A Shot With You (Bourbon Brothers) Page 8

  Brandon figured the reason everyone tiptoed around Lorena was because they all understood where she was coming from. Losing her husband in a drunk driving accident was bad enough—but the scandal that followed had wrecked them all. And then losing Dave in Iraq—well, no mother should have to experience that. So she was cranky.

  “I knew your parents long ago, dear,” Lorena said, leading the way into her living room and sounding more like a Southern belle than a modern, fifty-five-year-old businesswoman. “I was sooooo sorry to hear about your mother. I hope your father is doing well.” The insincerity rolled off of her in waves.

  Brandon noticed that Lesa’s lips just barely tightened. “Thank you. Papa’s great,” she lied. Brandon wasn’t sure how he could tell. Maybe a quick glance away before she answered Lorena, or a stiffening in her shoulders, but there was more there than simple grief at the long-ago loss of her mother.

  He cleared his throat. “So we stopped down to see how the new tasting center is going.”

  “Oh, it’s going to be gorgeous,” Lorena gushed, reaching for a leather-bound notebook on the coffee table and opening it.

  While Lesa oohed and ahhed over the architect’s rendering, Brandon murmured to Eve, “What’s going on?”

  Eve motioned him to the kitchen. “The contractor’s not answering my calls. Caleb said he hasn’t seen him around in a few days, and I’ve tried calling him all morning, but no answer. And Mom’s flipping out, because I hired the guy—he’s an amazing carpenter—but he’s someone she knew from her old life. You know how that goes. She’s convinced he’s a useless drunk.”

  “Yeah,” Brandon said. He did know. Lorena had grown up in less than affluent circumstances, and after marrying Jamie McGrath had made herself into a bluegrass blueblood. And she didn’t have much nice to say about anyone who’d known her when she’d lived in the rundown shack in the next county.

  Just then, Eve’s cell phone rang and Brandon returned to the living room.

  “Lorena, I’m sure you’re wiped out from all the traveling you’ve done the past few days.”

  “Oh, Brandon, you know me better than that,” she said. “I never sit still.”

  Okay, exhaustion wasn’t going to work as a ploy to keep her up here while the rest of them went to check out the work site.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’m sure you have a lot to catch up with here at the house. I was going to suggest Eve take Lesa and me down to have a look and see how things are going.”

  “Do you mind if I use your bathroom?” Lesa asked.

  “Certainly, dear.” Lorena pointed her down the hall.

  Brandon watched her walk down the hall—he loved to watch her walk.

  “Dammit!” Eve said, swinging her phone like she was going to throw it, but she shoved it into her pants pocket at the last minute and shot a sideways glance at her mother instead. She opened the notebook she always carried with her—her life management planner, she’d explained to him once—and scribbled something in it.

  “What’s the matter?” Lorena was on full alert.

  Brandon could see Eve weigh the wisdom of lying, and her decision to just get it out there in the open.

  “There are two cement trucks down at the building site, and no forms in place for the foundation.”

  Ice crystals practically billowed from Lorena’s nose and ears, and Brandon was glad Lesa didn’t have to witness the woman go from a warm, welcoming junior league hostess to the ice queen who could freeze any obstacle in her path, damn the people who were collaterally frostbitten.

  “Sweetheart,” she said to Eve, “I apologize for not being more direct and pulling rank when it came to suggesting you should choose the more reputable construction company over a ‘locally sourced’ business. I grew up with that SOB and I knew his irresponsibility would stay with him.”

  “It’s okay to just say ‘I told you so,’” Eve grumbled under her breath. Louder, she said, “Mother, I’ll take care of it.”

  “I hope it’s not too late to get the Randall brothers to come out and oversee the work. They did a wonderful job on the Robertsons’ new house.”

  Eve sighed, and looked down the hall, apparently to make sure that Lesa wasn’t standing there. She hissed, “Mom, the Randalls won’t work with us. Apparently Daddy screwed them over, too.” She turned to Brandon. “Sorry. I know you don’t like to have to talk about that stuff.”

