by Flynn, Avery
Damn it, this would not happen now.
Clamping her jaw shut tight, she inhaled a deep breath through her nose and kept her gaze locked on the crack in the wall above Sean’s head. Her nose twitched and she swallowed hard as she blinked furiously to keep the tears at bay.
I will not give him the satisfaction.
“Are you okay?” Sean backed up slowly as if he had a roast chicken tied around his neck and was nose–to–nose with a rabid junkyard dog.
“I am…” The first hot tear slid down her cheek, followed by a thousand more. She could practically feel her nose enlarging and turning Rudolph red. She sniffled back snot. “Perfectly fine.”
“Don’t cry.” He yanked open his center desk drawer and rifled through the contents. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
“I am not sad, you numbskull.” She wiped the back of her hand across her cheek then pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I am really fucking mad.”
“Then why are you crying?” He pulled a squashed mini–box of tissues from the drawer and held them out to her.
She swiped the box and yanked out a tissue. “It’s a common physical reaction to extreme annoyance.” Her voice wobbled like a deer in high heels and grew in volume with each word. “Especially when dealing with change–adverse jerks who think they’re artists of alcohol and won’t even consider for one damn second that all I’m trying to do is help.”
“Artist of alcohol?” The corner of his mouth curled and he shook his head. It should have made him look smug. Instead it just emphasized his scruffy hotness. “I like that.”
“Of course you do.” Natalie patted her cheeks dry and wiped her nose. She knew from past experience that she was not a pretty crier. Blotchy face. Puffy eyes. Sniffly nose. It was a little late to be delicate now. She laid the tissue box on his desk.
He swept it into the drawer, holding down part of the mess inside so he could shove it closed. “You’re still wrong.”
“About what?” Exasperation sent her leaping up with enough force to knock the flimsy plastic chair to the ground. Ignoring the clattering, she paced the length of his desk, whacking her clipboard against her opposite palm. “The fact that the ordering system is woefully out of date? That the records department is a frightening black hole of misfiled bills and past–due invoices? That the scheduling for the brew process is haphazard? Or, perhaps I’m wrong about the whole fly–by–the–seat–of–your–pants attitude you have about everything here. But instead of listening to my ideas, you’re submarining me at every opportunity.”
He crossed his arms, making his biceps bulge. “I don’t like change.”
“Too bad. Change happens.”
“Like you embrace it.” Sarcasm reverberated in his deep bass.
“Of course I do, what do you call this?” She raised her clipboard like a shield.
“Change you control, not the kind some crazy new boss forces on you.”
Natalie’s eyes almost bugged out of her head and her chest heaved. “That is the dumbest things I have ever heard.” Heat blazed in her cheeks.
Sean’s blue eyes darkened and his eyelids drooped. “You burn hot.”
Low and intense, his voice discombobulated her and had her clutching her clipboard to her chest.
“Hot?” She patted the sides of her French braid, tucking the loose strands behind her ears and straightened her glasses. “No. I am in firm control of my emotions.”
At least she used to be. Then she met the insufferable Sean O’Dell, quite possibly the most annoying man on the planet. She should have known he was trouble when they they were introduced and he’d acknowledged her with a caveman grunt. But she’d been too distracted by his warm, mahogany–colored eyes, broad shoulders, and ruggedly handsome face half hidden behind a beard. His stinginess when it came to talking drove her nuts, and not just because he wasn’t answering her questions, but because the gravel–edged timbre of his deep voice sent a delicious shiver down her spine every time he spoke. Knowing him, he probably spoke so infrequently to keep her off balance. He was as pleasant as ants at a picnic.
“Why don’t you talk about this…stuff—” he pointed to her clipboard “—with your sister?”
Natalie almost looked around for a hidden video camera, because this had to be a prank. Unfortunately, there was no camera. She clutched her clipboard to her midsection so she wouldn’t wring his neck. Sean wasn’t dumb, but his purposeful thickheadedness was about to make her snap.
