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ChapterOne
JT
“I feel like you left here in amood.” Alice’s voice through the Porsche speakers sounded way calmer than I felt at the moment.
My assistant wasn’t wrong. She rarely was.
“Mood.Mood,” I said through my teeth. “Yes, I think you could call it that. After three fucking years of working my ass off for Conrad Schaeffer with his promise of a promotion to vice president, I actually believed it was finally going to happen.”
“No shit, JT. The man’s an…” She lowered her voice. “An insufferable ass. But rumor has it he said you’d get promoted to VP as soon as you close the Honeybridge Mead account up in Maine. Which, let’s be honest, is practically a done deal considering you grew up in Honeybridge. Surely you have connections that can help…”
Her voice faded away while my head took me to a million places, none of which were compatible with my sanity.
Green eyes bright with arousal.
Bare, freckled shoulders.
A smile rarer than a sun-shower in June.
Anger so hot it burned, even in my memories.
Connections? I definitely had connections. But they were the opposite of helpful.
“Conrad made it sound like you know the guy who owns it, right? You two went to school together or something?” Alice continued, breaking me out of my memories.
Or something.
I swallowed around my nerves. Flynn Honeycutt was six feet of walking temptation wrapped in a barbed-wire coating ofstay-the-fuck-away-from-me.
My boss couldn’t have given me a more difficult challenge if he’d tried. Not that Conrad Schaeffer knew anything about Honeybridge Mead or Flynn Honeycutt. No, he’d most likely found out about the brand the same way the rest of the world had—through some viral social media posts.
Frankie Hilo had made several posts from the Honeybridge Tavern and Meadery. One duck-faced mirror shot of the singer being her ridiculous self in the men’s room. One orgasmic selfie of her holding a half-empty glass with the simple caption “bussin.” And one reel she’d shot in front of the Tavern, in which she panned the entire length of sleepy, old-fashioned Fraser Street, declared that she was “absolutely sliving the savage vibe” of Honeybridge, Maine, and instructed her Hilo-lovers to come see for themselves.
And apparently, they had. According to my mother, who served on every town development committee (because god forbid that anything should happen in Honeybridge without her input), tourism in the quaint lakeside town was up eighteen percent over the town’s best summer previously, and new artisans and chefs were moving in, bringing their talent and entrepreneurial spirit. “The club has even had to hire an extra gate attendant,” she’d sniffed, which was Patricia Wellbridge’s genteel way of saying the town had been overrun with riffraff.
If this was true, that was great. Flynn Honeycutt deserved the boon to his business, and Honeybridge itself could use the additional tourist traffic.
Personally, though, I had my doubts. Honeybridge was a tiny town that was a little too proud of its quaint traditions and local legends. Nothing ever changed there, including the people. The life you were born into was the life you were expected to lead, forever and ever amen.
That was the reason I’d deliberately escaped the place years ago in search of bigger and better things—a life on my own terms. It was a large part of the reason I hadn’t even been back for a visit in three years, too.
Now here I was, tasked with spending time in Honeybridge—“A few weeks at least, Jonathan. Heck, maybe the whole summer!” Conrad had suggested, to my utter horror—to court a new client into signing a distribution deal with me at Fortress Holdings.
A client I’d known my whole life and who’d hated me nearly as long.
A client whose naked body felt like it had been crafted to fit against mine.
A client whose prickly exterior hid a vulnerable underbelly of need.
A client whose soft cries in bed still haunted me most nights as I took myself in hand and searched for relief.
I had strong suspicions about why I, of all the people Conrad Schaeffer could have chosen to represent Fortress, had been chosen for this mission, and I was extremely displeased.
“Alice,” I said, clearing my throat and trying to put the past where it belonged—deep, deep down in a lead-lined vault. In the ocean. On another planet. “I need you to get me everything you can on Honeybridge Mead’s competitors. If we take them national, I want to know who they’d be up against besides Lotus and Fairchild.”
This wasbusiness, I reminded myself, no matter how personal it felt. A deal like any other I’d done for Fortress over the years. Sure, it was way more important since Conrad was so fixated on this particular deal that he’d placed it squarely between me and a VP title, but a deal nonetheless. And I was really,reallygood at closing deals.
Alice’s keyboard clacked in the background. “Will do. I’ve already put together a dossier on Flynn Honeycutt. He’s—”
