Chisholm Brothers 02 On Tap Read online

  There was always Hagg’s, which had been her destination often as not when she was looking for something to do in the evenings. But after her disastrous late lunch there earlier today, she thought it best to steer clear for a little while. She climbed the stairs, thinking she could be having a social life right now if she’d taken Reese up on his offer to mix a little pleasure with their business. But no…And there would be no second-guessing now—she’d already cancelled on him.

  “You really are a moron.” But it had been the right thing to do. She knew that. Trudging up the stairs, however, she was having a hard time rousing any excitement for the evening ahead. She could kill some time folding the pile of laundry awaiting her. Then maybe she’d really get wild and read one of the murder mysteries in Maude’s extensive collection. One thing she wouldn’t do was give in to the urge to go back down to her office and work, so she’d feel productive. This was off-hours. She didn’t need to produce anything. Hell, she could even flaunt convention and leave her laundry unfolded for another whole day if she wanted to. She could waste the entire remainder of her evening lazing around doing absolutely nothing. And learn to like it, dammit. She smiled a little at that as she let herself into her flat.

  She flipped on the lamp by Maude’s knitting chair and glanced down at the basket of yarn that was still tucked beside it. Maybe she should take up knitting. It would teach her patience and give her a much-needed hobby at the same time. She reached down, lifted out a soft spool of blue yarn, and rubbed it between her fingers. She glanced over at the ormolu clock on the mantel and saw it was closing in on nine-thirty. Yep, a whole evening ahead with nothing to do but sit back and relax and just enjoy the hell out of her brand new personal life.

  Who was she kidding?“Yeah, well, at least you gave it a try,” she murmured, then tossed the yarn back in the basket, turned, and walked straight out of her flat, not even bothering to flip off the light.

  Ten minutes later she was right where she really wanted to be, and life plans be damned. She stood in front of the employee entrance to Glenbuie Distillery, praying Reese hadn’t picked up his phone messages yet.

  Taking a deep breath, she let it out slowly, then lifted her hand and rapped on the steel door. In addition to the old Renault she’d recently bought, there was one other car and two company trucks parked in the rear lot. Hopefully one of them belonged to Reese. She waited what seemed like an eternity, and had just about decided she’d blown the whole deal when the door cracked open.

  It was darker inside than out, so Reese was totally cast in shadow, little more than a disembodied voice. “Change your mind?”

  She flushed a little. “You got my message?”

  “Aye. I was just locking up. In fact, if I hadn’t seen you on the surveillance camera, I wouldn’t have known you were out here.”

  He sounded quite professional, cool and distant. Maybe she’d already blown it and he was just being polite now. She really felt like the moron she’d accused herself of being earlier. He must think her a complete flake. She couldn’t say she blamed him. “Do you—do you want me to go?”

  He stepped back and pushed the door open wider. “We can still do the tour if you’re up for it. Did you bring a recorder or something, to take notes?’

  “What?” Still off guard, she stepped inside the building. He flipped a switch and the short hallway they stood in was immediately illuminated. She blinked a few times against the sudden brightness. “No, I, uh…I didn’t.” She definitely felt like an idiot. She’d rushed out of her apartment and raced over here, thinking about nothing other than seeing him again, about finding out what exactly was going on between them. For once in her life, business had been the very last thing on her mind. Quite naturally, given all her mixed signals, he probably had no idea what she was thinking.

  If she hadn’t been so mortified, she’d have laughed at herself.

  When her eyes adjusted to the change in light, she finally looked at him, trying to determine if he was merely teasing her, or…or if he wasn’t. She had no idea how to play this without further embarrassing herself, or him. So rather than play at anything, she simply came right out and asked him. At this point, what did she really have to lose? “I was under the impression from your invitation that, perhaps this was a more…personal tour.”

  Reese didn’t make a move to leave, or escort her further into the building. She couldn’t see beyond him down the hall—he filled her entire line of vision. He held her gaze quite intently. “I was under the impression from your message that you were no’ so thrilled with that suggestion.”

  “I was perfectly thrilled, to be honest. But then I stupidly got to thinking and, well, it made me second-guess myself.”

  He shifted forward slightly, keeping her between him and the door at her back, with little space to spare. “That whole issue about mixing business with pleasure, you mean.”

  She nodded. “My goal here was to find a way to separate work from play. Or to find time to play at all.”

  “I don’t believe these are work hours.”

  “But taking a tour, being here at all, is work-related.”

  “So would you rather I’d left a message inviting you to my place instead, then?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again. He still hadn’t come right out and answered any of her questions. “Is that what you’d rather have done?”

