Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
James
I’m totally feeling the phrase too many cooks in the kitchen . Though it’s more like too many workers in my warehouse .
Yes, I’ll concede it’s been helpful to have so many hands. What I thought wouldn’t take more than a few hours has turned into an almost all-day project, and we’re still going. I’m glad the contractor is late because it would have been even more of a disaster if he’d gotten here two hours ago.
Despite the benefit of extra help, I’m stressed, irritated, and overwhelmed with a near-crippling frustration. All the tension has centered in my skull, giving me a headache to end all headaches. And a big cause of it all is the woman walking by precariously balancing a stack of rotten boards.
I resist the urge to scoop them out of Winnie’s hands.
She would fight me, first of all—I may not know her well, but I know this for certain.
Plus, she’s shown through the day how well she can handle heavy lifting.
Now that she’s wearing my gloves, I don’t need to worry about her getting splinters.
She should really be wearing long sleeves to protect her arms though.
Or so you won’t find yourself distracted by her tattoos?
Busted. By my own internal monologue.
All day long, I’ve struggled. Struggled not to boil over when another person I hardly know shows up to “help.” Struggled not to snap when Winnie baits me—because, oh yes, it’s very clear half the things she says are to get a reaction out of me.
Struggled not to stare at the tattoos covering her toned arms. Struggled not to worry about her safety—which is a thing I don’t know why I’m worrying about at all.
It’s not just Winnie. I also struggled not to toss Collin into the dumpster for his continued comments.
Opinions about the interior setup, unwelcome suggestions about employees, and remarks about how much attention I’m paying to Winnie.
Which was especially ironic considering the fact Collin spent most of the day glued to her side.
Smiling, talking, even cracking jokes, apparently, based on the laughter I kept hearing from her.
“Don’t forget you have a girlfriend,” I muttered to him at one point.
“Oh—do you not like me flirting with yours?”
His grin was just begging to be knocked off his face. Winnie came around the corner at that point, which is the only reason the two of us didn’t end up in a scuffle. When he and Chase finally drive back to Austin, I couldn’t be more thrilled.
Tank left a little while ago to pick up Jo from Mari’s, and the other random Sheeters have finally gone as well.
I should be able to relax now that the building is quiet.
My head, though, is anything but. I won’t be able to really let go until the contractor shows.
Plus, any minute now, Winnie will pop up with a snarky comment or some other surprise I’ll hate.
She started the day by throwing me off, bringing me a coffee with a smile and not even a trace of snark.
It smelled like a trap. Both the gesture and the sudden sweetness were so uncharacteristic that I threw the coffee away.
I don’t think Winnie is the type to put a laxative in my coffee, but I can’t be too careful when it comes to her.
I hear the swish of a broom over concrete and head toward the sound.
Winnie is sweeping the first and smaller room in the warehouse, the one that will become the main bar.
Without electricity, the shadows pool inside the building, and I use them to hide from sight, for the first time all day allowing myself the indulgence of watching her.
Winnie is impossible to ignore, even sweaty from a day of work and dressed in baggy, athletic clothes.
It’s the woman herself who holds all the allure, not whatever she’s wearing.
My gaze falls from her messy ponytail to her full lips down to her lean but defined shoulders and arms. Winnie may be petite, but she looks like she knows her way around a weight bench.
Her pale skin and lithe muscles only emphasize the dark tattoos swirling down her arms. They’re something like vines or ribbons, curving and twisting over her skin with what look like words and other objects woven in.
I want to trace them with my fingers, study them, ask her about each one.
Winnie suddenly pauses, looking up to meet my gaze. I jerk mine away from her tattoos. “Am I sweeping to your impossibly high standards, boss?”
That . That right there is why the muscles in my shoulders feel like they’ll never unclench again.
It’s the teasing lilt in Winnie’s voice, the slight edge of sarcasm every time she says boss , the glint in her eyes, more visible today without her glasses.
That threw me off too—the uninhibited view of her deep blue eyes.
Does she wear contacts? Or are the glasses just for show?
You don’t care, James. Winnie’s eyesight is not your business.