“Two very good reasons,” she said, keeping her tone level, if laced with ire. “Number one, because Miranda got here nine days before I did and knows just as little about the history of this place as I do. Number two, because she’s tied up with wedding plans.”
He shrugged those broad shoulders, pulling his Sweet Salvation Brewery T–shirt tight across his muscular chest. “The changes will wait for her.”
“The changes have been waiting for months. I’m done waiting.” Her clipboard’s edges bit into her palms. God, what was it about this man that made her crazy enough to want to wing her favorite accessory at him?
“Looks like we’re at a standoff then, Sugar.” He picked up the brochure from his desk and circled around to her side. One callused finger tipped the clipboard away from her chest, never touching her skin but close enough that his heat licked her. The air hummed around them. Hunger. Want. Need. All three zapped between them, and as strong as an electrical current on steroids. “Of course, if you were to scratch my back, I’d guarantee your needs were satisfied too.”
Needs. Oh yes. She had them. Too damn many at the moment.
He slipped the brochure onto her clipboard. Fire ate its way up from her toes. The man had a death wish. It was the only thing she could come up with to explain why he kept purposefully pissing her off. “That’s blackmail.”
Sean chuckled, a sound that should never give her naked, naughty fun thoughts, but in his case did. “That’s harsh, Sugar. It’s negotiating, and if we do it right, we all walk away happy.”
She wasn’t falling for his brand of happy, no matter how tempting the messenger. “Forget it.”
Instead of pushing him away, her words only brought him closer. His scent wrapped around her, teasing her senses and melting her resistance until the only thing grounding her to the real world was the clipboard in her hands.
He leaned in, his lips so close to hers that his words brushed against her skin. “You’ll change your mind.”
One inch. That’s all it would take to close the distance between them. How very badly she wanted to eliminate the space was the only thing that kept her from doing it. So instead of jumping into the unknown abyss, she placed her palm over his fast–beating heart and stepped back. “What makes you so confident?”
He lifted her hand from his chest and kissed the center of her palm. Quick. Soft. Maddeningly effective. “Experience.”
A knock sounded and she whipped her tingling palm from his grasp.
“What?” she and Sean barked at the same time.
Natalie spun around to face the door.
Billy stood there, his eyes round with surprise and more than a dash of fear. “The bottle delivery? Uh…it’s not here.”
“Call them,” Sean said.
“I…uh…did.” Billy’s focus bounced from Natalie to Sean and back again. “They said the order had been canceled.”
“By who?” Natalie asked. This was just the type of sloppy mistake that happened when things weren’t organized.
Suddenly Billy became very interested in the toe of his tennis shoe. “Well…uh…you.”
“I most certainly did not.” And there was only one person at the brewery doing everything in his power to stall her every move.
Natalie spun on her heel and glowered at Sean.
Chapter Three
Natalie paced the eighteen strides from one end of Uncle Julian’s large farmhouse kitchen to the other, annoyance eating away at her stomach lining like a dog with a rawhide bone. It had been
two hours since she’d finally gotten the bottle delivery snafu straightened out and burned rubber on her way out of the Sweet Salvation Brewery parking lot, but she couldn’t stop going over the confrontation with Sean. He was just…so…so…
She threw her hands up in the air. “Ugh!”
“You’re going to wear a hole in the linoleum.” Her sister Miranda took a bite of a peanut butter and honey sandwich.
The same sandwich Natalie had made and abandoned when she’d started telling her sister about her latest head–to–desk moment with the most stubborn man in the world. It was hard to express the righteous indignation of the unfairly wronged when her mouth was stuffed full of liquid–gold goodness.
She glanced down at the lime green and orange squares bright enough to hurt her eyes. “A hole wouldn’t be the ugliest thing about this floor. We need to replace it anyway.” She scrolled through her mental checklist for the house she and her sisters had inherited along with the brewery. “It’s number three on the list of improvements we need to make to Uncle Julian’s house.”
