Chapter Five
When Wyatt hadn’t shown up by six, Bec began to worry. St. Cloud wasn’t that far away, and Cooper’s farm was easy enough to find. But Wyatt was an outsider from Denver—it was always possible he might have gotten lost. She figured she’d better call him and find out.
At which point she realized that she’d given him her number without getting his in return. Great. Given the spotty cell phone reception in the mountains, it might not make any difference. If he was lost, she wasn’t sure he could call for help.
She was absurdly relieved when she heard someone knock on the outer door. It had to be Wyatt. Nobody else would come to the brewery, since nobody else was interested.
She managed to get her triumph under control by the time she opened the door. No use letting him see she was relieved he’d made it back. She wasn’t giving him the upper hand. She’d already decided to keep him at arm’s length.
Wyatt stood on the porch in the light of the setting sun. He looked like he’d been pulled through a knothole. Backward.
His fine city clothes were streaked with dust. His nose was sunburned, bright red against the tan of his cheeks. His eyes looked slightly bloodshot, and he wasn’t smiling.
But then why would he smile? He looked like he’d had the mother of all bad days.
“What happened?” she blurted, promptly forgetting all previous decisions about how to treat Wyatt Montgomery.
“Harlan Cooper happened.”
He reached down and picked up two plastic buckets. She recognized them—Cooper’s hops buckets.
Bec stared at him blankly. She’d figured the only problem he might have would be convincing Harlan to sell him the Dunraven. Given the way he looked, his troubles with Harlan had clearly gone way beyond that. “What did he do?”
“He gave me a lesson in hop farming. Can I put these things down someplace?” He raised the buckets a little higher.
“Oh, sure, of course.” She backed up to let him inside, then guided him to one of the work tables. “Just set them down here.”
“Right.” He dropped the buckets on the table, then stood upright, placing one hand on the small of his back. He bent back slightly and gave a muffled groan.
“What exactly was this lesson in hop farming? What did Harlan make you do?” Because clearly Harlan had gone way beyond being a crusty local farmer. Bec only hoped he hadn’t made Wyatt clean out the barn or something.
“I harvested hops. The old fashioned way. You’d be surprised how many hop blossoms you find on a row of hop vines. I tried counting at first, but that got too depressing after a while.” He gave her a smile that was distinctly half-hearted.
Bec stared at him. “Harlan made you harvest hops? Why would he do that?”
Wyatt shrugged. “I think he figured I’d cave if he made me do some physical labor. Then he wouldn’t have to sell me anything. To tell you the truth, if I’d known how tough it was going to be to get the damn hops, I probably would have backed out of the whole thing. But by the time I figured it out, I was in too far to turn around without looking like a jerk.” He put both hands on the small of his back this time, leaning gingerly as if he were trying to loosen his tight muscles.
Bec took a quick breath. “I didn’t…that is, it didn’t occur to me that he’d do anything like that. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” He frowned quickly. “Oh, I’ve also got a message for you from Cooper.”
“For me?” Her eyes widened. “You told him you were working with me?”
He shook his head. “Nah. He figured it out on his own, pretty much as soon as I asked him for the Dunraven.”
Which also explained why Harlan had jerked him around. A little message for Bec. Just to let her know he wasn’t letting her off the hook. “Sorry. I guess I should have figured that would happen.”
Wyatt shrugged. “How could you have known what he had in mind? Anyway, his message is the next time you want to get his hops, you’ll need to talk to him directly and settle up. He says he knows it won’t be pleasant, but he wants you to do it. Needs you to, I guess.”
Bec rubbed her fingers across her forehead, trying to smooth out a sudden ache gathering around her eyes. Yeah, he needs me to. They all need me to. “I’m sorry you got caught in the middle of this.”
“Me, too.” He gave her a level look. “In fact, I think you’d better tell me a lot more about what exactly I’m in the middle of. Before your next vendor has me running a combine through a barley field.”
“They don’t grow barley around here,” she said absently. How much could she tell him about the whole mess without scaring him off? How much did she want to tell him?
He deserves to know what he’s getting into, Rebecca.
He did. Even if she wouldn’t enjoy giving him the full story.
Wyatt bared his teeth in something closer to a snarl than a smile. “I need to know what’s up, Bec. Before I go through anything else on this quest. Let’s do dinner. And you can fill me in on all the details you neglected to share before.”
She blew out a breath. “Okay. You’ve got a point. Do you want to go now?”
He glanced down at his clothes, then grimaced. “No. Right now I need a shower. And some different clothes. How about meeting me at Selig’s in a half hour?”
