“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.”