“Oh?” Erin asked.
Darcy nodded, and they relapsed into quiet. It stretched, and again, Erin found herself scrambling for small talk just to ease the tension between them.
They spoke at the same time.
“How is Charlie—?”
“How is your sister?”
Erin gave Darcy a wry grin. “She’s fine. At least I think she is. She’s away right now with our aunt on a trip.” She didn’t want to elaborate, feeling a little like she was betraying Jen by saying even this much.
“Glad to hear it. And Charlie’s fine, too. The board at the brewery has agreed to let him continue as interim chair for another six months. They were impressed with his new ideas and agreed to let him try to brew a couple of new beer ideas he picked up here on a trial basis. From what I could gather, it’ll be a little like a test. If the beers market well, they’ll keep him on more permanently.”
“That’s good,” Erin said.
Their conversation dried up, and they walked in silence for another block. Lottie and Willie were talking rapidly in front of them, both of them pausing to laugh now and again and throw furtive glances their way.
“They must be talking about us,” Erin said, sticking her tongue out.
Darcy sighed. “My cousin has always been the child of the family.”
Erin looked at her sharply, surprised. “That’s a little harsh.”
Darcy shrugged. “I don’t mean it in a derogatory way. She’s simply a little less mature than the rest of us.”
“I guess I should have known that you don’t like to be teased.”
Darcy glanced at her quickly and then away. After a moment, she nodded. “It’s true. I don’t have a tolerance for it. I’ve never liked being laughed at, even by people close to me.”
“That’s a shame,” Erin said, meeting her eyes. “I do love to laugh.”
Darcy’s face underwent a series of shifting expressions, from hurt to surprise to again something like pain. After all, Erin thought, what difference does it make to Darcy what I like or don’t like? Erin pretended to become absorbed in her bags to hide her own embarrassment. Why had she said that? It wasn’t as if they would ever see each other again after this dinner. Something about Darcy always made her say and do stupid, impulsive things. She couldn’t help but shift into the personal with her.
Their arrival at the restaurant saved her from an explanation, and Darcy had to speak with the host to see if they could arrange a different table for the larger party. A few minutes later they were seated, and Catherine insisted on making everyone sit in specific places at the table.
“I want to be able to talk to new people,” she explained. “I want to hear all about your brewery, Erin. Tell me how you got into such a masculine business. How on earth did your parents let you do it?”
Erin choked on her water and saw Darcy staring at her aunt with something like horror. Willie, who was sitting next to her, laughed out loud and slapped Erin on the back.
“Yes, Erin, please, tell us what drew you to that manly business?”
“Uh, well, it’s a very popular small business here in the state.”
“Indeed,” Catherine chimed in. “My niece Darcy has been doing an exposé of all the little places here in Northern Colorado. Some of them, as I understand, are quite good. I wouldn’t know, as I never drink beer.”
“Erin’s place is the one I was telling you about, Catherine,” Darcy said. “The review that’s coming out tomorrow? The one I showed you?”
“Indeed!” Catherine said, looking surprised. “Well, that is shocking. I would never have guessed.”
Darcy was smiling when Erin met her eyes, but before Erin could follow up, their waiter arrived for the drink order. Everyone at the table was wrapped up in their menus after this, and the moment slipped away. Erin couldn’t bring up the review without giving away her newfound anxiety about it, and something in Darcy’s smile had suggested that she didn’t need to worry about it. After all, Darcy had nothing to say but good things about her beer. At the very least, the review shouldn’t be outright terrible. Even if it was only middling, it shouldn’t hurt their current boom.
As they waited for their food, Erin realized that she was more shaken by this meeting than she’d admitted to herself earlier. She’d been surprised to see Darcy, and her heart had been racing almost since the moment she’d walked over to them, but even here, sitting apart from her, her hands were shaking and her face and palms felt sweaty and cold. All of the feelings she’d suppressed this month were back, making her head whirl and her heart pound even harder. She could hardly look at Darcy for fear of saying something, doing something, to give herself away. She stood up, excused herself, and headed to the restroom. If she didn’t get away for a few seconds she would do something rash.