She nodded. “I can do that.”
“Good. I’m ready for full disclosure.” He grimaced again as he stretched his shoulders. “And hot water. A lot of hot water.”
“I guess you are.” She leaned forward, almost without thinking, and removed a leaf from his hair, letting the silky strands slide through her fingers.
What are you doing? What the hell are you doing? No touching, idiot, no touching.
Wyatt froze for a moment, staring down at her, brown eyes suddenly alight. Then he nodded as he pulled back from her slightly. “See you there.”
She watched him head back toward his truck. Stupid, stupid, stupid. No touching, dammit. Absolutely no touching.
Because she knew only too well where that led.
…
The feel of the hot shower on his back and shoulders was so soothing that Wyatt groaned. He almost wished he’d invited Bec for breakfast rather than dinner. All he really wanted to do at the moment was crawl into bed and sleep for twelve hours.
Come on, Montgomery. You’ve got the advantage here.
True. For the first time he seemed to have the upper hand with Bec Dempsey. She owed him. Big time. And she had information he needed if he was going to succeed in his quest for that barrel of Zoria.
He pulled on a T-shirt and jeans—not exactly his usual outfit, but he was too tired to do much more. If Bec wasn’t impressed by his spending a day harvesting hops to win her imperial stout, he didn’t think a pressed pair of khakis would do much more.
For a moment, he found himself picturing those sky blue eyes as she ran her fingers through his hair. The Zoria might not be the only thing he wanted.
Focus, Montgomery. You’ve got a gastropub to save. That’s your priority here.
Right. He shoved all thoughts of Bec Dempsey and her flaming hair to the back of his mind.
He walked over two streets, then strolled by the Black Mountain Tavern on his way to Selig’s, glancing in when he reached the open door. He could hear muted music from the jukebox. Liam Dempsey stood behind the bar, waiting on a couple of tourists who were reading the blackboard for beer selections. He looked up briefly, his eyes widening as he recognized Wyatt. Then Liam looked back at the tourists again, resolutely ignoring him.
Okay, fine.
Wyatt wasn’t sure what exactly he would have said to Liam anyway, but he figured the man might have his own take on whatever story Bec was going to tell him tonight. One way or another, the Dempsey family seemed to have a lot of secrets.
He hiked down the street to Selig’s. This time at least Bec was already there waiting for him. She had a table at the side and a beer in front of her. He slid into the seat opposite, trying not to wince when his back came into contact with the bentwood chair. “Evening.”
She nodded at him. “Evening. You might want to grab a beer now—the bar’s not crowded yet.”
“Right.” He should have known he wouldn’t get to sit down that easily. He worked his way through the small mob of customers and grabbed a pint of the nearest beer on tap, Old Chub. At the table, he could see that the waitress had worked her way over to Bec. He managed to get back while she was still there.
The waitress raised an eyebrow in his direction. “What do you want tonight?”
He paused. His exhausted mind was a total blank.
“The gyros are good,” Bec supplied.
“A gyro it is.”
He dropped down into his seat again and took a long pull on his beer. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt this tired and thirsty. Certainly not since he’d become a gastropub owner. Gastropubs, pretty much by definition, were not hangouts for tired, dusty farmers, although they could handle thirst with the best of them. He hadn’t worked this hard since his first restaurant job.
“Okay,” he said, squaring up his beer in front of him. “Why does Harlan Cooper want your head on a platter?”
Bec sighed, chewing on her lip as she thought. “He doesn’t. Not exactly anyway. He’s just annoyed with me.”
Wyatt resolutely ignored the sadness in those sky blue eyes. She didn’t get a sympathy vote. “And he’s annoyed with you because…”
“Because I left him with some unpaid bills. And because I got his hopes up but didn’t follow through.”
Wyatt took a sip of his beer, still avoiding anything that felt like compassion. He’d spent the day picking hops, for Pete’s sake. He was the one who deserved some compassion here. “How did you manage to do that?”
“I told him we were going to make great beer. That we’d put Antero on the map when it came to brewing and that his hops would be a big part of it. Not only his Cascade and Amarillo, which are pretty much his stock in trade. But his experimental varieties too. The ones he really wants to sell.” She managed a smile, but it wasn’t much. “And I did use his stuff. And I made some pretty neat beer with it. For a while it looked like we were going to go big time.”
“Then you went belly up? That’s not exactly unheard of.” Hell, he’d been involved in some bombs himself. Restaurants were well known for their high failure rates.
