Hollywood on Tap (2 page)

“You can’t just carry me around like this,” Natalie huffed against his lower back. “I’m your boss.”

“I can and you are.” But he was bound to forget that last part if she kept squirming against him. Hell, he couldn’t seem to remember that fact while he was alone at night staring at his bedroom ceiling and imagining how those damn little buttons would open under his touch.

He thought he’d made good time on his first trip across the brewery when he was trying to escape her. He was wrong. Busting ass to make it to his office—the warmest place in the building—without half the staff seeing him carting around the brewery’s shivering co–owner over one shoulder had him hustling through his office door in half his earlier time.

“If you don’t put me down right now, I’m going to—” Her pert ass hitting the chair stopped whatever threat was about to come out.

Sean crossed over to his desk and circled behind it, figuring the oak and the stacks of papers and dirty coffee cups covering it would offer him some protection—but maybe not enough, judging by the fire snapping in her blue eyes behind her defrosted glasses.

“You monosyllabic Neanderthal, I am not some little helpless female who can’t walk across the brewery.”

He shrugged. “I did what was needed.”

“What the what?” She dropped the clipboard from beneath the hoodie and shoved her arms through the its sleeves before rubbing her hands up and down her arms to warm them. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

Sean doubted there were half–crazed mules more stubborn than Natalie Sweet. “If I hadn’t, you would have stayed in that cooler, freezing your ass off until you’d said everything you wanted to say—which, by the way, is usually more words that most people use in a year.”

Well, definitely more than he did, since that speech he’d just given had used up his allotted speaking time for the next week.

She blinked in surprise before immediately recovering her ire. “It was the most logical place to wait for you. You don’t think I realize you’ve been ditching me every chance you could get? Anyway, I would have stepped outside the cooler.” She paused. “Eventually.”

He snorted.

“Well, you can’t argue it didn’t work because we’re together now and I have the flowcharts that I need your input on. It would be wasteful not to take advantage of the situation.”

“Tomorrow.” He grabbed his keys from off his desk.

“Why are you so dead set against securing the brewery’s future?”

Sean dropped his keys and shuffled through the paper pile in the middle of the desk. It took a second—okay, a few minutes—but he finally found the printed brochure for the Southeast Brewers Invitational, which he shoved across the desk toward Natalie.

She leaned forward to read it. “Breweries go head to head with one crowned champion in each of ten beer styles.” Natalie looked up. “You think winning a competition would be better for the brewery than giving it a solid operational foundation?”

“Winning will do a lot more for Sweet Salvation Brewery than your four–billion–point plan will.” Certainty as solid as a concrete block firmed his spine and filled him with confidence. “I’m going to make a beer that is going to blow those little buttons right off your sweater.”

Natalie’s sisters could tease her for the pearl necklace she always wore and she’d roll her eyes. People in Salvation could mock her for her family’s wild, lawless history and she wouldn’t even let it put a pause in her step. But to question her flowcharts? Mock her efficiency strategy?

Oh hell no, that shit did not stand.

“My plan has twenty–five points, thank you very much. Each of which is carefully thought out and considered utilizing the best manufacturing processes and customized to meet the needs of Sweet Salvation Brewery. All of which you would realize if you ever took five minutes to review my flowcharts.” Her cheeks pulsed with the heat of a thousand fires, fueled by frustration and indignation. “You may like to think of this brewery as your own personal playground, where things happen willy–nilly so the creative process can work itself out, but it’s not. There needs to be order. Direction. Documented processes.”

Her voice cracked on the last word and her throat tightened, preventing her from expressing the rest of her outrage.

Damn it, this would not happen now.

Clamping her jaw shut tight, she inhaled a deep breath through her nose and kept her gaze locked on the crack in the wall above Sean’s head. Her nose twitched and she swallowed hard as she blinked furiously to keep the tears at bay.

I will not give him the satisfaction.

“Are you okay?” Sean backed up slowly as if he had a roast chicken tied around his neck and was nose–to–nose with a rabid junkyard dog.

“I am…” The first hot tear slid down her cheek, followed by a thousand more. She could practically feel her nose enlarging and turning Rudolph red. She sniffled back snot. “Perfectly fine.”

