Page 119 of Love Is Brewing

“Foster has his pulse on it and that is who I talked to,” he said firmly.

West was silent for a second. His tone dropped. “Tell me what is going on. Your words.”

“It’s taken care of,” Elias said.

“That isn’t what I asked,” West said. “I want an update. I want to know what is going on and how it was solved. A summary if you will. Just like I’d request of any business that I have a stake in. But we know this is more than that.”

His brother wasn’t yelling. Not like he used to do in the past.

But he was businessman cool. They’d both touched a nerve with the other.

“I feel as if you’re the principal calling me in for detention and I’ve got to give my side of it,” he said. “I’m the one making you money on this, not the other way around. You know as well as everyone else, I appreciated the start-up money for all of this.”

“It’s not about that,” West said. “I just told you I’m not treating you any differently than any other investment and if you don’t believe me, that’s on you. Ask Braylon or Laken, but you’re not being treated differently no matter how much you think you are.”

He weighed those words.

He couldn’t argue it because he didn’t know.

“Why did you bring up the expansion?” Elias asked.

He had said nothing to West about it.

West sighed. “Because I know my family,” he said. “You’re out to prove you can be the best, just like we all are. No way you’re settling with one location. It’s in your mind to branch somewhere else at some point. Maybe not soon, but you can’t deny it has crossed your thoughts.”

“I don’t need your approval to do that,” he said. “It’d be my money.”

“I never expected otherwise,” West said. “But I also would have hoped since you are one of the most profitable of my investments that I’d be given a chance to have ownership in more. That’s business,not family.”

Used to be West did everything for family. Now it was for business.

It was a moment of respect that maybe he’d been waiting for in his life and hadn’t realized it would come in this form.

“When I’m ready, you’ll be the first to know,” he said.

West laughed. As if he won.

Elias wasn’t sure how he felt about it but was going to ignore it for now.

“Now, will you tell me what has been going on?” West asked. “I do still have a lot of stake in your business.”

A third of it, Elias thought. West could have taken more, but he didn’t. Not as things expanded.

He told West how things started out slowly. Nothing alarming.

The wrong product was ordered and no one caught it. Beth hadn’t been involved in that that he could pinpoint at the moment. But Skip had been one to sign off and there were a lot of reports Beth seemed to be at Skip’s side distracting him. A temperature gauge being off. A leak costing them an entire vat of product. The water pressure issue just recently.

Everything timed to when he’d be working with Fierce.

“It had to do with my collaboration. Beth was an employee of the previous owners. I had no clue she was married to one of their best friends. She thought she was being loyal to them. It all boiled down to jealousy. That I was succeeding where they couldn’t.”

“Jealousy is a big motivator,” West said. “Not sure what she thought to accomplish. That collaboration failing wasn’t going to discredit your business. If it never went through you’d still be killing it.”

“She broke down in tears in my office,” he said. “She knew she was caught. I had enough on camera. She said her best friend’s marriage was on the rocks because of the loss of the brewery years ago. It was a plan they made after drinking one night. She thought it’d make her friend feel better.”

It didn’t make any sense to him.

The one thing that got answered was that Skip wasn’t sleeping with Beth. She was just flirting with him and giving him attention since he’d been down and out that his girlfriend broke up with him. It was to use him.

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