  Brandon shook his head. “No problem.” And it shouldn’t be. It had been many years, and the pain of humiliations past was beginning to finally ease. Except, of course, when anyone brought it up.

  Lorena’s lips were tightly closed. There was no way she’d call the Randall brothers now. Lorena had lost not only her husband in that drunk driving accident, she’d lost a shit ton of money and, even more important to her, significant social standing—and was only now beginning to feel comfortable in all of the places that fashionable Kentucky women went.

  “Well. We’re not going to be bringing that dirty laundry out for airing.” She turned. “Oh, look, here’s your friend.”

  Lesa raised an eyebrow. “Uh, yes. Here I am.”

  Eve rolled her eyes, and Lorena’s lips were even whiter than usual.

  “We’ll go down and talk to the cement guys and see what we can do,” Brandon offered. Another instance where Lesa would see Blue Mountain at her worst, but there was nothing he could do about it now. At least she didn’t have to be present for Eve and Lorena’s fight about who the contractor should be.

  Eve said she’d keep trying to reach the contractor, while Brandon and Lesa took the golf cart down the hill. As far as he knew, Lorena stayed in her perfect living room with a frozen smile, trying not to let her facade crack.

  …

  Over the next several hours, Lesa learned more about the construction business than she had ever hoped to. Right now, she was watching concrete dry. Or set. Or cure. Whatever. And surprisingly enough, she was enjoying herself immensely.

  “You’re gonna have to pay for these two trucks and the two more that are on the way,” the cement mixer driver had told Brandon when they rolled the golf cart up to the building site, which was nothing more than a hole in the ground at the moment.

  “You can’t divert it to another job?”

  “Nope.” The man sent a stream of brown spit into the foundation hole for the new business and tasting center for Blue Mountain Distilling.

  “Why not?” Lesa asked. Not to challenge the man—she was trying to remember that this wasn’t her problem, though she did feel bad for Brandon having to deal with this. He hadn’t said so directly, but she got the impression Eve was in over her head on this project, and he felt responsible to help her dig out. His enthusiasm for the project was infectious, however.

  The cement driver smiled at Lesa, looking her up and down. Brandon stepped closer to her.

  She’d never admit it to anyone but herself, but his protectiveness gave her some warm fuzzies. And there was that time when they first met—when she misunderstood what he told her his job was and she thought he was a professional grocery shopper. The dentist had laughed at her, but Brandon had shot him daggers with his eyes and gone along with her confusion so as not to embarrass her. The warm fuzzies squirmed happily. She smacked them down and took what she hoped was a casual step away from Brandon. Snuggly safe feelings could be deceptive, leading to dependence—and obligation. She was on vacation here, not The Bachelorette.

  “Well, ma’am,” the guy said, “This here ready-mix is a moderate-weight aggregate, and the other job we have in this area today is for a decorative, stained mix, and we can’t just dump extra rocks and pigment into this particular version. And concrete don’t keep. Once it’s been mixed, it’s hardenin’.” Spit.

  “How long do we have before you have to dump it?” Brandon asked, eyeing the giant hole in the ground and the half-finished forms for the walls of the basement.

  The guy looked at his phone. “’Bout an hour.”

  “
All right.” He motioned to the small finished area in front of him. “You start here. We’ll put up the rest of the forms and hopefully keep ahead of you.”

  Spit. “Welp, son, I hope you’ve got some work gloves, or those purty hands o’ yours are gonna be in sad shape by about three this afternoon.”

  Caleb, the distillery manager, had been listening to Brandon, and he nodded. “Miss Lesa,” he said, “would you feel comfortable driving up to the bottling plant and then the still room, and ask everyone who’s not fixing the broken equipment to get their backsides down here?”

  “Absolutely,” she answered. “Especially if I get to drive the race cart.” Shooting Brandon a grin, she jumped into the driver’s seat of the golf cart.

  “Hang on,” he said, walking over to her. “I’m sorry. I’m gonna be tied up with this all day. I can ask Lorena—” He shot a worried glance back toward the McGrath house. “Maybe Lorena and Eve would be free to take you into Lexington to go shopping or something?”

