Page 47 of Brewing Up a Bad Boy

His mum spotted them first and rushed over to hug him. “Ali. I’m glad you both could be here.” She turned to Poppy and gave her a stiffer, more formal sort of hug, kissing both cheeks before stepping back. “Nice to see you again.”

“Thanks, Helena.”

“Alistair,” his father said, holding out his hand.

“Sir,” Ali said, giving it a firm shake.

“Glad your wife is with you.”

“Poppy and Gemma are friends, so it was easy to convince her to come with me. But she’s still not pleased with how our family treated her,” he said.

His father’s eyebrows rose, but his mum stepped between them. “George is signaling that our table is ready. I think this is a conversation better had when we are all together.”

His mum tucked her hand into the crook of his dad’s arm. Poppy was taking deep breaths, and Alistair eyed the door. For a minute, he was tempted to just walk away. To escape to his Ducati and get as far away from this situation as he could.

But then he glanced down into Poppy’s brown eyes. He wasn’t going anywhere. If he exploded the way he had at the Lancaster-Spencer offices, well, he’d deal with it. But first, he planned to set the tone he wanted for the meeting.

Poppy could tell Alistair was all but vibrating with tension as they followed the family to the table. Her thoughts flashed between the man she’d known for the past few days and the man he’d been during their marriage. This kind of tension usually precipitated an outburst. His anger would be hard to control and could take all the attention from the points she wanted to make.

But he’d told his father this meeting would be different from the last. Plus, she could always walk away from this table. She wasn’t the scared young bride afraid to stand up for herself anymore.

Bronte looked nervous as well. Was there more than one plot in play?

Poppy almost strutted past the table and out of the restaurant. Of course there was something more going on. When had anything with the Millers been simple and straightforward?

Alistair pulled out her chair and leaned low to whisper in her ear as she sat down. “This is your show.”

As he went around to take his seat, she allowed the sentiment to wash over her. She wasn’t alone. Liberty had pulled a card for her that morning. It had still been midnight when she called her friend. Sera had video-chatted in too. They’d both agreed that she shouldn’t take a shit deal to keep Lancaster-Spencer from suing her. If they did, then WiCKed Sisters was prepared to deal with it.

Don’t settle for less than you deserve.Sera’s words circled in Poppy’s mind, adding to the strength she always drew from her friends. They weren’t going to be disappointed if she walked away from whatever Howard Miller offered her.

Their party was seated in the back of the restaurant, with no other tables close to them. Helena signaled to the servers, who took their orders. After coffee and tea had been delivered for everyone, Alistair’s dad cleared his throat.

“Poppy, I’m sorry that you feel you weren’t treated fairly by us. But the deal you were offered for your family’s tea-blend recipe was fair, and you still receive profits through Alistair from the sales of that blend,” his dad started.

The earl’s age really showed on his face. His thinning gray hair was still perfectly styled, but some of the toughness in Alistair’s father was gone.

“I should receive them myself. Alistair and I are di—estranged, as you know,” Poppy said, quickly catching herself. Her hands were clenched together in her lap as she braced herself to make her point.

“We could amend that deal,” George said. “We should never have hidden the fact that you were signing away the rights to the tea blend in perpetuity. That should have been spelled out from the beginning.”

“Perhaps, but you’re getting ahead of yourself, George. We already have a contract that we haven’t been enforcing due to you and Alistair working through your marital problems,” Howard said. “But given the success you’ve had in the last year, we can no longer ignore it. I think you are aware that the contract you signed when you joined Lancaster-Spencer has a noncompete clause in it.”

“I’m very aware of that. But I haven’t been an employee of Lancaster-Spencer for seven years. My noncompete clause only covered a period of three years after leaving Lancaster-Spencer,” she pointed out. She’d taken the time to go over the contract as soon as she’d gotten the offer from the Willingham of Hampshire tea company.

Howard took a sip of the Darjeeling tea that he favored, looking a little too smug for Poppy’s comfort. What had she missed? She wasn’t still employed by them; she hadn’t received any money from the company since she’d left London.

“That’s not necessarily true. You do receive dividends paid into your joint account with Alistair as an absentee board member.”

Alistair put his hand on her leg as she looked over at him. “Poppy wasn’t aware of that account, Father. I have held it until our marriage is settled. She hasn’t received anything from the company. I think you should consider, as well, that paying me for her work isn’t—”

“We weren’t paying you. We were paying into the account she had when she started at the company,” Howard pointed out. “Whether she used the money or not, we have been paying her.”

“Which isn’t the point,” George said. “We’d like to move past this and talk about what we really are here to discuss—the Amber Rapp tea blend and your plan to license it to Willingham of Hampshire. Instead, we’d ask that you license it to us under a very generous offer that would see you paid into your own account and the contract not linked in any way to Alistair.”

Howard’s glare should have melted George to his chair. But George ignored his father and kept his gaze on her.

“The terms I’ve been offered by Willingham include me keeping control of the recipe, and I would have full control over the factory that would package the tea mix.”

---