Love on Tap (Brewing Love)

by Meg Benjamin

  She was absurdly relieved when she heard someone knock on the outer door. It had to be Wyatt. Nobody else would come to the brewery, since nobody else was interested.

  She managed to get her triumph under control by the time she opened the door. No use letting him see she was relieved he’d made it back. She wasn’t giving him the upper hand. She’d already decided to keep him at arm’s length.

  Wyatt stood on the porch in the light of the setting sun. He looked like he’d been pulled through a knothole. Backward.

  His fine city clothes were streaked with dust. His nose was sunburned, bright red against the tan of his cheeks. His eyes looked slightly bloodshot, and he wasn’t smiling.

  But then why would he smile? He looked like he’d had the mother of all bad days.

  “What happened?” she blurted, promptly forgetting all previous decisions about how to treat Wyatt Montgomery.

  “Harlan Cooper happened.”

  He reached down and picked up two plastic buckets. She recognized them—Cooper’s hops buckets.

  Bec stared at him blankly. She’d figured the only problem he might have would be convincing Harlan to sell him the Dunraven. Given the way he looked, his troubles with Harlan had clearly gone way beyond that. “What did he do?”

  “He gave me a lesson in hop farming. Can I put these things down someplace?” He raised the buckets a little higher.

  “Oh, sure, of course.” She backed up to let him inside, then guided him to one of the work tables. “Just set them down here.”

  “Right.” He dropped the buckets on the table, then stood upright, placing one hand on the small of his back. He bent back slightly and gave a muffled groan.

  “What exactly was this lesson in hop farming? What did Harlan make you do?” Because clearly Harlan had gone way beyond being a crusty local farmer. Bec only hoped he hadn’t made Wyatt clean out the barn or something.

  “I harvested hops. The old fashioned way. You’d be surprised how many hop blossoms you find on a row of hop vines. I tried counting at first, but that got too depressing after a while.” He gave her a smile that was distinctly half-hearted.

  Bec stared at him. “Harlan made you harvest hops? Why would he do that?”

  Wyatt shrugged. “I think he figured I’d cave if he made me do some physical labor. Then he wouldn’t have to sell me anything. To tell you the truth, if I’d known how tough it was going to be to get the damn hops, I probably would have backed out of the whole thing. But by the time I figured it out, I was in too far to turn around without looking like a jerk.” He put both hands on the small of his back this time, leaning gingerly as if he were trying to loosen his tight muscles.

  Bec took a quick breath. “I didn’t…that is, it didn’t occur to me that he’d do anything like that. I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.” He frowned quickly. “Oh, I’ve also got a message for you from Cooper.”

  “For me?” Her eyes widened. “You told him you were working with me?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. He figured it out on his own, pretty much as soon as I asked him for the Dunraven.”

  Which also explained why Harlan had jerked him around. A little message for Bec. Just to let her know he wasn’t letting her off the hook. “Sorry. I guess I should have figured that would happen.”

  Wyatt shrugged. “How could you have known what he had in mind? Anyway, his message is the next time you want to get his hops, you’ll need to talk to him directly and settle up. He says he knows it won’t be pleasant, but he wants you to do it. Needs you to, I guess.”

  Bec rubbed her fingers across her forehead, trying to smooth out a sudden ache gathering around her eyes. Yeah, he needs me to. They all need me to. “I’m sorry you got caught in the middle of this.”

  “Me, too.” He gave her a level look. “In fact, I think you’d better tell me a lot more about what exactly I’m in the middle of. Before your next vendor has me running a combine through a barley field.”

  “They don’t grow barley around here,” she said absently. How much could she tell him about the whole mess without scaring him off? How much did she want to tell him?

  He deserves to know what he’s getting into, Rebecca.

  He did. Even if she wouldn’t enjoy giving him the full story.

  Wyatt bared his teeth in something closer to a snarl than a smile. “I need to know what’s up, Bec. Before I go through anything else on this quest. Let’s do dinner. And you can fill me in on all the details you neglected to share before.”

