The Good Chase

by Hanna Martine

  Shea smiled.

  The tall man in the blue T-shirt looked down his nose at Rugby and jabbed a meaty finger at the bottle in Rugby’s hand. “That’s made by a distiller in Scotland that still uses the original 1840 peat kilns to smoke the barley.”

  Shea fought for a straight face. Hmmm, maybe this guy was more Hot Air than Brown Vein. He was correct, but who voluntarily spouted off that kind of information to a stranger?

  “Impressive.” Rugby’s eyebrows shot up exaggeratedly as he pursed his lips at Shea. Hot Air didn’t get the subtle sarcasm, but she did and had to suppress another smile as she removed the bottle’s cap. Customer equality and all that.

  Out in the distant field, the athletes were taking a rest between events. A small contingent of pipes followed a line of old men dressed in military kilts as they marched onto the grass, Scottish and American flags whipping in the wind. The pipes started up, a wave of music drifting into the whisky tent.

  Rugby cringed.

  “No bagpipes, huh?” Shea teased.

  “Sorry. No.”

  “For shame. Leave my tent immediately.”

  Rugby’s cringe twitched toward a wan smile. And in that moment she became distinctly aware that he’d been monopolizing her attention, with four other tasters to entertain. How’d he do that?

  “Why are you at the Scottish games,” said Hot Air, who was tipsier than he’d originally appeared, “if you don’t like the pipes?”

  Rugby plucked at his dirty and sweaty shirt. “I go where the team tells me, hit who they want me to hit. Run wherever there’s a goal line.” He turned back to Shea. “You like bagpipes?”

  Glancing out at the small parade making its way around the field, she felt the cool, familiar glass of the bottle in her hand and replied, “I do. Very much.”

  When her gaze drifted back to the five people standing on the other side of her table, Rugby was staring at her so hard she swore he might have been the source of all gravity.

  “So,” he said, throwing her a bright smile that tipped heavily to one side, “do you remember me?”

  That blinked her out of that weird trance. She remembered regular faces, especially those who repeatedly visited the Amber Lounge, but with so many tastings and traveling and hired events and interviews these days, transient people tended to dissipate from her memory.

  Yet there was something familiar about him. Something about his off-center smile set against the tanned skin layered with sweat and specks of dirt. But she couldn’t place it right away, and she’d spent enough time away from the other four tasters.

  She gave him one of her careful, noncommittal smiles. “I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “I’m Byrne.”

  A little cocky of him—but not quite obnoxious—to assume that she’d remember him based on one name. She didn’t.

  “Just Byrne?”

  “Just Byrne.” His smile widened, tilting even more to one side. Holy crap. He was far too easy on the eyes. She hadn’t dared to think that about any guy who’d stood on the other side of her bar since Marco, and look how that had turned out.

  “Shea Montgomery,” she replied blandly, then turned to select a bottle. Too late, she realized she already held one in her hand.

  “Yes. I know,” said Just Byrne to her back. And then he chuckled.

  The sound of that laugh, soft and low, slid an invisible hand around the nape of her neck, took a featherlight hold, then dragged itself seductively down her back.

  Oh no. This did not happen to her while she was pouring.

  She shook it off because she had to and turned back around to face her tasters, meeting the eyes of everyone but Byrne. She poured a shallow tasting amount in each glass, starting at the far end with plaid-shirted Drinker and ending with Byrne, who nudged his glass a little closer to her.

  “Last summer?” he prompted.

  She made the colossal mistake of lifting her gaze, of getting a good, long look at his eyes. Powder blue with a dark navy ring around the edge. Gorgeous. Flirtatious. Really fucking dangerous.

  “At the Highland Games up in Gleann, New Hampshire.” And now the dangerous eyes were smiling, too. “That cow wiped out your tent. Me and my team helped you clean it up.”

