Page 17 of The Distiller's Darling

8

There were no words to describe how mind blowing his night with Naomi had been, but as Iain stared at his laptop, he briefly wondered if all those orgasms had been worth his sanity. Because even though he’d been explicit about what he was looking for from the graphic designer he’d spoken with after returning from Naomi’s, yet another watercolor wheat chaff was on his screen. At this rate, he’d be showing up at his next sales call like some snake oil salesman, pulling an unlabeled bottle out of his leather satchel and trying to convince his potential buyer it wasn’t complete swill.

With a defeated sigh, he pushed the laptop away and raised his eyes to the ceiling. He’d gone without a cigarette for almost a year, but now he craved one—desperately. Instead, he reached blindly for the bottle of bourbon on the table next to him and raised it to his lips. Since he’d begun hanging out with Max and Noah, he’d taken to drinking the stuff. His father would probably foam at the mouth if he knew Iain hadn’t had a drop of Irish whiskey in days, but that was just too damn bad.

As if that thought conjured the old man himself, Iain’s phone rang, a picture of his father alerting him to an incoming video call. Before answering, he scanned the room to make sure it was clean and presentable and that the bottle he’d been drinking from was hidden from view.

“Iain.” His father leaned forward, his eyes squinted as if inspecting his son for some flaw. His jaw ticked, and he settled back in his office chair, crossing his arms over his chest.

Clearly, he’d found something about his son’s appearance he didn’t approve of. Inwardly, Iain made a bet with himself. If his dad complained about his beard, he’d finish off the bourbon and order takeout. If, instead, he focused on Iain’s charming, albeit small, room at The Oakwell Inn, he’d head over to Frankie’s for a plate of tacos. Either way, he’d end the night on a positive note.

“Your beard is too long,” the other man barked as Iain’s hands itched to reach for the bourbon. “No one’s going to take you seriously if you look like a hippie.” Iain bit his tongue—literally—as his father continued. “It’s sloppy.”

Cathal Brennan had never worn a beard a day in his life and didn’t understand why his youngest son chose to. Aside from not liking how it looked, Iain’s father also frequently remarked on how aggravating it must be always having things caught in it. Iain’s eating abilities were somewhat beyond that of a toddler, and he wasn’t carting around bits of his lunch on his face all the damn time, but it wasn’t worth arguing. At first, he’d let his fashionable stubble grow into a neatly trimmed beard as part of a small rebellion against the tyranny of his father’s rules, but once he’d become accustomed to it, he’d decided to keep it.

Now, he ran his hand over the bristles, testing its length and softness. He’d found a new clove-scented beard oil in a shop down the street from Frankie’s and liked how it made the hair on his face both feel and smell. “I’ll take that under advisement. In the meantime, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I told you I’d call this week to discuss where you’re at with lining up customers for Brennan’s Small Batch.”

Iain chose to ignore the name his father had given Maeve’s whiskey. They’d discussed it at length, and he knew until his sister and he wrestled control of the whiskey from the hands of their brothers and father, the man wouldn’t budge. Instead, he focused on the timing of the call. “You said you’d call on Thursday; today is Tuesday.”

“No, I said Tuesday. You need to do a better job remembering your commitments. You should write them down instead of relying on that phone of yours to keep your schedule.”

For a split second Iain contemplated ending the call without saying goodbye. There was only so much abuse a man could take, and he was quickly reaching the end of his rope. If it wouldn’t destroy his mother, he sometimes considered severing all ties with the old man. Iain knew his father loved him, but he didn’t think the man actually liked him that much.

Iain pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “What did you want to discuss?”

“How many customers have you lined up since our last conversation?”

Iain blew out a breath and fixed his gaze on the swirls and dips of the purple silk curtains that framed a view of the vine-covered hillside beyond. “Ten.” Which was about twenty less than he’d been aiming for this month. The overall goal had been to secure one hundred bars and restaurants that would be willing to serve Whitman’s Revival—the name he and Maeve had agreed on—by the time his six months in the U.S. were up, but so far Iain had fallen well short of that target, and the realization stung.

