“What?” Cairo said. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been with a man who’s waxed?”
She tried to keep her face neutral. She really, really did. But she obviously couldn’t hide her horror.
“Oh, Beth!” Cairo gushed. “I swear, it’s the best. All that smooth flesh. Nothing between your mouth and his skin…. And with a guy like Davis, you want to get as close as possible, don’t you?”
“I…I…” She couldn’t imagine the process. Did he have to put his feet in stirrups for the waxer? “I’m sure it’s lovely.”
“Well, maybe you’ll find out for yourself.”
“So…” Beth tried to set the image away and couldn’t. “Harrison and Rex are waxed?” She’d met both of Cairo’s boyfriends on many occasions.
“Oh, Harrison has always kept it nice and smooth. Rex wasn’t interested, but he got jealous of all the attention I was giving Harrison, so, yeah…” Cairo’s smile seemed to stretch all the way from one ear to the other. “Now they’re both clean as a whistle.”
Oh, God. She shouldn’t have asked. She was going to faint from all the blushing she would do the next time Harrison or Rex came into the store. But that wasn’t the correct reaction for a sophisticated professional in this business, so Beth tried her best not to cover her face in embarrassment. “You’re a lucky woman,” she said instead. “And if I had a dollar for every time I said those words to you…”
“We’ll talk about it later, if you keep seeing Davis.” She hit Play on the phone and they both looked down at the pulsing head of the vibrator. LED lights blinked and twinkled. Cairo bumped her shoulder into Beth’s. “Are you going to keep seeing Davis?”
“We’ll see.” She stared at the dancing lights and tried not to picture Davis without body hair.
“You’re off at seven, right?” Cairo asked. “If you want to leave now, I’ll cover for you. Maybe you should give him a call.” Cairo was Beth’s best employee, always friendly, cheerful and just as busy as Beth. In fact, Beth had just made her assistant manager. “I’m good, but thanks.”
“So, what were you going to say about Donovan Brothers?”
“What?” Beth asked a little too loudly.
“The brewery. You said you were there last night.”
“Oh, right. Yeah. Um, my friend wanted to know if Jamie Donovan is married. You’ve mentioned him before, right?”
“Oh, God, he’s definitely not married.”
“Okay. Good. I’ll pass that on to—”
“But he was in here last week with his girlfriend, so he’s not available, as far as I know. Maybe they date around, though.”
Beth was nodding before the words really hit her. “What?” she said breathily.
“I know, I know. No gossiping about the customers. Sorry. I’ll get back to work.”
Cairo left the unboxed model out as a sample, then headed back to the cash register to finish cleaning the glass. Beth just stood there for a moment, as a pulse in her head started to beat hard. He’d come here? With his girlfriend?
No, that couldn’t be right, could it? He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t bring his girlfriend to Beth’s workplace, knowing that they sold sex toys and lingerie and cute, sexy gifts. That would be too cruel.
Cairo must be wrong.
Beth nodded, trying to convince herself, but she didn’t feel even a hint of reassurance. Because…why wouldn’t he come here?
This was the twenty-first century. Beth was a modern woman with obviously modern beliefs. They’d hooked up one time, no emotions involved. No strings attached. Certainly, plenty of Cairo’s ex-boyfriends came into the shop, with friendly hugs all around. Maybe it hadn’t even occurred to Jamie that Beth would be hurt if he came by with another girl.
They’d specifically agreed that their night together would mean nothing. Just because Beth wasn’t so good at holding up her end of the bargain didn’t mean that Jamie had any problem with his end.
She pressed her hands tight together and told herself that she wasn’t hurt. Still…thank God she hadn’t been here. There would’ve been no denying the pain of watching him wander through her store with another woman, holding her hand, picking out items to use together later in the bedroom.
Beth drew a sharp breath at the thought of it. Had it not even occurred to him? In the brief hours she’d spent with him, he’d seemed considerate and kind. Or hell, maybe he was just more sexually evolved than she was.