  His mouth quirked a little at the corner, but his eyes were dark and enigmatic, difficult bordering on impossible to gauge. “You wanted to see the distillery. For business purposes, yes. And I’d like to show you the business my family has spent centuries building. For personal purposes. Because it’s part of who I am.” He made a short, almost self-deprecating snort. “Aye, perhaps too much, but I canno’ change that fact. If you’re going to capture the spirit of this place in order to effectively promote it, then I felt it was imperative that you see it through my eyes.”

  She was mentally scrambling to keep up. “And for that you felt we needed to do this after hours?”

  “After hours there is less distraction and no immediate demands on my time, so yes, that was part of it.”

  “Part?”

  “The other reason was maybe a little foolhardy on my part. You seem to bring out that side in me.”

  “Why foolhardy?”

  He shifted closer still. “You invited me in today, gave me a glimpse of yourself, your private self. I liked getting to see that side of you, getting to know more about you. And so I was hoping you might feel the same. Sad to say, but this is my private self.” He gestured behind him. “I thought to offer you some insight into me. Maybe help reduce the problem we both have about that balancing problem you mentioned earlier.”

  “That doesn’t sound foolhardy to me. It sounds…”Sweet , she thought. And sincere. The latter didn’t surprise her. Reese Chisholm was nothing if not earnest and forthright. But he was also edgy and enigmatic. Not to mention sexy as hell.Sweet hadn’t been the first trait that had come to mind, or the second.

  “I’ll admit, I still don’t know about the whole Internet thing. But I am curious to see what you’d do with it. More because I’m curious about seeing how you work, how your mind works.” He smiled then. “I figured, worst case, the evening would be a personal bust, end up all business, but I’d get a Web site out of the deal, eh?”

  She smiled at that, and began to relax a little. “So…you do want me to take notes, then.”

  “I dinnae think that will be necessary this evening.” He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Let me show you a little bit of my world. We’ll start there. You can take notes next time.”

  Next time.Her heart began to thump, and her thighs trembled a bit. He hadn’t called her here because he wanted to get her naked. Although she was fairly certain he’d given it some thought. As she had. But he was right—if that was all they were about, he’d have just invited her to his place, they could have jumped each other, and gotten it out of their sys
tems. No, instead he’d offered to share a different, but perhaps more intimate, part of himself with her. He was serious about trying to figure out how to proceed with her, with…this. Whateverthis turned out to be.

  It should have unnerved her, or at the very least disconcerted her. She’d caved and given in to his request because he’d gotten her hormones hopping, yes. But she was also here because she’d been wrong in her initial assessment of what she’d live to regret. There was something about Reese Chisholm that was different from any man she’d ever met. And that something had called to something inside her that was new, and very different as well. That call was only getting stronger.

  And now here he was, telling her he felt the same tug, the same pull. A shiver of awareness raced over her skin as his fingertips brushed along her cheek.

  “Okay,” she told him. “Show me.”

  Chapter 7

  Reese was surprised he didn’t lose it right then and there.Show me.

  If she only had any idea what that quiet request made him want to show her. It took considerable restraint not to bury his fingers in her hair and drag her mouth to his. It still shook him, the primal way in which her very presence snatched at his control. Never had he felt so driven by impulses he had such little power over. His reaction to her should have made him run far and fast. Which had been precisely what he tried to tell himself to do when he’d left her shop earlier today.

  And that argument had lasted all of the ten minutes it had taken him to get back to his office.

  She’d apparently applied the same logic, or tried to…and had lasted only slightly longer than he had.

  He’d spent the remainder of his afternoon wandering around the distillery in a bit of a daze, the taste of her still on his lips, the scent of her filling his head, the sound of her little moans echoing through his mind. He found himself wondering what she’d think of the place, seeing it through new eyes as he imagined showing her around, explaining the distilling process to her, the history behind it, the indefinable essence, the magic of knowing what to bottle and when. He tried to imagine what she’d make of it, how her creative mind would go through its own distilling process, taking the rather technical and not particularly seductive information and blending it with the history, the importance of what the Chisholm experience lent to the process, to the area, and blend it into a provocative on-line elixir intended to give Glenbuie whisky a global audience.

  Although, to be honest, he spent more time imagining watching her, gauging her reaction to this vital part of himself, wondering what she’d think of it all. He’d been so distracted by it, in fact, that his stillman had been forced twice to ask him to come check one of the hydrometers. In the end, he’d extended the invitation for her to come by tonight, telling himself that until he did that and figured out this next step with her, he’d be useless.

  Now that she was here, showing her around the distillery was the last way he wanted to spend the rest of the evening…and night. And to think he’d always prided himself on his patience. If Brodie could only see him now, antsy like a schoolboy readying himself for his first dance, he’d have a fine laugh indeed.

