The Grump Whisperer (Morningsong Farm #1)

Two

I an Kingston lay in bed and listened to silence.

He’d thought, during that week in the hospital a couple of months ago, that he’d relish quiet after he escaped all of the endless beeping and murmuring and shuffling around that went on in every medical facility. Time had escaped him then, even as his life before had been scheduled down to the minute. In the hospital it was always daytime, always bright in the hallways and always busy, even in the middle of the night.

Here, night was pitch-dark, especially since only one lamp sat in the nearly empty bedroom, and there was no point in turning it on when all he was doing was lying still. Alone. Moping, his sister, Anne, would say.

The silence was, in fact, almost unbearable. He shoved the blankets off his body and tossed around, as if movement could dispel his thoughts and allow him to finally rest. But it only caused a familiar twinge in his hip and ache in his back, pain he hadn’t felt in a week or so.

At least the headaches had left him alone.

With a sigh, he swung his legs around to the cold floor and sat up. He peered out the window, bare of any curtains. It could be any time of night. He might have slept for an hour or for ten. But his well-tuned internal clock told him otherwise. He was all too familiar with the early morning period before dawn, and he guessed it was around five o’clock.

“Shit.”

He knew exactly what was keeping him from sleeping in as he’d planned to do now that he had nothing to keep him occupied, other than the aforementioned moping. It certainly wasn’t the bourbon, which he’d put away after she left, feeling more than a little pathetic. Which only added to his resentment of the intrusion. It wasn’t the aches and pains. It wasn’t even an existential crisis about his future. Not on this particular night, anyway.

He’d fully intended to continue secluding himself in the house, heading out only for necessities, until he decided what to do next. He knew that Anne believed he’d had enough time alone, but he hadn’t expected that she’d go to such extremes to push him out of his self-inflicted exile.

A boarding barn. What could she have been thinking?

He had to hand it to her, though. Instead of sleeping late and puttering around the house in peace, here he was, awake before dawn, thinking about what that woman—Bronwen—had said about the horses.

He didn’t really care about the people. They could move their animals to a different facility, for all he cared. That wasn’t his problem. But the danger to the horses... If some aspect of neglect or lack of action on his part caused harm to any of the horses, he didn’t know how he’d face himself. Because Bronwen was right, goddammit. He was the farm owner’s brother, and the only one of the two of them in residence. Without him, the horses would suffer.

Apparently there was at least one thing he still cared about.

With a groan, he stood and pulled on the jeans he’d worn yesterday.

He’d have to go now, if he was going to go at all. He didn’t want anything to do with any of the boarders, and even less so with Bronwen. The woman had caught him at a particularly low point, stuck in his head and in a house that he’d expected to be secluded and private but also warm and cozy.

“A quaint little farm in Massachusetts!” Anne had gushed. “Just a little outside of Boston. It should be gorgeous in a few weeks for spring, and you can house-sit for me until I move in.”

House-sitting while she took off for vacation to celebrate her divorce from a real estate mogul who had doted on her—until he hadn’t. But she’d been able to get a good settlement, as she deserved, considering how much she’d supported her husband and his business during their few years of marriage. Anne deserved a vacation. She deserved every happiness she could find, and she’d certainly deserved the money after the way they’d grown up. And it wasn’t like Ian had anything else planned or anywhere to go.

So he’d agreed, expecting a small farmhouse overstuffed with comfortable furniture. Maybe in the woods, where no one could find him. Instead, he found himself in a big old monstrosity with the bare minimum of furniture and no comforts other than the downstairs fire and the bourbon he’d bought in town.

And, worst of all, he’d learned that the farm was a boarding barn, with people coming and going all day and a pushy barn manager to boot.

It was exactly what he didn’t want, and yet knowing Anne the way he did, he should have seen it coming.

He looked around for his slippers, and not finding them, he headed downstairs barefoot, the wood floor unpleasantly chilled. No matter how high he cranked the ancient heating system, it was always cold in this house. Always empty. Always quiet. It should have suited his mood perfectly.

He stuck his feet into his old work boots and shrugged into his coat. Outside, everything was still and dark. His feet crunched on the gravel path down to the barn, and he stepped sideways onto the grass, even though no one could possibly be around to hear him at this hour. The horses, maybe, if they were expecting their breakfast—and horses were always expecting food.

