Real Men Will (Donovan Brothers Brewery 3)

His eyes traveled over her, and for a moment, she thought he was checking her out, but then she saw that he looked around the shop with the same assessing gaze. He was only detecting.

“Is there someplace we can talk?”

She nodded. There was only one customer, and she was in the toy room with Kelly. “My office,” she said.

“My partner will be here in just a moment.”

“Oh.” His partner? Beth’s hands started to sweat. This sounded serious. “Should we…?” She gestured vaguely toward the back room, wondering if she was about to be interrogated.

“Sure.”

Oh, God, she sincerely hoped that Luke Asher was the bad cop on this team, because even though he was intimidating he seemed like a fairly polite guy. Sure, she could feel his eyes boring into her skull like lasers, but…

Beth used the excuse of stopping at the door to the toy room to glance behind her. She was surprised to find that the man wasn’t even watching her. His eyes were still sweeping the room.

She stuck her head through the curtains to the toy room. “Kelly, can you listen for customers? I have to step into my office for a few minutes.”

Kelly nodded and gave a thumbs-up. She was chewing gum again. Beth sighed. She’d warned the girl twice. Now she was going to have to write her up.

But she forgot all about Kelly when she heard the front door open and turned to see a beautiful woman step in and give the shop the same sort of assessing look that Detective Asher had.

“This is Detective Simone Parker,” he said.

“Oh,” Beth said, feeling immediately calm when the female detective smiled. “Nice to meet you.”

But her calm disappeared once they were all seated in Beth’s tiny office. She pressed her palms flat to her desk, then realized she looked like she was about to bolt and clasped them tight together instead.

“So, is this serious?”

Asher smiled. “It’s likely nothing, but I do need to get the story directly from you.”

“Is Monica going to get in trouble for this?” As objective as she could be about Monica, Beth had known her for over fifteen years.

He leaned forward. “It’s not your story that’s causing her problems, Ms. Cantrell. This isn’t the first time she’s done this. And you know what? She’s not even the point of this investigation. I want her brother, and I need to persuade her to stop protecting him.”

That surprised her. “Is she protecting him?”

He smiled. “I see you know her fairly well. You’re right. Her father is asking her to protect him.”

She nodded, even though she really wanted to shake her head. Roland Kendall was arrogant and cruel in business, but he’d always been kind to Beth.

“But his son is already in trouble. He doesn’t want his daughter to go down, too.”

“I don’t want to hurt them,” she said quickly. “I just wanted to be fair to Eric. I mean, to the Donovans.”

He nodded, his gaze sliding past her shoulder. When his eyes froze, she glanced behind her to the crowded shelves where inventory was stacked. She didn’t try to figure out what had distracted him. It could’ve been any one of the brightly boxed toys. Or maybe the spectacle of all of them together.

The female detective cleared her throat. “We’ll do our best to keep you out of this as much as we can,” she said.

“Thank you.” Beth took a deep breath and told them exactly what had happened. Whatever these people had done, they’d done to themselves, and she couldn’t let herself feel guilty about that. Monica was the one who had pulled Beth into this mess in the first place.

By the time they stood to leave, Beth had managed to suppress most of her guilt.

Detective Asher shook her hand. “Thanks for getting in touch with Eric about this.”

“Oh, sure,” she stammered. “We local businesses have to support each other.”

His eyes darted behind her one more time before he smiled and tipped his head. “We’ll be in touch.”