But last night, he’d looked downright sneaky. It didn’t make any sense.
She retreated to her office and shut the door. And suddenly she was pissed. She’d felt guilty as hell being at his brewery with another man. And he’d dared to bring someone here? What kind of an asshole was he? And when exactly had he acquired this girlfriend? All the sneaking around that had seemed so exciting at the expo suddenly took on a new, sinister light.
“That bastard,” she growled.
She should drop it. Leave it alone. Now, six months later, it hardly mattered anymore, but Beth found herself overwhelmed with the urge to confront him. She turned on her phone, but that was hopeless. She’d deleted his number from her phone two weeks after she’d met him. She’d had to delete him from her life because the memory of that encounter had become its own aphrodisiac, and she’d known she would get to this point sometime. She’d known the temptation would rise up and swallow her.
“Damn it,” she muttered.
Maybe it would be easier for her to contact him through the brewery anyway. Less privacy, less intimacy. And no memory of the night her phone had rung and he’d said two simple words. “Room 421.”
The hair on her arms prickled as electricity zinged through her body.
Beth cleared her throat and shook her head. She shouldn’t call him. She knew that.
But maybe she could find out the truth another way. Between Facebook and Twitter and everything else on the web, people’s private lives were no longer private.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told herself. If he was some sort of creepy two-timing cheat, that wasn’t Beth’s fault. But she gave in to the weakness and searched his name on Google anyway. Thousands of hits appeared, all of them seemingly about beer and awards and the brewery. Looking for something more personal, she clicked on a link to Twitter. The account said Jamie Donovan of Donovan Brothers Brewery, but the picture was wrong.
Frowning, she clicked on the photo to enlarge it. The guy definitely wasn’t Jamie. As a matter of fact, he looked a lot like the blond man she’d seen tending bar at the brewery the night before. “What the hell?”
Thoroughly confused, Beth clicked back to Google and hit the Images tab. The first picture was the young blond guy again. She clicked back to the results page. Most of the pictures were of the blond guy. The only ones she saw with Jamie were group shots. Clicking on the largest of the group shots, she looked at the caption. Wallace Hood, Eric Donovan, Tessa Donovan, Jamie Donovan, Chester Smith.
This didn’t make any sense. She clicked through to the next page of images, but they were mostly Donovan Brothers logos and pictures of mugs of beer.
Then she noticed there were two video hits and clicked on that tab, light-headed with anticipation.
The first video linked to a local news channel. Beth pulled it up and waited, holding her breath.
The news theme song played, and then the camera focused in on a tight shot of a perfectly coiffed blonde reporter smiling widely. “Today we’ve got big news from an iconic local establishment! I’m coming to you live from Donovan Brothers Brewery in Boulder, Colorado, and I’ve been joined by one of the actual Donovan brothers.” The camera pulled slowly back, revealing first an arm, then a shoulder, then the man with the dark blond hair whom she’d seen in the bar. Beth frowned.
The reporter beamed up at him. “This is Jamie Donovan, one of the famous brothers.” He winked at the reporter while Beth’s mind reeled.
Jamie Donovan. Jamie. But not the man she’d slept with.
This made no sense.
The man and the reporter were still talking, their words jangling around in her head like broken glass scraping against her skull. Jamie. But not Jamie. She stared at the name that hovered beneath the man as he spoke: Jamie Donovan of Donovan Brothers Brewery.
Her hand shook as she reached for the mouse and clicked the pause icon.
A weight grew in her throat. Not tears or illness or emotion. It felt as if her actual flesh was swelling up and pressing her throat into a smaller and smaller space. She tried to swallow and couldn’t.
The man worked for Donovan Brothers. He’d been at the brewery. He was in the pictures. But he wasn’t Jamie.
Beth clicked frantically back through the pages until she pulled up that group picture again. She opened another window and tried querying every name, but she didn’t get any good image results. Just picture after picture of the Donovan Brothers’ green logo and photos of the awards and labels of the various beers they sold.
Who was he? Was he Wallace or Chester or Eric?
