Hollywood on Tap (15 page)

Not much anyway.

He glanced down at the papers but didn’t take them. “Why?”

Natalie took a deep breath, resisting the urge to roll up the paper and smack him in the head. Instead, she rounded the desk, stopped on the edge of his hot–guy–pheromone force field and slapped the papers down in the middle of his desk.

“Because the brewery has so much potential.” She dropped her clipboard to the desk, the clatter of it hitting the wood echoing her own frustration. “My sisters and I own this brewery, we know what needs to be done to make it better, and it’s past time you got on board.”

Power streamed through her veins, revving her up from the inside out. She might have her faults, but her belief in what the right processes could do to improve efficiency wasn’t one of them. If only that strategy worked as well in her relationships as it did in business.

Sean rolled back from the desk, interlocked his fingers, and rested them on top of his head. “Is it so wrong to just let it be?”

“Yeah, it is.”

Just let it be?

If she just let things be, she never would have reenrolled in college after dropping out, never would have found a healthy outlet for her anxiety, and never would have made good on what right now seemed like an insane promise to stop compartmentalizing sex and relationships.

Let it be.

Total crazy talk.

“Why just be okay when you can be more?”

He stiffened in his seat, and something dark flashed in his brown eyes. “So nothing but the best at any cost, huh?”

Just the way he said it, with such a cold, hard tone, sent a chill down her spine. Knowing she was treading on thin ice but not understanding why, she took a half step back and let out a cleansing breath. She’d sold more stubborn people than Sean on her ideas before. She could do it now.

“Not exactly.” Slowly, she slid the printout of her plan across the desk. “Take a look. You’ll see the changes are about improving efficiency and strengthening our production abilities.”

He stared at the papers but didn’t reach out to take them. “Part of what makes the Sweet Salvation Brewery special is the way we make our beer with care and commitment. It’s who we are.”

“Instead of thinking only the worst, why don’t you at least take a look?”

“You and your sisters own the place,” he snapped. “Why not just change everything by fiat?”

She considered it. It had happened at other businesses. Management had accepted her recommendations and told underlings it was this way or the highway. The results had always been tainted by the ensuing turnover and bitterness. The total brewery staff clocked in at twenty–five, many of whom had been there since the Sweet triplets were in middle school. Even a small change, if it wasn’t supported by key team members, could negatively affect the whole process and alienate the staff.

So why not just change everything by fiat?

“Because it’s not our style.” She shrugged and sat down on the corner of his desk. “We want your buy in.”

“What about you?” He dropped his arms and rolled his chair closer so that his knees almost touched her legs dangling from his desk. “What do you want?”

Electricity zapped between them, and she nearly fell into his deep–brown eyes—not to mention his lap.

Fighting to maintain proper decorum, she tapped the papers on his desk. “This is what I want.”

“No.” Sean leaned forward, his knee brushing against her leg. “What do you really want?”

Only his jeans and her winter tights kept them from skin–to–skin contact, but it wasn’t enough to keep her from going jittery and molten at once. Who was she kidding? A three–foot steel wall probably wouldn’t be enough for her not to notice him. The man was fast becoming her kryptonite.

She should move—but she didn’t.

“I don’t think this is an appropriate conversation for employer and employee.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time we were inappropriate.” He winked and scooted closer. Now his legs bracketed hers, and his palms rested flat on the desk, one on either side of her hips. “Did you forget yesterday? I haven’t.”

“You’re just trying to throw me off my game.” That came out way too breathy. What was it about this man that made her lose control so easily?

Sean rose from this chair but kept his hands planted on the desk. Leaning forward, he didn’t stop until his lips were millimeters from her ear. “Is it working?” he asked in a teasing growl.

Hell yes.
“No.”

He chuckled. “Really?”

Low and rumbly, his single–word question sent desire spiraling through her like a tornado of want and need and gimmie–some–of–that–hottie–now desire. But everything was so new, she didn’t have enough data to understand what was going on. There wasn’t a flowchart for how to act when you’d fallen for an employee. So she scrambled to safer conversational ground.

“Really.” She pushed him away and stood before her lust overwhelmed her ability to breathe and think straight, her knees a little shakier than she wanted to admit even to herself, and delivered a pointed stare at his arm blocking her retreat.

He took a few steps back to give her room to escape. And that’s what it was; they both knew it.

“Read it.” She grabbed her clipboard from the desk and held it close. “After all, I was right about organizing your office.”

He glanced around at his still–clean office before giving her a half–smile that melted everything south of her waist and made her rethink the importance of oxygen. “One condition.”

Her heart tripped over itself and banged against her ribs. Her lips parted. “What’s that?”

“Research the Southeast Brewers Invitational and what it can do for a brewery’s reputation.” He snagged a brochure from his top drawer and handed it to her. “That’s where we need to be concentrating. Winning could make the Sweet Salvation Brewery.”

She took it, careful to keep her fingers from brushing his, and backpedaled to the office door. A girl could only take so much temptation after all. “That may be true, but it won’t mean a damn thing if we can’t fill the orders without breaking the bank.”

“So you think the artist of alcohol and the organizational queen can work together?” Sean asked.

With the length of the office between them, Natalie regained her natural balance. Mostly. “Something like that.”

His phone buzzed. “Yeah?” He paused. “Sure, she’s right here.”

She took the phone and the air sizzled around them when her fingers brushed his. “Hello?”

“Natalie, there’s a guy here to see you,” Hailey said. “His name is Rupert Crowley.”

Fingers crossed it was the new hops and barley dealer here to negotiate next year’s prices. “Send him to my office. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“You got it.”