  “This way,” he blurted out, perhaps a bit more gruffly than intended, a wee bit embarrassed at realizing he’d been standing there like a dullwit, silently contemplating her for too long a moment. “To really understand the process, we should start outside. I wanted to take you out and show you the burn—pure spring water is a crucial part of distilling, and the water used matters in the end result. We’ve been distilling with water from that spring and brook for over two hundred years, long before this was a law-abiding enterprise. But it’s too dark, so perhaps another time.” He was essentially babbling. He never babbled.

  “Another time,” she agreed, and he could have sworn he heard an amused tone in her voice.

  He opened the door at the end of the hall and took her elbow, guiding her around a corner, then through a large set of double doors. “It starts with barley. We malt our own.” He glanced down at her, but quickly looked away. If he had any hope of keeping even a semblance of continuity and coherence, he had to keep his eyes, and hands—he realized he was gripping her elbow now and let it go—off of her. “Malted barley is barley that has been soaked in water—”

  “From the burn, I take it.”

  There was that amused tone again. He slowed a step. “Aye. We soak it until the germination stage, then dry it slowly. The starch in the barley turns to sugar, which is the first stage of turning it to alcohol.” He entered a large room and turned on the overhead lights. “Here we grind the barley into grist, then mix again with water. Our mashman—”

  “Mashman?”

  “Aye. He rules this particular domain. The temperature must be carefully controlled. The grist is put in the mash tun—” He gestured to the large vats lining the room. “And the end result is called worts.”

  “Worts.” She looked up at him. “I really should be taking notes. There isn’t going to be a quiz on this later, is there?”

  Her smile eased a lot of the surprising tension and nerves he felt, but jacked up a few other internal reactions. “It’s a lot to take in, I know. But not to worry—we can go over all this again.”

  “Tonight?”

  She held his gaze intently. But before he could decide what, if anything, to do about it, she slipped from his side and walked over to one of the vats. “How long does the whole process take? From here to the bottle? I know it ages from that point, but—”

  “Actually, it ages in huge oak casks. The kind of oak used is very important as it affects the final taste as well. We make our own casks.”

  Her eyes widened. “Impressive. Actually, all of this is impressive, and I know we’ve barely begun.” She crossed the room toward him. “So tell me more about how it all began. You said something about using water from the burn even before it was a legal operation?”

  He nodded. “Initially, two centuries past, there were over a dozen stills in this general area, all tucked away between burn and glen, amongst the rocks and such. And all run illicitly, as there was no way to pay the heavy taxes levied by the government. Young ladies from the village used to come up to the hills here and hide tin pots of whisky beneath their skirts and spirit them back into town.”

  Daisy laughed at that. “I’ve long agreed that ingenuity is the mother of invention.”

  “Aye, that it is.” He found himself smiling as well. “Early in the nineteenth century, the heavy duties were lifted and Glenbuie obtained legal license to distill, as did a few others. However, ours was the only one that survived to become a legitimate concern. I’d like to believe it’s because we’ve always strived to maintain the original methods, as much as one can, to maintain the quality even as we increased the quantity. We guard quite fiercely the specifics of our processes, not that there are any left in this area that care. We’re quite on the outskirts of the more popular and larger concerns and definitely out of the tourist loop, as I’ve said. But we’ve remained a family-held business and I’ve no plans to change that fact in order to improve our bottom line. Finney and all the rest of my ancestors would collectively roll in their graves, right before leaving them to come haunt me.”

  She had gone off to stroll the length of the room, walking along the row of mash tuns, but grinned at that last remark as she wound her way back to him now. “I know this is everything to you, and I think it’s all fascinating. Romantic, even, in some ways.”

  He gave her a look of disbelief, but she held up her hands. “I’m being quite sincere. I know the process itself is technical and dry, but there is a lot of the process that can’t be defined or specifically spelled out. There is a magic in that.”

  “I agree. I suppose I was just a bit surprised that you see that, too.”

  “You talk of the burn and the land being part of all this, land that’s been in your family’s hands for hundreds of years. Do you realize how few people can really fathom such a thing? Around here, per
haps, but think bigger, broaden your horizons. Or let me. If I can get the process detailed in layman’s terms, along with the historical background of how it all began, and I’ll need photos of all of it, including whatever you might have from the past. Also, pictures of the building now, the surrounding land, all so picturesque and beautiful, the village, too, as the distillery plays such a big part in its success, I—well, my mind is already spinning with the things I can do with this.”

  His mind was spinning, too. And it had absolutely nothing to do with something as banal as an Internet Web site. Her eyes were shining and her speech had picked up pace, along with the animated hand gestures and body language. She captivated and commanded his full attention.

  “What?” she asked, a bemused smile curving her lips as she noticed he was staring. “Am I sounding like a hopeless optimist here? Because I am very much one in this case. It’s a slam dunk, Reese, trust me. I know these things.”