Chapter 31
Luna
“Okay,” I say, before my duffel even lands on the luggage rack. “Bags are down. I have been a paragon of patience for six hours so you are now legally required to tell me what this trip is about.”
“A paragon.” Ash sets the garment box on the dresser, very carefully. “Is that what we’re calling the woman who tried to open this surprise at a gas station?”
“I was checking the ribbon for damage,” I say, putting my hands up.
“You were picking the knot,” he says, a slow, smile tipping up the corner of his mouth.
Dang, he noticed. I drop the question entirely, choosing to take in the room instead. It’s a nice space, glowing under the light of a few warm lamps, with a sprawling view of half the Seattle skyline framed perfectly in the window, and...
Two double beds.
Two. Separate. Double beds.
I’m staring. I can feel my face doing something, and dignified is not the word for it.
Ash follows my line of sight. “I didn’t want to be presumptuous,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck, a faint color rising in his cheeks.
“Booking one bed felt like assuming things.” He hooks two fingers under the ribbon on the garment box, idle, watching me.
“Of course, you’re always welcome in mine. Well, if you’re a good girl...”
He says it as a joke, but simply mentioning a bed with him is enough to short-circuit my brain.
We can be good, my omega says instantly. We can be SO good. Ask him what it pays.
“Noted,” I say instead, and my voice comes out almost steady. “So are you going to tell me what we are doing here?”
“I did promise I’d tell once we’d arrive.” He pulls the desk chair out for me, then sits on the foot of the nearer bed, elbows on his knees.
I sit down in the chair. “So?”
“There’s a man named Warren Holt,” Ash says.
“Beverage and hospitality money. He got started with one cocktail bar and now he owns about thirty of the nicest rooms on the West Coast, two restaurant groups, a distribution arm.” A beat.
“Tonight he’ll be drinking at a place across town called The Cormorant Room. ”
I wait for the rest of it. The rest of it does not come. “Okay, so the plan is to meet him there?”
“Yes, and to get him to invest in our cider. Except there’s a small catch.” His half-smile tips up. “I only brought a handful of bottles, and we don’t have an appointment.”
“I see.” I cross my arms. “So how do we get him on board?”
“I don’t know yet,” he says, his gaze steady on mine. “Which is why you’re here. Reed told me how you handled that kid back at the orchard, and I was impressed. So I was hoping you’d help me figure out how to get a guy like Warren to invest in a small-scale operation like ours.”
I want to say yes so fast it embarrasses me. “I’d need to research the guy,” I say instead. “And for that, I need more than my phone. But since somebody told me to pack light...”
“Somebody also said he had the rest.” He crosses to his bag, unzips it, and produces two laptops. Then a fresh legal pad. Then a handful of pens.
Well, that should do it.
“One more thing.” He nods at the garment box. “Open it.”
The ribbon I have been criminally prevented from touching since dawn gives up its knot in two seconds. Tissue paper. Then—
An emerald dress, in fabric that pours through my hands when I lift it. Square neck. Fitted through the waist with a subtle slit up the skirt. It’s obscenely soft.
Put it on, my hindbrain says. Put it on RIGHT NOW.
“Ash,” I say. My voice catches on his name, a soft, embarrassing hitch. “You shouldn’t have. Between this and the room... you could have put this money back into the orchard and—”
“I do what I please with my personal money,” he cuts in, a faint smile touching his lips as he keeps his eyes on mine.
I’m holding the dress slightly away from my body, afraid of putting fingerprints on it. “How did you even know my size?”
“Let’s just say I had a long, good look at you the night we met,” he says, perfectly relaxed.
“Is that so?” I ask in a sultry voice. “I’m impressed you remember, given how beautifully impaired you were by those sleeping chocolates.”
“Oh, I have an excellent memory,” he says, low. “... for things worth remembering.”
I have to squeeze my hands into fists to keep from perfuming and fucking him right on his bed. Fuck, that’s hot.
“Well then.” He stands, and suddenly the room is full of him. “Grab your coat. We’re not doing research cooped up in a hotel room like fugitives.”
“Where does one research a millionaire, if not a nice hotel room?” I ask.
“Somewhere with éclairs,” he says, already holding the door. “Obviously.”
***
The café two blocks down is all marble and brass, bright afternoon light streaming through the front window in wide, warm stripes, and a pastry case the size of a pool table.
Ash installs me at a corner table with my pick of the case and a coffee, takes the seat with his back to the wall, and slides the orchard’s laptop across the marble.
What I learn about Warren Holt in two hours and one cinnamon twist:
He’s fourty-five-ish, an alpha out of no money at all, and he has given the same origin story to every trade publication that would sit still for it: one failing cocktail bar, rebuilt by hand, then another, then an empire.
His self-made-ness is in the first paragraph of everything ever written about him.
He funds brands suddenly, completely, and always with a story attached.
And in fourteen interviews, nine podcast appearances, and one keynote I watch at double speed with my earbuds in, a pattern keeps surfacing, quiet and consistent, interview after interview.
Every single brand he’s ever backed, he found. The bottled negroni he noticed at a wedding. The mezcal he ordered by accident in Oaxaca. He tells each story the same way—the stumble, the discovery, the “I knew before anyone knew”.
I don’t take pitches. I take walks, I read.
Hmm, I guess it means he lets discoveries happen organically...
“He can’t be pitched,” I say slowly. “Pitching him is how you lose. Everything he’s ever invested in, he says he discovered.”
“Uh.” Ash sets his cup down. “So we don’t pitch?”
“No,” I say, flipping to a clean page on the legal pad. “We figure out how to make him discover us.”