Miranda snorted and took another bite. “Of course it is.”
Her sisters had loved giving her shit for her lists ever since she’d drawn her first one in three shades of red crayons. Normally it didn’t bother her, but today…Well, today everything bothered her. This was what happened when she didn’t have a release. The lack of sex, her favorite stress reliever, was really starting to get to her.
Despite what her sisters thought, she wasn’t a total prude. She just had always kept her personal life and her sex life separated. No fuss, no muss. But she was determined to end the separation and have a real relationship. Unfortunately, with all the hours she was putting in at the brewery, she hadn’t gotten the chance to go out and find someone with the right combination of relationship potential and sex appeal.
“Don’t start in on me, Miranda. I’m wound up enough as it is.”
“No shit, you’re as tight as a well–fed tick.” Miranda gazed at her with her all–seeing eyes. “What happened to Miss Cool–Calm–and–Collected?”
“That man.” She wound her fingers around her pearl necklace and twisted, her body primed with annoyance—and something more that started a warm, lazy southward wave from her lips to the juncture of her thighs. Damn, she needed to get laid.
Miranda shook her head, a teasing grin curling her lips. “Sean’s great.”
Oh yeah, great at driving her to distraction. “He’s a pain in my ass.”
“But he has a cute ass, something you used to appreciate in a man. Remember that hot football coach you introduced me to the last time I came to visit?”
Max. God, she really should have taken him up on that offer for goodbye sex.
Natalie started pacing again. Max hadn’t ever made her lose her cool. She’d always been in control with him. Cool. Calm. Collected. Just like she’d always been, until Sean and his beard of mystery rocked her world.
She flopped down, landing with a thud on a chair next to her sister at the kitchen table. She swiped the half of the sandwich her older sister hadn’t eaten yet and took a bite. “Why can’t Sean just do what I want?”
“You mean like everyone else does?”
She shot Miranda a dirty look. “You don’t. Neither does Olivia.”
“We’ve built up a tolerance to your steamrolling ways.”
Her spine stiffened. “I don’t—”
“You’re my little sister by a whole three minutes and I love you. But you can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes.”
“Said with love, I’m sure,” she grumbled. The truth of the statement stung more than she cared to admit.
“It is.” Miranda reached over and covered Natalie’s hand with her own. “You’re a list maker and a plan maker. It’s who you are. But not everyone is like that and you can’t always control what other people do.”
Sean’s words echoed in her head loud enough that she couldn’t help but repeat them. “Controlled change.”
Miranda cocked her head, her eyes—the same sky–blue shade as Natalie’s own—darkening with confusion. “Huh?”
Natalie shrugged off the almost–epiphany whispering from a dark corner of her mind. “Something that man said.”
“He has a name.”
She withdrew her fingers from her sister’s grasp and crossed her arms over her belly. “He does.”
“Say it.” Damn, the stubborn set of Miranda’s jaw meant trouble.
Normally, Natalie would have placated her or distracted her Type–A sister from the topic at hand. Wasn’t that what every middle child’s role in life was, especially when it came to their siblings? But for some reason, the situation with Sean tangled up her insides like a pair of earbuds languishing in a knotted mess at the bottom of her purse.
“Why should I?”
Miranda arched her perfectly waxed eyebrows and shrugged. “Because you’re going to have to get him on your side if you want to make changes.”
Her chest tightened at her sister’s assertion. “We own the brewery. He’s an employee.”
“And in all the research you’ve done, you’ve discovered that making changes by fiat as opposed to getting your team on board is the most efficient way to do things?”
“Well, no.” Natalie shifted in her seat and tried to quash the uncomfortable feeling of being wrong with the unmovable mountain of her stubbornness. “But I’m right.”
“I’m not the one you need to convince.” Miranda paused, sneaking a side–eyed glance at her sister. “Unless you just want to get rid of Sean.”
