Miranda was right. To implement the changes, she had to get the staff’s buy in, and to do that, she needed Sean. She wouldn’t even notice his broad shoulders or the way he chewed his bottom lip when he rolled a problem around in his head.
She could do this.
She would do this.
So why are you standing here with your hand hovering in the air, unable to knock on his door?
Straightening her shoulders and snapping on an imaginary chastity belt, she rapped her knuckles against the wood.
“It’s open.” Sean’s deep voice stirred up nothing but trouble inside her.
Steeling her nerve, she turned the knob and walked in. “Hey, do you have a minute?”
Sean looked up from the notes he was writing in his cramped script. He’d tossed his Sweet Salvation Brewery hat on top of the file cabinet, leaving his chin–length waves loose and wild. Like him. God, that enough should make her control freak self–padlock her knees together. If only her libido worked that way.
She clutched her clipboard closer to her chest.
His gaze zeroed in on it, and his pupils dilated and darkened. “I don’t know.” A slow, deadly smile curled his lips, and he relaxed back against his chair. “You’ve got that clipboard and too many clothes on.”
“Very funny.” Heat blazed against her cheeks. “Look. I’ve been thinking.”
“That’s always trouble.” His flirtatious tone remained, but his body sharpened as he leaned forward, tension thrumming off him.
Her breath caught and she almost stumbled back. Everything about him screamed danger. To her heart. To her sanity. To her ability to control the chaos. Tightening her grip on the clipboard, she squeezed it close to her chest like a shield.
“Yesterday shouldn’t have happened. People are already talking—neither of us wants that. We don’t need to pretend it was anything more than temporary insanity.”
That last bit was harder to get out than she’d expected. Each word slashed against her skin like a whip, leaving a red, raw welt in its wake.
“Who said I was pretending?” The deadly serious look in his brown eyes made her heart stutter. “I sure as hell hope you weren’t.”
“Oh.” For once, it was Natalie who didn’t have a thing to say, because he was right. She hadn’t been pretending at all. She wasn’t falling for her brewmaster—she already had.
He shrugged and rubbed his palm against hi
s head. God, she could still feel the smoothness of his hair as she’d run her fingers through it while he’d licked her nipples. A slow and easy warmth invaded her body.
Remember the plan, Natalie.
Latching on to her logical side before lust could tip its hand, Natalie shot him a dirty look and remained standing to hold on to the height advantage. “Enough procrastinating. We need to get these changes in place.” She whipped a copy of her plan from the clipboard. Back in control of her libido—okay, barely, but it was still control—her hand didn’t even shake.
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.