And then he was there, the absolute last place he wanted to be: outside the door to the barn. His breath tightened in his chest and his skin overheated uncomfortably despite the chill. He wanted nothing more than to run back to the house, barricade the door and dig the bourbon bottle back out of the cabinet. Silently he cursed his sister for her interference. She should have known better. Should have known he wasn’t ready. Wouldn’t ever be ready.

But he was nothing if not tough, if not able to compartmentalize his emotions and stuff the difficult ones into a box he might or might not open later.

He pushed open the barn’s large sliding door, noticing that it wanted to stick about halfway, forcing him to muscle it the rest of the way. Another problem. The padlock also stuck out haphazardly, loose on its screws. Another potential hazard for a horse walking by—no one wanted their horse cut or scraped by a solid piece of metal.

Cursing everything he could think of, he stepped into the dark barn aisle. Nickers greeted him up and down the stalls, the soft rustling of hooves in wood shavings breaking the silence as a dozen animals moved to see who was entering their home. He could just barely make out the outline of the nearest ones, the shape of their large heads so familiar.

The earthy smell of hay, horse, manure and leather hit him like a punch to the stomach, and he closed his eyes as if that would do anything at all.

He told himself he was being silly, overly nostalgic and dramatic, and groped around for the lights. He flipped the switch and found twelve sets of kind dark eyes watching him curiously from either side of the wide barn aisle. He had the absurd urge to wave and introduce himself. Instinct told him to check each stall, give each horse a little attention as he made his way down the aisle, to see if anything was out of place after a night alone.

Instead, he trudged toward the middle of the barn where another sliding door opened outward toward the fields behind, and he got a good look at the manure pile a few dozen feet away.

Yes, it was definitely overflowing. Inconvenient at the moment, but it would be unpleasant when the temperatures warmed up.

He wandered farther down the wide concrete aisle to the feed room at the far end of the barn, a small space lined on one side with large metal boxes of feed and on the other walls with cabinets and countertops. He opened one of the tightly lidded metal containers. Definitely low on feed. He didn’t bother to look for the hay storage. What Bronwen had told him was true. There was work to be done here, work that had to be paid for. If the farm wasn’t kept in good operating condition, if the feed store bill wasn’t paid, the horses would suffer.

He groaned in frustration. He wanted to march back up to the house, get in his car and drive away from this place. Why had he ever accepted Anne’s invitation? He should have known she was up to something.

A whinny pulled his attention from his thoughts. And then another. The horses were impatient to be fed now that they knew someone was up and in the barn. He smiled despite himself. Horses were in some ways so much more dependable than people. And in other ways, dangerously unpredictable.

He turned to leave.

A noise somewhere nearby stopped him in his tracks. It wasn’t the sound of a horse shuffling in its stall. It sounded like...footsteps on stairs. But that couldn’t be right. He assumed the only thing above was the hayloft, and no one should be up there this time of the morning.

Before he could sort out what the noise was, the door to the feed room creaked open and something came barreling toward his head. The dark shape came out of nowhere and he ducked instinctively as it whooshed over his head. He straightened and saw that the object that had nearly decapitated him was a shovel.

Heart pounding, he grabbed the handle and pushed it out of the way, then dived for the person holding the other end, shoving their body up against the wall and wrenching the shovel from their grasp. He let it drop to the floor.

“Oof,” the other person gasped, and he grabbed their wrists and held them to the wall.

The person was much smaller than him, much smaller than he’d expect an intruder wielding a shovel to be. Small and, he noticed as he glanced down to the floor, barefoot. And wearing pajamas. Yellow pajamas with little blue horses printed all over them. And a tight-fitting tank top with a faded logo for some college printed on it. A tank top that left nothing to the imagination, as his eyes drifted up toward the face of his attacker.

Bronwen.

She stood frozen like a deer on a nighttime road, caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Ian forced himself to loosen his death grip on her wrists, but he didn’t release her, and she didn’t struggle.

