Chapter Five
Grayson
“You didwhat?” Lukas’s shrill voice cuts through the crisp morning air.
With the sun barely above the horizon, the chill from the night still lingers around us. I widen my stance, securing my feet in the wet grass as I wrap my hands around the wooden post, gripping tightly. With a grit of my teeth, I heave once, ripping it out of the ground to toss it aside. “You heard me,” I reply as I step over the post to round the back of the trailer, reaching inside to pull out a new iron post. “Holly is coming tomorrow to spend the day with me on the farm.”
Ignoring Lukas’s dramatic scoff, I return to the hole, using the end of the metal post to break through some of the clay. I toss it to the side, dropping to a knee to dig through the hard earth with my hands, pulling out some of the bigger rocks before I return to the trailer for my sledgehammer.
“You know we have work to do, right?”
“Noshit, Luke,” I grunt. “Why is this such a big deal to you?”
“Yeah, Luke, why is it such a big deal?” Theo pipes up from where he’s still seated on the four-wheeler, leisurely sipping his mug of coffee. “If Grayson doesn’t seal the deal with the city girl, I’m next in line, so you’ll have to wait your turn like the rest of us.”
I pull one of my work gloves from my back pocket and slap Theo on the arm with it on my walk back to Lukas. Theo chuckles, pulling away from me and getting up to move to the other side of the trailer. “I’m just fucking with you, man. City girl only has eyes for you.”
I turn away from both of them, mostly because we have a long day ahead of us and this fence won’t repair itself, but also to hide my nerves at the thought of Holly coming back here for a day.
“It’s not a big fucking deal,” Lukas says, spitting to the side. “I’m not in line to bag the city girl. I just don’t like the idea of having to wait on some prim princess when there is real work that needs to get done.”
“What the fuck is your problem?” I snap, reaching again for the fence post and sticking it into the ground. “If anyone around here acts like a princess, it’s you.” The little shit has the nerve to roll his eyes at me. I may be his older brother, but I’m also the foreman, which technicallymakes me his boss, and I’ve had to cover for him every single day for the last week. “Hold this,” I bark, and Lukas immediately gets to his feet, setting his coffee next to mine and moving to stand across from me. He wraps his hands around the middle of the stake, and I pick up my sledgehammer, swinging it up and over my head, bringing it down hard on the top of the post.
The sound of metal meeting metal cracks in the air, and Lukas flinches. “Why aren’t you using the post drivers?”
I swing the hammer around and up, letting it drop on the post head with another snap. “I like the sledgehammer better,” I grunt out. “Tell me why you hate Holly so much when you haven’t even met her.”
“I met her,” he bites back, flinching each time I bring the hammer down.
“You met her for two seconds and didn’t have a single conversation with her,” Theo points out. He saunters over to us with a roll of barbed wire in one gloved hand. “Just admit it, you’ve been a crabby son-of-a-bitch ever since you got back, especially since things ended with Ma—”
“Don’t,” Lukas barks, and I can feel the tension radiating through his voice. “Don’t you dare speak her name.”
“What are you gonna do about it, little brother?” Theo, never one to back down from a fight, drops the barbedwire and the coil rolls to my feet before it stops. He juts out his chest, and Lukas abandons the fence post, twisting to meet Theo’s burning gaze with one of his own. They stare off at one another, each daring the other to make the next move.
“Enough, the both of you,” I bark, dropping the hammer to the ground. With the back of my hand, I swipe the sheen of sweat from my forehead. “Theo, quit intentionally pissing him off. And Lukas…” I wait for him to break his death stare on Theo and turn to me. I raise a finger in his face, making sure I have his attention. “Holly is coming tomorrow, and you will treat her with respect. At the very least, you will be polite. You will not make her feel uncomfortable in our home, do I make myself clear?”
Theo turns away, whispering an exaggerated “oooh” under his breath just like he did when we were kids. I drop my hand, reaching for the line of barbed wire that Theo had tossed to the ground. When I stand back up, Lukas is still glued to the spot with his eyes now staring at my feet. “Look man,” I say a little softer this time, quickly checking to make sure Theo is distracted. “I know you’re going through a lot. Theo’s comment about … her … was a low blow.”
Lukas sniffs once, reaching for the shovel I discarded earlier. With silent movements, he shovels the dirt backinto the hole, filling it to the brim before tamping it down. I watch as he works, hoping he’ll eventually open up to me. Instead, he pushes past me to grab the bolt cutters from the tool box, and I twist, waiting to see if he has anything else to say. It shouldn’t surprise me that he chooses to stay silent. My baby brother has never been good at apologies, and Theo knows that bringing up his ex is off limits.
Lukas hasn’t been quite himself since discharging from the military. Probably earlier than that, if I think hard enough, but his injury and subsequent change of plans happened so fast I didn’t think much about it. One day, he was whining about his future changing, and the next, he had enrolled in the military and was shipped off to boot camp. He’s been home about six months, and while many parts of my brother are the same, some things are vastly different.
I unwind a strand of barbed wire, twisting it around the post and securing it with enough tension before I unroll some more, walking backward until I reach the next post. “You talk to her at all?”
Lukas stiffens for a second, then attaches the come-along to the barbed wire, using the clear frustration coursing through his system to tighten the wire. “She’s ahalf a world away, Gray. She doesn’t want to hear from me.”
“Won’t know until you try.”
I watch him work, and the pinched expression on his face never fades throughout the rest of the morning. Lukas doesn’t say much else the rest of the day besides the occasional grunt or request for a new tool. He doesn’t bite when Theo tries to goad him, and he skips lunch, opting to work through it to finish earlier.
When we pull into my parents’ drive, Lukas immediately climbs in his truck and backs up, causing dust to fly as he peels out of the drive without even a hand thrown up in a goodbye.
Theo saddles up next to me with his hands on his hips as he watches Lukas drive off. “Now that the grouch is gone,” he says, spinning to face me with a shit-eating grin on his face. “How nervous are you that Holly is coming tomorrow?”
Chapter Six
Holly
