Page 1 of Bad Luck Club

Chapter One

“So you’re firing me?” Lee asked in a dry tone, tapping his finger on the table at Dos Sombreros. He had to admit this was how he probably would have handled it if he were in charge of Buchanan Brewery. Pick a public place to lessen the likelihood of him causing a scene. Assign his younger sister, Adalia, as executioner. It was hard to get furious with Addy.

Still, it felt like an especially low point to get fired by his kid sister beneath the two giant sombreros tacked to the wall.

“What?” she squawked, her eyes huge. “No! Of course not.”

“You just told me that I wasn’t a good fit for the social media division of Buchanan Brewery. The words ‘Debbie Downer’ were used.” He lifted his hands to make air quotes.

“Look,” Adalia said sympathetically, “not everyone is cut out for social media. And the two of us tweeting and posting on Insta and Facebook isn’t exactly adivision.”

It was hard to call anything a division in their small, family-owned brewery, which only had thirty employees, six of whom were either family or connected to the family in a very personal way.

He gave her a pointed stare. “Assisting Jack in event planning didn’t work out.”

Not that Jack hadn’t tried. Every time Lee had done something egregiously wrong, his half-brother had gone on and on about the learning curve.

Her left eyelid twitched. “In hindsight, having you help with a wedding reception two weeks after your breakup with your almost fiancée wasn’t the best idea.” Her gaze shifted to the floor and back. “Mistakes were made.”

Like Lee warning the groom that he’d noticed his father eyeing his new bride with a little more interest than might be appropriate. A fight had broken out, and the police had been called. Not exactly good publicity.

“Talk about the understatement of the new year,” Lee said.

“So you might have been projecting your own personal feelings.” She made a face that suggested it was painful to think of the reception. “We were equally to blame.”

As if that weren’t bad enough, they’d posted him at Buchanan Brewery’s booth at a beer festival in January, something Adalia’s boyfriend, Finn, had set up as a dry run for Brewfest, the big brewery competition coming up in March. Of course, the first to approach the booth were the bride and groom from that night, freshly back from their honeymoon. “Oh, come on,” the guy had groaned, as if a dog had taken a dump on his lawn.

Lee shuddered, but thinking about the wedding reception and its fallout was still better than dwelling on his own garbage fire of a life, which was why he’d been involved in the reception in the first place. He was supposed to be selling commercial real estate to millionaires, but here he was homeless and jobless in Asheville, North Carolina.

Okay, so the last part was an exaggeration. Sort of. He wasn’t homeless since he was a one-fourth owner of the house he lived in with Adalia, Jack, and Jack’s teenage sister, Iris. And his one-quarter ownership in the brewery he and his siblings had inherited seven months ago meant he wasn’t technically unemployed.

But just because his name was on the paperwork didn’t mean he belonged there. As he’d proven again and again by failing at every task he was given. Those failures had only chipped away at his already-damaged psyche. His father had drilled it into his head that Buchanans did not fail.Ever.So each thwarted attempt to contribute to Buchanan Brewery had made him feel more worthless than he’d felt before, which was an impressive feat in and of itself.

“What else is there for me to do?” he asked. “As you know, I’ve tried everything else. Even working in the tasting room—the one job that required little more than listening to Dottie talk about crystals—was a total bust.”

“Perhaps because you lacked serving experience,” Adalia said.

It was true he’d never waited tables like his sister had. Then again, Adalia was months away from her thirtieth birthday and had spent most of her adult years either in art school or as a starving artist who’d held down multiple jobs to make ends meet, much to their father’s humiliation. Lee was nearly thirty-two and had never worked for anyone besides Prescott Buchanan at Buchanan Luxury.

“I don’t want to even mention what happened when they put me on the production line,” he said with a shudder.

Her mouth twisted and guilt filled her eyes. “River thought it was a good idea for you to learn the brewery from the ground up, and also, in hindsight, hemayhave been trying to punish you.”

“For which of my sins?” Lee asked dryly. “Suggesting he was only marrying our sister to hedge his bets for ownership of the brewery, or ruining his engagement party? Or maybe because he flat out doesn’t like me?”

Adalia considered her answer for a moment. “Likely all of the above.” Then she added, her eyes lighting up, “And spilling twenty gallons of beer on the floor isnothingcomparedto Lurch peeing in the kettles the night before we took ownership.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Lee asked, his voice tight. “Because honestly, I can’t think of anything much worse than pissing in a beer kettle, claiming not to remember which one, then forcing Georgie to dump out Every. Drop. Of. Beer. in the production line and shut down the brewery for three months.”

He hadn’t known about that until recently. Dottie had told him, of course, because she wasn’t exactly the soul of discretion. Worse, she’d told him like she’d assumed he knew. Heshouldhave known, but his sisters hadn’t seen fit to tell him. Part of him felt like he should be pissed about that, only…this new Lee, this humbled Lee, understood why they hadn’t. He’d wanted to sell right from the beginning, and although he’d given Georgie his blessing when she decided to pick the failing business up off the ground and breathe life into it, they both knew he’d done it begrudgingly. And that wasbeforethe previous brewmaster, Lurch, had gotten pissed (literally in this instance) that the neglectful Buchanan grandchildren were inheriting Beau Buchanan’s pride and joy.

Then Adalia had joined the brewery, and he’d felt strangely left out. It hadn’t helped to have his father in his ear, needling him about getting his sisters to sell. Mocking him for not being able to “handle” them. “You’re supposed to be in real estate, and part of real estate is selling,Junior,” he’d said in his cold, aloof voice. “Why am I not surprised you can’t close the deal?”

Lee had tried to tell him that his sisters had minds of their own and weren’t easily manipulated (not that he had a mind to try). Now the irony was like a punch in the gut. Lee had thought himself immune to their father’s manipulations, all while the man had been playing him like a marionette.

At the time, Lee had wondered why his father seemed so desperate for them to sell the brewery and “invest” the money in Buchanan Luxury. Lee had chalked it up to his father’s desire to grow their brand to even greater heights with more capital. Now he knew his father had been desperate for cold, hard cash to get him out of the deep hole he’d dug himself into.

A little over a month ago, Lee had been living an entirely different life. He’d worked as a top-selling salesman at Buchanan Luxury, a company known for dealing in high-end commercial properties and resorts. And sure, he’d accepted a much lower salary than the other sales staff, but he’d believed his father’s motto that hard work reaped rewards. There’d also been the dangled carrot of the eventual ownership of Buchanan Luxury. His prospects had seemed bright—not just because of the job, but because he lived in a luxury apartment (owned by the company, of course) and was dating a beautiful, successful woman who wanted nothing more than to marry him.

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