  She blew out a breath. “Okay. You’ve got a point. Do you want to go now?”

  He glanced down at his clothes, then grimaced. “No. Right now I need a shower. And some different clothes. How about meeting me at Selig’s in a half hour?”

  She nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Good. I’m ready for full disclosure.” He grimaced again as he stretched his shoulders. “And hot water. A lot of hot water.”

  “I guess you are.” She leaned forward, almost without thinking, and removed a leaf from his hair, letting the silky strands slide through her fingers.

  What are you doing? What the hell are you doing? No touching, idiot, no touching.

  Wyatt froze for a moment, staring down at her, brown eyes suddenly alight. Then he nodded as he pulled back from her slightly. “See you there.”

  She watched him head back toward his truck. Stupid, stupid, stupid. No touching, dammit. Absolutely no touching.

  Because she knew only too well where that led.

  …

  The feel of the hot shower on his back and shoulders was so soothing that Wyatt groaned. He almost wished he’d invited Bec for breakfast rather than dinner. All he really wanted to do at the moment was crawl into bed and sleep for twelve hours.

  Come on, Montgomery. You’ve got the advantage here.

  True. For the first time he seemed to have the upper hand with Bec Dempsey. She owed him. Big time. And she had information he needed if he was going to succeed in his quest for that barrel of Zoria.

  He pulled on a T-shirt and jeans—not exactly his usual outfit, but he was too tired to do much more. If Bec wasn’t impressed by his spending a day harvesting hops to win her imperial stout, he didn’t think a pressed pair of khakis would do much more.

  For a moment, he found himself picturing those sky blue eyes as she ran her fingers through his hair. The Zoria might not be the only thing he wanted.

  Focus, Montgomery. You’ve got a gastropub to save. That’s your priority here.

  Right. He shoved all thoughts of Bec Dempsey and her flaming hair to the back of his mind.

  He walked over two streets, then strolled by the Black Mountain Tavern on his way to Selig’s, glancing in when he reached the open door. He could hear muted music from the jukebox. Liam Dempsey stood behind the bar, waiting on a couple of tourists who were reading the blackboard for beer selections. He looked up briefly, his eyes widening as he recognized Wyatt. Then Liam looked back at the tourists again, resolutely ignoring him.

  Okay, fine.

  Wyatt wasn’t sure what exactly he would have said to Liam anyway, but he figured the man might have his own take on whatever story Bec was going to tell him tonight. One way or another, the Dempsey family seemed to have a lot of secrets.

  He hiked down the street to Selig’s. This time at least Bec was already there waiting for him. She had a table at the side and a beer in front of her. He slid into the seat opposite, trying not to wince when his back came into contact with the bentwood chair. “Evening.”

  She nodded at him. “Evening. You might want to grab a beer now—the bar’s not crowded yet.”

  “Right.” He should have known he wouldn’t get to sit down that easily. He worked his way through the small mob of customers and grabbed a pint of the nearest beer on tap, Old Chub. At the table, he could see that the waitress had worked her way over to Bec. He managed to get back while she was still there.

  The waitress raised an eyebrow in
his direction. “What do you want tonight?”

  He paused. His exhausted mind was a total blank.

  “The gyros are good,” Bec supplied.

  “A gyro it is.”

  He dropped down into his seat again and took a long pull on his beer. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt this tired and thirsty. Certainly not since he’d become a gastropub owner. Gastropubs, pretty much by definition, were not hangouts for tired, dusty farmers, although they could handle thirst with the best of them. He hadn’t worked this hard since his first restaurant job.

  “Okay,” he said, squaring up his beer in front of him. “Why does Harlan Cooper want your head on a platter?”

  Bec sighed, chewing on her lip as she thought. “He doesn’t. Not exactly anyway. He’s just annoyed with me.”