“It isn’t so much that we went out of business,” Bec said slowly. “It’s the way we went out of business. It was like one week we were fine, then the next week we were on the ropes.”
Wyatt frowned. “You didn’t see it coming?”
“Not exactly.” Bec paused to take another swallow of her beer, then set the glass down again. “The only reason we could open Antero Brewing in the first place was that we had a backer with money. Liam and I together had some but not nearly enough to start our own business. But Liam had this friend, Colin. He’s a trust fund baby—looking for places to invest. Plus, he was a home brewer, too, like Liam and me. Liam gave him some of my home brew and told him we wanted to go into the beer business. Colin was our money man, the one who made it possible to get the equipment and open the brewery full-time.”
“And he ran out of money?” That also wasn’t unheard of. Backers suddenly lost their enthusiasm when the bills came in. Or they suddenly lost their money when the market dropped.
“He just ran, period.” Her voice sounded oddly flat, as if she’d scrubbed away all the emotion. “After we’d been in business for around a year, Colin showed up one morning and told us he was through. He’d paid off our bank loan and some of the outstanding bills, as much as he had money for at the time, but that was it. No more from him. We still weren’t making enough to sustain the business without outside help, and our outside help had just pulled out. He told me good-bye, and he took off.” Her eyes were bleak all of a sudden. Wyatt had a feeling there was more to it than that, but now probably wasn’t the time to probe for painful details.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “That sucks, but how does it involve Cooper?”
“Harlan and our other suppliers were in it with us. We’d pulled them in with our stupid ‘vision’ of what Antero was going to be. I should have leveled with them immediately, as soon as Colin took off. But I kept hoping we’d find somebody else to back us, so I kept putting them off.” She rubbed a hand across her forehead, staring down at her beer. “I mean, I didn’t order any more stock from them, but I still owed them for the outstanding orders. Eventually I had to go to each of them and tell them we were closing down, that Colin had taken off with his capital. And that we couldn’t pay them all of what we owed, at least not for a while. They weren’t happy with me.”
She blew out a breath, then picked up her glass.
He kept his sympathy shield firmly in place. This was business, goddamn it. “Did you pay them anything?”
She nodded. “We paid them as much as we could as we sold off the rest of the stock. We covered a little over half in the end. They’d done some expansion of their own in anticipation of our business—Harlan planted more Dunraven than he probably would have otherwise. But after Colin took off, we couldn’t buy more stuff from him or from anyone else. Not without asking them for credit, which they weren’t likely to give me since I already owed them money.” She paused, raising her clear blue eyes again. The hint of sadness was still there. “I promised to pay them the rest when I could, but I’m not sure they believed me.”
Wyatt ignored the pinch of his conscience. Business, strictly business. “Have you been able to pay back any more?”
She stared down into her beer for a long moment, then shook her head again. “Not much. They’re all still pretty pissed. I mean, I thought we’d do better than we did. For a while I didn’t think we’d be shutting down.” She pushed her fingers through her hair, sending red waves shimmering across her shoulders. “I hoped we wouldn’t, anyway. I thought maybe we’d make enough from the beer we’d sold to get by and pay off our debts. But we couldn’t. We just needed too much money.”
“And you didn’t declare bankruptcy?”
She shook her head, sending those red waves rippling again. “We didn’t want to sell the brewery—I didn’t, anyway. We sort of gave up.”
He leaned back in his chair for a moment, thinking. “Except you haven’t closed down exactly, have you? I mean, you’ve still got the equipment and the building.”
“We own the building,” she said slowly. “It was my dad’s warehouse. He ran a shipping business while we were growing up here. We had to do some renovations when we started out, but the building was sound. And the equipment was used when we bought it. There’s actually a lot of used equipment around, given the number of start-up breweries there are in the state.”
Which might explain why they didn’t cut their losses and sell everything. That, plus Bec’s apparent determination to start up the business again. They couldn’t do that if they sold off the equipment.
He picked up his beer. “Is the barrel of Zoria all the stock you have left?”
“It is now. We had some cases of wheat beer in our inventory and a nice IPA we bottled the first year we were open, along with a peach saison. But those sold pretty fast, and we used the money to pay taxes and pay as much as we could on the bills. And I had one other barrel of Zoria. We got good money for that.”
Wyatt frowned. He could see the waitress heading their way with their dinners. “Why didn’t you sell the other barrel when you sold the first one?”
