Consumed By the Charming Mountain Man (Silver Ridge Blue Collar Men #6)

1. Sage

one

Sage

The brewery is easy to miss if you're not looking for it.

Mara told me about it eight months ago and I filed it under someday and kept moving, because I've been moving since I left Vancouver and someday has been the organizing principle of my life.

I'm in Silver Ridge because I ran out of reasons not to be.

The road opens onto a cleared lot, a low cedar-sided building with a wide covered porch, and hanging planters still holding the end-of-season herbs: rosemary, thyme, sage of all things, leggy and past their prime but still giving off a smell that does something to me I don't want to examine closely.

The porch feels like someone thought about it.

The whole building feels like someone thought about it, which is not nothing.

A woman in her late fifties runs the floor with the unhurried authority of someone who's done this for decades and knows she's the best person in the room at it. I take a stool at the bar, pick up the menu, and start reading.

The food isn't trying to impress me. I find this genuinely impressive.

There's a note at the bottom of the menu about the brisket: fourteen-hour smoke, sold until we run out. That's a kitchen confidence move. You don't put a hard stop on something unless you know the thing is good enough that people will plan around it. Someone in that kitchen means it.

"You're reading the menu you like you’re studying for an exam."

I look up.

He came from the production side without me hearing the door.

I was focused on the menu, which is how he gets the drop on me, and I'm already annoyed at myself for it because the man is not subtle.

Tall. Dark-haired, dark beard trimmed close, broad through the shoulders.

He's wearing flannel rolled to the elbows and he smells of grain and something warmer and his hands when they come to rest on the bar are large and scarred at the knuckles.

Brown eyes. Direct and warm. I'm reading a man's eyes across a pub bar. I need to stop.

"Just reading," I say.

He looks at me with the patience of someone who has a much better read on the situation than I'd like. Then he picks up a small glass and pulls a pale ale without asking. Sets it in front of me.

"Tell me what you would pair with this," he says.

I should probably not do this. I pick it up and smell it — floral, a little citrus, clean bitterness — and taste it, and my brain does the thing it still does automatically even after eight months of trying to turn it off: catalogs, sorts, lands on an answer.

"Something fatty. Aged cheddar. Or the brisket, if the smoke doesn't overpower." I set the glass down. "The mushroom soup if you're using a good stock."

He's looking at me with an expression that has moved past pleased into something more like interested. I find this more dangerous.

"I'm Hops," he says.

"That's a name."

"Nickname. Henry Oliver Patrick Sullivan — my family grew hops in the Okanagan. It followed me." He says it the way someone says something they've made peace with, which is to say easily and with a hint that he finds it funny. "You?"

"Sage Wild."

He goes still. "Wild. Isn’t that a little on the nose?"

"Family thing. Less interesting than yours."

"Sage Wild," he says again, like he's placing it.

Then, before I can decide whether he's flirting or just warm — it might be both, I suspect it's both — he's setting a full tasting flight in front of me.

Five glasses, lightest to darkest, each labelled in pencil.

He brings small plates from the kitchen without asking: paired bites.

I taste everything. He watches me without watching me while he's doing other things, talking to the floor manager, refilling someone at the far end of the bar, laughing with two women at a table, and his attention on me doesn't waver through any of it.

I feel it the way you feel warmth from a fire when you're trying to pretend you're not cold.

Midway through the flight there's a saison that's wrong. Not wrong on its own terms — the beer is good, but the pairing suggestion is off, chasing a flavour note that isn't there and missing the one that is.

"The saison," I say, when he comes back. "The pairing doesn't work."

He leans on the bar. "Tell me."

So I tell him. And he listens and asks one question that's genuinely good, and I answer it, and then I'm two hours deep into a conversation I didn't plan to have with a man I didn't plan to meet in a town I planned to leave by Thursday.

"I'm not working in a kitchen right now," I say. It comes out like a disclaimer, which is exactly what it is.

"Okay," he says. Just that. Not why or but you clearly know what you're doing. Just okay, like he received the information and put it somewhere reasonable.

I look at him.

"Come back tomorrow," he says. "I'll show you the fermentation room."

"I'm staying at Silver Lodge. I was planning to leave by the end of the week."

"Come back tomorrow," he says again, like the leaving part didn't register.

I don't say yes. I don't say no. I tip Bev on the way out and I push through the door onto the covered porch where the rosemary is still releasing its smell into the October dark.