. “And please don’t say anything about it to Owen, Hunter, and Eli. We already sort of get along. I don’t want to turn into a charity case.”
A minute passed, turning into two, then three. Finally, Tobias said, “You really are your momma’s girl. When Lorraine got her head set on somethin’, there never was any talking her out of it. I’ll keep mum about the debt if that’s what you want. But if you change your mind—”
“I won’t,” Marley said, tacking on, “but thank you for the offer.”
“You’re welcome.” He nodded toward the threshold leading back to the front of the house, his eyes still weary but his words warmer than the milk in her hands. “Now go get some rest, you hear? The sun’ll be up before you know it, and tomorrow’s a new day.”
20
Greyson reached up to wipe the sweat from his brow, fairly certain that Satan’s backyard didn’t even get this hot in the summertime. Not that he’d trade it—all this sunshine was good for crops. For building dog runs, though?
Not so freaking much.
“Okay,” Marley said, bringing the last premeasured board over from what had once been a hulking pile of them in the shed. “This should be it.”
Greyson nodded, the sight of her tousled hair and those infernal cutoffs that he both hated and wanted to build a goddamn shrine to not helping to keep him from overheating. “Well, I hope so, because if it’s not, then we screwed this thing up somewhere along the way.”
She made a noise of doubt, rocking back on the heels of her boots to look at the dog run now taking over a good portion of the yard. “We just spent all day finishing it, and it looks great,” she said. “No way is it wrong.”
“It does look pretty good, huh?” Greyson asked, hammering the last board into place and making sure the door he’d just secured swung neatly into its resting spot, and that everything lined up just so to keep the animals safe.
“After all the work we just did? I think even Louis will be happy with it.”
Greyson was tempted to dish up his smack talk du jour about how Louis probably wasn’t even happy on Christmas morning, but he trapped his tongue between his teeth before the words could launch. The cranky old guy had mellowed out a little over the past week. Of course, Greyson hadn’t been pushing so hard, either, so maybe there was a little truth to Marley’s claim, after all.
Pushing first might be better than pushing back, but sometimes, he could get what he wanted by not pushing at all.
“We should test the run out,” he said, sliding the thought aside. He and Marley had spent one hot night together. Sure, they’d followed it up with a great day, talking and laughing easily despite the whole manual-labor-in-the-dead-of-summer thing, and yeah, they’d preceded it with a week’s worth of flirty conversations studded with just enough truth-telling to make him think in ways he never had before. But she wasn’t sticking around.
Fuck, he wanted her to.
“Oh, we should!” Marley agreed. The excitement on her face brought him back to the moment for good, scattering the unease that had collected in his gut.
“Gypsy and Blue get along pretty good, and Blue could use some extra runnin’ around,” he said. They’d just gotten the puppy, whose exact age and breed was anyone’s guess, a few days ago. Michelle Martin had found the thing running crazy alongside the road leading out of town and brought him in to the shelter. Somebody (correction: some raging dickbag) had abandoned him, probably because the dog was overactive as hell. If Greyson ever got his hands on the person who’d left the dog there to get hit by a car—or worse—he’d throttle the son of a bitch. He’d named the little guy Blue for his eyes, which were the color of cornflowers. The vet had said it was likely because there was some Siberian husky going on in the dog’s lineage, and the size of his paws sure confirmed it. He might be a puppy (ish? Who knew) now, but he wasn’t gonna stay small for long. So far, the only person the dog came close to heeding was Greyson, and even then, it was barely fifty-fifty. Poor, misunderstood mutt.
“Blue could always use some extra running around. Even in his sleep,” Marley said, laughing. They made their way through the shelter’s back door and headed for the main room where the dogs were all curled up, most of them snoozing in their pens. Marley had convinced Louis to invest in new beds for both the dogs and cats last week, pulling apart the budget and examining the numbers with a microscope to find the money for the added
comfort. She paused to kneel down in front of the cage in the corner, crooning softly to the little black dog inside for a minute before moving to Gypsy’s cage to take the old girl out with a gentle, well-practiced grab.
“You name that one yet?” Greyson asked, his eyes still on the corner cage. The dog—some kind of lab mix, maybe?—had shuffled to the front of his cage to stare after Marley intently, the same way he’d done on Thursday, when they’d last been at the shelter. He still shrank back a bit whenever Greyson, or anyone else, for that matter, gave it a go, so Marley had taken to talking to him in soothing tones, then talking to Greyson quietly right after, to try and make the dog more comfortable around both of them.
Marley clipped Gypsy’s leash into place. “He kind of looks like a Shadow, don’t you think?” she asked, and God, it was perfect.
“I do. Shadow it is.”
“Louis told me animal control found him at a puppy mill.” The delicate line of her jaw tightened. “Said he’d been treated really badly. The rescue vet in Camden Valley fixed him up and neutered him, but they couldn’t find him a home, so that’s how he ended up here.”
Greyson used the furious energy pumping through him at the thought of Shadow’s treatment to grab a leash for Blue and move over to the dog’s pen, where he was already making high-pitched cries of excitement and wagging not just his tail, but pretty much his entire brown and white body.
“Louis told you all that?” Greyson asked in belated surprise. The guy was hardly gabby or friendly.
“To be fair, I bugged him as sweetly as I could ’til he caved.” Marley waited until Greyson had talked Blue down from a fever pitch—sweet Jesus, the dog was a ball of energy—and gotten him out of his pen without too much fanfare before continuing. “But I also told him Shadow seemed to be coming around a little. He said we could see about me and you taking him out and holding him a little this week. The poor dog has been through a lot.”
Whoa, talk about a new development. Louis was stingy as hell with that dog.
Crossing Hope (Cross Creek Series Book 4) Page 19