by Holley Trent
“You mean for the agency.”
She scoffed. “No. This job is as close to pro bono as we can get. They’re just barely covering the overhead. Sometimes, we pick up local clients just for the sake of community. Come on.” She bobbed her silver head toward the staff kitchen.
Ariel followed.
“People notice beer, and not just beer drinkers. Store owners. Restaurateurs. Design geeks. They pay a lot of attention to the labels, because sometimes people buy craft beers just for the pretty packaging. The packaging might be better than the swill in the bottle.”
Ariel had bought new kinds of coffee quite a few times solely because of packaging, so she understood the psychology. Usually worked out okay, but her standards were low.
Agatha pulled a teabag from the stash on the kitchen island and dunked it into her cup. “Have I given you anything else to work on?”
Has she forgotten already? Ariel shifted her weight. “Uh, yes, you gave me the — ”
“Ignore it. Clear your desk and work on this. Take a look at the info and get me some ideas by tomorrow.”
“To … tomorrow?”
“Did you not have deadlines in Los Angeles?”
“Of course I did, but — ”
“Got a meeting. Gotta run.” She click-clacked away on her high heels, grunted, then turned around. “By the way, it’ll be your name on the awards this campaign gets.” She held up her hands and spayed her thumbs as if she were framing a marquee between them. “Art directed by Ariel Thomas. You know how often you see a woman’s name on a campaign for a commodity most often purchased by men?”
Ariel got the gist. “Rarely.”
“Now you’re swimming in the deep end of the pool, honey. Go tread some water.”
Ariel raised a brow. “Okay.”
“This isn’t affirmative action or feminism or anything of the sort,” Agatha said, now halfway down the hall. “This is me leveling the field. Kick some ass, sweetie.”
“I’ll try, ma’am.” She sucked in some air and shifted all those beer bottles to the other arm. “I’ll try.”
Back in her office, Mark spun in his chair and pushed his headphones back.
Ariel sighed. Great. Now he wants to talk.
“Pretty sweet campaign, right?”
She shrugged and dropped all the materials on her desk before stretching the kinks from her neck. Sleeping sitting up was for the birds. That’s what she’d resorted to after having given up on sleeping. She’d decided to read a book, and that did the trick. She’d fallen asleep on page three with her back against the headboard.
“I guess so,” she said.
“I’ve been itching for a chance to work on a gig like this for the past ten years. I mean, come on. Do you know how many Belgian ales are called white devil or some permutation of that?”
“Devil?” She sank into her rolling chair and pulled the pile of paper across her desktop. She read the brief. “Snow Devil. Huh.”
“Yeah. Isn’t that great?”
Ariel cast her gaze up from the desk and found Mark grinning like the cat that got the cream. There was something sinister about his smile. He seemed far too enamored about the concept. Meanwhile, Ariel had no clue what she was going to do with it.
She’d never worked on a beer campaign or even a drink item in general. But now, this one? With a theme she wasn’t so geeked about to start with? She’d be surprised if she’d even be able to come up with a single idea.
“Have fun writing copy, guy.”
“Are you kidding? I’m going to love this. Hold on. Let me set the mood.” He flicked his thumb over the screen of his phone, set his headphones back atop his head, and moments later, began to headbang like a victim of repeated whiplash.
Ariel sighed and knew he couldn’t hear it.
Great.
She took a sip of her tepid coffee and willed herself to concentrate on the presentation.
Way Down South Beer. Incorporated 1666. Hmm. That must be a typo. Probably meant 1966.
The next line gave her pause.
CEO Bill Nolitzname.
The photo beneath that name made her nauseous. She knew that smirking blond man — had just met him the day before.
“God damn.” Ariel believed sometimes coincidences happened, but this sure as shit didn’t feel like one.
Chapter Fifteen
Ariel had never been the person to flake on an appointment, but as soon as she could leave without piquing the receptionist’s curiosity, she bounded out the ad agency and headed north to Momma’s.
Momma was in the kitchen peeling potatoes when she arrived.
“I’m making hand-cut fries and — ”
“Where’s John?”
Momma sighed. “Like I was saying before you so rudely cut me off, I’m making hand-cut fries and John is out back heating up the old barbecue. We’re having bur — ”
Ariel was already halfway out the back door before Momma could get that last syllable out. She stomped through the freshly-mown grass, which she suspected John had something to do with, and grunted as she approached the cement pad bearing the old brick barbecue her granddaddy had constructed way back when.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” she said, giving John a push.
“Hey! Be nice.” He set down the bag of charcoal he’d been emptying beneath the grate and clapped his hands clean on his jeans. “Don’t I even get a hello? I thought we liked each other better than that.”
“I thought we did, too, until you started lying and keeping secrets.”
His forehead furrowed and he crossed his arms over that broad chest. “What secret have I kept this time?”
“Don’t play dumb. The beer company?”
