Cross Creek: Crossing Hearts Part 1

Cross Creek.

Crossing Hearts.

Kimberly Kincaid.

This book is dedicated to my husband, who taught me exactly what's possible when someone believes in you even more than you believe in yourself.

I write happily ever after because I know it by heart.

I love you.

CHAPTER ONE.

As far as Hunter Cross was concerned, life was only as good as it was simple. So the fact that he was about to fall a solid twelve feet from the hayloft where he'd been catching the bales his brother Owen had been tossing up from the ground meant Hunter was about to have a s.h.i.t day of epic proportions.

"G.o.d dammit!" Adrenaline sent his heart slam dancing against his ribs, his breath jamming to his lungs as the last of his balance went on a complete walkabout and he tumbled over the hayloft's edge. Hunter vaguely heard Owen's voice, laced tight with panic as it burst up from the hard-packed dirt floor, and instinct flared in a split-second flash of saving his a.s.s over protecting his arm. He thrust his hand blindly overhead from midair, his fingertips slapping over the splintered ledge of the floorboards and digging in hard for the mother of all Hail Mary saves.

Hunter's surge of relief lasted less than a breath before the force of the fall combined with his body weight, reverberating up his arm and sending a bolt of liquid-lightning pain into his shoulder like rusty razor wire.

"Ah!" The pain tore a direct path from his arm to his mouth, stunning him so completely that any other movement-h.e.l.l, even breathing-felt impossible.

"Hunter! Hang on." The bale of hay in Owen's grasp thudded gracelessly to the barn floor, scattering dust motes and a string of swear words through the morning sunlight streaming in past the double-wide doors. Hunter forced himself to keep his grip on the edge of the hayloft despite the h.e.l.l-hot burn burrowing deep into the spot between his neck and the back of his arm. His brother wasted zero movements clambering up the wooden ladder four feet to Hunter's right, and seconds later, Owen had hauled him back to the safety of the rough-hewn boards of the hayloft.

"Jesus, that was close." Owen sat back on the heels of his work-bruised Red Wings, gray eyes wide with concern. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I-" The pain pulsed out a steady stream of change your tune, buddy, giving Hunter no choice but to recant. "I think I might've tweaked something in my shoulder, is all."

"Tweaked something," Owen repeated, both his tone and his frown marking Hunter's statement for the dial-down it was, but come on. No reason to make a molehill into Mount McKinley just because he'd- Another blast of pain ricocheted from the right side of Hunter's chest all the way to his glove-covered fingertips as he tried to lift his arm, and, okay, maybe "tweaked" was a bit of an understatement.

"You need to go get that looked at." Owen wasn't one to mince words, that was for d.a.m.ned sure, just like, normally, Hunter wasn't a pushback kind of guy. But between the unpredictable weather this year and soil compositions that had been more miss than hit for their corn and soybean crops so far, they were up to their belt loops trying to get in front of an already weak season.

"Last I checked, we run the family farm, not a quilting circle," Hunter said, sticking a smile to both his face and his answer. Yeah, his shoulder felt like ten miles of bad road in the rain right now, but if he took a breather every time an ache popped up, he'd be permanently parked on the seat of his Wranglers. Not to mention just as permanently miserable.

If Owen's expression was anything to go by, he remained unimpressed. "We do run the family farm, which is exactly why you should get that shoulder checked out. If you have an injury, a day's worth of work around here isn't gonna make your arm feel any better."

Hunter formed his response with care, taking direct aim at the path of least resistance. "Okay. I'll call Doc Sanders when we're done with these." He jutted his chin toward the fat stack of golden-brown hay bales below that still needed moving into the hayloft. "Maybe she can take a look this week."

"You'll call her now," Owen said, his concern blanking any rough edges the words might've otherwise carried. "You busted up that shoulder pretty good in high school, Hunt. No reason to go lookin' for trouble."

"Ah, that was a dog's age ago. Really, I'm cool. It doesn't even hurt that bad." Hunter rolled his shoulder beneath his sweat-damp T-shirt in an effort to maximize the no-big-deal factor. Of course, his muscles chose that exact moment to remind him exactly who was boss by cranking down hard enough to make his wince inevitable.