There was a small washroom in front of the women’s toilets, and Erin stopped at one of the sinks and splashed cold water on her face. She needed to figure out a way to get out of here soon without causing a scene. She desperately tried to think of an excuse—anything to get Lottie to understand that she needed to leave, but her mind was blank, still swimming in anguish. She met her eyes in the mirror and her pale, scared face.
“Get it together, Erin,” she whispered. She had to leave.
The door opened a moment later, and Darcy stood behind her in the reflection. They met each other’s eyes, and finally Erin turned toward her. Darcy continued to move closer, and then they were in each other’s arms, Darcy’s mouth meeting hers in a crushing kiss. Their embrace was desperate, tight, painful almost, and a moment later, Erin had to make herself push Darcy away. They both took a wary step apart, Erin shaking all over.
“Darcy, we can’t,” Erin said, still breathing heavily.
That pained expression passed over Darcy’s face again, and she nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t…I mean, I needed to—”
Erin held up a hand to silence her. “I don’t want to hear it, Darcy. Don’t you get it? I can’t do this. We can’t do this. You must see that.”
A moment later, Darcy nodded, but her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I know. This is about Charlie and Jen, right?”
Erin nodded and then shook her head. “It is, but it isn’t. I mean it’s also us, isn’t it? How could this ever work? What’s happening between us?”
Darcy shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Erin took another deep breath and let it out. “We shouldn’t be in here together. The others will wonder what’s happening. I’ll go out there and make up some excuse so Lottie and I can leave.”
Darcy grabbed her arm. “Don’t. Please don’t go. I haven’t told anyone, and I don’t want to have to explain—”
“Don’t you see I can hardly stand it? When I’m around you…” She shook her head. It was hard to explain, and even harder to say out loud. Being around Darcy made her feel unmoored, shaken.
Darcy took a step closer, and Erin held her breath. She had to stop herself from leaping into her arms again.
“Please stay. For me.” Darcy’s voice was barely above a whisper. “I won’t ever bother you again.”
Erin stared into her gray eyes for a long moment, and finally her heart rate slowed and calmed. She felt steadier now that they’d finally had it out, and she realized what it would look like if she and Lottie left now. It would cause more questions than she was willing to deal with.
Finally, she sighed in defeat. “Okay. I won’t leave.”
Darcy’s shoulders dropped. “Thank you.”
“I better go out there now. Give it a minute or two before you join me, or they’re going to know we were in here together.”
The dining room was bright and noisy after the quiet of the washroom, and for a moment Erin wasn’t sure she could go through with this. Then she saw Lottie, happily chatting away with Willie at the table, and knew she must. If she didn’t, the whole thing would come out right then and there. As calmly as she could, she walked toward their table,
relieved to see that the food was arriving with her. No one even glanced at her as she sat down, giving her a couple of extra seconds to compose herself.
She kept her eyes fixed in front of her, only dimly aware that Darcy had rejoined them, too. Catherine turned her attention to Lottie as they ate, and Erin sagged with relief. The older woman’s earlier attentions were a little hard to take. She glanced to her right and met Willie’s smiling face.
“You are really quite striking,” Willie said.
Erin couldn’t help but blush, and she laughed uncomfortably. “Thanks.” Like Willie, she kept her voice low enough that, in the relative noisiness of the dining room, none of the others at the table could hear them.
“When Darcy was talking about you before, I didn’t think she was being quite honest with me. She has a tendency to exaggerate.”
“She talked about me to you? Before this?” Erin’s stomach dropped. How much had Darcy shared?
Willie nodded, turning to her food. “She said she’d met an interesting brewer while she was here.” She was grinning as if she’d said something funny, but Erin didn’t get it.
Erin’s relief warred with something like hurt feelings. While she was glad she wouldn’t have to talk about her affair with Darcy with this nice, but unfamiliar woman, she was a little hurt that Darcy hadn’t told anyone. Then again, neither had she.
