Real Men Will (4 page)

Her body was still numb, her head still beating like a pulse. It occurred to her that she probably shouldn’t drive, but she pushed through the doors and headed straight to her new cherry-red Nissan 370Z. The engine roared to life with the barest turn of the key. She’d purchased it for herself five months before, because she’d wanted it, and she was trying to train herself to take what she wanted. Though right now all she wanted to do was kill someone. Someone whose name she didn’t even know.

The shock of it hit her again, and she gasped in a breath to try to stop the dizziness. She was in a car on a public street. She couldn’t indulge the black spots dancing at the edge of her vision. She took another breath, and another. And even though her whole skull still thumped with every beat of her pulse, her vision cleared, and the closer she got to the brewery, the calmer she felt. Not less furious, but more. Angry in a focused way.

When she pulled into the brewery lot, she shut off the engine, got out of the car and quietly shut the door.

Her heels ground sand against asphalt as she walked. She watched her own hand curl around the door handle as she opened it, as if her fingers had nothing to do with her.

She stepped into a cheerful scene. Fiddle music fell from speakers. Laughter erupted from a table nearby. Beth walked through the laughter as if she were in one of those dreams where nothing made any sense, but she just kept moving.

The man behind the bar turned around, and she felt her heart brace itself, but he was no one she knew. A stranger. Though they were all strangers, really.

She waited until he looked at her. “Is Jamie Donovan here?” Her skin burned with regret as she spoke the name.

The man—a boy, really—leaned forward. “I’m sorry? I didn’t catch that.”

The music had seemed quiet when she’d walked in, but now it swelled in her ears, along with the noise of the early Friday crowd. “Jamie Donovan?” she said more loudly. “Is he available?”

“He’s not working the bar tonight. Is there something I can help you with?” He said it as if the request was a common one. As if women walked in here all the time looking for a man named Jamie who’d lied his way into sex. A scalding wash of shame crashed through her. She’d been laughed at before, and she couldn’t do it again. She couldn’t. So she nodded and started to back away.

A door opened to her left, and she jumped in horror, thinking it could be
him
. But it was just a customer coming out of the bathroom.

When Beth realized that she’d felt genuine fear, she smashed it down and turned it into anger, like pressure turning coal into diamonds.

She stood straight and met the gaze of the bartender again. “I need to see him. It’s personal.”

The boy’s eyebrows rose, but after a wary moment, he shrugged. “I’ll see if he’s in the back. What’s your name?”

“My name is Beth Cantrell. Tell him that and see if he’ll come out.” She put a hand on the bar, not to steady herself but to give her fingers something to squeeze, because the anger was eating her up.

And then she waited to find out exactly who she’d had sex with six months before.

E
RIC PICKED UP A HALF-FULL
bottle of pilsner and squeezed the neck tight in his hand. He wouldn’t throw it against the wall. He wouldn’t. But this damn bottling machine was supposed to have been fixed last week, and now it was doing an even worse job, jostling the bottles so much that half the beer foamed out before it reached the capping station.

“Shut it down!” he yelled at Wallace.

Wallace scowled and shut down the line, and when the roar of machinery died down, Wallace’s stream of creatively foul curses pealed through the cement-walled room.

Wallace didn’t care about bottling or distribution or profit margins. His only concern was the beer, and a lot of it was slowly crawling its way toward the drain in the floor.

Eric cursed. “I’m going to have that mechanic’s head on a platter.”

“Not until I’ve torn it off his neck,” Wallace yelled.

Eric glanced down at the tubing that snaked across the floor. “Goddamn it. You know what needs to be done. There’s no way we’re getting this back on line today. Maybe not even tomorrow.”

Wallace bit back what sounded suspiciously like a sob, but it was hard to read his emotions behind the thick beard that covered his whole lower face. His giant shoulders sunk, bringing his height down from about six-six to six-five. “It’s a damn tragedy,” he wheezed before turning to stomp toward the door that led to the tank room. A moment later he was back, the valve having been locked, and he mournfully unhooked the hose from the bottler and moved it over to the drain. He thumbed the valve and pilsner poured from the tube directly into the screened hole in the floor.