Owen lifted one dark-brown brow. "Go. I'll find Eli and get him to finish this. Lord knows he could stand some good, hard work, anyway."

Hunter's gut tensed right along with his shoulder at the disdain in Owen's voice at the mention of their younger brother. Not that Eli helped matters by doing as little as possible to skate by, especially now that they were behind the eight ball more than usual, but still. When Eli put his mind to it, he got his hands just as dirty as the rest of them.

"Cut him a break, O. He was up with the roosters." Literally. The last place Hunter had seen Eli was by the henhouse adjacent to the hay barn at o'dark-thirty this morning.

"Mmm. So was I, and so were you and Dad. It doesn't make him special, and it d.a.m.n sure doesn't give him license to f.u.c.k around when there's work to be done. With the Watermelon Festival next Sat.u.r.day, we're going to be up to our eyes in it this coming week."

s.h.i.t. How had Hunter blanked-even temporarily-on the annual town-wide festival that signified the official beginning of summer in Millhaven? The Watermelon Festival was one of the biggest local events in the Shenandoah Valley, and Cross Creek Farm always had a huge booth there, showcasing all the pre-summer bounty of a hopefully strong season to come.

"I'm going to head into town and see the doc," he said, hoping like h.e.l.l that the swerve in topic would loosen some of Owen's annoyance with Eli. As well practiced as he was at playing referee between his brothers, the job was getting to be more tiresome than a f.u.c.king triathlon lately. "I'll see if she can't fix this up for me."

We have a winner. "Okay, yeah." Owen nodded, scrubbing a hand over his darkly stubbled chin. "Just do me a favor and check in when you get word, alright?"

Hunter pulled in a calm, cool breath, determined to smooth the corners of the conversation and his life back to status-quo territory once and for all. He hadn't even fallen all the way out of the hayloft, for pity's sake. "You're worse than Dad. An ice pack and a little ibuprofen, and I'll be right as rain."

Owen's chuckle was quick, but at least he let it out. "Uh-huh. Don't come back 'til the doc signs off on it, you hear me?"

"Yeah, yeah. I hear you. You pain in the a.s.s."

Owen dropped himself back down the ladder to the barn floor, unclipping the two-way radio at his hip and putting out an all call to find Eli. Hunter sent up a small, silent prayer that his younger brother was reasonably busy somewhere on Cross Creek's 750 acres, a relieved breath pushing past his lips as Eli responded with a slow drawl.

With all systems go-at least for the moment-Hunter shucked his thick leather work gloves and kicked his boots into motion down the ladder and toward the main house. His father was the only one who had technically resided in the two-story Colonial ever since Eli had turned eighteen and moved to the apartment complex up the road a decade ago. But the house where Hunter and his brothers had grown up not only held the farm's business office, but it was the central hub for all four men during the course of any given workday.

Translation: while Hunter had his own cottage on the east side of their property and Owen lived in a matching residence to the west, the house in front of him and the farm around him would always be home.

Hunter's footsteps called out his presence on the whitewashed porch steps, then the mola.s.ses-colored floorboards of the main house as he made his way over the threshold. Other than to endure regular cleanings and necessary repairs, the main house hadn't changed in twenty-four years, mostly because his father refused to change it. The lace-edged curtains, the time-scuffed farm table in the kitchen with the worn pine benches to match, the hand-st.i.tched quilts on every bed-they'd all been chosen with care by Hunter's mother.

Which, Hunter suspected, was exactly why his father had never had the heart to replace them, despite the time that had pa.s.sed since breast cancer had stolen her from them at the age of only thirty-seven. It was sure as h.e.l.l why Hunter never so much as mentioned updating the place.

Tobias Cross's life had been hard enough single-parenting three boys while running the biggest family-owned farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Just because Hunter and his brothers were adults now didn't mean he was going to throw a monkey into the wrench by broaching a subject that would break his old man's heart. Again.