“Well?” She leans on the handle of the push broom, grinning at me. Her skin glows with a light sheen of sweat. She looks tired, but the happy kind of tired, the energized kind. My work gloves still cover her hands, and I like seeing them there, touching her skin.
Something about her sets off a series of connected reactions in me, spanning the distance from anger to attraction. Turns out, those two are closer in proximity to one another than I ever thought.
“It’s fine.”
“I think you need to refresh your vocabulary. The word fine is so … overused.”
I grunt at this. No need to use words at all.
“The place looks good,” she says, after a moment.
It does look good. And it wouldn’t be so close to completely cleaned out if she hadn’t been responsible for getting so many people here.
We would probably have another day or two of work, easy.
I’m working to scrounge up words to thank her when she starts to take off my work gloves with her teeth.
All my thoughts die right where they are. I swear my head is about to explode.
First, because those things are filthy. She’s been hauling rusty, old equipment and sweeping broken glass and picking up rotted pieces of wood for hours. My dirty gloves shouldn’t be anywhere near her mouth.
But also … watching Winnie’s teeth close around the finger of my glove has me imagining her mouth biting down on my fingertip. What would a little nip from her feel like?
“James? Are you still with me?”
“Yep.”
The problem is I’m a little too with her. I shake my head to dispel my errant thoughts. There’s nothing I can do, however, to shake loose the inexplicable attraction to a woman I don’t like. And the resulting frustration because Winnie’s draw only seems to be growing, not diminishing.
No, now I’ve devolved to the point of imagining Winnie nipping me with her teeth.
This is not like me. Tank made words like consent and respect a part of our early education, saying he refused to raise a house full of men who behaved like teenage boys in a locker room. I am not a man who imagines women—much less my employee— biting me .
And yep—now I’m picturing it again.
She has broken my brain. Winnie plus the stress of everything I’m trying to do here, the nagging comments from Collin all day, and the dang cats infesting the building—it’s all too much. That is the only explanation for my errant and inappropriate thoughts.
“When is the contractor coming? He’s pretty late.”
“Any minute now, temp.”
Winnie’s eyes light up at my words, and my stomach dips. Why did I have to go give her a nickname pulled straight from The Office ? And yet … the nickname totally fits. She is my Ryan—the totally unqualified temp I can’t get rid of.
“Hello?”
The contractor, now a full three hours late, has impeccable timing. I walk to meet him, shaking his hand as he apologizes for getting caught up at another site.
“I’m sorry I got such a late start,” he says, glancing around, his eyebrows climbing his forehead as he takes in the space. “Especially since it looks like you don’t have your electrical set up.”
“The electrician is coming later in the week, but I’m not sure if any of the lights work anyway. We’ll have to use phone flashlights.”
“That should be fine, since this is just a preliminary look. Wow,” he says, glancing around and running a hand through his dark red hair. “This space is massive. That’s a good and bad problem to have.”
That’s exactly one of the issues I’ve been having.
With a warehouse that’s essentially one massive open space with a few small storage rooms and closets, I don’t know how to break things up.
I’ve been to a lot of breweries in Austin to study how things are set up.
No two are alike. And none of them had a building this big and empty.
I’ve always been more focused on the brewing side of things, and while I have the measurements and know exactly where the system of tanks will be installed, everything else is a big question mark.
“Why don’t you walk me through and tell me what you’re thinking?”
I balk, because what AM I thinking? Doubt is a fast-acting poison, paralyzing me where I stand.
I don’t know how I want to break up this massive space.
I don’t know how to make the leap from brewing to serving beer and having a tasting room.
Recipes and flavor profiles—that I can do. But all of these details?
Not for the first time, I question the wisdom in taking on a giant project like this—upgrading from a Brewer’s Permit to a Brewpub Permit and turning my Me-shed small-batch brewing into a 10,000-barrel a year operation.
I don’t know how long I stand here, frozen, before Winnie steps between us, holding out one hand. She still has the push broom in the other. “Hey! I’m Winnie.”
“Peter. Good to meet you. Are you his, um, partner or …?”
Peter looks between me and Winnie, and I don’t know if he means partner in the romantic or business sense. I’m also not sure which of those ideas is the most preposterous.