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Authors: Avery Flynn

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BOOK: Enemies on Tap
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While his brain was still trying to process how in the hell he’d just messed up so wholeheartedly, the rest of him was enjoying the view of her ass and round hips swaying as she strolled across the restaurant to a back booth where Ruby Sue waited for her. He should have been pissed, but all he could do was shake his head with wonder.

Chapter
Six

Even though the loading dock had been open for a day and a half to let the place air out, more than a hint of bleach hung in the air as Miranda toured the 15,000-square-foot brewery floor. The three stainless steel beer kettles, once smudged with grime, shined enough that when she peered closely, she couldn’t miss the overstuffed suitcases under her eyes and the freckles across her nose. Both were the result of two days spent painting the six-foot wide Sweet Salvation Brewery sign out front.

The finished sign along with a successful negotiation for the hops were minor victorie
s, but they still went in the win column, and she needed everyone one of those. The DeBoer-imposed deadline loomed like a black cloud on the horizon, and there was a ton to do before she could get the brewery to stop leaking money like a busted keg. Without that, everything she’d done so far would be a waste.

She hopped back from the kettle. Best not to look that close at her messy reflection.

Instead, she gave the brewery the once-over and didn’t even bother to fight the smile tugging up the right side of her mouth. The past few days had been long and hard days of cleaning and just as long nights studying the brewing process so she could prove to Sean and the rest of the staff that she wasn’t a complete idiot. She could recount the steps by heart now.

First, the staff would steep the malt in hot water for about an hour. Thanks to Sean’s
Beer for Everyone
books, she’d learned that this process activates enzymes in the malt, making it break down and release its sugar. The hot sugary water, which goes by the gross name of wort, is drained out of the kettle and put into a brew kettle, where it’s boiled and the hops are added. After that, the wort is cooled, filtered, and transferred to a container where Sean adds the yeast, making the whole place smell like an alcoholic bread factory. Then, bam! In a couple of weeks, they’d go through the bottling and aging process. A month later, Sweet Salvation Brewery’s stock would be delivered to restaurants and bars across the region. It sounded so easy when she thought of it that way, but the reality was a lot harder. Every step of getting the brewery back on track was kicking her ass, but she wasn’t about to give up.

Miranda’s belly fizzed up like a can of soda on a roller coaster, and she did a little shimmy in the middle of the brewery floor. They were going to do it. Despite everything, they were really going to make the brewery profitable.

“Thought you were nuts.” Sean stood beside her, his normal grimace replaced with a neutral look. That translated to practically an ear-to-ear grin for him. At six-foot-one with a barrel chest and a close-trimmed beard, the taciturn assistant brewmaster wasn’t known for his exuberance.

“Be still my heart. You think I’m sane now?” She laid on her long-dormant Southern accent extra thick and batted her eyelashes for comic effect.

Not a muscle in his face moved. “Didn’t say that.”

Mirada let out a laugh. “You’re the oldest and grumpiest twenty-eight year old I’ve ever met.”

He lowered the bill of his Sweet Salvation Brewery cap. “Thanks.”

After a week spent cleaning the brewery from the front office to the back door, she and the assistant brewmaster had formed an alliance of sorts. He backed up her changes to the staff with his silent-but-solid presence, and she prodded him into longer and longer sentences each day. The other day, while they and three other staff members had been working to clean the walk-in cooler, she’d asked about the difference between Amarillo, Fuggle, and Sterling hops. He’d spoken for two minutes straight about aromas, alpha acids, beta acids, and growing locations. Then he’d launched into an explanation about how alpha acids acted as precursors to beer bitterness. Beta acids, on the other hand, were only a little bit bitter, he’d said, and typically lost their bitterness during the brewing process. The monologue had stunned the staff into silence.

Miranda peeked into the walk-in cooler, now organized and sparkling, which only went to show just how damn empty it was when it should be bursting with boxes of dried green flowers.

“So where are we with the hops?”

A horn blared, and Sean nodded in the direction of the loading dock, which had been refinished and stained. “Should be them.”