  The bottle slipped from her fingers. Just an inch or two, but it made a graceless clink on the table. She did remember him now. How he’d tried to openly flirt with her the first night after his team had won the tug-of-war competition, and then more subtly the next day after that damn loose cow had destroyed hundreds and hundreds of dollars of good whisky.

  She also remembered that she’d been briefly intrigued by him. Extremely reluctantly intrigued, but intrigued nonetheless.

  That damn crooked smile layered a boyish tint over his confident, intense focus on her, and she suddenly realized that his sojourn in here and all his amusing comments weren’t entirely about the whisky.

  Good luck with that, buster, she wanted to say. I don’t ever date tasters.

  “Oh yeah.” Cool as the breeze, that was Shea. “Didn’t you guys win the tug-of-war?”

  “So you do remember.” The way he said it, all drawn out, was packed with suggestion.

  He was acting way too encouraged, like their witty banter would actually go somewhere. She shrugged. “That’s about all I remember.”

  She turned her back on him and stepped to the center of her tasters, then poured herself her own tiny glass.

  “So you do, like, a lot of these things?” slurred Drinker down at the end.

  “You mean the Highland Games?” she asked, and when Drinker nodded, she replied, “Last year was my first doing the tastings. Got a couple more this summer.”

  “Lot more people up in Gleann,” Byrne said, looking around her empty tent with an odd, thoughtful expression. Gleann’s tent last year had been nonstop, from open to close.

  “I am grateful for each and every taster,” Shea replied carefully.

  “But you wish there were more people?” he asked, meeting her eyes again.

  “I always want to share whisky.” God, she was starting to sound like a brochure. Throwing on a smile, she returned her focus to the two couples. “Are we finally ready to drink, folks?”

  Drinker held up the small, squat, stemmed glass. “Why not the flat-bottom glasses? What do you call those again?”

  “These are better for nosing the whisky,” Shea replied. “Here, hold the base like—”

  She didn’t mean to look over at Byrne again. Habit, really, to take in everyone at the tasting table, to make sure she had their attention and that they each knew they were important to her. Hot Air was grasping the glass underneath, resting the bowl in his palm. But Byrne had the base balanced lightly in his fingertips. Correctly.

  She ripped her stare from him and focused on the couples. “Hold it like this.” She showed them how to hold the base of the glass and not grip the bowl like a Viking. “What we’re going to do first is nose the whisky three times, each time slightly longer than the last. One second, two seconds, three seconds. I’m going to count. Why don’t you all watch me as you do it.”

  The women shared a glance and laughed, and Shea wondered how many of those empty plastic beer cups had been theirs.

  “One.”

  Shea lifted the glass to her face, inserted her nose, and inhaled.

  The couples followed suit and displayed pretty much the range of reaction she’d expected. Everything from I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit-Let’s-Drink, to Ew-This-Is-Disgusting, to dramatic, chest-pounding coughing because she’d inhaled too deeply and too long. Hot Air’s expression said that this was nothing he hadn’t already known.

  And then there was Byrne. Nose in his glass for about a quarter second longer than was necessary. Powder blue eyes lifted just over the rim. Set solely on her.

  Did he think he was the first guy to give
her The Eye from the other side of the bar? This flat surface in front of her was No-Man’s-Land. Quite literally.

  “Should be different the second time, now that you got the shock of the alcohol out of the way,” she heard herself saying. “It should be sweeter.”

  The corner of Byrne’s mouth twitched, a hint of that crooked smile, then he buried his nose in the glass again, exactly matching her movements. Concentrating. This time not looking at her. Black lines of dirt had settled into the deep grooves of concentration along his forehead. He must be a few years older than her, maybe midthirties. He wore his years extremely well.

  Stop it, stop it, stop it.

  On cue, Hot Air started spouting off to his companions a list of all the things he smelled in the whisky. While there were never any right or wrong suggestions to specific scents or notes—whisky was an entirely personal experience—he was messing with Shea’s rhythm.

  “And the third?” Byrne asked Shea, cutting into Hot Air’s thesaurus recitation. Hot Air shut up.

