Part 1 (1/2)

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-s.h.i.+rt 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fted 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?”