Bec rubbed her hand across her forehead again so that her bangs flipped a little to the side, a fine spray of red. “I wanted to know what it would be like if it aged a little longer. It’s got a lot of body. I figured another year in the cask would make it more interesting.” She gave him a slightly defiant smile, a beer master justifying her craft.
He smiled back. No argument here, ma’am. “Could be. Bourbon barrels can do interesting things with imperial stout.”
She nodded, leaning against her chair to let the waitress put her more-than-generous plate of gyro and fries on the table in front of her. “They can. They most definitely can.”
By some kind of unspoken consent, they stopped talking about beer during dinner. Not that they stopped drinking it, but talking was out. Wyatt found himself watching her eat. It shouldn’t have been attractive, but for some reason it was—particularly the French fries, which she ate carefully, one by one. He watched her tip her head back slightly, nibbling delicately on the end of the fry, pink tongue flicking out to lick salt from the corner of her mouth.
You are not getting turned on by watching a woman eat french fries. That would be ridiculous.
He wasn’t. Not exactly. Still, he was once again aware of Bec Dempsey as a woman, not just a business possibility. Her creamy skin contrasted with the deep blue of her eyes, the bright gold-red of her hair. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, maybe a little mascara on her long lashes. She didn’t need much, of course, not with that skin that took on color whenever she looked at him. Her lips were full and pink, and when they pursed around a ketchup-laden fry, he felt his own body tighten.
Oh, for the love of heaven, knock it off.
Clearly, he’d been concentrating on work too much lately. He needed to re-establish his social life, assuming he could find a willing female when he got back home.
But then there was this hot redhead sitting across the table.
You are not thinking about that. Concentrate on saving Quaff.
Wyatt took a deep breath. This situation was getting out of hand. “Does your brother still have an interest in the brewery?”
Bec’s blue eyes became cloudy again. “Technically, yeah. But he walked out when he figured we weren’t going to be able to make it without Colin’s money. He wanted to sell everything at first.”
“And you didn’t?”
She shook her head. “I most definitely didn’t. And I still don’t. Not while I still have any hope we could get going again.”
“Will he be upset if you sell me the Zoria?” Not that he really gave a rat’s ass whether Liam Dempsey was upset or not.
A fine line appeared along her brows as she frowned, which somehow made her face seem even more interesting. “He may be upset if he’s not involved in the deal. But the Zoria is the brewery’s asset, not Liam’s. The money we get for it should be used to get the company going again on a very limited basis.”
Wyatt nodded. “I understand.”
“You’re still interested?” One of her auburn eyebrows arched upward.
“Sure.” He frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, I thought maybe after today, and Harlan…” Her voice trailed off as her cheeks flushed a pale shade of pink.
Very nice. He shook his head. “He wasn’t that bad. And I learned a lot about hops.” Mainly how nasty the stuff was, but he’d keep that to himself when he explained to his customers about the details of beer making.
“Okay then.” She glanced down at her suddenly empty plate and her suddenly empty beer glass. “I guess I’m done.”
He thought about offering her another beer, but he wasn’t sure he could stay awake through a second glass. On the other hand, he could definitely stay awake if he got a little crisp mountain air. “I’ll walk you home.”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I didn’t say I had to. I want to.” He tried a salesman’s smile, but it came out a little more tentative than he’d thought.
After a moment, she shrugged. “Okay.”
A few moments later, Wyatt wondered if this walk had been such a good idea. He’d forgotten how tired he was until he got outside on the street. He’d still have to walk back to his hotel after he got Bec safely to her brewery.
But after he’d smelled the sweet willows by the creek and heard the sound of falling water, his exhaustion seemed to drop away. Well, that and seeing the hint of pink in Bec’s cheeks again. Maybe it was the slight chill in the air. Or maybe it was his presence as he walked along beside her. The lady’s face was an open book once you got to know her.
He’d like to get to know her even better, now that he’d had a couple of evenings with her. Bec Dempsey made him stop and think, and he couldn’t say that about most of the women he knew. Or the men, either, if it came to that.
She took a different route to the brewery, a dirt road that headed out of town. Pine and spruce lined both sides, sending their scent into the twilight. Without thinking about it, he took her arm, guiding her around a pothole at the side.
He was aware suddenly of the warmth of her skin, the slight scent of vanilla in her hair, the delicate line of her lashes against the satin of her cheek.
She stiffened slightly beneath his hand, holding herself tight until he let her go again.
You should be thinking about Quaff. Except he was sick of thinking about Quaff. And he was ready to start thinking about the intriguing woman beside him. Thinking about her even more than he had been.