  Wyatt resolutely ignored the sadness in those sky blue eyes. She didn’t get a sympathy vote. “And he’s annoyed with you because…”

  “Because I left him with some unpaid bills. And because I got his hopes up but didn’t follow through.”

  Wyatt took a sip of his beer, still avoiding anything that felt like compassion. He’d spent the day picking hops, for Pete’s sake. He was the one who deserved some compassion here. “How did you manage to do that?”

  “I told him we were going to make great beer. That we’d put Antero on the map when it came to brewing and that his hops would be a big part of it. Not only his Cascade and Amarillo, which are pretty much his stock in trade. But his experimental varieties too. The ones he really wants to sell.” She managed a smile, but it wasn’t much. “And I did use his stuff. And I made some pretty neat beer with it. For a while it looked like we were going to go big time.”

  “Then you went belly up? That’s not exactly unheard of.” Hell, he’d been involved in some bombs himself. Restaurants were well known for their high failure rates.

  “It isn’t so much that we went out of business,” Bec said slowly. “It’s the way we went out of business. It was like one week we were fine, then the next week we were on the ropes.”

  Wyatt frowned. “You didn’t see it coming?”

  “Not exactly.” Bec paused to take another swallow of her beer, then set the glass down again. “The only reason we could open Antero Brewing in the first place was that we had a backer with money. Liam and I together had some but not nearly enough to start our own business. But Liam had this friend, Colin. He’s a trust fund baby—looking for places to invest. Plus, he was a home brewer, too, like Liam and me. Liam gave him some of my home brew and told him we wanted to go into the beer business. Colin was our money man, the one who made it possible to get the equipment and open the brewery full-time.”

  “And he ran out of money?” That also wasn’t unheard of. Backers suddenly lost their enthusiasm when the bills came in. Or they suddenly lost their money when the market dropped.

  “He just ran, period.” Her voice sounded oddly flat, as if she’d scrubbed away all the emotion. “After we’d been in business for around a year, Colin showed up one morning and told us he was through. He’d paid off our bank loan and some of the outstanding bills, as much as he had money for at the time, but that was it. No more from him. We still weren’t making enough to sustain the business without outside help, and our outside help had just pulled out. He told me good-bye, and he took off.” Her eyes were bleak all of a sudden. Wyatt had a feeling there was more to it than that, but now probably wasn’t the time to probe for painful details.

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “That sucks, but how does it involve Cooper?”

  “Harlan and our other suppliers were in it with us. We’d pulled them in with our stupid ‘vision’ of what Antero was going to be. I should have leveled with them immediately, as soon as Colin took off. But I kept hoping we’d find somebody else to back us, so I kept putting them off.” She rubbed a hand across her forehead, staring down at her beer. “I mean, I didn’t order any more stock from them, but I still owed them for the outstanding orders. Eventually I had to go to each of them and tell them we were closing down, that Colin had taken off with his capital. And that we couldn’t pay them all of what we owed, at least not for a while. They weren’t happy with me.”

  She blew out a breath, then picked up her glass.

  He kept his sympathy shield firmly in place. This was business, goddamn it. “Did you pay them anything?”

  She nodded. “We paid them as much as we could as we sold off the rest of the stock. We covered a little over half in the end. They’d done some expansion of their own in anticipation of our business—Harlan planted more Dunraven than he probably would have otherwise. But after Colin took off, we couldn’t buy more stuff from him or from anyone else. Not without asking them for credit, which they weren’t likely to give me since I already owed them money.” She paused, raising her clear blue eyes again. The hint of sadness was still there. “I promised to pay them the rest when I could, but I’m not sure they believed me.”

  Wyatt ignored the pinch of his conscience. Business, strictly business. “Have you been able to pay back any more?”

  She stared down into her beer for a long moment, then shook her head again. “Not much. They’re all still pretty pissed. I mean, I thought we’d do better than we did. For a while I didn’t think we’d be shutting down.” She pushed her fingers through her hair, sending red waves shimmering across her shoulders. “I hoped we wouldn’t, anyway. I thought maybe we’d make enough from the beer we’d sold to get by and pay off our debts. But we couldn’t. We just needed too much money.”