He shook his head. “What? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Seriously, sweetpea. Please tell me whatever it is you think I’ve done wrong so I can talk you down from this hysteria.”
“Hysteria, huh?” She jabbed a finger at his chest.
Naturally, he didn’t budge. His lips actually twitched a bit at the corners.
“Typical man, dismissing a woman’s feelings. Telling her she’s hysterical when in fact he’s completely in the wrong. I refuse to go through that again.”
“Whoa, there.” He put up his hands, palms out, and shook his head again. “I’m not taking credit for that. I’m sure I’ve put you through at least a little bit of shit, but beer isn’t a component of it. Now tell me about this company.”
“Take off the sunglasses. I can’t take you seriously when you’re wearing mirrored lenses.”
He dismissed the request by retrieving the bottle of lighter fluid on the shelf and popping the lid. “What happened at work to get you so agitated?”
“Okay, if you’re going to pretend you don’t know, I’m going to pretend you’re dumb as dirt and give you the whole back story. I got called into a meeting for a new client. It’s a beer company local to Wilmington called Way Down South. They’re re-branding. Need new packaging, new logos, new everything. It’s a big project for a small client. Anyway, I was reading the company information and what did I find?”
He struck a match on the bricks and tossed it into the coals. The result was a raging inferno that made both step back a few paces until it burned itself down a bit.
“What’d you find?”
“The owner is a gentleman named Bill Nolitzname.”
“Okay?”
“You don’t know your own father’s last name?”
He turned and one of those blond brows arched up behind his sunglasses’ lens. “Excuse me?”
“There was a little picture under his name. CEO. Said the company has been around since sixteen sixty-six.”
“That long, huh?”
“Why don’t you soun
d more surprised?”
“I am surprised, but I suspect acting like it won’t do me a bit of good.” He poked at the coals with a pair of tongs, rearranging the pile into a tidy pyramid now that most of the flames had calmed down. “Like I told you. Before last week, I had never met the man. He visited me at the compound. Offered me a gig — ”
“Is that what you were really coming out here for?”
The hinges of his jaw twitched. He was grinding his teeth. “Yes.”
“You’re lying.”
“Ariel, sweetpea … ” He blew out a sigh and cautiously placed his hands atop her shoulders. “This is going to sound very fictitious — hell, made for reality television, perhaps — but he gave me cash and a means out. I took it. I started making my way east, and you came along.”
“Why didn’t you just fly?”
“Why didn’t you?”
Damn him for using logic.
“Ariel, I swear to you, I don’t know the extent of my father’s business holdings. I didn’t even know the beer company existed. Trust me. It won’t hurt my feelings if you ask to be taken off the account.”
“I have no plans to do that. My boss says it could be a good move for my career, and well, I’m going to take it. It’ll be good for my portfolio.”
“You believe me, then?”
“I don’t know. I’m just too tired to argue with you. Besides, Momma seems to trust you for some reason unknown to me, and she’s never wrong about this kind of stuff.”
His expression softened and his lips parted as if he were going to say something, but closed them as if he’d thought better of it. He pulled her in a little closer. “Why are you tired?”
She could tell that wasn’t what he wanted to ask, but it was an important enough question on its own. “I didn’t sleep well last night,” she said to his chest. He smelled wonderful — like hard work and charcoal and leftover peach pie and …
She allowed herself a deep inhale.
Like Sanka. He’d gotten into Momma’s decaf, obviously.
“Sorry, sweetpea. Neither did I. Claude came to visit and I think I … must have overindulged a bit. I was totally wired. He had me pacing the room until around three, and that’s when he took off. He had to go rescue Charles from something.”
“I guess that’s what siblings do. I regret never having any.”
He tensed, but when she looked up, he’d managed to pull his lips into a smile. “Yeah. I’m used to being my own counsel, so I guess I’m taking advantage of the newfound big brothers thing.”
The sliding door smacked open. “I’ve got the oil heating for the fries. Y’all done reconciling? The burgers are ready to go on. Hurry up, now. I want to see my stories tonight. Morgan Freeman. Woo!”
Ariel groaned then laughed. “All right, Momma. We’re coming.”
• • •
Apparently, Ariel had a bit of an OCD streak and she wouldn’t believe the coals had stopped glowing. While John and Clarissa stood in the kitchen, cleaning up from the meal in time for Clarissa’s primetime movie, Ariel stood on the cement pad, peering into the coals, waiting for the slightest sign of smoke. She seriously thought a spark would jump and set the grass on fire. Then it’d all spread to the house and burn them to death while they slept. She actually said that out loud.
“Let me see ’em,” Clarissa said. Her eyes were locked on the kitchen window where she watched for Ariel’s imminent return.
He lifted the sunglasses.
She cringed.
He dropped them.
“Did he say how long they were going to be like that?”
“Best I could tell this wasn’t a side effect he expected from the ritual. He’d never done it before. It was kind of like a little exorcism, which as you can imagine went about as ridiculously as it sounds. It was supposed to purge the demon parts of me, but I don’t know to what extent.”