Hunter leaned against the white enamel sink at the kitchen counter, his shoulder throbbing with every movement and every breath as he washed and dried his hands. Owen hadn't just been blowing smoke about Hunter's old injury, even if the emphasis was on old. The rotator cuff tear had been nasty, and even at the resilient age of seventeen, it had taken one reconstructive surgery, three doctors, and eight months of uncut determination to get him healed up right so he could get back to work on the farm.

He hadn't really given much thought to the freak-accident play that had ended his high school football career since he'd healed, although come to think of it, he had kind of been going through the Icy Hot a little faster than usual lately. Guess it wouldn't be the dumbest thing going to get Doc Sanders to take a look. With any luck at all, she'd green-light his shoulder real quick, and he could get back to the farm in time to start work on the corn in the north fields-and keep Owen and Eli from trying to knock each other's blocks off while he was at it.

Adjusting his ancient Cross Creek baseball cap against the glare of the mid-June sunlight, Hunter grabbed the keys to his equally ancient Ford F-250 and hit the road into town. "Town" was a bit relative in Millhaven, since the closest thing to a stoplight in the entire zip code was the flashing amber caution marker outside the fire station. But that was just the way Hunter liked it. Streamlined. Simple. No muss, no fuss, and definitely no stress.

Until he got through the nurse's Q and A about the reason for his visit and into Doc Sanders's exam room, anyway.

"Hunter Cross." The doctor lifted her sandy-blond-gray brows high enough to breach the wire rims of her gla.s.ses as she read the fresh notes on top of his patient file, and s.h.i.t, this couldn't be good. "Nurse Kelley tells me you're having some discomfort in your right shoulder."

The paper on the exam table gave up a crinkle as he shifted his weight. "Yes, ma'am. A little."

"Can you rate the pain on a scale of one to ten for me, ten being the worst pain you've ever felt?"

For a second, Hunter was tempted to tell the doctor the worst pain he'd ever felt had nothing to do with bodily harm and everything to do with a smart, feisty redhead, but he swallowed the urge along with a healthy dose of where the h.e.l.l did that come from? Busting up his shoulder might resurface a thought or two from back in the day, but diving into the past so wasn't his thing. Especially when it came to memories that didn't just rock the boat but freaking capsized it.

Hunter shook his head, refocusing on the doc's question. "I guess it'd be a six when I move my arm. A seven if I try to lift something heavy."

"Hmm." Doc Sanders scribbled something in Hunter's chart, her expression softening even though she looked no less serious. "Then you're in more than 'a little' discomfort. You want to tell me how you hurt it?"

"The pain's not so bad." The joint in question ached at Hunter's verbal hopscotch around the truth, and, f.u.c.k it. He threw in the towel. "I was hauling bales of hay with Owen, and I lost my balance on the edge of the hayloft. I managed to catch myself before I fell all the way over, but the force torqued my shoulder pretty hard. The pain isn't as bad now, but my arm is still sore. It's the same one I hurt in high school, so . . ."

Doc Sanders nodded, the end of her neat ponytail swinging over the shoulder of her doctor's coat. "I remember."

"You do?" Surprise p.r.i.c.kled through Hunter's chest beneath the faded-green gown he'd put on over his jeans.

The doc dished up a wry grin. "Not too many of my patients tear a rotator cuff on the winning touchdown in a high school football championship game, Hunter. Plus, if you recall, I a.s.sessed your injury on the way to the hospital. So, yes. I remember."

"Oh, right." Leave it to Doc Sanders to be able to dial up the details. The woman was whip smart. It also probably didn't hurt that she'd been a local for twenty years and Hunter's doctor for just as many.

Speaking of hurt . . . Time to get that all clear so he could go back to what mattered. Owen hadn't just been spouting off about how much needed done this week. "This pain isn't near as bad as when I tore my rotator cuff, though. And I didn't fall on my arm or anything like I did back then."

Okay, so the grab to save his a.s.s today hadn't tickled, but he was well enough acquainted with manual labor to know this shouldn't be a big deal. Hauling bales of hay-or farm equipment or fertilizer or feed or any of a dozen other things-was all part of the daily checklist at Cross Creek. He could handle a little soreness.

"Rotator cuffs are tricky business," said Doc Sanders. "Let's start by taking a look at yours and seeing what we've got."