Erin swallowed a sip of water. “Interesting? That’s all she said?”
Willie grinned at her. “That’s why I thought she was exaggerating. That’s the nicest compliment she ever gives someone she likes. She’s a close one, our Darcy.”
While nothing would ever come of it, it was still pleasing to know that Darcy had, in fact, been interested in her, not simply bored and passing time. The moment in the sitting room and now Willie’s words confirmed this assumption. Like Erin, Darcy had felt something for her. She was incredibly beautiful, and Erin had seen what she could be like when her reserve melted that ice a little. Darcy would have gotten serious with her under different circumstances. It hadn’t just been an affair after all—Erin could admit that to herself now. She cared about Darcy.
Trying to hide these feelings, Erin gave Willie a wide, if somewhat false, grin. “So you thought she was exaggerating when she said that I was interesting?”
Willie shrugged. “Hey. I’ve seen some of the women she called interesting before. And believe me, they weren’t.”
Both of them laughed, and Darcy, who was stuck chatting with Anne, looked at them suspiciously. They both laughed harder, and Darcy narrowed her eyes at them before turning to Anne.
“Who’s she?” Erin asked, tilting her head at Anne.
“The woman my mother wants Darcy to marry.”
Erin almost spit out her drink again and had to swallow painfully to keep from choking. She had a sudden flash of memory from several weeks ago. Charlie had mentioned this woman in passing to Darcy.
“Why?” Erin managed. “Why does she want her to marry her, I mean?”
“She might not look it, but Anne’s a multimillionaire. She owns hotels all over the world. My mother met her at a charity function in Aspen last year, and when she found out she was a lesbian, she became determined to hook them up. I’m pretty sure she thinks lesbians are like pandas or something—just get two of them in the same room, and they’ll fall in love. I think Anne’s game, but Darcy is completely uninterested. Why she just doesn’t tell my mother off is a mystery.”
Erin watched Darcy and Anne for a while with horrified curiosity and soon reached the same conclusion as Willie. While it was clear that Darcy was polite enough to be civil to Anne, she was clearly just that—polite. Anne was gazing at Darcy with fawning appreciation, but Darcy’s expression remained simply attentive. Erin was pretty sure she could recognize Darcy’s attraction now, and this wasn’t it. The thought gave her a stab of embarrassment, and she looked away quickly, only to find Willie grinning at her.
“Do you find Darcy interesting yourself, Erin?”
Erin guffawed and then put a hand over her mouth when everyone turned her way. “Sorry,” she said to the others. She lowered her voice again and spoke to Willie. “I’m not going to answer that question, Willie. God knows what you’ll do with the answer. I’ve known you less than an hour, and I can already tell you’re a gossip.”
They shared a conspiratorial smile and then ate in silence for a while. Just when Erin had convinced herself that the dinner could end without more personal questions from this woman, Willie set her silverware down and sighed.
“That was really wonderful. I don’t know what I expected from the restaurants out here, but they’ve all been great.”
Erin shook her head. “Not you, too. I thought your cousin was the snob. Guess what. Even people in ‘flyover country’ know how to cook.”
Willie held up her hands. “Sorry, sorry. I deserve that.” She leaned forward a little, lowering her voice again. “Hey, I wanted to ask you something you could probably answer.”
“Sure, what?”
“Darcy was telling me about this other woman brewer here in the state.”
“Another interesting one?”
Willie grinned. “Not interesting to Darcy, no, but to her friend Charlie. He apparently had some kind of fling with her when he was here. Jane or Jackie, something like that. Do you know her?”
Erin’s stomach dropped. Darcy had clearly not told Willie about her connection with Jen, if that’s who Willie was talking about. Erin decided to make sure. Her throat felt suddenly constricted, and she swallowed with some difficulty. “Do you mean Jen?” She almost whispered.
Willie pointed at her. “That’s it! That’s the name. Darcy said this Jen was taking Charlie for a ride. Just wanted his money. Darcy decided to step in and save him before it was too late. The guy was actually thinking of buying her a ring, if you can believe it.”