  “On the third nose,” Shea said, “you should smell some fruit, going deeper into the intricacies of the glass.”

  Her tasters followed her actions.

  “Byrne! You done in there yet? Come on, let’s go!”

  Byrne swiveled to the sound of the chorus of male voices. Outside in the sun, the rest of his team, muddy and disheveled in red and black, beckoned to him. No other rugby players wore yellow wristbands.

  Byrne acknowledged them with his glass, then took a perfect taste of what Shea had poured.

  The brown liquid disappeared slowly into his mouth. His jaw worked it over for a good four or five seconds. Biting it, chewing it. Savoring it, as it should be done. Then he swallowed it back, his throat working.

  Exactly like how she was about to instruct her newbies.

  Byrne lifted his eyes to Shea without a hint of pretentiousness or flirting. “Excellent, thank you.” Then, with a nod to the other four tasters, he left her tent.

  She watched him go.

  He had a long stride, masculine but oddly graceful. A leisurely confidence to his gait, contrasted by the clumps of turf stuck to the bottom of his cleats. He was built exactly how a rugby player should be with those ridiculous legs—tanned and thick and strong, with a distinct pronunciation of his quads. Might as well have rugby player tattooed down the side.

  Goddamn it. In her mind she held one of those giant cartoon mallets and was whacking herself on the head.

  Outside, the rest of Byrne’s team had moved on except for one guy with a stocky build and longish blond hair. Byrne gave the other guy a “just a minute” gesture and disappeared in the opposite direction of his team.

  Shea shook her head of his image and poured the next whisky for the couples, answering their questions about the Speyside distillery and the mashing process and what the years of aging on the bottle meant.

  Then Byrne ambled back into view. Just a red-and-black-striped figure in her periphery at first, but her stupid brain demanded she look out through the tent flaps again, and so she did, beyond annoyed at herself. Distantly she thought she heard a nearby clearing of a throat, but she couldn’t rip her stare away from Byrne.

  His friend had drifted out of sight, but Byrne didn’t seem to be looking for him. Instead Byrne went down the grass slope to where two couples, possibly in their forties, had spread out a blanket along the flag rope just outside the athletic field. The hammer toss was going on, but Byrne ignored the event and instead tapped one of the women on her shoulder. He gave her that incredible, crooked smile.

  Toast. That woman was toast.

  But then all four of the strangers were listening to Byrne say something, nodding up at him enthusiastically.

  Byrne reached into the pocket of his rugby shorts and pulled out four yellow wristbands. One of the men reached for his wallet, but Byrne waved him off.

  Shea gasped. Why on earth had he done that? Four hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars! Not to show off or to try to impress her, she hoped, because tossing around money was the absolute wrong way to do that.

  To be generous, maybe? But still, four hundred dollars on whisky, given to complete strangers? Who was this guy?

  As the two new couples slapped on the wristbands and stood, folding up their blanket, Byrne headed in the direction his team had gone. As he passed by the whisky tent, he turned his head and instantly found Shea. Caught her staring.

  She quickly ducked her head, blindly grabbing for the third and final bottle, but not before she was blasted by the full impact of that crooked smile, far too bright in the sunshine.

  That smile promised a lot. Things she hadn’t allowed herself—or been afforded—to think about in a long, long time. Things that hit her right where she hadn’t been touched in an embarrassing number of months.

  It disturbed her greatly, to be disarmed while in uniform, so to speak. It disturbed her even more that the man who’d done it was a taster—quite possibly a Brown Vein—met while she was working, and apparently in possession of some kind of money. No-nos, all around.

  He wouldn’t win.

  He had to know that even though he’d caught her staring, and even though she’d looked away like a shy virgin at a bachelor auction, it didn’t mean that he’d gained any sort of ground with her. She had strict personal rules to uphold, a hard-won reputation to maintain, and a business to keep at the top of the New York scene.

  But when she looked up to tell him all that with her cool, disinterested expression and Stay Back eyes, Byrne was gone.

