Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster's Secret (Small Town Grumpy Sunshine #9)

1. Jenna

JENNA

The U-Haul's air conditioning quits somewhere around the Nebraska line, and by the time I cross into Colorado the whole cab smells like sunscreen, goldfish crackers, and the particular sourness of eight-year-old socks.

I crack the window another inch and tell myself the mountain air will fix everything once we get there.

It always looks that way in the pictures.

I've never actually seen Pinewood Ridge except in pictures.

"Mom." Eli's voice comes from the back seat, flat and urgent in the way that means business. "I need to pee."

"You said that twenty minutes ago."

"I need to pee again."

Josie doesn't look up from the coloring book balanced on her knees. "He drank the whole thermos."

"I was thirsty."

"You're always thirsty. That's not an excuse. That's a personality."

I laugh before I can stop myself, and something in my chest loosens for the first time since Ohio. Eight years old and already sharper than half the adults I left behind.

The dashboard clock says quarter past three.

My interview is at four, and I still don't know where the brewery is, only that Main Street is supposed to be impossible to miss in a town this size.

I pull off at the first gas station I see, a squat building with a hand-painted sign that says PINEWOOD RIDGE FUEL & FEED, and Eli is out the door and sprinting before I've fully stopped the truck.

"Walk," I call after him. "Please, for the love of God, just once, walk."

He does not walk.

Josie climbs out slower, dragging her backpack by one strap, and stands next to me squinting at the mountains like she's deciding whether to trust them.

They're bigger than anything either of the twins has grown up with, dark green going to blue at the top, and for a moment I understand the squint completely.

It's a lot of mountain to trust all at once.

"Is this it?" she asks. "Is this where we live now?"

"This is close to where we live now."

"Is it far from the ocean?"

We have never lived anywhere near an ocean. I don't correct her. "Pretty far, yeah."

"Good," she says, with the total conviction of a kid who has decided something and doesn't need reasons. "I didn't like the ocean anyway."

I know exactly what she means, and I don't ask her to explain it, because some things are easier left unsaid between two people who already understand each other.

By the time Eli reappears, looking smug and significantly lighter, we've lost ten minutes I don't have.

I buckle them both back in, merge onto Main Street, and start scanning storefronts for anything that says brewery.

What I find instead is a barn, a big one with red paint faded to the color of an old brick, two enormous doors thrown open at the front, and a hand-carved sign hanging crooked above them that reads RIDGELINE brEWING CO.

There's no parking lot to speak of, just a gravel apron wide enough for a few trucks, and I ease the U-Haul into the space furthest from the door like that'll make it less obvious I'm driving a twenty-six-foot rental into a job interview.

"We're here," I say, mostly to myself.

"Can we come in?" Eli's already got his seatbelt off.

"No. You're staying in the truck with a book and a very serious face while I go in and be a professional adult."

"I don't have a book."

"Then you're staying in the truck with a very serious face and nothing else."

I should have known better. I've known these two for eight years, and I should have known exactly how long that plan would last: about ninety seconds, roughly how long it takes me to grab my folder of resumes off the passenger seat and walk around to check the U-Haul's lock.

When I turn back around, both car doors are hanging open and two small figures are sprinting straight for the barn.

"Eli. Josie."

They don't stop. Of course they don't stop.

I take off after them at a dead run in flats that were not built for gravel, through the open doors, past a wall of stacked grain sacks that smell like warm bread, and into a cavern of a room full of steel tanks taller than I am, all of it lit by high dusty windows in gold afternoon light.

It's beautiful, actually, in the single heartbeat I have to notice.

Then I see where the twins have stopped dead in the middle of the floor, and I see why, and I stop noticing the room at all.

He's enormous. That's the first thing my brain manages to process, before it gets to any of the finer details.

He's six foot something, broad enough that he could probably block the doorway just standing there, arms crossed over his chest. There's a pale line of scar tissue disappearing under the rolled sleeve of his flannel, and his face has the stillness of a man doing math he doesn't like the answer to.

He is looking down at my children like they might detonate.

"I'm so sorry." I get a hand on each small shoulder, more to reassure myself than to contain them. "They got away from me. We were just parking. I have an interview at four, I'm early, I didn't mean to just... come charging in like this."

He doesn't say anything. He keeps looking at the twins like he's not sure what to do with them, somewhere between alarmed and confused.

"You're not supposed to be back here," he says finally, to them, not to me. His voice is low and rough, like it doesn't get much use.

"Sorry," Eli says, entirely unbothered. "It smells really good in here. Is that beer?"

"It is."

"Can I have some?"

"No."

"Can I have a job?"

That gets the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, gone almost before I catch it. "How old are you?"

"Eight."

"No."

"What about her?" Eli jerks a thumb at his sister, who has gone unusually still, which is never a good sign with Josie.

She's staring up at him with the particular focus she gets right before she does something that mortifies me, and I open my mouth to intervene approximately half a second too late.

She pulls a dandelion out of her jacket pocket, slightly crushed from the drive, and holds it out to him with both hands like she's presenting a medal.

"This is for you," she says. "Because you look sad."

The room goes very quiet. I brace myself for him to say something sharp, because that's what my brain has been trained to expect from a man this size with that kind of stillness in his shoulders, and I hate myself a little for the flinch that's already starting behind my ribs.