Erin was staring at Darcy now, her stomach now reeling with sorrow and disappointment. “But Darcy stopped him?”
“Yes. Luckily Darcy said she talked Charlie into leaving while he was ahead. He’s out the dinners he bought her and some overnights at hotels, but nothing more serious. Anyway, since you know Jen, could you do me a favor?”
Angry tears rose to her eyes, and she looked down at her plate to hide them from Willie. She took a calming breath. “What kind of favor?”
“If you see her, could you sock her in the eye for me? Charlie Betters is about the nicest person in the world. I hate to think of someone trying to take advantage of him.”
Later, at home in bed, Erin wasn’t really sure how she made it through the rest of the dinner, but she managed to pass off her altered behavior as a headache. She and Darcy avoided each other as they said their good-byes. Erin was glad for the earlier awkwardness that allowed her to keep from meeting her eyes. She was pretty sure Darcy would see her anger there, and she didn’t want to say anything in front of the others.
She kept the news from Lottie on the drive home, rolling Willie’s words over and over again in her mind.
Only when she was alone, sitting on her bed with the lights off, did she let herself feel the depth of Darcy’s betrayal. She had known in her gut that Darcy was the reason Charlie had left so abruptly, but she had never once thought it had anything to do with money. Bile rose in her throat with the heat of her anger, and she jumped to her feet, fists clenched, almost ready to track Darcy down and punch her in the face. She paced around inside her dark house long enough to let the anger pass, and when it did, she felt drained and depressed. She sank down on her bed, still clothed, and passed out from fatigue.
She’d never been as disappointed in someone as she was in Darcy. What she’d done was unforgivable. And she would never forgive herself for getting involved with her.
Chapter Twelve
With only a few days left before Christmas, the brewery was packed the next day with tired shoppers and out-of-towners home for the holidays. Thankfully, Erin was too busy to think about anythin
g but the next task for most of the morning and afternoon. She wanted to give all of her employees the evening of Christmas Eve and the day of Christmas off, but it was going to be tight to see if that was even possible. The brewery would be closed to the public at that time, but if she and the rest of the staff didn’t manage to take care of several things before then, she would have to ask some of them to come in on Christmas Day. Just about everyone who worked for her was waiting for the announcement of their vacation, but she didn’t want to disappoint anyone by telling them prematurely. They would be closed, so most of the front counter staff knew they had the time off, but everyone else was still waiting.
Luckily, she still had a full staff. Two or three had grumbled about late paychecks, but the bank had sorted everything out by that afternoon. The people who hadn’t been paid yesterday had gotten their deposit at midnight, and everyone had been warned beforehand in a staff-wide email. Even the fees Erin owed were nominal, considering what could have happened. On the whole, she was lucky the disaster hadn’t been worse.
During a lull in the late afternoon, Erin let Lydia and the other counter staff go home early before the evening shift arrived. A lone pair of drinkers sat in the corner—two men—but they kept to themselves, talking in hushed voices and bent over their beers. One of them was clearly upset about something, and they both gave the impression of wanting to be left alone. Erin did just that.
However, for the first time all day, Erin had nothing immediate to do. In her current mood, this was bad. She needed to stay busy, or the bleak, angry darkness that had come over her last night would take over again. She’d been so upset that her entire evening, from the drive home and afterward, seemed like a bad dream. She couldn’t help but think of Jen, and a wave of anxiety and sorrow washed over her again.
The counter staff used a couple of tablets as the cash register for credit-card transactions, but, as the brewery was so quiet right now, one of them was available. She detached it from the stand and opened her Facebook account, hoping to see more pictures from Jen and Aunt Eddie. Sure enough, another huge batch of photos showed up, all of them from Boston, where they were now at the end of their trip. Uninterested in the pictures of places and things, Erin scrolled through them, searching for some of Jen. For the most part, she had remained absent from the series her aunt had posted these last weeks, with, at best, a side profile or a shot from behind; however, there was an occasional shot of her entire face, as there was in this batch.
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