Travis pumped his fist. “Another beer hater bites the dust.”
They moved on to stouts and porters, and Kate loved them all. Clearly, she had misremembered her earlier beer encounter.
Once the guys had finished up with the tasting, they started discussing Travis’s recipes. Kate tried to follow the conversation, except she didn’t have the background to know whether his autumn pumpkin ale was “cutting edge,” as Travis claimed, or “too out there to coutthe baturn a profit,” as Matt contended.
“Is it getting warm in here?” Kate asked.
The men paused in their conversation.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” Matt said.
“Okay. Carry on.”
Kate wandered over to the small tasting bar and began leafing through Travis’s beer notes and advertising materials. The editor in her quickly returned.
“Does anyone have a pen?” she asked.
All she received in response were blank stares. They had moved on to addressing the level of nutmeg in Travis’s brew. No big deal. Her purse, which always held a fistful of pens, was in the truck.
When she returned, she asked the guys, “Mind if I grab another Dog Day?”
“Go for it,” Matt said. “We shouldn’t be that much longer, though.”
She pulled a beer from the cooler and went back to flyspecking Travis’s notes. She’d finished her first mini-glass and was pouring her second when Matt joined her at the bar.
“Sorry this is taking so long,” he said. “I need to take advantage of the time I can be up here. Travis isn’t hot on listening to Bart, so I have to be the enforcer.”
“No problem.” She slid Travis’s brochures closer to Matt. “I’ve been keeping myself busy. I cleaned up the copy and kicked up the language.”
Matt gave her a funny look. “Your face is kind of red. Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
Or at least she thought she was. Kate touched a hand to her cheek. She
“I think I’ll step outside for a second,” she said.
Whatever Matt had to say in return was left in the dust as she bolted toward the door. Once outside, she climbed into Matt’s truck and flipped open the passenger’s vanity mirror.
“Oh, man!”
The whole beer issue was coming back to her now. That youthful flirtation had ended not because she’d drunk too much and made herself sick, but because beer was her Kryptonite, something akin to severe lactose intolerance.
She wasn’t red. She was Chet-colored.
Kate sat back and fanned her face. She knew what was coming next. Her internal temperature would kick up even higher, her stomach would begin to ache, and finally she’d emit a rumbling last heard at Mount St. Helens. She had an hour and more in the truck with Matt on the way back to Keene’s Harbor. No way could she pretend for that le cd fe, and fngth of time that she had no idea where those noises might be coming from.
Damn.
Kate hopped from the truck to catch the October wind. If she could cut the heat, maybe she could kill the whole vicious cycle.
“Calm thoughts, cool thoughts,” she coached herself as she headed upwind. “You can beat this.”
Once she’d made the outer edge of Horned Owl’s parking area, she pushed up her long sleeves and held out her arms for optimal wind exposure, slowly rotating like a deranged wind turbine. Still, she could feel sweat collecting between her breasts.
“I am so screwed.”
She shot a look at the brewery’s door. Thank heaven all was quiet and still. The guys could talk while she cooled. She returned to the truck and used the open passenger door as shield.
Kate pulled her arms from the sweater’s sleeves. Inside the sweater’s protection, she reached back and unhooked her bra. Those miserable years of middle school gym class had served a purpose, after all. She could still remove her underwear without showing a square inch of skin.
One hot-pink bra with black lace overlay was history in three seconds. Kate chucked it onto the truck’s seat, then jammed her arms back through her sleeves.
“Please, please, please,” she murmured. Just who outside of her own rebelling body Kate was begging, she didn’t know.
Her digestive system emitted a groan that silenced the chickadees up in the trees. Temptation grew. One polite burp that no one other than her feathered friends would hear might fix the whole issue. But then she flashed back to her last beer episode. She’d been sucked in by that whole “one burp” theory, and the aftermath hadn’t been pretty.
She pulled on her sweater’s neckline until she got some good air between herself and the knit fabric. Then she took the sweater’s bottom, looped it up through the top, and drew it back down. The rig held, even though her posture made a gargoyle look good. She turned and just about smacked into Matt.
“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.
“Long enough,” he said. “Do I even want to know?”
“Probably not.”
“You’ve been gone awhile,” he said. “Bart and Travis wanted me to come out and check on you.”
Which was a lie. They were negotiating the terms of a winner-takes-all arm-wrestling match over the pumpkin brew recipe. A rabid fox dropped into the middle of the room wouldn’t have distracted them.
“As you can see, I’m kind of having a problem.”
“Either that or you’re into some voodoo ritual. What’s up with your face, though?”
“My face?” Kate’s voice rose an octave in alarm. “What’s wrong with my face?”
“You’ve gone from red to spotty. Is it possible that you have an allergy to something in beer?”
She clamped her hand over her mouth in what he would have said was an expression of shock, except for the way her chest and shoulders heaved.
“You’re not going to hurl, are you?” he asked.
Hand still over mouth, she shook her head no.
In Matt’s estimation, whatever else was about to happen appeared to be equally bad.
“Hang on,” he said. “Let’s get you back to town.”
She nodded her head a frantic yes.
MATT RETURNED to the barn, where Bart and Travis were going mano a mano.
“I upped the stakes,” Bart said without turning his dead-eye glare from Travis. “If Travis loses, he’s spending the next month of Wednesdays coming to Keene’s Harbor for poker night and then he works for me on Thursdays.”
“Sounds good,” Matt said. Adding Travis to poker night would bring a new, if warped, dynamic. But Matt had more important stuff to deal with right now. “I’ve got to head out now. Bart, I’ll catch up with you on Monday. Travis, you’re not going to take him in any kind of match. And even if you do, when it comes to your beer, he wins. Got it?”
“Dude, that is so not fair,” Travis said.
“When you can pay me back, we’ll talk about fair. Until then, it’s all about leverage.”
Bart slammed Travis’s hand to the tabletop, winning the match and illustrating Matt’s point.
“Just like that,” he said.
Back outside, Matt found Kate waiting for him in the truck. As he climbed into his seat, a pink-and-black bra went flying into the back. He’d witnessed a bra toss before, but not in these circumstances.
“I think it’s the hops,” he said rather than comment on the projectile. “I’ve seen it happen to people before-the redness you started out with, at least-just not this bad.”
