Mutual Release (29 page)

Julie smiled, realizing she was on the verge of doing exactly that after reading his first paragraph. She put a hand to her face. It was hot, but she shivered as if she were standing in her cold warehouse storage room.

I have to admit, however, that today’s encounter was pleasant for me. I realize my weird reaction at the end might not have given that impression. Actually, it was the most pleasant experience I have had in a damn long time. I could go on and say what I really want right here, like I’d do it again in a heartbeat, if I knew that you wouldn’t reach down and rip my dick off, all the while smiling your killer smile.

She giggled, then looked around embarrassed, as if anyone could see her. Buddy the cat was up on the table, licking his paws. But otherwise she was alone, as usual.

So I’ll finish with this: I admire you, Julie Dawson. I know what you have done to make your family’s company as successful as it is. Because I am slowly learning that owning/running a business is something that means you hardly ever sleep, eat when you remember to, and sweat every goddamn detail so hard it makes it difficult to make any decision even when asked something simple like “do you want fries with that?” You are, in short, amazing. And I am very sorry for being such an ass today.

I hope we can talk again, especially about the Black IPA that seemed to turn you on so much…

Yours truly,

Evan Adams, JD

Owner and president: Big House Brewing

And humbly asking you if you would join me for coffee tomorrow, 6:30 a.m. at the Main Street Espresso Royale in Ann Arbor, to be followed by a tour of my facility.

Julie gulped, re-read the last paragraph, then blinked when realizing he had asked her to come to Ann Arbor tomorrow as if she could just toss away the carefully constructed and maintained schedule her position demanded of her. But she could see her own face reflected in the mirror over the table, and the goofy smile that was spread over her face told her she would move heaven and earth and would figure out a way to get there. But in the meantime…

She pulled the laptop closer, hit
reply
, and composed her answer.

Dear Country Club,

While the inner bitch in me wants to tell you to keep your grimy paws to yourself, I will admit I am seduced… by that Black IPA of yours. Lucky for you, your brewer knows what he or she is doing and has saved you from a giant sexual harassment lawsuit. But as a “JD” I’m guessing you know that already.

I’m pretty busy, as you know. Since you admire my amazingness so much. What makes you think I’ll drop everything and spend half a day having overpriced coffee in an annoying hippie college town with a cold, boring brewery tour after? Do you have any idea how many breweries I have toured? And how many of them are way bigger than yours?

Your problem is you take yourself too seriously. Your beer is good but not great, and this state is overflowing with great beer. This little “owning a brewery” hobby of yours is cute, but maybe you should go back to playing golf and suing people.

All the best!

Julie Anderson Dawson, Never quite graduated and proud of it

President of Dawson Associates, the distributor who doesn’t want you

Her finger hovered over the keyboard. She’d been too bitchy. But it was how she felt, and she’d taken a vow years ago to never ever be anything but herself. She touched
send
carefully, as if the message itself sat there asking her something like
“Um, Julie. You like this guy. Why are you being so difficult?”
But it didn’t. And the whooshing noise as it wended its way to Evan’s computer made her hands shake.

She got up from the table, determined to ignore whatever clever response he might send. After puttering around in the kitchen, staring at cable news a while, and trying to get a grip on why she was so excited to be communicating with this guy, she picked up the ugly cat, stroked him as long as he would tolerate it, and sat back down. Buddy jumped to the floor, stared at her as if she were insane, then commenced licking his fur and ignoring her. The little
ping
of an incoming email made her smile again. But it wasn’t him. Just her dentist, reminding her of an appointment next week. She blew out a breath and chided herself for acting like a high school girl waiting for the house phone to ring.

But when he sent his response nearly an hour later, she was still awake and had hauled out a wine glass, figuring she could celebrate… what, she wasn’t sure. As she touched her fingertips to her lips, recalling his amazing, brief kiss, her body flushed just as the pinging sound told her another message from Evan Adams, JD had dropped into her inbox.

Dear Poor Little Rich Girl,

I get your point about the hippie college town, and it is well taken. I’m a product of the ’burbs myself and spent my entire growing up years thinking if I crossed over M14 far enough I’d grow facial hair, a picket sign would adhere to my hand and Birkenstocks to my feet. Of course, my father, being a staunch Republican, probably brainwashed me some. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised over the last four years or so to find it not quite that bad.

But to matters at hand:

1. I am, in fact, a card-carrying member of the Barton Hills Country Club, so you got me there.

2. I have a brewer who is a graduate of the Oregon State Brewing Science program, as a matter of fact. Just hired him a few weeks ago.

3. Since you kissed me back, we are even, harassment-wise.

4. Six days out of seven, I would agree that going back to suing people in between golf games would be a better plan. But that seventh day, when I look around my bar full of people drinking my beer, being served by my staff, in my building…well, that makes it all worthwhile. Until the next day, of course.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. We’ll call it a fresh start and pretend today never happened. And I’ll show you my small, humble, yet enthusiastic brewery operations. How’s that, Oh Mighty Size Queen?

Cheers

Evan

She laughed out loud, shut the computer off, and climbed into bed after setting her alarm for four-thirty. And for the first time in as long as she could remember, her last thoughts before sleep were not of numbers, charts, projections, and meetings, but a lovely, compelling, intriguing man with hazel eyes and the most amazing lips.

Chapter Eleven

As they walked through Evan’s small but state-of-the-art facility, Julie kept a firm grip on her goal – to honestly assess the potential of a brewery she’d never even given a third thought to until this guy had walked into her company’s office. She sipped her cooling coffee, listened to him boast about his new thirty-barrel brew house and the six shiny new sixty-barrel fermenters, yawned her way through the brand new bottling line spiel, but was honestly impressed by the size of one thing.

