AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was the last thought I had until morning.
ChapterNine
JT
Spending the night in Flynn Honeycutt’s bed was one revelation after another.
Revelation number one: Flynn was a snuggler.
The man was pricklier than a cactus and spent way too many hours of the day killing his own joy by overthinking, so I never would have imagined that he’d tolerate being held for long. But two minutes after I’d wrapped my arms around him, he’d dropped into sleep like a stone into a pond. He’d rolled with me in the night, too, keeping our connection, like once his body was sated and pliant and his brain shut off, he could finally let himself have what he needed.
Which led me to my second revelation.
Carly from the Premiere Sleep Shoppe at Lexington and Twenty-Third had steered me wrong. The secret to a good night’s sleep was not, in fact, the plush topper and premium king-sized mattress she’d talked me into. It turned out, squeezing onto a smallish mattress filled with organic oat hulls in an un-airconditioned loft in the height of a humid Maine summer while a gorgeous man nearly as large, broad, and hot-blooded as me drooled into my chest hair and made my left arm go numb was the true key to a good night’s sleep…
As long as the drooler was Flynn Honeycutt.
I brushed back a lock of his dark hair with the back of my finger and stared down at his face. The pinkish dawn light highlighted a faint spray of freckles on his cheeks and gilded his morning scruff. The acres of his smooth skin—paler across his back and shoulders, deeper gold where the sun had tanned him—were slightly bruised from my mouth and fingers and reddened from beard burn, and every mark felt like a victory. A visible reminder that Flynn wanted me, too.
He should always look this way.
I traced my finger down his hairline and over the curve of his ear, and Flynn’s forehead scrunched. His arm wrapped around my chest more firmly, and he burrowed into me like I was his own personal pillow before going boneless once more.
I pressed my lips together, trying not to laugh as I imagined what Flynn would do if he ever learned of his own behavior. The outraged horror. The immediate denial. The walls building.
And suddenly, I didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
To say that last night had not gone according to my expectation would be a massive understatement.Just sex, I’d told myself as we’d slow danced around the bar.Keep it simple. Keep it light.
I was pretty sure I’d failed on all counts.
Memories littered the ground between us like land mines, exploding at the slightest touch. Flynn attacked with hurricane intensity, all vicious thunder and lightning, whenever he felt threatened. And I’d nearly walked out the door at least three times, thinking my attempt to get us on firmer ground was doing more harm than good.
Thank fuck I hadn’t left. I would have missed out on the sweet satisfaction of having Flynn yielding and undone beneath me. Missed out on giving him the pleasure and relief he deserved. Missed out on the most mind-shattering, earth-shaking orgasm of my entire life.
Which brought me to a third revelation. Flynn was brilliant. He was valiant. He was witty and challenging and loyal and passionate. But he was also skittish as a deer and stubborn as a mule. He was determined to fight anything I proposed, whether it was a night of hot sex or a deal with Fortress, no matter how good those things could be for him.
So if I wanted him to be happy in the long-term—and I fucking did—I couldn’t wait around for him to decide he could trust me and come to the negotiating table… I needed toshowhim how great it could be and blow through all of his objections.
In short, I needed to figure out a way for Fortress to keep the manufacturing and distribution of Honeybridge Mead in Honeybridge.
The idea was simple, but the execution of it… I blew out a breath, and my arms tightened around Flynn involuntarily as I imagined the complexity of it. It would be unlike any deal I’d negotiated before.
Working things this way would increase up-front costs exponentially. But if I adjusted the terms so the majority of Flynn’s compensation came on the back end, trusting that Honeybridge Mead’s star would continue to rise the way I now knew it would, I could make this a profitable acquisition for Fortress… and an absolutely killer deal for Flynn.
The hardest part would be convincing Conrad Schaeffer that we wanted to set up a manufacturing operation in the backwoods of Maine in order to sign one small-town meadery to Fortress’s roster. I’d need to have bulletproof numbers and projections. Every i dotted and t crossed.
“I’m gonna make this happen, Firecracker,” I whisper-vowed in his ear as the first rays of morning sun peeked through the skylight above us. “You’ll see.”
“Nnkay,”Flynn replied eloquently. He gave my hip a fond pat… then shoved me away and rolled over, tugging the sheet over his head.
I grinned. Thunder and lightning andsweetness.
A man like that was worth all kinds of complexity.
I climbed out of bed and dressed, then hurried downstairs as quietly as I could so as not to wake Flynn. I quickly looked up contact information for Hayden Lewis, Honeybridge’s local real estate agent, and sent him an email asking to set up a meeting to check out available properties. Then I emailed Alice a request to pull and examine every contract with nontraditional manufacturing terms that Fortress had ever signed.
By the time I sent off Alice’s email, Hayden was already calling me back. I’d forgotten that this was how Honeybridge rolled.