“Don’t cry.” He yanked open his center desk drawer and rifled through the contents. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“I am not sad, you numbskull.” She wiped the back of her hand across her cheek then pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I am really fucking mad.”

“Then why are you crying?” He pulled a squashed mini–box of tissues from the drawer and held them out to her.

She swiped the box and yanked out a tissue. “It’s a common physical reaction to extreme annoyance.” Her voice wobbled like a deer in high heels and grew in volume with each word. “Especially when dealing with change–adverse jerks who think they’re artists of alcohol and won’t even consider for one damn second that all I’m trying to do is help.”

“Artist of alcohol?” The corner of his mouth curled and he shook his head. It should have made him look smug. Instead it just emphasized his scruffy hotness. “I like that.”

“Of course you do.” Natalie patted her cheeks dry and wiped her nose. She knew from past experience that she was not a pretty crier. Blotchy face. Puffy eyes. Sniffly nose. It was a little late to be delicate now. She laid the tissue box on his desk.

He swept it into the drawer, holding down part of the mess inside so he could shove it closed. “You’re still wrong.”

“About what?” Exasperation sent her leaping up with enough force to knock the flimsy plastic chair to the ground. Ignoring the clattering, she paced the length of his desk, whacking her clipboard against her opposite palm. “The fact that the ordering system is woefully out of date? That the records department is a frightening black hole of misfiled bills and past–due invoices? That the scheduling for the brew process is haphazard? Or, perhaps I’m wrong about the whole fly–by–the–seat–of–your–pants attitude you have about everything here. But instead of listening to my ideas, you’re submarining me at every opportunity.”

He crossed his arms, making his biceps bulge. “I don’t like change.”

“Too bad. Change happens.”

“Like
you
embrace it.” Sarcasm reverberated in his deep bass.

“Of course I do, what do you call this?” She raised her clipboard like a shield.

“Change you control, not the kind some crazy new boss forces on you.”

Natalie’s eyes almost bugged out of her head and her chest heaved. “That is the dumbest things I have ever heard.” Heat blazed in her cheeks.

Sean’s blue eyes darkened and his eyelids drooped. “You burn hot.”

Low and intense, his voice discombobulated her and had her clutching her clipboard to her chest.

“Hot?” She patted the sides of her French braid, tucking the loose strands behind her ears and straightened her glasses. “No. I am in firm control of my emotions.”

At least she used to be. Then she met the insufferable Sean O’Dell, quite possibly the most annoying man on the planet. She should have known he was trouble when they they were introduced and he’d acknowledged her with a caveman grunt. But she’d been too distracted by his warm, mahogany–colored eyes, broad shoulders, and ruggedly handsome face half hidden behind a beard. His stinginess when it came to talking drove her nuts, and not just because he wasn’t answering her questions, but because the gravel–edged timbre of his deep voice sent a delicious shiver down her spine every time he spoke. Knowing him, he probably spoke so infrequently to keep her off balance. He was as pleasant as ants at a picnic.

“Why don’t you talk about this…stuff—” he pointed to her clipboard “—with your sister?”

Natalie almost looked around for a hidden video camera, because this had to be a prank. Unfortunately, there was no camera. She clutched her clipboard to her midsection so she wouldn’t wring his neck. Sean wasn’t dumb, but his purposeful thickheadedness was about to make her snap.

“Two very good reasons,” she said, keeping her tone level, if laced with ire. “Number one, because Miranda got here nine days before I did and knows just as little about the history of this place as I do. Number two, because she’s tied up with wedding plans.”

He shrugged those broad shoulders, pulling his Sweet Salvation Brewery T–shirt tight across his muscular chest. “The changes will wait for her.”

“The changes have been waiting for months. I’m done waiting.” Her clipboard’s edges bit into her palms. God, what was it about this man that made her crazy enough to want to wing her favorite accessory at him?