  Lesa snorted. “Where will I find extra work gloves? We don’t want your purty hands to get too beat up. Or mine.”

  “Ask Dale in the still house,” Caleb hollered, as she drove away, leaving Brandon staring after her.

  The next four hours were a whirlwind of hammering and mud. What normally probably took two days of work was finished before the last concrete truck rumbled into the driveway of Blue Mountain.

  “Oh my God, you’re a mess,” Eve said, handing Lesa a wet wipe to clean her hands. She’d been on the phone for hours trying to straighten things out with the contractor. “I can’t believe you got down in there and set those forms with the guys. I’m in awe.”

  Lesa shrugged. “I mostly was a…chipmunk,” she said.

  “Gopher?” Eve asked. “You go for this and go for that.”

  Lesa laughed. She liked Eve. “Yes. I goed for…um, went for tools. But I did manage to get dirty enough for it to count, I guess.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Lesa dropped the wipe into the plastic grocery bag Eve held and thanked her for the bottle of water she handed her. The woman was about her height with short dark, wavy hair and blue eyes. She reminded Lesa of Elizabeth Taylor—somewhere between the teenager in National Velvet and the man-eater in Cleopatra. Maybe Father of the Bride.

  She wondered if Brandon had ever had a thing for Eve, but when he walked over and asked her about the contractor, she didn’t get any vibe from either of them about anything besides friendship. Not that it was any of her business. She was a temporary guest star in this film.

  “So did you find him?” he asked.

  “More or less. He’s apparently had the flu. According to Mother, it’s the brown bottle flu.”

  “Aw hell.” Brandon started to scratch his head, but stopped and pulled off his glove before trying again.

  Lesa noticed his hands didn’t look the worse for wear. Too bad. She wouldn’t have minded rubbing lotion into his blisters, if he’d gotten any. But she suspected, from the way he’d taken on the manual labor, that he was no stranger to hard work. He was just better at the business part of things, so that’s what he did.

  “Did you fire him?” he asked.

  Eve shook her head. “We don’t have anyone else who can step in right now, and we’re already behind schedule, which really will put us over budget.” She shot a look at Lesa.

  Lesa pretended to be busy checking her phone for emails and not paying attention.

  In spite of the broken equipment and mismanagement in the construction arena, she felt that this was a good place. The people here jumped right in to solving problems. When she’d stepped into the still room, people had been cleaning—not sitting around and drinking coffee while they waited for their actual job to start. And when she’d explained that Brandon needed help with construction, one of the women had laughed and said, “Yeah, I would imagine he does.” And then she’d told Lesa a story about the pinewood derby car he’d tried to carve when he was a Cub Scout.

  Brandon wasn’t just the big boss’s son. He was a respected, contributing part of this enterprise. His employees cared for him, and he cared for them as well. And that seemed like good business to her.

  Granted, Lesa hadn’t yet bothered to dig into the operations and finance books, but her instincts told her that Papa could do worse than go for Brandon’s barrel deal. Without all the subterfuge.

  She looked at Brandon, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, his polo shirt stretched over his sweaty chest and shoulders, and reminded her hormones that it was all fun and games on vacation, but thinking about more than a fling led to people getting hurt—like her. Brandon was exactly the kind of guy who would want his woman to stick close to home, and she’d already discarded that as a life option.

  Chapter Ten

  “Oh my God,” Lesa gasped between licks and sucks at her fingers. “This barbecue sauce is amazing. I. Love. It.”

  Brandon shot a glance at the pile of bare rib bones on her paper plate. “I can see that.”

  The rest of the afternoon’s work crew bid Brandon and Lesa good-bye and faded into the dusk with a wave.

  What a great group of employees they had here at Blue Mountain. They’d pitched in to help him get the forms in for the foundation and even pretended to protest when he insisted on buying ribs and beer as a thank-you.

