A back set with cocky, self-assured swagger.
Too bad I’m about to burst his big ego-inflated bubble.
After dumping my belongings in the office, I head around the other side of the building. If Grayson doesn’t want to give me a tour, I’ll find someone who will.
A girl comes into view almost immediately, carrying a stack of empty bins out of an open door in the side of the building. She looks about my age, clothed in bright orange bibs and a stained white tee shirt, dirty blonde hair swaying in a messy ponytail.
She doesn’t seem to notice me, so I jog to catch up to her.
“Hey!”
She glances over her shoulder, and her expression shifts from curious to crestfallen. “Shit,” she mutters as I close the distance.
Probably because she thinks I’m a visitor, like Grayson yesterday.
“I’m Eliza, the new Social Media Director. Anson hired me,” I say with a friendly smile.
My introduction only worsens the dread on her makeup-free face, and now some of her dread transfers to me. I haven’t done anything but offer my name and evidence that I work here, but she’s looking at me like I’m a giant raincloud.
“Grayson was a little too busy to give me a tour, and I was hoping to run into someone who could,” I try.
She sighs, takes me in, then answers, “Look, you seem nice, so I’m going to save you the trouble of going up to every person here. We’ve got a lot to do here, and we can’ttake any time to do social media stuff. Even if I wanted to, Gray told us no.”
Fucking Grayson.
“And Gray is almost always in a good mood, so on the rare occasion he gets testy like this, you listen.” The buckets in her hands tilt on a shrug. “I don’t know what you did to get on his bad side, because it takes a lot, but just know he’s not your biggest fan.”
I bark out a short laugh. “Yeah. Got that memo.”
Problem is, I did nothing butshow up to my job on time, and somehow, that landed me on Grayson’s allegedly elusive shitlist.
She purses her lips. “Good luck.”
She’s already starting to walk away when I say, “Can I at least have your name?”
I’ll admit it sounds a little desperate, but I need at least one ally here, and she was kind enough to throw me a bone.
She throws me another one. “Amanda.”
I commit that to memory before allowing myself to internally crash out.
Grayson’s game is easy to read.
He’s made it startlingly clear he doesn’t want me here, but he can’t fire me, so he wants to make my job impossible.
Well, if he thinks I’m going to throw in the towel and leave, he has another thing coming. I’ve played victim enough recently, and I’mdone.
I’m going to kick ass at my job, blow Anson away, and make Grayson Gold drop to his ungrateful knees and thank me by the time August rolls around.
That, and touch every single thing on this farm.
4
GRAYSON
I hateearly mornings on the farm about as much as I love them.
The four-thirty alarm kills me, but watching the sunrise from the pond is one of my favorite things in life. There’s something about the quiet early hours of dawn, when the water’s still, those pretty colors painting the sky, just me and nature coexisting as the engine hums along, that feels transcendent.
