by Liz Crowe
Virginia’s face flushed red. Austin suppressed a groan of consternation and a smile of amusement. She stood firm, facing his mother, her shoulders set, her face neutral.
Good girl. Don’t let her get to you.
“Yes, well, anyway,” his mother turned to him. “When can we begin planning?”
“Planning what?” He honestly couldn’t process the question. Evelyn handed him a plate piled high with chicken shish, rice with almonds and hummus. His mouth watered when the delicious odors hit his brain.
“I’m assuming she means the wedding, dear.” Her emphasis on the endearment made him snap his attention from the sustenance to the conversation.
“No need, Mother. We’ll handle it.” He took the plate and shrugged at Evelyn, mouthing the word “sorry” to her. The flatness of her expression did not bode well and he knew it. But fuck it, he was borderline passing out exhausted and this little tête-à-tête was the opposite of helpful.
He set his jaw and turned to Virginia who was, in turn, staring holes into his fiancée.
“Well, then, actually I’m here for another reason, if you must know.”
“Oh, you mean you actually aren’t here to congratulate me. No big surprise. Excuse me.” Evelyn shoved her way past them both on her foot-stomping way to the back bedroom. Austin sighed and put his plate on the high granite eating counter.
“Okay, Mother, I’ll bite. Why are you here?”
Virginia dragged her flaming gaze away from Evelyn’s retreat and squared her shoulders. “It’s your father. He’s… Well, he’s sick. I mean, not cancer or anything.” She waved a hand dismissively as if anything less really wasn’t worth speaking about. “It’s his blood pressure.”
“There’s medication for that,” Austin said, acknowledging the dread building in his chest and throat.
“Yes, he’s on some. But for some reason…well, he spent the night in the hospital last night and—”
“God damn it, Mother,” Austin spat out, as he dumped his untouched plate into the sink already piled high with dirty dishes. “Why didn’t you call me? I’d have been there.”
“Well, dear, your…girlfriend has made it clear that you don’t want any part of us and so…” She gazed wistfully out of the window.
“You know that’s not the case.”
She arched one carefully manicured eyebrow at him.
He sighed and plowed on. “I mean, not if it’s a medical emergency. You’re the one who’s made it clear she’s not welcome. She’s just responding to your petty, stuck-up bullshit.”
“No need to curse, dear.” Virginia managed to seem shocked, appalled and triumphant all at once. Austin’s vision got red around the edges, and the lurking headache crept forward out its cage.
“You know what? Fuck you, Mother. Where is Dad now? I’ll go see him.” He started back to the living, room, his mind roiling with all the various consequences of this little news bombshell. There was no one Maxwell Fitzgerald trusted with his super successful business. No one but Austin, of course. When he turned around, a million questions on his lips, he saw something he’d not seen since Brock’s last disappearing act—tears standing in Virginia’s faded green eyes.
“I don’t understand you, son. I really don’t. You had a perfectly lovely young woman to marry—someone who understood us, what it means to have a family legacy, how to nurture it and grow it and protect it. And you just dump her for that…that…”
Evelyn reappeared, dressed in jeans and a soft blue sweater that hugged her breasts, emphasizing them in a way that Austin loved. His head seemed to expand out from his temples, throbbing with this new stressful reality.
“Where is Max now, Virginia? At home?” Her voice was soft, non-confrontational and noncommittal. Austin grabbed her hand and yanked her to him, wrapping one arm around her so they could face his mother as a team, a bonded pair, whether she liked it or not.
She leaned into him a split second, then pulled away to start packing up the food. “Tell you what,” she said, looking up at Austin. “You go on over with your mother. I’ll come behind you with this so we can eat and visit with him.”
Austin smiled at her gratefully. Head whirring and aching, he tossed the keys to his car on the counter. “Let’s go, Mother.”
“Really, dear, you don’t have to—”
“Come over to your house?” Evelyn had everything packed back up and was putting it in canvas bags with the Fitzgerald Brewing logo on them. “I’m sure you’d rather I not. But, to be clear, I do care about Max and want to see with my own eyes how he’s doing. You can do whatever you like to pretend I’m not there. But I am…here. And I’m engaged to marry your son and you will not come between us no matter how hard you try.” Both Austin and Virginia gaped at her a few seconds. He was shocked that she’d managed these words in such a calm, matter-of-fact tone. And he was damn proud of her, too.
“Mother?” He held out a hand to indicate that she should precede him out to the living room and to the front door. With a little sniff and patented chin-raise, she did that, not favoring either of them with another word.
Limp, reamed out emotionally and physically, he stared across the kitchen at Evelyn for a few seconds. “I… I love you,” he choked out.
She pulled her hair up and into a high ponytail. “I know, Austin.”
“We have to talk…more.”
She glanced up at him, her blue eyes soft and inviting, making him wish they could just stay here, eat, fuck, talk…anything but what they were about to do. “It’s all okay, Austin. Now go on, take your mother home before I toss her off the balcony.” She crossed her arms and cocked one hip in a jokey way. Austin ran a hand down his face, nodded and turned to follow his mother to the condo’s front door.
