Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 116455 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 582(@200wpm)___ 466(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116455 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 582(@200wpm)___ 466(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
I pressed my lips together, trying not to laugh as I imagined what Flynn would do if he ever learned of his own behavior. The outraged horror. The immediate denial. The walls building.
And suddenly, I didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
To say that last night had not gone according to my expectation would be a massive understatement. Just sex, I’d told myself as we’d slow danced around the bar. Keep it simple. Keep it light.
I was pretty sure I’d failed on all counts.
Memories littered the ground between us like land mines, exploding at the slightest touch. Flynn attacked with hurricane intensity, all vicious thunder and lightning, whenever he felt threatened. And I’d nearly walked out the door at least three times, thinking my attempt to get us on firmer ground was doing more harm than good.
Thank fuck I hadn’t left. I would have missed out on the sweet satisfaction of having Flynn yielding and undone beneath me. Missed out on giving him the pleasure and relief he deserved. Missed out on the most mind-shattering, earth-shaking orgasm of my entire life.
Which brought me to a third revelation. Flynn was brilliant. He was valiant. He was witty and challenging and loyal and passionate. But he was also skittish as a deer and stubborn as a mule. He was determined to fight anything I proposed, whether it was a night of hot sex or a deal with Fortress, no matter how good those things could be for him.
So if I wanted him to be happy in the long-term—and I fucking did—I couldn’t wait around for him to decide he could trust me and come to the negotiating table… I needed to show him how great it could be and blow through all of his objections.
In short, I needed to figure out a way for Fortress to keep the manufacturing and distribution of Honeybridge Mead in Honeybridge.
The idea was simple, but the execution of it… I blew out a breath, and my arms tightened around Flynn involuntarily as I imagined the complexity of it. It would be unlike any deal I’d negotiated before.
Working things this way would increase up-front costs exponentially. But if I adjusted the terms so the majority of Flynn’s compensation came on the back end, trusting that Honeybridge Mead’s star would continue to rise the way I now knew it would, I could make this a profitable acquisition for Fortress… and an absolutely killer deal for Flynn.
The hardest part would be convincing Conrad Schaeffer that we wanted to set up a manufacturing operation in the backwoods of Maine in order to sign one small-town meadery to Fortress’s roster. I’d need to have bulletproof numbers and projections. Every i dotted and t crossed.
“I’m gonna make this happen, Firecracker,” I whisper-vowed in his ear as the first rays of morning sun peeked through the skylight above us. “You’ll see.”
“Nnkay,” Flynn replied eloquently. He gave my hip a fond pat… then shoved me away and rolled over, tugging the sheet over his head.
I grinned. Thunder and lightning and sweetness.
A man like that was worth all kinds of complexity.
I climbed out of bed and dressed, then hurried downstairs as quietly as I could so as not to wake Flynn. I quickly looked up contact information for Hayden Lewis, Honeybridge’s local real estate agent, and sent him an email asking to set up a meeting to check out available properties. Then I emailed Alice a request to pull and examine every contract with nontraditional manufacturing terms that Fortress had ever signed.
By the time I sent off Alice’s email, Hayden was already calling me back. I’d forgotten that this was how Honeybridge rolled.
“Shit,” I muttered, darting a glance up the stairs. There was nowhere soundproofed in his closet of a house, and Firecracker needed his rest after being worked off his feet yesterday. Probably better to handle my calls on the walk home, even if it meant I wouldn’t be able to say good morning.
I slid my shoes on and stepped out to the porch, shutting the door behind me.
“Hayden. Hey. Thanks for calling me back. I know it’s early—”
“Frog!” Hayden interrupted. “Holy sh-shoot am I glad to hear from you.”
A giggling voice in the background repeated, “Holy shoot!” then demanded, “More Cocomelon, Daddy!” and Hayden excused himself for a moment before his voice came back on the line.
“Sorry about that, Frog. The early thing doesn’t faze me—some of us have been watching cartoons for hours—but getting your call sure did! You’re moving home to Honeybridge?”
“What? No. Of course not,” I said, honestly baffled about why he would think that. What in the world would I do around here?
“But you said you needed property…”
“Oh! Not property for me. Property for a manufacturing operation. I’m in the early planning stages of… something.”
“Ah, too bad. I told Fabienne it was too good to be true when we heard your message, but I couldn’t help hoping. It was so much fun talking to you at the Tavern the other afternoon. You had a lot of insights on consumer trends we wanted to pick your brain about for Fabienne’s new catering business.”