He swallowed heavily, taking in her long brown hair, messy as if she’d just rolled out of bed. Her full, parted lips. The delicate curve of her shoulder, bare to the cold air. Her chest, rising and falling as her breath came rapidly, nipples sharp points under her shirt.

Some alchemical reaction charged the air between them, turning the crisp chill into something warm and heavy. He licked his lips, not even sure how to name the thing between him and this woman he’d met exactly once. A woman who’d just tried to bean him with a shovel.

In the house yesterday, he’d known she was beautiful, of course. Striking, with a long, slim nose and pointed stubborn chin. Green eyes that had pinned him where he sat on the sad, lonely armchair. But he had been too distracted by his anger and shame to notice any sort of chemistry. Now chemistry was all around them, fizzing and sparking and doing things to his body that he was definitely not prepared for at five o’clock in the morning in a barn he didn’t want to be in, with a woman he didn’t even know.

Bronwen sucked in a breath and her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth. His body tightened in response, warmth pooling in his groin and an urgency squeezing a groan out of him.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, and he realized he’d leaned into her until their torsos nearly touched. Which would have been even more embarrassing than being caught drinking yesterday morning, given what his body was currently doing.

He jerked back and glared at her. He needed to break this spell and get ahold of himself. Anger would build that wall back up, just as it had been doing for him since his accident.

“Me? I live here. For now. What are you doing here? It can’t be time to feed the horses yet.”

She stared at him. “What do you know about horses?”

He swung away from her, crossing to the other side of the small room and bracing his arms on top of the counter there. Forced himself to take a few long, slow breaths, until arousal was fully replaced by annoyance. Then he turned back to face Bronwen.

She was still pressed against the wall behind her, looking a little shell-shocked. The shovel lay on the floor, inches from her bare feet. If it had fallen on one of them, she could have been injured, a thought that caused a twinge of guilt.

He pushed the twinge away. She was the one who had tried to attack him, when she shouldn’t even be here at all.

“ Why are you here, Bronwen Jones, barn manager?” He used his most authoritative voice, the one that people generally obeyed without questions.

She just looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Yeah... barn manager . Manager. Of this barn.” She pointed to the ceiling. “I live in the apartment over the barn. You know, while I manage it.”

Bronwen pushed off the wall and placed her fists on her hips. Ian ran a hand over his face. Stupid. It was hardly unheard-of for a barn manager to live on-site, even in the barn itself. He’d just been too distracted by the fact that there even was a barn manager, or a barn to be managed. He wouldn’t have missed the plot so thoroughly, before. This sudden and complete uprooting of his entire world made him forget the most basic things. He was more than off-kilter. He was completely upside down, and the disorientation was more dizzying than the concussion he’d allegedly recovered from.

“And do you usually greet visitors with a shovel to the head?” he asked, falling back on snark.

Jesus. Like his head hadn’t been through enough. A shovel would probably have sent him right to his just reward. Or punishment.

She narrowed her eyes, and he had the distinct impression that Bronwen Jones was not easily intimidated. And that she didn’t appreciate his snark.

“I do when someone’s broken into the barn I’m responsible for in the middle of the night.”

He glanced out the small window above the counter, where no thread of light poked through the gloom of darkness.

“It’s morning,” he said. Not his greatest comeback.

“I’d hardly know that when I just got out of bed and ran down here to stop an intruder,” she said dryly.

She made a good point. But he was still on edge, from his worries about the well-being of the horses, from the unwelcome discovery that his retreat was anything but, from whatever the hell had passed between him and Bronwen when he had her pushed up against the wall—something that appeared not to have bothered her in the least, while his body was still suggesting all kinds of useful things they could do with that something.

He grimaced. He needed to get out of there.

“Look. I didn’t know you lived over the barn. I thought you were breaking in.”

“Funny, I had the same thought about you.” She eyed the shovel like she was still considering using it on him.

“I just wanted to...see.”

She waited, silent.

He sighed. “See if what you were saying was true. If there was any danger to the horses if things weren’t straightened out.”

Bronwen’s cheeks flushed, probably with anger at him, but it was still incredibly attractive. Why did she have to be so pretty? The last thing he needed—aside from this entire mess—was an unwelcome attraction to a woman he definitely needed to avoid at all costs.

