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ChapterFifteen
GEMMA
Felix was bad news for me. He was trouble with a capital T. But as I smiled at him from over my beer glass, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I only had a few more days with him before we had to go back to reality, and I was going to enjoy it.
I was glad we had sex this morning before leaving for the breweries. I wanted to savor him. To remember how he made every inch of my body come alive. To catalog the way he looked at me when he grabbed my throat as he fucked me to an inch of my life. I kept telling my heart to slow down, that it was only sex, but I knew it was getting big ideas. I tamped those down as I drank more of my beer.
“What do you think?” Felix asked as he finished his beer.
This was our second stop. The first brewery in town hadn’t impressed me. I didn’t have high hopes since I didn’t love their IPA, and they disappointed me with their other offerings. We ordered a flight at this one, and I liked their IPA way better.
“Better than the last place, but our beer’s better.”
“Beer snob,” he joked.
I shrugged and downed the rest of my beer. I pulled up the beer name list I had in my notes app on my phone and started typing new ideas as they came. Nolan mentioned a potential Oktoberfest beer or a stout during Christmas, so I had some names rattling around in my brain. I looked up at the ceiling as I thought and then typed more ideas.
“What are you doing?” Felix asked.
“Nolan was talking about a new stout or Oktoberfest beer. I’m trying to come up with names.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. He had questioned my ‘forced vacation’ comment before, and I was sure he noticed I had grumbled about Declan yesterday. I was hoping he would ignore that.
“What’s the real reason you came to the cabin this week?” he asked.
I pretended I didn’t hear him. I put my phone down and scanned the draft list again.
“Gem?”
“Hmm? Oh, we should get going to the next place.”
Felix grabbed my hand. “Gemma.”
I sighed. “Fine. Declan wants me to become the marketing director.”
“I thought you already were.”
I shook my head. “No. I do the social media because no one else can be trusted. I just had to fix one of April’s posts. She didn’t even use any hashtags, and there were a ton of misspellings.”
He peered at me curiously.
I sighed. “Declan wants me to think about my career, so he basically forced this vacation on me. Can we not talk about this?”
“Gem, how much have you thought about work since you got here?”
I stared down at the draft list in my hand. Every spare thought I had was about the brewery. Coming to tour these breweries wasn’t just because I wanted to drink different beers; it was me researching our competition. It was seeing what everyone else was doing and thinking about how else we could promote the brewery.
Felix held up the draft list and pointed at the guest lines section where this brewery featured beers from other breweries. “What was the first thing you did when we sat down and looked at the draft list?”
“Said we should start doing guest lines,” I muttered.
“Gem, I don’t understand why you’re fighting this. You come up with the best names for the beers, you give me clear creative briefs for the artwork, and you have literally not stopped thinking about how to improve the brewery’s branding since you got here.”
“Because I don’t want to fail!”
He reached a hand out and squeezed mine. “You won’t. Declan can be a pain in the ass, but he sees your potential. That’s why he wants you as his marketing director. He wouldn’t pressure you if he didn’t think you could do it.”
I sighed. “But I failed before. I don’t want all the pressure.”