“Powerful magic. At least your skin isn’t see-through anymore. When are you supposed to know if it’s working?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s coming.”
They made themselves look busy.
“Never mind. She’s filling a bucket with water.”
“What’s her deal?”
“Oh, that goes back a long time. I think third or fourth grade when Smokey the Bear came to visit the kids in school. She’s been real paranoid since then.”
“It’s cute.” He chuckled. “She would have made a great big sister with all that paranoid fretting. I understand why you didn’t tell her about the baby, though. She would have never been able to think about anything else. And now she’s got even more to feed her paranoia.”
“What do you mean?”
“When she went to the bathroom, I looked it up. Way Down South is a real company and my father really does own it. I don’t know what to think.”
Clarissa groaned. “I think Claude is right and your daddy is playing cat and mouse games.”
They watched through the sliding door as Ariel doused the grill from five feet back. She stared into it a moment, nodded at it, then set the bucket down.
“Now she’s really coming.”
John opened the freezer door and stuck his head inside.
“You want some ice cream?” Momma asked her when she entered.
“Sure. I’m going to go wash my hands and put on my pajamas. I suspect I reek of smoke.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
When she padded away, John grabbed the ice cream and closed the door. He took off his new sunglasses and wiped the fog off on the edge of his T-shirt.
“How am I going to get through the next couple of days like that?”
“Make up a lie.”
“I’m tired of lying.”
“I’d like you less if you weren’t. Just tell you did some work on the roof and you hammered something and a bit of shrapnel flew into your eyes. You went to get it checked and the doctor figured she’d dilate ’em while she was at it.”
“Hey, Clarissa, you’re pretty good.”
She pretended to fluff her gray curls. “I learned from my big sister. She was the best liar in three counties. I miss that heifer.”
“You ever going to tell Ariel what happened?”
“What happened to what?” Ariel said, stepping into the kitchen with a sketchpad and sharpened pencil.
Shit. John turned his back and walked as leisurely as he could to the counter. He pulled open the nearby drawer and extracted the ice cream scoop. “Uh … we were just talking about the chicken coop and why Clarissa stopped using it a couple of years ago.”
“Oh.” He saw her retreat into the living room in his periphery, and let out a relieved exhale.
“That woman is going to kill me.”
“Probably.”
He peeled off the ice cream lid and scooped out a generous scoop of butter pecan for Ariel.
“I’d better make some coffee.”
“Make it decaf,” Clarissa said. “’Less you want her up ’till dawn. Honestly, I got sick of hearing the floorboards creak last night. Lord, help me, I’m tired.”
John managed to keep his affliction hidden away over the next few hours solely because of Ariel’s busyness. He’d poked his head out of her bedroom once and found her on the sofa, sketching little devils in earmuffs and igloos with devil tails, before he eased back in and closed the door. She was going to have a big surprise when she found out what real demons looked like. They weren’t so cute.
She’d crawled into the bed in the dark at around two A.M., yawning as she pulled back the covers.
“You still awake?” she asked.
“Yeah. Come up with any good ideas?”
“Ideas? A few.” She snuggled close and dipped her hand inside the
waistband of his pajama bottoms as if to warm it. “Whether they’re any good or not, I can’t say. I want to do a good job on this, but I think I might be thinking too literally.”
Definitely.
“I’m sure it’ll come to you.”
“You feel a little cold tonight.”
“I do?” He put a hand on his own forehead but to him it just felt normal.
“Yeah. It’s nice, though. I can’t wait until the heat breaks and some of this stifling humidity winds down.”
“I like it.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I think it suits me better than the desert did.”
“You’re nuts. I imagine summer in The South is what Hell feels like.”
You may be right if that’s your worst fear.
He held her closer and stroked her hair. He had so much to say, and didn’t have the words to say any of it. She deserved to know what was going on — if she was in the midst of something that had the potential to be unsafe. The brutal truth was if he walked away — got back on the road and apologized to Gulielmus — Gulielmus would probably leave Ariel alone. She was just a small fish in a really large pond. To John, though, she was the pond itself. She had the potential to give him everything he craved from life. Home. Hearth. Stability. Affection. Maybe even a couple of vaguely supernatural offspring.
“Hey, Ariel?”
“Hmm?”
Her response was slow, groggy, so he didn’t think she’d hang in there much longer. It probably wasn’t a good time for deep conversations, but when else to ask her except when she was still?
“How would you classify our relationship?”
“That’s a weird question.”
“I don’t think so.”
She yawned again and shifted her hand so it was wedged between his thighs. He tried to think chilly thoughts, but he suspected his other head would think independently as usual. That’d kill the mood he was going for.
“Give me some parameters, here.”
“Okay. Where do you see this going?”
“Going? I dunno. I’ve known you a week. Feels like longer, though. I like you a lot. I want to keep ya.”