“You think I came up to the house and lied about what’s going on in the barn?” she spit out. “Why would I do that?”

“How should I know?” he snapped back. A horse snorted somewhere outside of the feed room, no doubt wondering why they were talking instead of scooping feed. “I didn’t even know there were horses here, let alone a whole boarding operation. You could have been anyone, saying anything.”

She rolled her eyes, and his patience began to fray. All he’d wanted was to be left alone. To forget about everything: his previous life, his injuries, the horses, the people who’d vanished on him...

He shook his head to clear those thoughts.

“Look,” Bronwen began, irritation sharpening her words. “Your sister owns this farm. She’s not here. You are. You are responsible—”

“I heard this speech the first time you gave it,” he said, cutting her off.

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and stalked to the door, careful to give her a wide berth. He didn’t want any of that strange reaction to make a reappearance. He had enough problems.

“And it’s still as true as it was yesterday,” she retorted.

Ian inhaled through his nose, then out. And a solution came to him. It wasn’t perfect, but maybe it would get this woman off his back so he could go back to his solitude. And it would also relieve the guilt he’d feel if anything happened.

“Fine. I get it. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll look into the issues you mentioned—feed bill, farrier bill, hay delivery, manure removal. Anything else?”

He made a mental note about the dangerous padlock on the barn door, as well, and realized he’d have to do a full assessment of the farm, somehow. Without Ms. Bossy trailing after him. Any sharp edges of pieces of metal or wood sticking out from the barn could harm a horse. Pasture fencing needed to be checked regularly for holes or hazards. What condition was the grass in? Was the barn roof holding up? Leaks could damage the hay above, and it sounded like they didn’t have any to spare to mold or dampness. He hadn’t been looking for issues with the property, but having spent time in the barren old house, he hoped the rest of the farm was in better shape than that building.

“The outdoor arena needs new footing,” Bronwen added.

Right. She’d mentioned that before. “That’s a big project.”

Bronwen shrugged. “A farm is a big project. If your sister didn’t want to deal with it, she shouldn’t have bought it.”

They agreed on that, at least. But his sister must have had ulterior motives from the beginning. He was going to have it out with her as soon as he could reach her.

“Fine. I’ll see what I can do. About all of it.”

Ian had the money in savings, and he knew that Anne was good for repayment. He’d basically never spent more than he needed to live, out of force of habit. He could run a farm for a few weeks until Anne could pay him back.

“Really?” Bronwen looked skeptical, and he could hardly blame her. She had no idea who he was, which suited him just fine.

“You have my word. Leave contact information for the vendors in the mailbox at the house. I’ll take care of everything I can.”

Doubt creased Bronwen’s forehead. She clearly didn’t believe him for a moment. But that wasn’t his problem.

“And in return...”

Doubt turned into wariness as he watched her. She folded her arms in front of her and lifted her chin.

“In return?”

Jesus, what did she think he was going to say? He was hardly going to ask for sexual favors in exchange for new outdoor arena footing, as expensive as that was going to be. He wasn’t a monster, although of course she had no way of knowing that. He’d been monstrous enough yesterday when she’d caught him off guard, looming and snapping and growling at her like a wounded animal.

“In return, I want you to leave me alone. Completely. If there’s a problem, put a note in the mailbox. Don’t come to the house, don’t look for me, don’t bother me. Understood?”

Something flashed in her eyes, and he wondered what she thought he was doing up at the house. Something horrible, probably. Nothing as pathetic as lurking around the empty rooms trying to figure out who the hell he was. It was for the best if she thought he was terrible. She’d be more likely to stay out of his way.

And that was what he wanted, even if she was too appealing, holding her ground against him in her horse pajamas, even if he was impressed by her dedication to the animals and the people who owned them. Even if he’d felt more alive in the past few minutes than he had in two months.

She bit her lower lip, and he made himself turn away. This was what he needed. He’d do as he had promised, but he wouldn’t have any further interactions with Bronwen Jones.

“Understood,” she finally said, so quietly he wasn’t sure if it was doubt that he’d follow through or something else tingeing her voice.

“Good,” he replied shortly and strode out of the feed room back toward the house.