  It had been a good day. It could have been a major setback for Eve’s project—and this tasting center was near and dear to her heart—but they’d managed to pull together to take care of today’s crisis, anyway.

  Hopefully she’d be able to get her contractor sobered up long enough to come through and finish the job so she didn’t have to listen to her mother gripe too much. And so they didn’t have to have a public dissection of past problems, and why some in the tri-county area wouldn’t do business with Blue Mountain. The last thing Lorena wanted was to talk about her late husband. Brandon’s memories of Jamie McGrath were tarnished, as well. He didn’t like to remember how gullible he’d been when he’d gotten involved with Suzanne, and what she’d gone and done, the part she’d played in Jamie’s downfall, but it wasn’t about him. What he couldn’t bear was the thought of Lorena and her daughters being dragged back through the crap of the past.

  Lesa seemed to have had a good time helping this afternoon, too, which surprised him. He could tell she was a doer. But getting in that big muddy hole and slogging around all day certainly wasn’t in her visiting-business-associate agenda. If she was playing him so that he’d offer Carlos below market price on the barrels, she was working overtime. And there wouldn’t be any payout. He let himself have a moment to imagine Suzanne, standing and watching while Brandon and the rest of the Blue Mountain crew worked. No, Suzanne wouldn’t have been standing and watching. If she’d stuck around at all, she’d have been sitting in a folding chair searching Pinterest for fingernail decorations.

  “And this beer is pretty good, too.” She swallowed the last of the Bourbon Barrel Ale in her bottle and clunked it down on the table. She grinned, a stray bit of sauce on her cheek, giving her a definite sexy maniac look. Kind of a supermodel Hannibal Lecter thing.

  “You’ve got a—” He touched his face, to show her where the sauce was.

  “Where?” She reached up, but only managed to smear it farther along her cheek.

  With an exaggerated sigh, he swiped at her face with his thumb and held it out in front of her.

  “Oh.” She reached out, took his wrist, and pulled his thumb into her mouth. Watching him, her tongue swirled over the pad, silky strokes along the knuckle.

  Oh Jesus. He shifted in his seat

  With one last little lick, she released him. “There.” “We seem to have a habit of cleaning each other’s faces,” he said, remembering the other night in the kitchen with the peanut butter.

  She snickered. “We’re like orangutans at the zoo.” She held up the bottle, and raised her eyebrows at Brandon. “Want another one?”

  He shoo
k his head. He still had to maneuver the golf cart up the hill.

  She frowned in thought. “Are orangutans the ones that have big swollen butts when they are in the mood?”

  “Are you sure you want another?” he asked.

  She nodded vigorously. “This is the best beer I’ve ever had.”

  “It is good. But I think we’re out of cold ones.”

  “Oh. Maybe another would be a bad idea, anyway.” A strand of hair fell over her face and she blew it out of the way. She smiled, and it was that smile. The one that welcomed everyone in. A little goofy at the moment, but still powerful.

  He knew she wasn’t for him, that she was a rambler, and she said she didn’t want to live at a distillery. Although she might feel differently if her dad’s enterprise was in better shape. He’d gotten some information today about the Ruiz finances that told him that Pequeño Zarigüeya could use more than some souped-up barrels. They needed a cash infusion. If he were inclined to take risks, he might be able to help, in exchange for an interest in the tequileria. He wasn’t sure it would be a good deal, however, and he only took chances if—well, he didn’t take chances.

  He gathered the rest of the trash and shoved it into the big garbage bag and made a mental note to send the owner of Mamaw’s Meat Shop a bottle of Dangerous Dave’s as a thank-you for the last-minute delivery. Mamaw’s was another of his favorite hole-in-the-wall places—fortunately this one hadn’t been taken over by smoking, drinking, organic, Goth people.

  “What are we going to work on tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Uh, hopefully nothing,” he said. “I’m supposed to be convincing you that everything here is hunky dory, not roping you into participating in our problems.” The last thing he needed was letting her see anything else go wrong.

  “Hmm.” She eyed him, but didn’t say anything as she rose to follow him to the golf cart.