“Looks like we’re at a standoff then, Sugar.” He picked up the brochure from his desk and circled around to her side. One callused finger tipped the clipboard away from her chest, never touching her skin but close enough that his heat licked her. The air hummed around them. Hunger. Want. Need. All three zapped between them, and as strong as an electrical current on steroids. “Of course, if you were to scratch my back, I’d guarantee
your
needs were satisfied too.”

Needs. Oh yes. She had them. Too damn many at the moment.

He slipped the brochure onto her clipboard. Fire ate its way up from her toes. The man had a death wish. It was the only thing she could come up with to explain why he kept purposefully pissing her off. “That’s blackmail.”

Sean chuckled, a sound that should never give her naked, naughty fun thoughts, but in his case did. “That’s harsh, Sugar. It’s negotiating, and if we do it right, we all walk away happy.”

She wasn’t falling for his brand of happy, no matter how tempting the messenger. “Forget it.”

Instead of pushing him away, her words only brought him closer. His scent wrapped around her, teasing her senses and melting her resistance until the only thing grounding her to the real world was the clipboard in her hands.

He leaned in, his lips so close to hers that his words brushed against her skin. “You’ll change your mind.”

One inch. That’s all it would take to close the distance between them. How very badly she wanted to eliminate the space was the only thing that kept her from doing it. So instead of jumping into the unknown abyss, she placed her palm over his fast–beating heart and stepped back. “What makes you so confident?”

He lifted her hand from his chest and kissed the center of her palm. Quick. Soft. Maddeningly effective. “Experience.”

A knock sounded and she whipped her tingling palm from his grasp.

“What?” she and Sean barked at the same time.

Natalie spun around to face the door.

Billy stood there, his eyes round with surprise and more than a dash of fear. “The bottle delivery? Uh…it’s not here.”

“Call them,” Sean said.

“I…uh…did.” Billy’s focus bounced from Natalie to Sean and back again. “They said the order had been canceled.”

“By who?” Natalie asked. This was just the type of sloppy mistake that happened when things weren’t organized.

Suddenly Billy became very interested in the toe of his tennis shoe. “Well…uh…you.”

“I most certainly did not.” And there was only one person at the brewery doing everything in his power to stall her every move.

Natalie spun on her heel and glowered at Sean.

Chapter Three

Natalie paced the eighteen strides from one end of Uncle Julian’s large farmhouse kitchen to the other, annoyance eating away at her stomach lining like a dog with a rawhide bone. It had been two hours since she’d finally gotten the bottle delivery snafu straightened out and burned rubber on her way out of the Sweet Salvation Brewery parking lot, but she couldn’t stop going over the confrontation with Sean. He was just…so…so…

She threw her hands up in the air. “Ugh!”

“You’re going to wear a hole in the linoleum.” Her sister Miranda took a bite of a peanut butter and honey sandwich.

The same sandwich Natalie had made and abandoned when she’d started telling her sister about her latest head–to–desk moment with the most stubborn man in the world. It was hard to express the righteous indignation of the unfairly wronged when her mouth was stuffed full of liquid–gold goodness.

She glanced down at the lime green and orange squares bright enough to hurt her eyes. “A hole wouldn’t be the ugliest thing about this floor. We need to replace it anyway.” She scrolled through her mental checklist for the house she and her sisters had inherited along with the brewery. “It’s number three on the list of improvements we need to make to Uncle Julian’s house.”

Miranda snorted and took another bite. “Of course it is.”

Her sisters had loved giving her shit for her lists ever since she’d drawn her first one in three shades of red crayons. Normally it didn’t bother her, but today…Well, today everything bothered her. This was what happened when she didn’t have a release. The lack of sex, her favorite stress reliever, was really starting to get to her.

Despite what her sisters thought, she wasn’t a total prude. She just had always kept her personal life and her sex life separated. No fuss, no muss. But she was determined to end the separation and have a real relationship. Unfortunately, with all the hours she was putting in at the brewery, she hadn’t gotten the chance to go out and find someone with the right combination of relationship potential and sex appeal.

“Don’t start in on me, Miranda. I’m wound up enough as it is.”

“No shit, you’re as tight as a well–fed tick.” Miranda gazed at her with her all–seeing eyes. “What happened to Miss Cool–Calm–and–Collected?”