Thank God. In between cleaning and renovating, she’d been lining up restaurants, bars, and stores willing to carry a new line of beer. She had a meeting with the Boot Scoot Boogie management soon. It wouldn’t be easy to get them to bring on Sweet Salvation beers, not with the slipshod operation Uncle Julian had run the brewery and handled accounts, but she had to make it happen. And when they did sign, she wasn’t going to blow it by not being able to fill their beer orders due right in time for the holiday season. And if the people of Salvation didn’t need an extra beer or twelve on hand when they were stuck elbow-to-elbow with family arguing about football and the proper way to make stuffing, she didn’t know when they would.

The late October breeze swirled the leaves scattered across the wooden loading dock that stuck out about three feet outside the large rolling door that looked like a garage door on steroids. The driver backed the delivery truck decorated with the green and gold Gulch City Brews logo up to the edge of the planks before getting out and jumping up onto the dock.

The timbers groaned and swayed under his feet.

Miranda reached out to him, but it was a hair’s breadth too late. The wood posts holding up the dock tilted to the right and the whole thing tumbled down like a slinky on a staircase. The driver landed in a heap on top of the pile.

Sean jumped down the three-foot drop and hauled the driver into a standing position.

“Oh, my God, are you okay?” Miranda scrambled into the fray, picking her stepping spots carefully so as to not bite it.

The driver brushed off his pants and jacket. “It’ll definitely leave a mark, but I’ll live.” He had a pair of leaves stuck in his hair, but otherwise didn’t have a scratch on him—at least not one she could see, and she wasn’t about to do a strip search.

Relief slackened the tension pulling her shoulders tight. “Thank goodness. Is there anything you need? Anything we can do?”

“Well, I’d suggest getting that dock fixed.”

Which was exactly what she’d asked Carl to do on Tuesday. “Where’s Carl?”

“Outside.” Sean pulled the driver up onto the landing.

She pulled the assistant brewmaster aside and lowered her voice. “Make sure he’s okay and get folks moving on unloading those hops. For what we had to pay out for those little buds, I won’t be able to breathe until they’re safe in our cooler.”

“Where you going?”

“The OK Corral.” Time for a showdown with her mutinous brewmaster. She’d tried nice. She’d tried all business. She’d tried cajoling. Now, it was time to try bitch with big brass balls.

While the rest of the crew worked their asses off, Carl was exactly where he’d spent most of his time this week —lounging in the outdoor employee picnic area, a dented soda can full of tobacco spit in one hand and a view of the Hamilton River in front of him. There was no way he didn’t hear her cross the gravel parking lot to get to him. Still, he didn’t bother to glance her way, keeping his gaze locked on the slow-moving water.

It was one thing to be a difficult person to work with, but laziness and a bad attitude made a dangerous combination. She marched in front of him, blocking his view and forcing him to look at her. “I asked you to stabilize and refinish the dock on Tuesday so we’d be able to accept delivery of the hops we just spent a huge portion of our budget on. The dock just crumbled underneath a driver from Gulch City Brews here to deliver the hops. We’re lucky as hell that he didn’t get seriously injured.”

Carl rolled his shoulders. “It’s not like he fell into the Grand Canyon. He’ll live.”

“That’s not the point.” She smacked her palm down on the table hard enough to make her skin sting. “If you aren’t with us in turning this place around, then you’re against us, and there’s no place for you here.”

He
thunked
the can down on the table, splashing a few drops of foul-smelling brown liquid onto her hand. Hate and a little touch of something crazy burned in his narrowed eyes. “You think you can fire me?”

“I know I can. My sisters and I own the brewery.” The hairs on the back of her neck pricked up, but she wasn’t about to back down to Carl. First the grandstanding when he and a few others tried to intimidate her from walking into the brewery, his refusal to help with the renovations this week, and now the dock. He was a bully and a lazy SOB, and she’d put up with enough of his shit. “Clean out your office, Carl. You’re fired.”

Carl unfolded his rangy form from the bench until his shadow covered Miranda from bangs to tennis shoes. Wary, but undaunted, she didn’t flinch. If there was one fringe benefit of being a Sweet in Salvation, it was learning to stick up for yourself and stand your ground before you could even walk. Being a stubborn pain in the ass was an ingrained part of the Sweet DNA.

When she didn’t budge, Carl took a step back and rocked on his heels. “All those hops are going to go to waste if I’m not here for brew day.”

“Sean’ll do fine without you—maybe better.”

