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Present Day
Salvation, Virginia
At times like this, Sean O’Dell—movie star in hiding—almost wished he’d never left Hollywood and the millions sitting untouched in the bank.
If he could make it across the Sweet Salvation Brewery to the walk–in cooler in time, he could hide behind the crates of hops until Natalie Sweet left. Worst case scenario, he’d ditch the stubborn woman in the stacks of burlap bags filled with malt.
He’d purposefully ordered the staff to arrange them out of alphabetical order just to annoy the efficiency expert always nipping at his heels. The micromanaging menace could never go near them without stopping a staff member to help her put the bags to rights. He laughed, but didn’t slow his breakneck pace through the brewery.
Hooking a left turn at the brew kettle, he pulled his Southeast Brewers Invitational baseball hat lower and hustled toward the cooler.
“Yo, brewmaster, hold up, man,” the brewery’s delivery driver hollered from the open bay door.
Sean didn’t check his speed. “Nope.”
“But your shadow—” The words faded into background noise when Sean made a left at the bottling station.
Punctual to the hundredths of a second, the bane of his existence marched out the door at 5:05 every day without fail. If he could make it undiscovered for the next ten minutes, he’d have until six tomorrow morning blissfully free of her clipboard, her flowcharts, her spreadsheets, and her plans to change everything about the brewery that he loved. Not to mention Natalie’s big blue eyes, the stubborn tilt of her chin, and the curves she tried—and failed—to hide underneath cardigans the color of carnival cotton candy.
The question of exactly how fast, or slow, he could unfasten all those little pearly buttons haunted him as he lay in bed at night and in his morning shower—exactly the kind of thoughts he should not be having about the woman who signed his paychecks.
The walk–in cooler stood twenty feet away.
So frickin’ close he could practically smell the flowery green hops and feel them crumble in his palms.
The weight on his chest eased with each step. He was going to close out the day without having yet another conversation with Natalie about lean manufacturing or whatever the hell system the people at Toyota invented.
She’d been hounding him all day to sit down with her and go over her crazy–ass plans to streamline the brewery process. As if the craft and creativity of making beer could be distilled down to numbers on a spreadsheet. The woman was as annoyingly persistent as she was hot—both were a distraction he didn’t need in his life right now, not with the Southeast Brewers Invitational coming up.
But for the next thirteen hours, he wouldn’t have to hear any of her harebrained recommendations. He reached for the cooler’s door handle and turned it, noticing as he did so that it wasn’t latched.
He yanked open the door before his brain processed the ants dancing up his spine.
The motion triggered the cooler’s sensor–activated overhead lights. His gut dipped and he clenched his jaw.
Natalie stood shivering on the other side of the cooler’s threshold, clutching her damn clipboard to her chest.
He stopped cold. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you in your favorite hiding spot.” Her teeth chattered. “Do you really think I don’t know your secrets?”
God knew exactly how long she’d been lying in wait for him, but it was enough time for her button nose to turn red and her glasses to frost over. His gaze slid to the right. The temperature gage read twenty–six.
A smarter man would have shut the door and walked away, let her deal with the consequences of spending time in the cooler without a coat. But no one—from his asshole of a father to his always–hungry–for–more agent to his on–set teachers—had ever accused him of having an overabundance of brains.
Instead, he whipped off his thick hoodie and pulled it over her head. Not bothering to get her arms through the sleeves, he wrapped her up—clipboard and all—inside its fleece warmth. The hood drooped over her head, covering everything down to her nose. Before she could squeak out a noise over the chattering of her teeth, he wrapped an arm around her narrow waist and tossed her over one shoulder like a sack of grain. Her cold seeped into him, pouring over his body and making him shiver.
“P–p–put me down.” She made a halfhearted attempt to wriggle free.
“No.” He spun around and kicked the cooler door shut with his boot heel.
“This is unseemly.”
Her body may be half a degree away from being a snow cone, but holding her like this had him running a few degrees warmer. “Yep.”
“You can’t just carry me around like this,” Natalie huffed against his lower back. “I’m your boss.”
“I can and you are.” But he was bound to forget that last part if she kept squirming against him. Hell, he couldn’t seem to remember that fact while he was alone at night staring at his bedroom ceiling and imagining how those damn little buttons would open under his touch.
