Page 69 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"I hate this," Rafe says, staring straight ahead at the pharmacy's window display. "I hate sitting still while somebody threatens my family and being told the correct move is patience."

"I know." I reach over and take his hand off the gearshift, lace my fingers through his. "I hate it too. But she's right. And you know she's right, or you wouldn't have agreed so fast."

"Doesn't mean I have to like it."

"No. It doesn't."

He drops me at the brewery on the way back to check on Gunny, and the second I walk through the taproom door I understand exactly why Rafe's phone has been buzzing with updates all morning. Gunny's got a clipboard, an honest to goodness clipboard, and he's moving between the fermentation tanks with the brisk, unsmiling efficiency of a man conducting a full inventory audit rather than just running a normal shift.

"Status," he says, not even looking up when I walk in.

"I'm not one of your kegs, Gunny."

"Everybody's a keg today." He finally glances up, and something in his face softens the second he actually sees me. "How'd it go with the lawyer?"

"About as well as it could, I think. She seems good at her job."

"She'd better be. I called half the town this morning making sure people know to keep their stories straight if anybody comes around asking questions." He says it as plainly as reporting the weather, and it takes a beat before the actual meaning of it catches up to me.

"You did what?"

"Dot's already got a list going. Half the diner, both churches, every regular who's ever pulled up a stool and watched him run this place honest. People who'll stand up and say exactly what kind of man he is if it ever comes to that." Gunny sets the clipboard down, and for a second the brisk, businesslike mask slips just enough to show what's actually underneath it. He loves this town, and he shows it the only way he knows how. "This town's not going to let some guy from three states over decide what kind of family you two are building. Not on my watch, and definitely not on Dot's."

Words fail me for a second, my throat closing up tighter than I expect it to, standing in the middle of a taproom that smells like hops and cold steel and, apparently, loyalty. "Thank you. Really."

"Don't thank me. Go pick up your kids." He's already turning back to the tanks, back to whatever imaginary threat level he's decided the brewery's operating under today. "And Jenna. We've got this. All of us."

I don't make it three steps down the sidewalk before Dot Higgins intercepts me outside the salon, still holding a pair of shears like she forgot she was carrying them, silver hair perfectly set despite the wind trying its best to undo her.

"I heard," she says, no preamble at all, the way she says most things.

"Heard what, Dot?"

"Don't do that with me, honey. Don't play innocent." She points the shears at me for emphasis, then seems to remember what's in her hand and lowers it, a little sheepish. "Half this town already knows that man is trying to weasel his way back into those babies' lives with a piece of paper and some lawyer's fancy language. The other half will know by supper."

"It's not exactly a secret I was hoping to keep from you specifically."

"Good, because you couldn't have anyway. I've already got Pastor Mills and both the ladies from the library ready to write letters the second anybody asks. Maggie's putting together something too, and half the soccer parents." She softens, just slightly, the brisk efficiency cracking to show something warmer underneath it, the same thing I keep finding today in every corner of this town. "You've got people, Jenna. More than you probably know. Don't you forget that when it gets ugly, because it might."

"Thank you." It's the second time in twenty minutes I've said those exact two words and meant them with everything I've got.

"Save the thanks. Just win." She pats my arm once, brisk and sure, and bustles back toward the salon before I can say anything else, leaving me standing on the sidewalk with something warm lodged behind my ribs where the fear's been sitting all morning.

I believe her, and I believe Gunny, almost all the way to the Busy Bean, right up until I push through the door and the bell overhead jingles and Josie waves at me from her usual spot by the window, marker in hand, mid-argument with Eli over whose drawing of a dragon looks more realistic.

"Mom, tell him dragons don't have five legs."

"Dragons can have however many legs they want, they're magic," Eli says, with the flat certainty of a boy who's lost this exact argument more than once today and has no intention of learning from it.

"That's not how logic works."

"It's a dragon, Josie. There is no logic."

I'm laughing before I've even set my bag down, some of the morning's tension finally loosening in my chest at the familiar, ridiculous rhythm of them, and I'm halfway to their table when it happens, before I've even fully registered why. The hair on the back of my neck lifts, slow and certain, some old instinct in me sounding an alarm before my mind catches up, the exact feeling I used to get walking into a house that looked calm from the driveway and wasn't.

I turn around.

Derek is sitting at the corner table, coffee cup in front of him, watching the three of us like he's been there a while.