Later, as she drove them home, she said out of the clear blue sky, “I don’t want to plan the wedding for next year. It’s too much right now. I have… We have a lot to get done first.”
“Okay,” he said, figuring it for more Fitzgerald-family avoidance. But something about the way she said it—as if assuming he’d be all right with whatever she said about this important aspect of their lives—dug into his psyche like a burr.
“And, frankly, I can do without a big fancy wedding. I mean, if that’s all right with you.”
They were parked under the building now, still sitting in the car and staring at the concrete wall in front of them. “I have to wonder,” he said, knowing he should keep his stupid, tired, borderline sick mouth shut but unable to do that, “if you even give a shit what is all right with me.”
She turned to face him, her blue eyes alight in a way that would make him horny—were he not so bone-deep exhausted. “What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You are great at the job, Evelyn. You’re doing exactly what you’d promised you’d do. You are making my job harder, but I know in the long run it’s all for the good of the company.”
She kept staring at him, breathing heavy, nostrils flared, cheeks flushed. “And…your point is what?”
“I don’t know… I mean, shit.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “You’re not…”
“I’m not being a sweet, soft-spoken, ladylike employee.”
“No. I mean. Yes. I mean… You’re taking this whole I-don’t-care-what-anyone-thinks-of-me thing too far. You don’t have to be such a fucking…ball buster all the time. You’re, I don’t know, out of balance, or something.”
“Out of balance,” she repeated softly, as if testing the words in her mouth.
“Evelyn, honey, I’m so tired I am seeing double and if I don’t get into a dark, quiet room soon you’re gonna have to take me to urgent care for a migraine.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. But she didn’t move from behind the steering wheel. “You want me to cave to her, don’t you?”
“Cave…to who?” He put a hand on the door handle, praying for escape before he made it worse.
“You want me to get alon
g with your mother.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what you do about her. You know that.”
“But it would make your life easier, wouldn’t it? If I just took her random, rude bullshit and absorbed it like a sponge, smiled, and passed the mother fucking teapot, right?”
“Well, yeah. But—”
“Great. Okay. Well, thanks for the honesty.” She got out of the car and headed for the elevator without him.
Chapter Thirteen
Denver, Colorado
One month later
If Austin had to shake one more hand, listen to one more drunk tell him how awesome his beers were, or get one more slap on the back, he would scream. Not that he’d be heard over the nearly five thousand people crammed into the Denver Convention Center.
Participation at the American Beer Festival was a necessary evil in his book. An expensive one at that. After shipping out beers in cold trucks, paying the exorbitant booth fees and for the necessary staff to fly out and stay in a half-decent hotel, crafting a unique and eye-catching display, and buying endless rounds and dinners after the festival doors shut each day, it blew the marketing budget every year. And at that moment, a total whopper of a headache was lurking and muttering behind his eyes, which didn’t help matters.
He knew he sounded crabby to everyone around him, which was so unlike his usual easygoing personality that people were starting to talk. He knew this thanks to his ever-diligent secretary who, while she respected Evelyn for being a hardworking female in a male-dominated industry, didn’t really care for her as a person.
Pretending to study his booth display, he sought out the one set of blue eyes that would calm him. She was working her magic on the other side of their massive end-cap booth, laughing, drinking and schmoozing as only she could. As if sensing his gaze, she glanced up and met it. But instead of winking and smiling as she normally would, she looked away, refocusing on her task, unwilling to give him what he so desperately wanted.
He’d apologized for the stupid comments about his mother. She’d accepted. They’d kissed and made up, more than once. But something in her had changed. He knew her well enough to acknowledge it but once she’d finally spilled it that she wanted to enter them into the Brewing Associations Annual Mid-Sized Brewery of the Year contest, hence all the need for specific reports and numbers and crap, they’d poured themselves into it, leaving everything else, including physical intimacy, behind them for a solid month.
The annual award came with a ton of free publicity, and bragging rights she would use like mad for years, he knew. It was important. And they could do it. He gave her a ton of credit for trying and figured he owed it to her to give it everything he had, too.
He ground his teeth and forced the image of her body out of his head. He hadn’t seen it in a while, at least three, possibly four weeks.
Pressing fingers against his burning eyes, he turned, pasted a smile on his face, and resumed the torture that constituted a national beer event. After another hour, convinced everyone in the building was too drunk to matter anymore, he declared himself done for the day.
He recalled that Evelyn had glided over to him about twenty minutes earlier, brushed her lips against his, and mumbled something about catching a drink with Rene and Kim, two female owners of west coast breweries. He’d gripped her arm, needing to talk to her, to get her alone and away from this madness, so they could talk about something other than that fucking award, and sales reports and the god damned brewery.
“Damn it, Evelyn, you can’t do this.”
“Do what? Have drinks with my friends?” She’d glared at his hand then looked around, not meeting his eyes. Austin had tried not to shake her like a rag doll. She could be the most frustrating woman on the planet. And he loved her so much it made his teeth ache. She was operating under the biggest shoulder chip he’d ever encountered and the more he got to know about her, the bigger and more uncompromising that damn thing got.
Defeated, he’d let her go, had met her flat stare with one of his own.
