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?”
“That man.” She wound her fingers around her pearl necklace and twisted, her body primed with annoyance—and something more that started a warm, lazy southward wave from her lips to the juncture of her thighs. Damn, she needed to get laid.
Miranda shook her head, a teasing grin curling her lips. “Sean’s great.”
Oh yeah, great at driving her to distraction. “He’s a pain in my ass.”
“But he has a cute ass, something you used to appreciate in a man. Remember that hot football coach you introduced me to the last time I came to visit?”
Max. God, she really should have taken him up on that offer for goodbye sex.
Natalie started pacing again. Max hadn’t ever made her lose her cool. She’d always been in control with him. Cool. Calm. Collected. Just like she’d always been, until Sean and his beard of mystery rocked her world.
She flopped down, landing with a thud on a chair next to her sister at the kitchen table. She swiped the half of the sandwich her older sister hadn’t eaten yet and took a bite. “Why can’t Sean just do what I want?”
“You mean like everyone else does?”
She shot Miranda a dirty look. “You don’t. Neither does Olivia.”
“We’ve built up a tolerance to your steamrolling ways.”