“I’ll kill him,” he muttered.

“We probably shouldn’t.”

“That batch was fucking stellar.”

“And there’s plenty of it left.” Eric put a reassuring hand on Wallace’s shoulder and they shared a moment of silence over the beer as it spiraled down into the sewer system.

Wallace sniffed, but Eric was afraid to look and see if there were tears wetting his beard. “I’ve got to make a phone call about this.”

“Rake him over the fucking coals,” Wallace insisted.

Eric strode through the silence of the tank room and emerged into the chaos of the…well, it was a kitchen now, though it never had been before. In fact, two men were currently wrestling a gigantic pizza oven into place against the far wall.

Months of prep work had led to this very event, and Eric wished he felt more than just happiness for Jamie. He wished he felt excited instead of nervous. But Jamie was grinning as he turned away from the stove and headed toward the doors to the front room, Henry hot on his heels.

“Henry,” Eric called before the boy could disappear. “Are you working cleanup tonight?”

Henry jerked to a stop, his hand already on one of the doors. His freckles stood out against his pale skin, as if Eric had frightened him.

“I am, but…Jamie has me filling in at the bar so he can supervise the installation.”

“Great. But when you’re done I need you in the bottling room. Dump all the beer and put the bottles into recycling, then mop the floor.”

“Got it.”

Henry disappeared and Eric retreated to his office. He wanted to spend time helping Jamie, but he had his own work to do, boring as it was. His muscles tightened to stone as he shut the door and called the mechanic.

He felt a little better after yelling at the guy and demanding that he get his ass to the brewery at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, Saturday or not. Eric hung up with a little less tension in his shoulders. Still, there was no silencing the laughter from the other room. It reminded him of his brother, and how different they were.

Eric tried to make himself smile at the sound of it. He wanted Jamie to be happy. Without a doubt. But Eric couldn’t help the feeling that his own happiness was slipping away. Melodramatic, maybe, but still true.

This place was his whole life. This brewery. This office. This role he had here.

Eric dug his fingers into the back of his neck and took a deep breath. There was no point sitting around brooding. He had work to do.

A minute later, someone knocked on the door. Eric looked up, expecting to see Jamie, but it was Henry. “Hey, did you get to the bottling room yet?”

“No. Um…some woman is pissed at Jamie and he asked me to come get you.”

“If she’s pissed at Jamie, then it’s Jamie’s problem, not mine.”

Henry’s face creased with embarrassment, but he just stood there with his fingers wrapped around the door.

“Fine.” Eric sighed. “I’ll be there in a second.” What the hell was this? A year ago, Eric wouldn’t have been surprised by anything involving Jamie and a woman, but now…Jamie had a girlfriend. A really nice girlfriend. If he was screwing around on her, Eric didn’t want to know. It would put a whole lot of strain into their newly easy relationship.

Still, he felt a little surge of satisfaction. This was like the old days, when Jamie had needed him. In fact, if Jamie’s girlfriend hadn’t been a consideration, Eric would’ve smiled as he stood up and headed for the barroom, off to make sense of Jamie’s screwup again.

The workmen stood in the doorway, holding the doors slightly open as they peered out. Their eyes widened when they saw Eric coming, but he ignored that and tipped his head in the direction of the oven. They shifted toward it as if they were only pretending to go back to work, but Eric held his tongue. He didn’t want to step on Jamie’s toes.

He pushed through the doors. “Jamie,” he said when he spotted his brother standing at the end of the bar with his arms crossed. “What’s the problem?”

And then Jamie shifted to the side, and Eric’s world split apart as if an earthquake had just torn through the ground beneath his feet.

For a long moment, Eric could only look at her.
Her.
He should have anticipated this, after last night. But his relief had made him stupid. And now here she was, standing next to Jamie.

Reality hit him then, with all the subtlety of a two-by-four across the face. Eric’s eyes shifted to Jamie, who was also staring at him, though his eyebrows were raised in incredulity. “Eric,” he said, and Eric caught the way Beth blinked in shock.

Oh, shit. This was bad. Worse than bad.