Instead he crouches down, slow, like he's approaching something that might spook, and takes the flower from her with two fingers like it's made of glass.

"Thank you," he says, and his voice has changed completely, gone low and gentle. "Nobody's given me a flower in a while."

"You're welcome." Josie beams at him like she's just fixed something. In her mind, she probably has.

He straightens back up, looks at the dandelion in his hand for a second too long, and then looks at me like he's just remembered I'm standing there.

"You're the four o'clock."

"Jenna Walsh." I stick out my hand, praying it isn't shaking as visibly as it feels. "And I promise I don't usually bring an entourage."

He shakes it. His hand swallows mine entirely, calloused, warm, and the handshake itself is careful in a way that doesn't match anything else about him, like he's used to holding back more strength than he needs to.

"Rafe Montgomery." He pauses for a beat. "You're early."

"The twins had other plans."

"I noticed."

There's an office off the side of the brewhouse, more of a converted supply closet with a desk crammed into it, and he waves me toward it while Eli and Josie trail behind us like they've decided this is now their building too.

He doesn't tell them to wait outside. I notice that, and I file it away without knowing yet what to do with it.

The desk is a disaster. Stacks of paper leaning at angles that violate several laws of physics, an ancient desktop computer with a Post-it note stuck to the screen that just says CALL BACK in block capitals, and what appears to be an actual literal shoebox sitting open with receipts spilling out of it.

"That's the filing system," he says, following my eyes. "I'm aware of how it looks."

"This is a crime scene."

"It's not far off. My last office manager quit three months ago. Didn't tell me. Just stopped showing up one morning, and I found out when the state sent a letter asking why I hadn't filed quarterly taxes."

"Isn't that illegal? The vanishing part, I mean."

"Probably. I didn't chase it. I was more concerned with the taxes."

I glance at Eli, who has picked up an invoice off the desk and is reading it with total absorption like it might contain state secrets, and at Josie, who has found a rolling office chair and is spinning herself in slow, contented circles.

"I did bookkeeping for a divorce attorney for three years," I say, dragging his attention back before he changes his mind about all of this.

"Forty thousand line items, reconciled monthly, and I never once made him ask twice for a number.

I can read a spreadsheet. I can read a shoebox, if that's what this job actually requires. "

I slide my resume across the desk before he can talk himself out of listening to the rest of it.

He looks at me for a long moment, and I can't tell if he's reading it or just deciding something about me. "Why'd you leave the attorney job?"

"We moved."

"From where?"

"Does it matter?"

Something shifts in his face, like he's just decided not to push on a door that's clearly locked. "No," he says. "It doesn't."

He doesn't ask again. I don't offer anything else, and the silence settles between us like a small, mutual agreement neither of us says out loud.

"I'm bad at math," he says instead, flat, like it's a confession he's made before and hated every time. "I'm worse at people. I need somebody who can do both so I can go back to doing the one thing I'm actually good at."

"Making beer, you mean."

"That's the one."

Josie stops spinning the chair long enough to announce, "My mom's really good at people. She's just bad at parking."

"I heard that," I say.

"It's true, though."

Rafe's mouth does the thing again, the almost-smile that doesn't quite commit, and for a second this stops feeling like an interview and starts feeling like a conversation I might actually want to keep having.

He looks down at the resume in his hand for another few seconds, then sets it on top of the shoebox without reading past the first line.

"When can you start?"

"That's it? You're not going to ask me anything else?"

"Do you want me to?"

"No," I say, too fast, and he almost smiles again. "I can start whenever you need me."

"Tomorrow, then." He glances at Eli, still absorbed in the invoice, and at Josie, already climbing down off the chair to inspect a poster on the wall. "Bring snacks next time. For them, I mean. Not for the invoices."

"Noted."

We shake on it, same careful grip as before, and I walk the twins back out through the brewhouse with a job I didn't have when I drove in and can't quite believe I'm leaving with.

The late sun is slanting gold through the high windows again, catching the steel tanks, and for one strange, suspended second the whole place looks less like a stranger's building and more like somewhere I could actually belong.

The rental cabin is fifteen minutes outside town, up a gravel road so dark by the time we find it that my headlights are the only light for half a mile in either direction.

The twins fall asleep before we're even off the highway, worn down by a day that asked too much of them, and I drive the last stretch in a silence that feels earned rather than lonely.

My phone buzzes on the passenger seat.

I glance at it out of habit, the way you check a stove burner you already know is off, and the number on the screen stops my breath for exactly one beat.

It's not saved. I deleted it eight states ago, in a parking lot outside Toledo, with my hands shaking so badly it took three tries to hit confirm.

But deleting a number doesn't mean you forget it, and I've had this one memorized since long before I knew better.

I don't answer it. I don't even open it to see what it says.

I turn the phone face-down on the seat beside me and keep both hands on the wheel, keep my eyes on the narrow beam of road ahead, and let the last of the daylight finish draining out of the sky over Pinewood Ridge.

Somewhere behind me, Eli mutters something in his sleep about beer and invoices.

Somewhere in my chest, a thought surfaces that I'm too tired to argue with.

The scariest-looking man I've met in years is also the first one in a long time who's made me want to stay somewhere.

I hold onto that thought instead of the phone, all the way home.