Natalie hung up the phone. “I have to go.”

Sean tipped an imaginary hat at her. “Looking forward to talking again soon.”

Damn her mutinous body, so was she.

Sean finished the last page of Natalie’s twenty–five–point plan, dropped it on his desk and sat back. The woman was scary smart and damn good at her job. The changes she outlined seemed so obvious and a hell of a lot less crazy once he’d read them in black and white. He rubbed the back of his neck hard enough to heat his palm, but not enough to wipe out the memory of the lengths he’d gone to avoid even taking a look at Natalie’s plan.

And the asshat of the year award goes to…me.

It really sucked that he couldn’t even cook something as simple as popcorn, because he was going to be eating crow for days.

He pushed away from the desk and stood. Better to get it over with sooner rather than later. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he was making any headway on creating a unique new stout recipe. Everything he’d come up with in the past two days had lacked any kind of punch. He glanced down at the notes he’d scrawled in the notebook laying open in the middle of his clean desk.

One word was circled: cherry.

It wasn’t unheard of for cherry to be in beer. The cherry lambic was made by fermenting the lambic with sour Morello cherries. Maybe Natalie had something.

Again.

With traditional ales and lagers, the fermentation was carefully controlled and included specific cultivated strains of brewer’s yeast. But a lambic utilized spontaneous fermentation with wild yeast and bacteria from Brussels. If he could apply some of the lambic process to the stout, he could create a unique sweet and sour stout that would stand out at the Southeast Brewers Invitational.

He turned the idea over in his head, trying to think around the mental image of Natalie in the reference room and the way her pink lips had moved when she’d said the word cherry. In a heartbeat, he was back in that tiny room, surrounded by the honeysuckle scent that clung to her tightly bound hair. He’d stood close enough that, with the slightest movement, he could have reached out and touched her soft skin hidden beneath the naughty librarian cardigan and sensible skirt.

His fingers itched to touch her now.

As much as she’d driven him to distraction when she’d arrived at the brewery with her clipboard and no–nonsense attitude, he hadn’t stopped thinking about her since the first time she’d said “flowchart”. The pull only gained strength the more time he spent with her. Shit, their meeting in his office this afternoon had left him with a hard–on big enough to leave a zipper imprint on his dick.

She felt it too, he knew it, but propriety and office etiquette held her back from thinking it could be more. He wished he had as good of an excuse. Lying through his teeth about who he was and why he was in Salvation didn’t tread the same moral high ground. Either way, she was off limits.

Well, to paraphrase Bogie, his personal problems didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, so he might as well man up and take on something he could fix: the brewery. Swiping Natalie’s plan off his desk, he stood and hustled out into the hallway, intent on finding the world’s sexiest efficiency expert.

And for a man about to scarf down a large slice of humble pie, he was pretty damn happy about it.

“Yo, Sean.” Billy poked his head through the swinging door separating the offices from the brewery floor. Today was his first day back and, except for the bandage covering a buttload of stitches on his forehead, he looked no worse for the wear. “Come check this out.”

Indecision tugged at Sean. The need to go see Natalie had him strung tight, but he couldn’t exactly put off Billy when the kid had taken one for the team practically right between the eyes. “Whatcha got?”

His gaze dropped to the ground and he gulped. “The delivery trucks all have flat tires.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Carl was still in jail, of this he had no doubt. The judge had been plenty pissed at the former brewmaster and had revoked his bond. Maybe Billy was still suffering from the head injury and had misunderstood what he’d seen? Yeah, because that was likely. “All of them?”

“Yep.” The kid’s eyes were clear and focused. “Saw it myself.”

He shoved the brim of his Sweet Salvation Brewery baseball hat lower on his forehead. “Fuck me running.”

“No thank you.” Billy grinned.

Sean flipped him off. “Smart ass. Come on.”

They hustled through the brewery and out the open loading dock door. Sweet Salvation Brewery had built up their delivery fleet to three trucks, each one of which was parked behind the building. As he stormed toward them, he could see they had sunken down to the rims.

One tire he could understand, but multiple tires on each of the vehicles? That wasn’t an accident, and someone was going to pay, even if Sean had to deliver justice himself. “Call the sheriff’s office.”

“You got it.” Billy took off back inside the brewery.

An angry heat seared him from the toes up, and if he’d looked in a mirror at that moment, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see a twisted, red–faced, bearded, younger version of his father staring back at him.

Alone in the gathering twilight, Sean crisscrossed the gravel rear parking lot, the blood pounding in his ears with every determined step. The security lights clicked on and he spun around.

Billy stood by the switch, the phone to his ear.

Sean waved a hand. “Thanks.”

After getting a thumbs–up from Billy, he turned back to his perusal. A sparkle amid the dusty gray gravel grabbed his attention. He squatted down and picked up the tiny piece of metal.

A nail.

Everything inside him went still, cold, and quiet. Whoever had it in for the brewery wasn’t done wreaking havoc. He glanced back at Billy and his bandaged head. The kid could have been killed or seriously injured. If the truck tires hadn’t lost air pressure so fast in the cool winter air, the nails would have stayed embedded in the tread until the drivers had a blowout while going seventy miles an hour on the highway. He tossed the nail into a bin.

At that moment, he understood better than he ever had in his life the kind of rage that had torn his dad up inside. He looked around and the ground resembled a disco ball, with little silver nails scattered everywhere. “Dammit.”

It only took a few minutes to confirm the same nail circle surrounded the other trucks’ tires. Someone was fucking with the brewery, and they were done trying to hide it.