“Fire him?” The question came out as a squeak and she ran her fingers across her necklace, counting sixteen pearls one way and then working her way back to her starting point. The old habit didn’t help calm her. She’d made two revolutions in quick succession and her pulse hadn’t slowed from all–hands–on–deck emergency mode.
“We do own the place.” Miranda grabbed the chipped blue–stoneware plate and strode to the sink. “Of course, I never thought you were the kind to back away from showing someone the light. I didn’t think convincing Sean would be that much of a challenge for you.”
She fisted the necklace tight enough that the pearls made circular indentations in her palm. “It’s not.”
Miranda rinsed the plate and popped it in the ancient avocado–colored dishwasher before slamming it shut. “So untwist your pearls and make him a convert. It is the Sweet Salvation Brewery, after all. Aren’t we all supposed to understand things better in Salvation?”
That had been Natalie’s original intention when she’d pulled up stakes and moved back home. If she couldn’t persuade Sean to see the light, what chance did she have of enlightening herself?
Working on about four hours of sleep thanks to the ever–present image of Natalie Sweet burned on the inside of his eyelids, Sean slouched against the wall in the Sweet Salvation Brewery break room in a nearly comatose state, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing.
The allure of closing his eyes and catching a few Zs tugged at him, but he knew as soon as he did, all he’d see was Natalie. The pearl necklace circling her throat, drawing attention to her soft, creamy skin. The ever–present cardigans that drove him nuts wondering what was hidden beneath. The tightly pulled–back hair and skeptical demeanor that fueled the resurgence of every librarian–inspired fantasy he’d never known he had.
Even after a night of tossing and turning, he could still feel the slight weight of her across his shoulder and the surprisingly muscular length of her thighs. Her sweet honeysuckle scent had stayed with him long into the night. For as tightly wrapped a package as she was, Natalie Sweet offered more temptation than the Playboy Mansion ever had.
And she was completely off limits.
The Sweet Salvation Brewery had saved him. He’d worked his way up from night cleaning crew to head brewmaster in a few years, and when he perfected the latest stout recipe, he’d solidify his position at the brewery with a blue ribbon win at the
Southeast Brewers Invitational.
Julian Sweet had taken a chance on Sean despite him showing up as a man without a high school diploma, his real Social Security number, or the truth about who he was and where he’d come from. Sean sure as hell wasn’t going to repay Julian by banging the dead man’s niece as if she were a groupie who’d followed him into the bathroom at a movie premiere.
“Yo, Sean.” Billy poked his head into the break room. “Some dude called for you.”
He eyeballed the younger man. “Name?”
“Rupert Something–or–Other.” He sauntered into the room, grabbed a coffee mug from the cabinet and rested a hip against the counter. “Talked too fast to get it all down. He said he’d call back.”
Sean’s gut clenched, sending his breakfast surging up the way it had gone down. He clamped his jaw shut and willed the bile into submission.
“What the hell kind of first name is Rupert anyway?” Billy asked.
The kind of name that brought back memories of dark closets with locked doors and warnings delivered with a backhanded swing.
The Styrofoam cup crumpled in Sean’s grip. “Where was he calling from?”
He’d croaked out the question, but Billy didn’t seem to notice. Instead the gangly, Southern version of a hipster grabbed the coffee pot and poured himself a cup of dark roast. “Sunny California.”
The other side of the country. The black clouds of dread gathering around the edges of his vision cleared a bit before his gut twanged with suspicion. “How do you know he was in California?”
“Caller ID is a beautiful thing. If you ever talked to anyone on the phone, you would have realized that technology kicks ass. Damn man, you still use a pre–paid flip phone.” Billy held out the coffee pot toward Sean before his gaze dropped to the crushed cup in Sean’s fist. Shrugging, he slid the glass carafe back onto the warmer.
Sean had to play this close. If anyone at the brewery realized his name was Sean Duvin and not Sean O’Dell, there’d be more trouble than he ever wanted to deal with. The only thing worse would be if Rupert showed up on the brewery’s doorstep with a camera crew and a mic.