Her fingers traveled over Hunter's chest, shoulder, and arm in a careful clinical a.s.sessment. The contact wasn't so bad, and he could even handle the gentle pressure she applied when she got to the muscles and tendons on the back of his shoulder, proper. But as soon as she asked him to lift his arm and move it side to side, the pain jackhammered back through him hard enough to push a hiss through his teeth.

"So what do you think?" Hunter asked, his pulse picking up speed at the seriousness coloring Doc Sanders's expression.

"What I think is you're not going to like this. But without X-rays and an MRI, there's no way of knowing what we're dealing with here."

A cold sweat popped over Hunter's brow. "The injury is that bad?"

"It might be," she qualified. "Sometimes, damage to a rotator cuff is caused by one specific incident that can be easily pinpointed."

"Like when I tore mine in high school." Getting body slammed by an all-star defensive back with his arm fully extended had definitely been a specific incident. At least Hunter had gotten the arm with the ball over the goal line first. Not that the touchdown had mattered much when he'd had to spend eight months on the sidelines at the farm.

Doc Sanders nodded, taking a step back on the gray-and-white linoleum. "Exactly. But other times, we see what's called degenerative damage. The cause is usually repet.i.tive stress over time. All it takes to aggravate that sort of damage is one wrong move, even a small one."

Ah h.e.l.l. "Like grabbing on to the edge of a hayloft."

"I'm afraid so," she said, her expression backing up the truth in her words. "Listen, Hunter, we don't know anything for sure right now other than the fact that your shoulder needs to be looked at more closely. There's a possibility your pain is being caused by run-of-the-mill muscle strain. But with you already having suffered a full-thickness tear once before, and the fact that manual labor is a big part of your daily activity . . . I have to send you to the orthopedist in Camden Valley to find out what we're dealing with."

Hunter sc.r.a.ped in a deep breath. Held it. Forced himself to stay calm, composed. Steady. "Worst-case scenario." At Doc Sanders's obvious hesitation, he added, "I can handle it, Doc. But I need to know."

Slowly, she nodded, and her answer knifed through him harder than any pain his shoulder could dream of working up.

"Worst case is that your rotator cuff is torn, which would put you out of commission on the farm. Indefinitely."

CHAPTER TWO.

Emerson Montgomery straightened the boxes of elastic bandages on the shelf in front of her for the thousandth time that hour. Turning to survey the one-room physical therapy office tucked in the back of Millhaven's medical center-aka Doc Sanders's family practice-she surveyed her new digs in search of something to keep her occupied. She'd already rearranged the rolls of athletic tape, wiped down the questionably st.u.r.dy portable ma.s.sage table-along with the geriatric treadmill and rec.u.mbent bike over by the far wall-and organized the mismatched hand weights and resistance tubing she'd dug out of the storage closet.

She was still an hour shy of lunch on her first day at work, and she'd officially run out of things to do. Beautiful.

Now she had nothing but time to dwell on the fact that in the last two weeks, she'd lost a job she'd loved, a boyfriend she hadn't, and the ability to keep the one vow that had saved her life twelve years ago.

She was back in Millhaven.

Emerson blew out an exhale, trying to ignore the stiffness in her knees that made her wonder if her synovial fluid had been replaced with expired Elmer's glue. She knew she should be happy Doc Sanders had been willing to hire her to do supplemental physical therapy, especially when the fifteen job inquiries Emerson had made before her last-ditch call to the doctor had yielded fifteen positions requiring sixty hours a week, with fifty-nine of them on her feet. Under normal circ.u.mstances, Emerson would've pounced on any of those employment opportunities before returning to Millhaven. h.e.l.l, under normal circ.u.mstances, she'd have never left her high-powered, higher-energy job as one of the top physical therapists for the Super Bowl Champion Las Vegas Lightning in the first place. Of course, everything she'd known about normal had been blasted into bits five weeks ago.

And if there was one thing Emerson knew by heart, it was that once you broke something into enough pieces, your chances of putting it back together amounted to jack with a side of s.h.i.t.

The door connecting the physical therapy room and the hallway leading to Doc Sanders's office s.p.a.ce swung open with a squeak, and the woman in question poked her head past the threshold.