  Chapter

  2

  That one sip of sweet, hot, golden whisky spread out and tingled its way through Byrne’s body. He wanted more, plain and simple, but it had been pretty clear that what he wanted wasn’t exactly available.

  That was a damn shame.

  The day had started out with the stress of the workweek still lingering in his system, until he’d hopped into the van with the rest of his rugby team, tightened the laces on his cleats, and jogged out onto the pitch, so very ready to get physical. Every play, every scrum, every hit, knocked out a little chunk of the shit he’d had to deal with this week—the intense kissing of asses, only to lose the business in the end—so when the clock wound down today and Manhattan Rugby chalked up yet another loss, he didn’t care. The game had done what it was meant to do for him, and he’d walked off the field feeling high.

  Shea Montgomery had been merely a bonus. A delicious whisky chaser.

  He’d been meandering through the Highland Games, trying desperately to outrun the screech of those god-awful bagpipes, when he saw the whisky-tasting tent. The names Amber Lounge and Shea Montgomery had given him a good slap across the face.

  Shea. The gorgeous, intriguing whisky expert he’d met last summer. He recalled briefly trying to track her down after their chance encounter with the cow up in Gleann. But then life and work and general crap had gotten in the way, and she’d slipped from his mind for a whole year.

  How on earth could that have ever happened? After enthusiastically paying a hundred dollars and stepping into her tent, seeing her standing tall and confident and utterly beautiful in front of a line of sparkling brown bottles, he really didn’t know.

  Then she’d shot him down, bringing the total number of bullet holes she’d given him to two, because he seemed to remember standing in front of her firing squad up in Gleann last year.

  And yet . . . just now he’d caught her looking.

  Now Byrne swam against the crowd as he tried to make his way toward the parking lot that jutted up against the back of the whisky-tasting tent. A lot of people seemed to be making their way over to the big field where some seriously huge guys in plaid skirts were trying to swing some sort of ball on a short pole across the grass.

  “There you are. Finally.” Erik was standing at the taillight of a sweet blue Tesla, tappin
g at his phone. “Was about to call. George is ready to leave without you.”

  “Sorry.” Three lanes over, the van the team had rented sat idling with its side doors thrown open, George’s thick body stuffed behind the wheel, the rest of the team wedged in the back. “Wanted some whisky.”

  Still did.

  Erik peered over Byrne’s shoulder, and Byrne also turned, if only to see what his friend saw. Of course it was Shea, perfectly framed by the waving flaps of her tent, standing with her hands spread on top of her makeshift bar, laughing with the four people sporting new yellow on their wrists. Her long ponytail, nearly white in its paleness, swung down her back.

  “Uh-huh.” Erik threw Byrne a side eye. “So what was with the wristbands?”

  Byrne shrugged. “It was a great setup and no one was inside. Was a shame to let all that good whisky go to waste.”

  He’d loved Shea’s enthusiasm, her clear knowledge, and her patience and love for talking to tasters. More people deserved to experience that. He remembered how packed her tent had been up in Gleann. He wanted that again for her.

  Erik slapped Byrne’s arm. “Hey, don’t suppose you’d want to stick around with me? Hire a car to take us back later?”

  Someone started up on the pipes again and Byrne shuddered. “No. Why would you want to stay?”

  “I don’t know. I kind of love this. Feels a little like home.”

  “But you’re German.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m liking it here. I could have a couple of beers, you could try to romance the whisky chick again. Looks like some sort of band is starting up soon?”

  Byrne squinted at the stage on the other side of the athletic field. More bagpipes. No fucking way.

  “This really isn’t my thing, man. Sorry.” Normally Byrne was game for anything Erik wanted to do, but this? Besides, Byrne was champing at the bit to get back into the city.

  Erik spouted something in German—he tended to do that when he got too excited or upset or frustrated—made a dismissive gesture to Byrne, and then stomped off toward the van. Byrne wove through the cars after him.