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So, the fact that the first thing I grabbed was a knife wasn’t all that surprising. After I’d thrown the first two, I was feeling much better. I especially liked the surprised look in Draco’s eyes when I unleashed them on him. And I wasn’t blind. I saw his jeans twitch when I threw the first one. It made me a little giddy with delight. I waited until he’d hightailed it out the door before throwing the last one.
I’d turned back to the table to see Draco’s Aunt Kate and my grandad grinning.
“Here, just one more,” Kate said, handing me another knife just as Draco shouted through the door about the last one being unnecessary.
I’d followed that by letting another knife loose, smiling hard at his curse.
That one meeting seemed to lay the ground rules for our relationship or non-relationship, depending on how you looked at it.
I knew that sometimes he did stuff on purpose just to piss me off and I did the same to him because it was fun to see him grind his teeth.
There was always an underlying simmering chemistry that neither of us had chosen to explore and I wondered if when we eventually did if it would be an explosion or if it would fizzle out like a damp squib.
Either way, the man lived to frustrate me. He thought I didn’t know about the sneaky ways he made my life easier. I never mentioned it because it was a good feeling to know that no matter how much I irritated him, he would be the first one to stand next to me when I needed him to.
If only he wouldn’t annoy me so much, life would be perfect!
CHAPTER 1
RAVEN ROOST BREWERY
SEPTEMBER 2003
MOLLY
“Uggh, you are such a dickhead,” I shouted at the retreating form of Draco, aka Liam Davies, as he swaggered away from me with that sexy walk of his. Sexy he may be, but he’d left me fuming mad. Yet again!
‘Oh, my good lord, that man drives me insane,’I thought to myself as I returned to packing bottles of beer into the boxes for shipping. This is what I’d been busy with before the irritating man had come over to tell me I was doing it wrong.
‘Seriously, if anyone was going to drive me to drink, it would be him,’ I muttered to myself.
I mean, what was his problem? He was always telling me I was doing something wrong. If it wasn't the taste of my beer, it was the way I ran my life.
Grabbing the packing tape, I took my frustrations out on the boxes in front of me. They were so well wrapped in tape that I felt sorry for my customers on the other end trying to get into them.
What did I have to do to show him I was doing just fine without his interference? I had managed to run my life for the last twenty-five years without his help.
I carried on muttering and cursing under my breath at the frustrating man, wondering what I'd done to deserve having him for a neighbour. I mean, I was a good person, always happy to help anyone in need. His family was amazing. It was just him. Maybe he was adopted. That would be the only answer, considering his siblings, Bella and Onyx, were awesome.
Take today, for instance. I'd been happily packing my way through all the boxes of beer, getting them ready to ship out, and he came in and tried to tell me how to do my job. Granted, his idea would have made my life much easier, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction. I'd wait a couple of weeks before implementing the changes and then I'd pretend I'd come up with the idea. That always got his goat. I snickered at the thought.
Once I was done with the packing, I added the boxes to the pallets, waiting for Hawk and Navy to come give me a hand and wrap it for shipping. Frowning, I took note of changes on orders from some of my regular customers. Their orders were a bit light this week. I made a mental note to contact the managers in the next few days to make sure all was okay.
Leaving the brewery, I made sure to lock it up tight behind me before I went up to the house that I'd grown up in. It was a beautiful stone cottage that once had a thatch roof, but my grandfather had changed this back in the eighties to a shingle roof. Thankfully, despite its age, it wasn’t a listed building. It was a larger than average cottage, with a family bathroom and four bedrooms upstairs, although one was tiny, and I tended to use it as a craft room as I wasn’t sure you would even get a single bed in there.
Downstairs there was a fair size lounge and a dining room, but my all-time favourite room was the kitchen. It had the original stone floors that were slightly uneven and added character to the whole room. I’d upgraded the kitchen after my grandfather had passed away this May and had the wooden cupboards painted white. I’d had rustic wooden shelves made from old pieces of reclaimed timber I’d found when we’d cleared out a shed before the sale and had them hung on the wall where I kept all my grandmothers’ knickknacks.
I’d had a beautiful farmhouse sink and mixer installed. I also found a big wooden table and chairs at the local charity shop that had nicks and dents to show that it had been well loved. It suited my rustic kitchen to a tee.
Over last winter, I’d made a few hand-woven rugs from old scraps of material I’d found, and I had them dotted around the kitchen for some added warmth. The only thing that hadn’t changed was my grandfather's worn chair that I’d left by the open fireplace at the end of the kitchen. I loved to curl up in it, especially on the days when I missed his gruffness. I could feel my throat tightening at the thought of him.
I’d moved in with my grandfather at the age of five when my mother, his daughter-in-law, had been taken into a mental health facility after my father had passed away. She hadn't coped well with his death, and it was brought to the attention of child services that I was being neglected.
Thankfully, I don't remember much from those days other than being hungry, dirty, and cold. My grandfather had already been in his late fifties when I’d landed on his doorstep on the farm. There had been some hope that it was temporary, but my mother, in her second year at the facility, had caught pneumonia and hadn’t pulled through, making my grandfather my last family member. We'd muddled along together, learning from each other as we went. He was the measuring stick for every man I'd ever been out with. They had all come up short. They had big shoes to fill.
I’d loved that old man for all that he’d done for me, and I’d been devastated when he passed away this May. I'd been shocked when he told me he wanted to sell the farm, but once he’d explained that he didn't want to leave me looking after all this property by myself and that he wanted to leave me with a nice nest egg, I'd understood. The fact that he'd sold it to the Crow’s next door was a blessing.
They'd been happy to leave me with my five acres and they’d taken over management of all the livestock we'd had left. There wasn’t much. We still had pigs and a few chickens; I had a fair idea why they kept the pigs but the chickens? I had no idea why they'd kept them. They were left to roam and peck at the land with supplemented feeding. I assumed that they wouldn't be replacing them once they had all gone to chicken heaven.