Jamie cocked his head. “Eric, this is Beth Cantrell. There seems to be some confusion about something that happened at the business expo earlier this year.”

Something that happened.
Okay. Maybe he could still salvage some part of this. If Beth hadn’t said anything to Jamie yet… “Beth—” he started, but she stalked toward him like a vengeful goddess.

“Eric?” she sneered.
“Eric?”

His eyes darted to Jamie. “I can explain.”

One of her elegant fingers poked him in the chest. “You can explain? Explain why you told me your name was Jamie?”

“I didn’t actually—”

“Explain that you lied to me?”

“Beth, if you’ll just—”

“Explain,”
she yelled, her finger digging a hole in his sternum, “that you let me think you were someone else when you had sex with me?”

“What?”
Jamie yelled.

That was it. This was an official disaster. The solemn silence that had fallen over the barroom seemed to confirm the horror of the situation.

“I can explain,” Eric said again, weakly. He thought the low growl was coming from Beth, but he couldn’t be sure, because at that moment Jamie surged forward, grabbed Eric by his shirtfront and twisted.

“Henry!” Jamie shouted, as if Henry wasn’t standing right there, wide-eyed. “Cover the bar. You…” His green eyes burned into Eric. “Into the back. Right. Now.”

Oh, this was a new experience, being the one who’d done something wrong. Something hot and scalding slid into his veins. Shame. Eric didn’t like it one bit.

He pulled away from Jamie’s grasp and kept his eyes on Beth. “Beth, let’s talk about this. Alone.”

She moved toward the doors with a jerky nod, and Eric held his hand up to stop Jamie from following. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“You’ll fucking talk to me
now,
” Jamie countered.

As Beth pushed through the double doors, Eric spared a look around the room. Every eye was on them, and it was a Friday evening, so there were a lot of eyes. “Let me talk to Beth alone. She doesn’t deserve to be in the middle of us.”

“Seems like she’s already right in the middle of us. Or did I misunderstand something?” But Jamie had fallen back on his heels, and his jaw jumped with frustration instead of aggression, so Eric turned and followed Beth into the back.

She was pacing across the kitchen area, her movement followed by the workmen’s fascinated eyes. She wore the same kind of hip-hugging skirt he’d seen her in last night, but this time her stiletto heels were dark purple instead of black.

Eric swallowed hard. “My office is this way.” He gestured toward the hallway and she glared at his hand as if she wanted to snap it off.

“We might want to stay out here. Whoever you are, you’re less likely to end up dead if there are witnesses.”

One of the men made a noise that was somewhere between a bark and a laugh, but when Eric shot them a glare, both men pressed their mouths into straight lines.

When he didn’t respond, Beth passed by him with a sneer and stalked down the hallway. He gestured toward his office and the chairs in front of his desk, but she didn’t sit down. Instead she paced to one corner and then spun around to glare at him.

“You came back,” he said quietly as he shut the door.

“Yes, I came back. Is that your big concern right now? How about, who the hell are you? How about we start with
that?
”

“Of course,” he said, his face flaming with embarrassment. This was no longer a gorgeous secret they shared. It wasn’t a quiet whisper he could offer into her ear to make her smile. There was no more titillation in this for her; it was all betrayal.

Her eyes looked furious and frightened.

“I’m sorry, Beth,” he said. “I can’t… Listen. When we met, you thought I was my brother because of the name tag on the table. He was supposed to have been working the booth that day.”

“Well, that explains the first fifteen seconds of our relationship,” she snapped.

“I know. I mean, I knew at the time that it wasn’t right. I did try to correct you—”

“You’re kidding, right? Did you try really, really hard,
Eric?
”

“I—”

“This is…this is horrible. You lied to me just to…”

“No, it wasn’t like that. I swear.” Eric felt sweat prickle along his hairline, and his stomach turned as he registered the hurt on her face. “Beth, I’m so sorry.”

“Why would you
do
that? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know. At the time…at the time you said you’d heard of my brother, you knew his reputation, and maybe that made it easier.”

“You pretended to be him because you thought that’s who I wanted?” she shouted.