  “And you didn’t declare bankruptcy?”

  She shook her head, sending those red waves rippling again. “We didn’t want to sell the brewery—I didn’t, anyway. We sort of gave up.”

  He leaned back in his chair for a moment, thinking. “Except you haven’t closed down exactly, have you? I mean, you’ve still got the equipment and the building.”

  “We own the building,” she said slowly. “It was my dad’s warehouse. He ran a shipping business while we were growing up here. We had to do some renovations when we started out, but the building was sound. And the equipment was used when we bought it. There’s actually a lot of used equipment around, given the number of start-up breweries there are in the state.”

  Which might explain why they didn’t cut their losses and sell everything. That, plus Bec’s apparent determination to start up the business again. They couldn’t do that if they sold off the equipment.

  He picked up his beer. “Is the barrel of Zoria all the stock you have left?”

  “It is now. We had some cases of wheat beer in our inventory and a nice IPA we bottled the first year we were open, along with a peach saison. But those sold pretty fast, and we used the money to pay taxes and pay as much as we could on the bills. And I had one other barrel of Zoria. We got good money for that.”

  Wyatt frowned. He could see the waitress heading their way with their dinners. “Why didn’t you sell the other barrel when you sold the first one?”

  Bec rubbed her hand across her forehead again so that her bangs flipped a little to the side, a fine spray of red. “I wanted to know what it would be like if it aged a little longer. It’s got a lot of body. I figured another year in the cask would make it more interesting.” She gave him a slightly defiant smile, a beer master justifying her craft.

  He smiled back. No argument here, ma’am. “Could be. Bourbon barrels can do interesting things with imperial stout.”

  She nodded, leaning against her chair to let the waitress put her more-than-generous plate of gyro and fries on the table in front of her. “They can. They most definitely can.”

  By some kind of unspoken consent, they stopped talking about beer during dinner. Not that they stopped drinking it, but talking was out. Wyatt found himself watching her eat. It shouldn’t have been attractive, but for some reason it was—particularly the French fries, which she ate carefully, one by one. He watched her tip her head back slightly, nibbling delicately on the end of
the fry, pink tongue flicking out to lick salt from the corner of her mouth.

  You are not getting turned on by watching a woman eat french fries. That would be ridiculous.

  He wasn’t. Not exactly. Still, he was once again aware of Bec Dempsey as a woman, not just a business possibility. Her creamy skin contrasted with the deep blue of her eyes, the bright gold-red of her hair. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, maybe a little mascara on her long lashes. She didn’t need much, of course, not with that skin that took on color whenever she looked at him. Her lips were full and pink, and when they pursed around a ketchup-laden fry, he felt his own body tighten.

  Oh, for the love of heaven, knock it off.

  Clearly, he’d been concentrating on work too much lately. He needed to re-establish his social life, assuming he could find a willing female when he got back home.

  But then there was this hot redhead sitting across the table.

  You are not thinking about that. Concentrate on saving Quaff.

  Wyatt took a deep breath. This situation was getting out of hand. “Does your brother still have an interest in the brewery?”

  Bec’s blue eyes became cloudy again. “Technically, yeah. But he walked out when he figured we weren’t going to be able to make it without Colin’s money. He wanted to sell everything at first.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  She shook her head. “I most definitely didn’t. And I still don’t. Not while I still have any hope we could get going again.”

  “Will he be upset if you sell me the Zoria?” Not that he really gave a rat’s ass whether Liam Dempsey was upset or not.

  A fine line appeared along her brows as she frowned, which somehow made her face seem even more interesting. “He may be upset if he’s not involved in the deal. But the Zoria is the brewery’s asset, not Liam’s. The money we get for it should be used to get the company going again on a very limited basis.”

  Wyatt nodded. “I understand.”

  “You’re still interested?” One of her auburn eyebrows arched upward.