“Are you as crazy as the rest of your people? That boy showed up one day without any experience working in a brewery, and your uncle hired him against my advice.” His body tensed, and he curled his hands into fists.

If he’d meant to intimidate her, he’d failed. “Considering a trained chimp with a coke habit would be better than you, I’m sure Sean will blow your record out of the water.”

Sure, Sean was relatively new to the brewery business and had never been a brewmaster, but dealing with a newbie had to be better than dealing with the current brewmaster. Hell, she’d put Uncle Julian’s obnoxious cursing parrot in charge just to get rid of Carl.

“So that’s how it is, huh?” His upper lip curled into an angry-dog snarl. “You not only steal the brewery out from underneath me, you fire me, too.”

That wasn’t how it happened at all, but she was beyond done petting this man’s ego. “Looks like it.”

“There’s a ton of breweries that’ll be lucky to have me.”

Not once they met him. “Glad to hear that. While you pack up your stuff, I’ll cut you a severance check.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” A glint of something ugly and mean shone in his eyes. “I always get what’s coming to me.”

At the end of
an unbelievably long day, it took everything Logan had not to peel out of the bank’s parking lot. But once he hit the city limits, all bets were off. He needed to blast down some country roads with the windows down and the fall wind chilling him until he stopped thinking about the woman who’d gotten the better of him, because the thoughts he was having had nothing to do with revenge or winning. The woman with her sassy mouth, sharp mind, and curvy body had taken up residence in his head, and he needed to freeze her out.

Hours later, he parked his truck in the Sweet Salvation Brewery’s nearly deserted parking lot and headed over to the Hamilton River. The irony didn’t escape him. He hadn’t meant to end up here, but the place drew him like a magnet.

Leaves crunched behind him, and he turned. Miranda crossed the grassy space between them, the brewery’s outdoor security lights outlining her mouthwatering hips as she walked. Something released inside him, loosening his limbs. The truth of it was he had spent years wanting the woman before him. She was just so…unexpected.

She stopped beside him, near enough he could feel her without touching. “You’re not here to burn the place down, are you?” Her words were a challenge, the kind he relished.

“According to the rumors around town, that’s supposedly your devious scheme.” He meant it to tease, even though it was true.

A heavy silence fell and embarrassment slapped him on the cheeks.
Fuck. You are such an asshole to make a dumb joke.
Then she tossed back her hair and laughed. Loud. Happy. Relaxed. The transformation from her normally tough-as-nails exterior sucked the wind right out of him. It was like he’d seen the real her, the one he’d first seen years ago in chemistry class, and he liked it. Really liked it.

“It’s still a beautiful view.” He nodded toward the river. The last time he’d been up here at night, it had been farther upstream. He’d been with Miranda then, too. An image of her spread out before him on the thick blanket covering his truck bed flashed in his mind. God, they’d been so young and hopeful. He’d actually believed who they were wouldn’t matter. He’d learned differently, a hard lesson in what happened when he veered from what was expected of a Martin in Salvation.

“So you came up here for the view?”

Logan turned to face her. “Exactly.” Long legs, bountiful curves, and freckles, she was a wonder.

“You are so full of shit.” She laughed again, the sound warm against his skin like a summer rain. “A little Martin flirting won’t get me to give up on the brewery.”

As if their family histories weren’t enough, they still had that between them. God, he was so fucking tired of it. “I suppose that was too much to hope for.”

She nodded, sending her wavy hair shimmying around her shoulders. “Truce for tonight?”

“Why?”

Her shoulders dipped, and she rubbed the back of her neck. “Because I just fired our brewmaster, and I don’t have the energy to fight anyone else tonight.”

Now is when he should seize the chance to hit her while she was down. Sympathy and emotions didn’t have a place in business. How often had his father told him that?

“Truce.” The word slipped out before his brain had a chance to block it.

Miranda sat down backward at the picnic table so she stared out at the river. Logan followed her lead, keeping enough space between them to be decent, but not enough that he couldn’t smell her jasmine perfume or feel the spark of electricity buzzing between them. But it was wasted attraction. He was a Martin. Solid. Dependable. Duty-bound. She was a Sweet. Wild. Unpredictable. Always stirring up trouble. Salvation wasn’t the kind of place where they could get together.

BOOK: Enemies on Tap
12.72Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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