“Nice night,” he said. Walking with her was sort of like trying to tiptoe across an ice floe. He wasn’t sure where the shakiest parts were yet.
She nodded. “We’re in the transition period between summer and fall. Not hot, not cold, just letting you know what’s coming. Then again, there’s always the chance of an unexpected snowfall.”
Somewhere, a dog barked off to the side. Or it might have been a coyote—he’d heard a few howling the night before. “So you grew up here?”
She nodded. “Born and bred. I went away to college, but I came straight back.”
“Are your parents still here?”
“My dad died a few years ago. My mom moved to Grand Junction to be closer to her sister.” She dipped her head a little lower.
“Has she tried your beer?” He wasn’t sure why he was asking, maybe to keep the conversation going.
Bec glanced up at him, eyes narrowing. “Not that I know of. She knew what we were doing, but she thought we were sort of nuts. On the other hand, my dad was a great home brewer, so you could say she was used to nuts like us.”
Wyatt gave her a quick grin. “I’ve run into a lot of home brewers over the years. Some of them were terrific. Some of them you wanted to run from if you saw them coming.”
“The problem is anybody can get into brewing these days. It’s not like making wine, where you need grapes of a certain type from a certain area to make anything decent. And where you have to wait for a few years before you know what you’ve got. With beer you can know within a couple of months, depending on what type you’re making. You get a lot of people thinking it’s easy when it’s anything but.”
She stepped into an open parking lot at the end of the road, and he realized they were back at the brewery. He hadn’t noticed how picturesque the area was when he’d been there before. The wind whispered through the rattling aspen leaves, and the silhouettes of peaks loomed up in the distance. A tasting room here would be terrific.
Bec turned back to him again. “Thanks for dinner. And thanks for understanding about the whole Harlan thing.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. Like I say, I learned a lot.”
She gave him a dry smile. “I hope you still feel that way after the next couple of days.”
He leaned a shoulder against her doorframe, smiling down at her. “Your other suppliers have something interesting planned?”
“Could be. You never know.” She took her key from her purse and reached toward the door.
He took the key from her fingers and unlocked it. “There you go.”
Bec blinked up at him for a moment, eyes widening. She seemed slightly wary all of a sudden. “Oh. Thanks.”
For a moment he let himself lean forward, close enough to feel the warmth of her breath upon his cheek. Her lips parted slightly, and she ran the tip of her tongue across the bottom one.
His lower half turned to granite.
If seeing her lick her lips turned him into a raging horndog, what might happen if he saw her without the down vest and the wary expression? He didn’t know, but he was suddenly eager to find out.
Probably not tonight, though. He straightened again. “See you tomorrow, Ms. Dempsey.”
She gave a quick grin, no more than a lip flex. “Count on it, Mr. Montgomery.” She stepped by him, opening her door. At the last moment, she turned to give him a quick nod. “Good night.”
He nodded. “Sweet dreams.” But as he walked back up the dirt road, he figured he might have a few problems getting to those sweet dreams himself.
…
Bec leaned against the door for a moment, waiting for her pulse rate to slow down again. She wasn’t sure what exactly was going on with Wyatt Montgomery, but she was sure it scared her to death.
You’re not ready for this. He’s another Colin.
Maybe. But she was getting perilously close to finding out for herself.
Her phone buzzed against her hip, bringing her back to reality again. Liam. She grimaced. Had he been keeping tabs on her again? If so, she was going to tell him where to go and what to do when he got there.
She clicked Connect. “What?”
“Well, hello to you, too. Did you see Montgomery today?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Did you get a call from some guy named Threadgood?”
Bec frowned. “No. Why?”
“He left a message on my voicemail. He’s interested in talking about the Zoria.”
“I don’t want to talk about the Zoria. I already have a deal with Montgomery.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you don’t even know how much this Threadgood might be offering.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I made a deal with Wyatt, and I’m not backing down.” Particularly when he’d already brought her the hops they needed.
She could almost hear Liam steaming on the other end of the phone. “I’m going to talk to him.”
“Talk away. But I won’t change my mind.”
“You might if the offer was big enough. If we could move beyond paying off the bills and making a few small brewing runs.”
Bec closed her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this. I’m tired.”
He sighed. “You can ignore this for now, but it’s not going away. We need to get the best possible price for the Zoria, particularly if we’re going to start up again.”
“Good night, Liam.” She disconnected before he could harass her anymore.
She hated it when her brother was the voice of reason. Especially since reason was so far away from where she wanted to be right then.