to get to the point today?”
“We have to reapply for our jobs,” Larry said in a rush. “By the end of the day tomorrow. I don’t—Casey, you know me. I don’t even have a résumé. I’ve worked here for the last thirty years.”
Oh, for the love of everything holy... Casey pushed herself out from under the tank again and sat up. “Okay,” she said in a much softer voice as she got to her feet. “Start from the beginning. What does the memo say?” Because Larry was like a canary in a coal mine. If he kept calm, the staff she was left with would also keep calm. But if Larry panicked...
Larry looked down at the paper in his hands again. He swallowed hard and Casey got the strangest sensation he was trying not to crack.
Crap. They were screwed. “It just says that by end of business tomorrow, every Beaumont Brewery employee needs to have an updated résumé on the new CEO’s desk so he can decide if they get to keep their job or not.”
Son of a... “Let me see.”
Larry handed over the paper as if he’d suddenly discovered it was contagious, and he stepped back. “What am I going to do, boss?”
Casey scanned the memo and saw that Larry had pretty much read verbatim. Every employee, no exceptions.
She did not have time for this. She was responsible for brewing about seven thousand gallons of beer every single day of the year on a skeleton staff of seventeen people. Two years ago, forty people had been responsible for that level of production. But two years ago, the company hadn’t been in the middle of the never-ending string of upstart CEOs.
And now the latest CEO was rolling up into her brewery and scaring the hell out of her employees? This new guy thought he would tell her she had to apply for her job—the job she’d earned?
She didn’t know much about this Zebadiah Richards—but he was going to get one thing straight if he thought he was going to run this company.
The Beaumont Brewery brewed beer. No beer, no brewery. And no brewmaster, no beer.
She turned to Larry, who was pale and possibly shaking. She understood why he was scared—Larry was not the brightest bulb and he knew it. That was the reason he hadn’t left when Chadwick lost the company or when Ethan Logan tried to right the sinking ship.
That was why Casey had been promoted over him to brewmaster, even though Larry had almost twenty years of experience on her. He liked his job, he liked beer and as long as he got regular cost-of-living increases in his salary and a year-end bonus, he was perfectly content to spend the rest of his life right where he was. He hadn’t wanted the responsibility of management.
Frankly, Casey was starting to wonder why she had. “I’ll take care of this,” she told him.
Surprisingly, this announcement made Larry look even more nervous. Apparently, he didn’t put a lot of faith in her ability to keep her temper. “What are you going to do?”
His reaction made it clear that he was afraid she’d get fired—and then he’d be in charge. “This Richards guy and I are going to have words.”
Larry fretted. “Are you sure that’s the smart thing to do?”
“Probably not,” she agreed. “But what’s he going to do—fire the brewmaster? I don’t think so, Larry.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, okay?”
Larry gave her a weak smile, but he nodded resolutely.
Casey hurried to her office and stripped off her hairnet. She knew she was no great beauty, but nobody wanted to confront a new boss in a hairnet. She grabbed her Beaumont Brewery hat and slid her ponytail through the back. And she was off, yelling over her shoulder to Larry, “See if you can get that drainage tube off—and if you can, see if you can get it flushed again. I’ll be back in a bit.”
She did not have time for this. She was already working ten-to twelve-hour days—six or seven days a week—just to keep the equipment clean and the beer flowing. If she lost more of her staff...
It wouldn’t come to that. She wouldn’t let it. And if it did...
Okay, so she’d promised Larry she wouldn’t get fired. But what if she did? Her options weren’t great, but at least she had some. Unlike Larry, she did have an updated résumé that she kept on file just in case. She didn’t want to use it. She wanted to stay right here at the Beaumont Brewery and brew her favorite beer for the rest of her life.
Or at least, she had. No, if she was being honest, what she really wanted was to be the brewmaster at the old Beaumont Brewery, the one she’d worked at for the previous twelve years—the one that the Beaumont family had run. Back then the brewery had been a family business and the owners had been personally invested in their employees.
They’d even given a wide-eyed college girl the chance to do something no one else had—brew beer.
But the memo in her hand reminded her that this wasn’t the same brewery. The Beaumonts no longer ran things and the company was suffering.
She was suffering. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d strung together more than twenty-four hours of free time. She was doing the job of three people and, thanks to the hiring freeze the last CEO implemented, there was no relief in sight. And now this. She could not afford to lose another single person.
She was a thirty-two-year-old brewmaster—and a woman, at that. She’d come so far so fast. But not one of her predecessors in the illustrious history of the Beaumont Brewery had put up with quite this much crap. They’d been left to brew beer in relative peace.
She stormed to the CEO suite. Delores was behind the desk. When she saw Casey coming, the older woman jumped to her feet with surprising agility. “Casey—wait. You don’t—”
“Oh, yes, I do,” she said, blowing past Delores and shoving open the door to the CEO’s office. “Just who the hell do you think you...are?”
Casey came to a stumbling stop. Where was he? The desk was vacant and no one was sitting on the leather couches.
But then a movement off to her left caught her eye and she turned and gasped in surprise.
A man stood by the windows, looking out over the brewery campus. He had his hands in his pockets and his back turned to her—but despite that, everything about him screamed power and money. The cut of his suit fit him like a second skin and he stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, as if he were master of all he saw.
A shiver went through her. She was not the kind of girl who went for power suits or the men who wore them but something about this man—this man who was threatening her job—took her breath away. Was it the broad shoulders? Or the raw power wafting off him like the finest cologne?
And then he turned to face her and all she could see were his eyes—green eyes. Good Lord, those eyes—they held her gaze like a magnet and she knew her breath was gone for good.
He was, hands down, the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Everything—the power suit, the broad shoulders, the close-cropped hair and most especially the eyes—it was a potent blend that she
