Page 36 of Beyond the Hate

Is she doing okay? She must be exhausted. I’ll make her a coffee and bring it to her. It’s as good an excuse as any to check on her.

Plan in place, I fold out of my SUV and head inside.

The offices of the distillery are dark when I enter. Not strange considering it’s barely six a.m. My brothers and the rest of the staff usually don’t arrive until around eight. Although Kai is always late, Zane comes and goes at will, and Miles often doesn’t show up at all.

I can’t complain. Zane is a master at marketing. And Miles did warn me he wouldn’t be at the distillery often when we founded the company.

I dump my briefcase in my office before making my way to the break room. I prepare a cup of coffee for Paisley the way I know she drinks it. Strong with lots of sugar but no milk.

I hum as I traverse through the offices to the distillery. I pass Jaxon’s office but he isn’t in yet before reaching Paisley’s.

“Good morning,” I call as I enter.

Paisley jumps in her chair and clutches her chest. “You scared me.”

I lift the coffee up in the air. “I bring you replenishments.”

She reaches for the cup. “I could use a hit of caffeine.”

I hand her the coffee making sure our fingers touch. A jolt of excitement rolls through me at the feel of her skin. The pads of her fingers are surprisingly soft considering how much she works with her hands.

I can’t help but wonder how soft the rest of her skin is. It’s a question I’ve spent quite a bit of time considering while laying in my bed with my cock in my hand. My cock twitches in reminder and I clear my throat before I end up getting hard.

Paisley sips on her coffee and moans. Damn. I want to hear her moan when she’s sipping from my lips, not coffee. There is no chance of me not getting hard now.

“What are you working on?”

She rips her glasses off and flings them on the desk. “The scheduling. Coordinating the brewing, fermentation, packaging, and cleaning schedules shouldn’t be this hard.”

I chuckle. “Except you’d rather be playing around with new recipes or getting your hands dirty with the actual brewing.”

She narrows her eyes on me. Without her glasses on, those hazel eyes of hers are even more gorgeous. “How do you know?”

“Because I know you, Lace.”

She nabs her glasses and sets them back on her face. “Lace? You don’t know me well if you can’t remember my name.”

The term of endearment slipped out. “I know you prefer to get your hands dirty rather than sit behind a computer all day.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“I remember in biology class none of your friends would dissect the frog as assigned and you ended up dissecting five of them. One for you and one for each of your friends.”

She narrows her eyes on me. “It wasn’t cheating.”

I raise my hands. “Of course not. Paisley Bardot would never cheat.”

She sniffs and lifts her nose in the air. It’s adorable. “Dang right, I wouldn’t. I made my friends recite all the parts of a frog’s anatomy before I agreed to help with their dissections.”

“You and your friends always were troublemakers.”

She scowls. “I’m not a troublemaker.”

“And you didn’t cover the social science teacher’s desk with yellow sticky notes with drawings of a penis on them either?”

“He shouldn’t have said sex education was a waste of time.”

“The drawings were very accurate.” We were fourteen at the time. How did she know the anatomy of a penis at such an early age? Especially when the teacher refused to teach us the sex education curriculum?

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