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I was proud to be in their company.
“We’ve none of us had an easy time of it lately,” Hunter went on. “I’m sure none of you have missed the recent news about Knox Liquors.”
Angry grumbles spread through the crowd in response; Hunter waved them to silence.
“Now, now. What’s done is done. As a very wise lady told me just recently—” his eyes locked on mine, and he gave a wolfish grin—“there’s no point in dwelling on the past when you could be looking towards the future. And what a bright future it’s looking to be!”
Whoops of agreement greeted his statement.
“Now, if you’ve all sufficiently wetted your whistles to form an opinion on what recipes you find most palatable, you’ll find the ballot boxes to your left, with Martha distributing the voting slips; everyone gets three to distribute between the flavors as you wish.”
“What if we haven’t wetted our whistles enough yet?” heckled someone from behind me.
“Then too bad, because we’re all out of beer!” Hunter shot back, and the crowd laughed. “Well, what are you waiting for?”
The crowd hustled over to the ballot boxes, and I did as well, intercepting some of the tidal wave of people before they could swamp Martha entirely with their questions and their voting slips. We helped direct everyone to the ballot box they wanted, and sent them away with plates of barbecue and lemonade until there was enough breathing space to pull out the calculators and tabulate the results.
It seemed every brew had a few diehard fans, but soon a few clear leaders emerged, and from those candidates, one soon began to stand head and shoulders above the rest: a hoppy blend with strong overtones of sarsaparilla and Mexican vanilla that Hunter had chosen to call simply “Dixie.”
“Dixie is the winner!” Martha announced to widespread cheers.
Hunter was surrounded by supporters, who showered him in hugs, handshakes, and hearty backslaps. A few of the burlier young men hoisted him on their shoulders and began to run a victory lap around the lawn, and I laughed and laughed as I watched them, until I had to sit down on the grass or fall down. My heart felt as light as a feather, and my mind was already dancing with visions of what was coming next, exhilaration and nervousness combining in a heady mix of anticipation and terror.
This had been the easy part.
Next up, the expo!
EIGHT
“Ah, Miss Bartlett. How is that family of yours doing? Any developments in that…emergency of theirs?”
My boss peered at me over his glasses. He was trying to make me feel guilty for not divulging any more information than privacy laws said I had to. Was this just his normal brand of passive-aggression, or was he starting to get suspicious?
“Almost cleared up,” I said as brightly as I could. “Oh look, is that the time, I have to go update the company’s social media presence or everyone will think we’re dead, see you later!”
I fled as quickly as I could, hoping that the words ‘social media’ would have confused him enough to keep from following me.
The best way to keep my boss from asking questions had always been to start talking about something he knew nothing about; better to let the flighty young lady do her thing, he seemed to think, than to reveal he knew nothing about it.
I was back at work, and with Hunter prepping production on a new test batch of the Dixie brew, there was nothing for me to do back at the manor house. Well, I could have stood around admiring Hunter’s profile and simultaneously being bored silly by all the beer jargon he spouted like an overexcited fanboy, but somehow that seemed less productive than heading back to D.C. and catching up with all the work that had piled up for me in my absence (I didn’t think that Hunter’s red alert levels of hotness would qualify as an emergency my boss would be on board with).
Well, trying to catch up, anyway. Enough stuff had piled up in my absence that I was starting to think they’d made my cubicle into a trash can and forgotten to tell me.
No one had done any work on that tampon line while I was gone and the other woman in the office was out sick—too afraid of cooties, I guess—and the client was irate, threatening to take their business elsewhere. I tossed off some copy for it, no big deal—I could’ve done another tampon line in my sleep—and sent Sandra an e-mail outlining what they wanted in terms of art. That barely dented the pile of work, though—it seemed that while I was gone, I’d been designated everyone’s official paperwork monkey, and those forms weren’t going to file themselves.
Lost in the daydreamy reveries of self-filing paperwork and coworkers who actually did their own damn jobs, I was so busy that it wasn’t until my stomach rumbled and I looked up at the clock that I realized I’d managed to skip lunch. I looked at the pile of paper on my desk and decided that I couldn’t risk the time it would take to hop over to the Chinese joint across the street that did the really good chow mein—if I stepped away from this desk for more than five minutes, the paperwork would probably start reproducing.
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