“Fine, pretend you don’t know what I mean. Have fun.” He’d turned away, his chest so tight he could barely draw a breath. Her scent had invaded his nose, had let him know she remained at his shoulder. But he’d had nothing to say, nothing that would do any good anyway.
Even if she’d wanted to speak, she wouldn’t, and he knew it. One other thing he’d learned about his roommate and lover of the past few months was that she could be the most emotionally unavailable human being he’d ever encountered. She could slam a wall down between them so fast and hard he could hear it, could feel the breeze it made as it passed him.
Admittedly they were stressed for a lot of reasons. The application they’d made for Mid-Size Brewery of the Year had taken a lot out of them both. The past month and a half had been a blur of time spent collecting the necessary data to fill out the reams of reports required to even apply for such an award. It had left them both exhausted and cranky. Which had added to the cooling between them.
Of course, the hard fact of his father’s declining health hadn’t helped. The three words ‘congenital heart failure’ had haunted his nights for the past month. More than one morning had found him wide awake, sitting in his recliner still clutching a cup of tea. The fact of the matter was, if Max Fitzgerald died, he, Austin, would be handed reins of the food supply empire. Something he’d never wanted, and had made clear, but somehow, both of his parents remained deaf to this for the past years—even after observing the success of the business he did love and nurture, biding their time, as if figuring that he’d get over his silly brewery obsession, leave it and return to the Fitzgerald fold where he belonged.
“That girl, can’t she run the beer thing?” his mother had asked him the week before over lunch at the club, something he’d been doing once a week by way of placating her.
“She’s a woman, and yeah, I guess she could. But what about Grant, or Ken?” He named the two men closer to his father’s age who were his number two and three in charge—one of logistics and the other of the money. “Why not name one of them as interim president and get him trained up?”
But she’d waved it off, in that way she always had, discounting his brewery as a lark, a silly hobby, that he’d toss aside the second he was handed the Fitzgerald company to run. That had been four days ago. He’d come home from work that evening to find her on the couch, wrapped in a robe, sipping tea and reading sales reports after spending the previous three days meeting potential distribution partners in New York.
Something about seeing here there, hair up, face scrubbed clean of makeup, comfortable and happy in his—in their—space had driven him to drop to the floor in front of her and lay his head in her lap. “They’re not going to stop until I leave the brewery and take over for my dad,” he said, gripping her legs as she ran her fingers through his hair.
“Shh, don’t talk about it.”
He’d raised his head from her lap, furious and shocked that she’d say such a thing. “I mean it, Austin,” she’d insisted, putting her finger to his lips.
“Good god, you are unbelievable.” He’d gotten up and headed for the shower.
“No, I’m not. We have enough to worry about at this moment, right now. Okay? Let’s cross that bridge should it arise. Max looked great the last time we saw him. I have to believe that—”
He’d whirled on her, grabbing her wrists and backing her against the wall outside the bathroom. She’d frowned at him, squirmed to get away, which had lit a match to his neglected libido. He’d glared at her for a split second before slamming his lips over hers, shoving his tongue inside her mouth and grinding his erection against her stomach.
“Austin, stop,” she’d said. He thought. It didn’t really matter at that point. He’d brought her to a loud, wet orgasm on his fingers before he shoved her down on the bed, yanked off his belt and trousers and rammed into her. He came fast and hard with a loud cry of half-satisfaction, half-frustration and without a damn though
t in his head to anything but the tightness of her pussy and his need to get laid. He hadn’t even kissed her after he pulled out and got up to make his way to the shower. And when he’d come back into the bedroom, embarrassed with relief that he’d knocked some of his edge off, it was empty.
He’d heard her in the kitchen, pulling out last night’s takeout to warm for dinner, so he made his way there, taking a few minutes to observe her. She’d prepped them both plates, heated his in the microwave first and handed it over. Her hair had been tousled, her color high. But her eyes had been flat and expressionless.
“I want to set a date,” he’d said. “For our wedding.” Something about the unknown, the extreme instability of everything around him, thanks to his father’s illness, made him need an anchor. Something that he could count on.
“I’m not ready. Come on, let’s read through the last application draft.”
“Fuck you and your fucking application. I never wanted that award. I want you. I want us. I need us, Evelyn. Badly.”
“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” She’d started to walk past him with her plate but he held out an arm like a traffic cop, halting her and taking the plate from her hands. “What? You wanna rough fuck again? Fine.” She’d yanked open her robe and turned around. “Make it fast though, doll. I have fucking work to do. Work for your goddamned company.”
He’d glared at her ass and actually considered it for a half second. But for the way her eyes had shone with tears when she glanced over her shoulder at him. “Stop it,” he’d said, pulling her up and tying the robe’s belt around her waist. “Just stop it.”
“Stop what, Austin? Stop being me? Stop working so hard? Stop letting your mother say whatever she damn well pleases to me?”
“Stop avoiding my question.”
She’d blinked fast. He’d taken her in his arms and pressed his lips to her forehead. “Let’s go to the courthouse tomorrow. I want to be your husband. I want you to be my wife. I want to be together.”