Beth stood up so quickly that she banged her thigh hard into the desk, but the pain barely registered. She stumbled out from behind her desk and into the cheerful brightness of the shop.
“Cairo?”
Cairo popped up from behind the cash register. “Yes?”
“What does Jamie Donovan look like?”
Cairo shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s cute. Pretty preppy-looking. Straitlaced, but he’s got a sweet smile.”
“Dark hair?” Beth made herself ask, even though her throat tried to close over the words.
“No, not dark. Sort of gold. Not super blond. Why?”
“Just… We…” All that blood pounding in her brain was doing her no good at all. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t even feel. Her body had gone numb. “No reason,” she managed.
“Are you okay, Beth?” Cairo started to reach for her, but Beth backed away.
“I’m fine. I just…I’m not feeling well. Are you still willing to cover for me for an hour? I think I’d better head home.”
“Of course, but…”
Beth rushed back into her office to grab her purse and her phone. She shut down her computer and cleared the history, not quite sure why—all she knew was that she felt ashamed. Ashamed because she’d been tricked. Made a fool of. And, my God, that was an awful, familiar feeling she hadn’t had to deal with in years.
She started hearing the words in her head that she’d absorbed over years of studying sexuality and women’s history. Someone else can’t bring you shame. Shame means you did something wrong. You did nothing wrong. But how else was she supposed to feel after being tricked and lied to?
Tears sprang to her eyes, but she growled her frustration as she blinked them back.
She wasn’t seventeen this time. She didn’t have to simply sit quietly and take it. This time, she’d confront it head-on, and give the shame to the one who deserved it.
When she stalked out of the office, Cairo was helping a customer, dusting a sample of honey body powder on the woman’s arm, but she looked up with concern in her eyes as Beth passed. Beth watched the customer bring her arm up and tentatively touch her tongue to her wrist. The sight would have made Beth smile on any other day, but today she simply watched in blank confusion.
Her body was still numb, her head still beating like a pulse. It occurred to her that she probably shouldn’t drive, but she pushed through the doors and headed straight to her new cherry-red Nissan 370Z. The engine roared to life with the barest turn of the key. She’d purchased it for herself five months before, because she’d wanted it, and she was trying to train herself to take what she wanted. Though right now all she wanted to do was kill someone. Someone whose name she didn’t even know.
The shock of it hit her again, and she gasped in a breath to try to stop the dizziness. She was in a car on a public street. She couldn’t indulge the black spots dancing at the edge of her vision. She took another breath, and another. And even though her whole skull still thumped with every beat of her pulse, her vision cleared, and the closer she got to the brewery, the calmer she felt. Not less furious, but more. Angry in a focused way.
When she pulled into the brewery lot, she shut off the engine, got out of the car and quietly shut the door.
Her heels ground sand against asphalt as she walked. She watched her own hand curl around the door handle as she opened it, as if her fingers had nothing to do with her.
She stepped into a cheerful scene. Fiddle music fell from speakers. Laughter erupted from a table nearby. Beth walked through the laughter as if she were in one of those dreams where nothing made any sense, but she just kept moving.
The man behind the bar turned around, and she felt her heart brace itself, but he was no one she knew. A stranger. Though they were all strangers, really.
She waited until he looked at her. “Is Jamie Donovan here?” Her skin burned with regret as she spoke the name.
The man—a boy, really—leaned forward. “I’m sorry? I didn’t catch that.”
The music had seemed quiet when she’d walked in, but now it swelled in her ears, along with the noise of the early Friday crowd. “Jamie Donovan?” she said more loudly. “Is he available?”
“He’s not working the bar tonight. Is there something I can help you with?” He said it as if the request was a common one. As if women walked in here all the time looking for a man named Jamie who’d lied his way into sex. A scalding wash of shame crashed through her. She’d been laughed at before, and she couldn’t do it again. She couldn’t. So she nodded and started to back away.
A door opened to her left, and she jumped in horror, thinking it could be him. But it was just a customer coming out of the bathroom.