"Hi, Emerson." She swept a hand toward the PT room in an unspoken request for entry. Emerson nodded, sending a handful of bright-red hair tumbling out of the loose, low ponytail at her nape.

"Hey, yes, sure. Come on in Doc . . . tor Sanders," she said, awkwardly tacking on the more formal address. But the woman was her boss, an MD whom she respected greatly, and at any rate, more than a decade had pa.s.sed since Emerson had left Millhaven. She was an adult now, a professional. Accomplished. Capable.

Even if her pretense for coming back home was a complete and utter lie.

"Emerson, please," Doc Sanders said, her smile conveying amus.e.m.e.nt over admonition. "I know with all your experience, you're probably used to different protocol with physicians, but call me Doc. No one in Millhaven has called me Doctor in . . . well, ever. And quite frankly, it makes me feel kind of stodgy."

Emerson dipped her chin, half out of deference and half to hide her smile. While all of the doctors on the Lightning's payroll had been top-of-their-field talented, they'd also sported enough arrogance to sink a submarine, making sure everyone down to the ball boys knew their status as MDs. Even though she'd technically earned the t.i.tle of "Doctor" along with her PhD five years ago, she never used it, preferring to go by her first name like all the other physical therapists at the Lightning. True, she'd been the only one of the bunch with the varsity letters after her name, but the t.i.tle meant nothing if she wasn't good enough to back it up hands-on. Plus, she'd always felt something heavy and uncomfortable in her chest on the rare occasion anyone called her Dr. Montgomery. She turned around every time, looking for her father.

Don't go there, girl. Head up. Eyes forward.

Emerson cleared her throat, stamping out the thoughts of both her father and her lost job as she kept the smile tacked to her face. "You got it, Doc. How are things in the office?"

"Not so bad for a Monday, although I could've done without Timmy Abernathy throwing up on my shoes."

"Gah." Emerson grimaced. Broken bones and ruptured tendons she could handle, no sweat. But stomach woes. No, thank you. "Sorry you've had a rough morning."

"Eh." Doc Sanders lifted one white-coated shoulder. "Timmy feels worse than I do, and I had an extra pair of cross-trainers in my gym bag. At any rate, I've got a patient for you, so I thought I'd pop over to see if you have an opening today."

Emerson thought of her schedule, complete with the tumbleweeds blowing through its wide-open s.p.a.ces, and bit back the urge to laugh with both excitement and irony. "I'm sure I can fit someone in. What's the injury?"

"Rotator cuff. X-rays and MRI are complete, and Dr. Norris, the orthopedist in Camden Valley, ordered PT. But the patient is local, so I figured if you could take him, it'd be a win-win."

"Of course." An odd sensation plucked up Emerson's spine at the long-buried memory of a blue-eyed high school boy with his arm in a sling and a smile that could melt her like b.u.t.ter in a cast-iron skillet. "Um, my schedule is pretty flexible. What time did he want to come in?"

"Actually, he's a little anxious to get started, so he came directly here from the ortho's office . . ."

Doc Sanders turned toward the hallway leading to her waiting room, where a figure had appeared in the doorframe. Emerson blinked, trying to get her brain to reconcile the free-flowing confusion between the boy in her memory and the man standing in front of her. The gray-blue eyes were the same, although a tiny bit more weathered around the edges, and weirdly, the sling was also a match. But the person staring back at her was a man, with rough edges and s.e.x appeal for days, full of hard angles and harder muscles under his jeans and T-shirt . . .

Hunter Cross.

Emerson stood with her feet anch.o.r.ed to the linoleum, unable to move or speak or even breathe. For the smallest sc.r.a.p of a second, she tumbled back in time, her heart pounding so hard beneath her crisp white b.u.t.ton-down that surely the traitorous thing would jump right out of her chest.

A blanket of stars littering the August sky . . . the warm weight of Hunter's varsity jacket wrapped around her shoulders . . . the warmer fit of his mouth on hers as the breeze carried his whispers, full of hope . . . "Don't go to New York. Stay with me, Em. Marry me and stay here in Millhaven where we'll always have this, just you and me . . ."