Page 9 of Relief Pitcher

Ethan: We’ll eat your share of Caleb’s food and thoroughly enjoy it.

I texted the guys for a couple more minutes about Ethan’s boyfriend, Parker, having an important meeting before our brunch tomorrow that would hopefully mean he could relocate from Portland to Dahlia Springs. Though they were only an hour apart, it was tough on Ethan to make their schedules work since he usually worked during Parker’s off hours.

When I slid the phone back into my pocket, it dawned on me that I might be cramping Cooper’s style. What if he’d had his own hookup planned? Or a date with a partner?

“You don’t have to entertain me. Pretend like I’m not here and do whatever you normally would.”

Cooper laughed drily. “This is usually what I’m up to on a Saturday night. Thrilling, I know.”

“You’re right. Itisthrilling to have a handsome and mysterious stranger land on your doorstep and have to deal with him asking annoying questions and making obnoxious commentary during movies all evening. Want some more cheesy popcorn?”

Cooper held out his hand. I’d made a convert of him. “It’s my day off, so having you here isn’t stopping me from doing anything.”

I sensed there was something he wasn’t saying, but it wasn’t my business. “Day off from work? What do you do?” That seemed like a neutral conversation topic.

“I’m an arborist.”

“A what-ist?”

“I work with trees and shrubs. I help maintain them, diagnose issues, cut them down if need be.”

“Like a tree doctor?”

“Tree surgeon is used more often.” There was a teasing hint to his smile.

I pulled a piece of saltwater taffy out of my goodie bag and untwisted the wrapper. “How do the trees reach out when they’re sick? Do you have a clinic that they visit? How does insurance work for that?”

Cooper chuckled and leaned back in his recliner. His thick thighs fell open wider with the movement.

“They all have insurance cards with the phone number of the company I work for on the back. You’ve never noticed the card pockets on tree trunks before?”

“Giving a tree a piece of dead tree with a phone number on it is morbid as fuck. You arborists are freaks.” I tossed a piece of taffy at him. “Is that why you live out here around all these trees? Do you like to live among your patients?”

A pained look passed through his eyes, but it was gone in a moment. “It’s convenient to be close to where lots of trees are.” He picked at a string on the arm of his recliner. “According to your babbling earlier, you co-own a brewery?”

Not only was the guy like a sexy tree I wanted to climb, but he also volleyed back my teasing. That was turning me on as much as his thick body.

“I wasn’t babbling.”

He leveled an unamused stare in my direction. “You were totally babbling.”

“Fine. I suppose there was some light, babbling-adjacent talk happening, but I was stressed and it was raining really hard. My three best friends and I run the brewery together. We opened it a couple of years ago.”

“How did that come about?”

I settled back onto the couch. I could talk about the brewery for ages. “One of the guys, Austin, is my cousin, and we met the other two, Ethan and Dom, our first year of college. Ethan and Dom had the room next to me and Austin. We hit it off and hung out all the time. Eventually, we discovered we loved beer. Austin taught himself how to make it, and for years, we joked about how fun it would be to open a brewery together.” Sometimes, I still couldn’t believe we’d made it happen.

“When Ethan inherited a hefty chunk of change, he pitched the idea of quitting our jobs and making the brewery a reality. How could I say no to that? It’s the best job in the world.”

Ethan’s inheritance had covered most of the startup. Dom had sold his house in Gresham and bought a Victorian fixer-upper in Dahlia Springs that the rest of us lived in rent-free. We each used our skills from our own careers to make it happen. Fortunately, it’d been easy for me to transition from marketing for a restaurant group to marketing and sales for our brewery.

Dom’s previous jobs had all involved managing budgets, which made him a perfect fit for handling the brewery business stuff. Ethan had been a bartender for years, so he slipped easily into managing our taproom and being our main server. With Austin home-brewing for years, we counted on him to brew our product after he’d learned how to scale up his home operation to a professional one. And since Seth returned to town last year, he’d been helping us in the taproom and learning how to brew with Austin. The extra support was overdue and much appreciated.

Cooper’s smile was genuine. “It’s amazing how that worked out for you all. I’ve been there before. It’s great.”

It sent a thrill through me every time someone said that. It would never get old. I idly wondered if I’d seen him when he’d come in. I made it a practice to not hit on customers—I neededsomestandards, but Cooper would’ve stood out.

“Yeah, it’s worked out well. We’ve all contributed in our own ways and made it happen. It’s taking a lot of sacrifice, but it’s been worth it.”

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