Free Honey Red by Liz Crowe

between them, but at the same time she wanted him to step closer, to put his hands on her face, her arms, her back, her…she shook her head. “Anyway, I assume I have some time to think about it?” She grabbed her purse, needing to be as far from Ian as she could get, like right now. This whole scene was all of a sudden too much for her to handle.
    She picked her portfolio up off Gavin’s desk and turned on her heel, determined to ignore the man standing and staring at her as if she were something nasty on the side of the road. “Excuse me.” She had to step closer to him to get by the chairs where she’d been sitting for nearly an hour. “I’m sorry if I’m not your first choice. I need this job, and I’m willing to give it a shot, but only if you stop looking at me as if I just killed your best friend.” She stood in the doorway, a safe distance between them and shook her hair back.
    Ian’s face reddened and he sat, as if boneless. “No, I’m, it’s…well,” he ran a hand down his face. “This whole hiring someone new was my idea. Gavin didn’t want to add any more employees. So I’m glad it didn’t take him weeks to choose somebody.” He looked up at the ceiling and, in that split second, Hannah realized something about the distressingly handsome man she would be working with daily. He was as uncomfortable as she was right now. “You’ll be fine. We’ll teach you the beer side. You bring a skill set we lack. So,” he stood, suddenly relaxed, his chiseled face set in calm lines, his deep green eyes sporting a sexy, mischievous twinkle. “Welcome to the team Hannah,” he held out a hand.
    She stared at him, mesmerized by the message her brain was receiving but unable to comprehend. She had a job and with a man she wanted in ways she didn’t even understand. Well played, Hannah.
    “Thanks,” she shook his hand, turned, and tried not to run out the door to her car.

Chapter Eleven

     
    “Donovan!”
    Ian looked up from his task and cursed when his skull connected with the solid stainless steel opening of the giant fermenter. “Jesus,” he muttered, rubbing the knot rising on his scalp. If the voice matched the face he expected, his day had digressed from crappy to complete shit. He sighed and turned, meeting the angry stare of Hannah Williams. The woman had been on board as marketing director for Ypsi Brewing Company for exactly six weeks, and Ian had gone from bizarrely obsessed with her, to hating her ever-loving guts when he was not fantasizing about fucking her brains out.
    “Yeah?” He let his gaze flicker away from hers. He knew what was up, but ever since the tall redhead had taken the reigns of marketing, Ian’s life had been a living hell, for many annoying reasons, not the least of which she was the sexiest thing on two female legs he’d laid eyes on—ever.
    When Hannah had been added to the mix, bringing with her a healthy dose of spread-sheeted, computerized reality, it had turned Ian into a twitching nervous wreck. His brother had insisted they needed it to “get to the next stage” and kept conveniently forgetting that it had been Ian who’d convinced him to hire a marketing director—but this particular marketing director was all sorts of infuriating. Ian figured that this “next stage” was either going to kill him or make him insane.
    He had called the production shots in the brewery from the beginning. Gavin took whatever Ian and his staff of trained brewers made and sold it, not vice versa. It had worked for them. They’d grown from nothing to one of the bigger craft breweries in Michigan inside of six years doing things this way.
    Ian respected the hell out of his brother, with his suave manner, his charming patter, clean cut suits and the women who flittered around him like moths to a flame, but Ian cursed the man daily for hiring this fiery red-headed temptress who seemed to think that he would be scheduling his brews around her sales. She shoved a computer