Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 79968 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 267(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79968 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 267(@300wpm)
“Robbie,” a stern voice said, bellowing across the bar. “Got a problem back here. I’m mashing in, but the temperature’s staying steady.”
“It’s Harlan, isn’t it,” I said under my breath to Jax, who was crushing mint for a mojito.
I pulled in a deep breath, gathering myself before turning to face Jade Brewery’s most grumpy brewer, looking at me from the end of the bar.
“Harlan, you can call me Rush, not Robbie,” I said, even though I’d already told him that twice over the last week that I’d been here. “Let’s head back and see what’s going on with the temp.”
Harlan was built like a Mack truck, and I hadn’t seen him smile yet. He certainly looked good working in the back with the big fermentation tanks—I’d seen customer after customer stop to stare over the railing toward the tanks, watching Harlan at work, amazed at how strong and gentle he was during the process. Brewing beer was a very physical process, and Harlan was even better at that side of it than I was.
He always looked like he’d gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, but at least he didn’t cause me any problems. He never talked about his hobbies, didn’t have a ring on his finger, and kept to himself.
I followed him back toward the tanks.
“This one,” he said, nodding at the big, shiny drum that was stuck. “Old Man Rushing used to take care of it when it got finicky.”
I nodded. It seemed like there were a lot of things that my dad had little rituals and tricks to fix.
“He didn’t happen to write down what he did with it, right?”
Harlan just looked at me, raising one eyebrow.
“Okay. Right. Dad never wrote anything down,” I said, turning back to the panel on the side of the tank. “He wanted to keep everything in his head, and come to the rescue when it went wrong.”
It took me a good fifteen minutes of fiddling with the settings before I realized that one of the temperature sensors had inexplicably been inactivated. I made sure it was back on and within a minute, it started rising to the correct heat.
“There she goes,” I said, slapping the top of the panel. “Batch won’t be exactly perfect, but there’s no harm done. Thanks for asking me, Harlan.”
He just grunted, already climbing back up the stepladder to start stirring the mash again. I pulled out my notebook again, making sure to write down the exact setting that had been wrong so that I could reference it in the future.
As I passed by the rest of the tanks and made my way back up toward the main area of the bar, my spidey senses—or really, my dick’s spidey senses—finally started to perk up.
Oh, God, yes.
There it was. A guy who’d just walked in and was everything I needed. I could only catch his side profile right now, because he was looking over at the far wall. But if there was ever someone I’d break my don’t-flirt-with-customers rule for, it would be this guy.
He was wearing a nice blue flannel overshirt that was open in front and was snug around his biceps in exactly the right way. He was in amazing shape, and looked like he’d earned it through good, old-fashioned manual labor. His dark hair was sexy, too, a little shorter on the sides and longer on top, just enough to get a good hold on.
I bit my lip, realizing I was getting a little hard at that thought. I sure as fuck didn’t need to be sporting a hard-on at work, no matter how tempting it was to think about grabbing this stranger’s hair in my hands.
I made my way out through the back tank area and emerged again into the main bar, and Mr. Very Fucking Hot Stranger was looking at me now. Really looking at me.
Oh, it’s on.
“Rush,” the guy behind him said, and I realized that Nathan had finally gotten here.
Then, all at once, I realized who Mr. Very Fucking Hot Stranger was. It made sense why his brown hair and eyes were the same color as Nathan’s. I laughed out loud, my body flooding with heat.
Fuck.
Lovely. No big deal. My best friend’s brother had just somehow become one of the most fuckable people I’ve ever seen.
Just because someone is fuckable doesn’t mean you have to actually fuck them, I reminded myself, knowing full well that it had never worked for me in the past.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Welcome in.”
3
SHAWN
If I’d thought Rush was a teenage heartthrob back in the day, I sure as hell wasn’t prepared for what he was like now. He looked like a full-blown movie star, as if some real-life version of Henry Cavill had walked right into the bar I’d been coming to for years. Perfectly styled black hair. Blue eyes that should have been illegal. A face that had only gotten more chiseled with time. All underneath a crisp, fitted, very expensive-looking dusky-blue collared shirt.