When Beth realized that she’d felt genuine fear, she smashed it down and turned it into anger, like pressure turning coal into diamonds.
She stood straight and met the gaze of the bartender again. “I need to see him. It’s personal.”
The boy’s eyebrows rose, but after a wary moment, he shrugged. “I’ll see if he’s in the back. What’s your name?”
“My name is Beth Cantrell. Tell him that and see if he’ll come out.” She put a hand on the bar, not to steady herself but to give her fingers something to squeeze, because the anger was eating her up.
And then she waited to find out exactly who she’d had sex with six months before.
ERIC PICKED UP A HALF-FULL bottle of pilsner and squeezed the neck tight in his hand. He wouldn’t throw it against the wall. He wouldn’t. But this damn bottling machine was supposed to have been fixed last week, and now it was doing an even worse job, jostling the bottles so much that half the beer foamed out before it reached the capping station.
“Shut it down!” he yelled at Wallace.
Wallace scowled and shut down the line, and when the roar of machinery died down, Wallace’s stream of creatively foul curses pealed through the cement-walled room.
Wallace didn’t care about bottling or distribution or profit margins. His only concern was the beer, and a lot of it was slowly crawling its way toward the drain in the floor.
Eric cursed. “I’m going to have that mechanic’s head on a platter.”
“Not until I’ve torn it off his neck,” Wallace yelled.
Eric glanced down at the tubing that snaked across the floor. “Goddamn it. You know what needs to be done. There’s no way we’re getting this back on line today. Maybe not even tomorrow.”
Wallace bit back what sounded suspiciously like a sob, but it was hard to read his emotions behind the thick beard that covered his whole lower face. His giant shoulders sunk, bringing his height down from about six-six to six-five. “It’s a damn tragedy,” he wheezed before turning to stomp toward the door that led to the tank room. A moment later he was back, the valve having been locked, and he mournfully unhooked the hose from the bottler and moved it over to the drain. He thumbed the valve and pilsner poured from the tube directly into the screened hole in the floor.
“I�
��ll kill him,” he muttered.
“We probably shouldn’t.”
“That batch was fucking stellar.”
“And there’s plenty of it left.” Eric put a reassuring hand on Wallace’s shoulder and they shared a moment of silence over the beer as it spiraled down into the sewer system.
Wallace sniffed, but Eric was afraid to look and see if there were tears wetting his beard. “I’ve got to make a phone call about this.”
“Rake him over the fucking coals,” Wallace insisted.
Eric strode through the silence of the tank room and emerged into the chaos of the…well, it was a kitchen now, though it never had been before. In fact, two men were currently wrestling a gigantic pizza oven into place against the far wall.
Months of prep work had led to this very event, and Eric wished he felt more than just happiness for Jamie. He wished he felt excited instead of nervous. But Jamie was grinning as he turned away from the stove and headed toward the doors to the front room, Henry hot on his heels.
“Henry,” Eric called before the boy could disappear. “Are you working cleanup tonight?”
Henry jerked to a stop, his hand already on one of the doors. His freckles stood out against his pale skin, as if Eric had frightened him.
“I am, but…Jamie has me filling in at the bar so he can supervise the installation.”
“Great. But when you’re done I need you in the bottling room. Dump all the beer and put the bottles into recycling, then mop the floor.”
“Got it.”
Henry disappeared and Eric retreated to his office. He wanted to spend time helping Jamie, but he had his own work to do, boring as it was. His muscles tightened to stone as he shut the door and called the mechanic.
He felt a little better after yelling at the guy and demanding that he get his ass to the brewery at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, Saturday or not. Eric hung up with a little less tension in his shoulders. Still, there was no silencing the laughter from the other room. It reminded him of his brother, and how different they were.
Eric tried to make himself smile at the sound of it. He wanted Jamie to be happy. Without a doubt. But Eric couldn’t help the feeling that his own happiness was slipping away. Melodramatic, maybe, but still true.
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