“Damn.” She ran her hand along the edges of the giant cold space he’d had carved out of an existing storage room in the back of the dilapidated warehouse. “For a small brewery, this is…” She gestured around the nearly thousand square foot cooler. His eyes shone at her response. She shrugged, resumed her nonchalant perusal of his hops library, the massive storage tanks, and finally the new draft system he’d had installed for the Tap Room. By seven-thirty the place was already pretty busy, with the new head brewer – a young guy for such a big job, Julie mused aloud – going through the day’s tasks with his assistants.

They made their way out to the large beer bar, ghostly and deserted at such an early hour, with chairs stacked up on tables and dark but for the weak light shining through some skylights. Evan pulled down a couple of bar chairs and indicated she should take a seat. Pondering how to break her news to him, she stood. He sat, flipped through his smart phone a minute. When he spoke it startled her enough to make her take a step backwards.

“So, where is James Dawson anyway?” He leaned one arm on the bar and pinned her with those eyes that had fueled a fairly vivid erotic dream not a few hours before. “I mean, you have him listed on the masthead in the annual report as Chairman of the Board with you listed as President and CEO. I mean…” He rose to his feet, stuck his hands in his jeans pockets, loose-limbed, casual, and sexy as fuck.

She lifted her chin. But he just stood there, silent, waiting for an explanation to a perfectly logical question. Finally, she set her coffee down and took a seat, hooking her high-heeled boots into the rungs. Staying quiet until he sat back down, his knees inches from hers.

“Move back, please. I’m getting the sexual harassment vibe again. If we,” she twirled a finger, indicating the space they were in, “are going to work together, there can be no ‘we.’” She used the same finger to point to his chest, then to hers. “Big time conflict of interest and something neither of us needs to deal with relative to jealous other breweries, got it?”

He grinned again, transforming his sexy bedroom face into one of a happy boy. And for some reason it made her nervous. Not three minutes ago she was prepared to tell him that Dawson would not take on Big House Brewing. They were too new and didn’t have a good handle on quality processes yet. But of course Jackson Brewing did, she thought, until their last huge batch turned out shitty. She sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

“Sorry. None of my business, maybe?”

His voice startled her, but once again did something to her nerve endings resembling coating them with sweet, warm honey. He was so… nice, and funny, and cute, and… easy to talk to. For the last couple of hours she had not felt on display, or on stage, or in any way having to impress. And since she spent the bulk of her days doing just that, suddenly she had no idea what to say. So she went with her gut – to tell him the truth. Something about the man was so trustworthy. She’d never experienced anything like it.

“James Dawson is my husband.” She sipped her coffee, watching as he absorbed that little factoid.

“Huh, that is not what I expected you to say.” He held up his cardboard cup as if to make a toast. “Well done. I never would have guessed that about you.”

“Well, it’s more complex than usual, I suppose.” She turned to face the bar, gathering her thoughts.

“Having never been married, I wouldn’t know.” His voice was tight. She glanced at him, getting a distinct whiff of jealous male.

“Evan, I have no reason to play games with you or hide anything. I’m surprised you didn’t know already. I assumed it was the talk of the brewery world.”

“You’d be surprised about what we are focused on here in Brewery World,” he said, resting his chin in his hand and pinning her with that annoyingly killer gaze. “We are busy brewing and trying to get marquee distributors to take us seriously. We don’t gossip much.”

“Oh, you are cute.” She patted his knee. Big mistake – as it sent a spark shooting from the skin under denim to her hand, up her arm, to the base of her brain. She yanked her hand back and tried not to shake it as if she’d been burned. “I mean, your naiveté is… charming.”

“Huh.” He turned from her, but she saw his jaw clenching in profile. “I don’t know if I should be insulted or consider it a compliment.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she told him, and then her words rushed out unimpeded. “I was a secretary at Dawson, my first job while I was in college. I was on my own and living in the basement of a barely legal building in Livonia,” she said, shivering a little at the memory of her early days alone in a down-market suburb. “James is the son of the founders of the company. His parents had more or less ceded control to him. He was – is – a very creative guy. Not a practical bone in his body, though. I was his assistant, got his life organized, and was starting to make sales recommendations within about six months.”

Evan kept staring at her, making her scalp prickle. She bit her lip, smiled. “I seduced him, I guess. It was weird. He was – is – an amazingly good-looking man. Tall, blond, huge blue eyes, obsessively fit body.” She grinned as she sensed Evan suck in his nonexistent gut and square his shoulders. She sipped the last of her coffee, observed the gorgeous new draft system and the woefully out of date point-of-sale set-up behind his bar. “He was easy, really. And I have some skills, I guess.” She shrugged and looked right at him. “You know how it is. The moment just grabs you and you go with it.”

Evan raised a dark eyebrow, and she watched his full lips wishing he would just breach the gap between them and kiss her. He didn’t, of course. So she kept talking, spinning a web of half-truths, unable to tell him the real story for some reason.

“But he was… ah, let’s just say he was a bit of a one-trick pony, sexually speaking. Like a lot of guys, attaching a lot of missing emotion with a ton of boinking. About two months after I had more or less moved into his expensive condo, he’d given me a huge, obnoxious diamond ring and was thrilled at how horrified his parents were by me. They held their noses, though, through a low-key ‘classy’ wedding.” She sighed at the memory. “It was lovely. James was – is – lovely, kind, considerate, romantic to a fault – I swear if he bought one more bag of rose petals to strew around our bedroom I was going to puke. His mother is a raving bitch, but…” She shrugged, suddenly missing him, James, the one man she’d been finally comfortable enough around to open up with, to share everything about her more than slightly dysfunctional upbringing. She put a hand to her lips, the urge to cry so strong she shut her eyes.