If he were launching the expression in Ireland, he would have had that many customers lined up within a week, even without labels on the bottles. Breaking into the U.S. markets without relying on his family’s PR machine backing the venture was proving more difficult than he’d anticipated. Maybe it had been a naive dream, but he’d figured with such a sizable focus on craft distillers in the States, customers would welcome him—and his superior liquid—with open arms.

Iain wasn’t being arrogant; what his brilliant sister had created (with a bit of his input, of course) was remarkable whiskey. A fifteen-year-old single malt matured in bourbon barrels before being finished in Pedro Ximenez sherry puncheons was some of the best whiskey he had tasted in years. With a nose that recalled relaxing in an oak-lined library, the scent of a wood fire blazing in the hearth while you sipped mulled wine and snacked on fresh gingerbread, Whitman’s lingered on the tongue with silky notes of sticky toffee pudding, candied fruits, cinnamon, and nutmeg. To Iain’s mind, it was Christmas in a glass, and it was unlike anything anyone in Ireland was currently producing.

“That’s not going to cut it, son.”

“I know,” he groaned. Trust me, I know. “But I’ve still got sixty days to line up the remaining forty customers, and I have some ideas that I think are going to work. I met with a designer—”

“I told you; you should use ours. They know Brennan’s branding and what works for the label.”

“We talked about this, dad. We don’t want to launch another Brennan’s whiskey. What Maeve has done is so different from anything our family has ever put out. We want it to stand on its own.”

“While relying on my connections for barrels and using my facility for storage.” His father snorted. “But you and Maeve keep telling yourself you’re doing this on your own.”

Iain bit back the retort that rested bitterly on the tip of his tongue. His dad might be the chairman of Brennan Family Distillers, one of the only independently owned and operated whiskey brands left in the country, but he didn’t own the company outright. Thanks to Iain’s great-great-great grandfather, every male Brennan was given a share of the company immediately upon his birth. A fact his sister, a better distiller than any of his brothers or uncles could ever claim to be, bemoaned almost daily. The patriarchy wasn’t kind to female Brennans. But since Iain owned approximately two percent of the company, and the Whitman’s barrels took up significantly less than two percent of floor space in the warehouse, he had no ethical qualms about using a Brennan facility for storage.

Gripping the roots of his hair tight in his fist, Iain kept his voice as even as he could. “Is this the part of our conversation where I remind you that I own two percent of Brennan’s, and that technically speaking, you’re only a majority shareholder—not the only one?” It was probably a mistake to poke the bear, but he didn’t seem to have a choice.

Iain’s father bristled visibly, and his face flushed red. “If so, this must be the part of the conversation where I remind you that you have sixty days left to make a success of this harebrained scheme. If you can’t, I expect you back at your desk in Dublin, or I might be forced to find someone else to take over your job.”

With those last snapped words, his father abruptly ended the call, leaving Iain to stew over the old threat hanging over his head. The threat that kept him up at night, wondering if he was fooling himself … if he actually had what it took to make a go of this.

Iain wasn’t too proud to admit he’d gotten his job because of who he was, but he’d also attended university and done an intensive internship in London. He had the education to back up his ideas. And it was his idea and hard work that had earned the tasting room an award for being the top tourist attraction in Dublin. He’d done that; not his father … and certainly not his brothers. t pissed him off that regardless of his success, they had the power to make him doubt himself.

Fucking imposter syndrome, he thought as he pushed off the chair and paced the floor—what little there was of it..

He loved the Oakwell Inn, but his room was the smallest one, the majority of the floor space taken up by the plush queen bed and an antique bureau. With a quick sweep of his eyes over the space, he acknowledged he couldn’t stay there much longer. Landing at Noah’s girlfriend’s B&B that first day had been a stroke of good luck, but the costs were adding up. Since he now planned on camping out in River Hill for two more months, he needed to find a less expensive, more permanent place to stay. The town’s central location and artisan population made it a good base of operations for his plan, but a pricy bed and breakfast wasn’t really in the budget.

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