Page 3 of Small Town Firsts
“No, we don’t. But I’d rather respect the man who comes in, and Stanford Lang is an opportunist. He’d leave us high and dry within a season, I’d bet my six-digit pasteurizer on it.”
I folded my arms. “I still would have liked to be in on the decision. If I’m to run the taproom, I have to be able to work with this guy. He needs to know I’m the one making decisions, and you doing the hiring undermines my authority.”
He sighed. “All right, I can see where you’re coming from there. But I know he’s the one, Key. He’s brilliant and has the nose.”
“You and the stupid nose.”
“It’s not stupid. You either have it or you don’t. And he does. Even if he’s a little…unorthodox.”
“Dammit, Beck.”
Unorthodoxwas code for hell, I just knew it. Beckett had a habit of picking the underdog. I knew it because I had definitely been one of his favorites to champion.
“Give it three months and if he doesn’t work out, we can revisit your hire list, all right?”
I sighed. “Fine.”
This time he didn’t try to argue. He just lifted the reins. “You’ll like Ronan.”
“What the hell kind of name is Ronan?”
“What the hell kind of name is Kira? I still like you.”
I flipped him off.
He laughed and turned to give me a fine view of Storm’s ass. Before he let the horse break into a trot, he yelled back at me. “Say goodbye to the old you, Key! I know you’re ready.”
I walked back to my tree and brushed my thumb over the year I’d just carved into the bark. What if I wasn’t ready? What if this was all a cosmic joke and Beckett was wrong?
A smaller voice nagged at me.What if he’s right?
TWO
RONAN
TESTING LOCKS
I jangledthe keys in my hand. Actual keys. No security protocols that made me feel like I was being microchipped, for fuck’s sake. I’d worked in so many electronic-based operations that anything analog now felt foreign.
But was that a bad thing?
Beckett and Hayes Manning had contacted—actually, more like ambushed—me and had thrown a stupid amount of money my way to come out here and work for them in Bumfuck, New York.
What the hell kind of name was Turnbull? When I Googled it, the first thing that came up was that it was in the top five places for snow. One hundred and fifty inches of fucking snow each winter on average, thanks to lake effect.
What?
That was just…disturbing.
But the next tidbit seemed to be the remarkable amount of apple orchards that were out this way. Goddamn apples as far as the eye could see. Not just on the Happy Acres acreage either. Drive down any road in the area and you’d trip over three orchards.
Complete orchards—and most of them weren’t mom and pop operations either. Not to mention the wineries sprinkled into the mix. I’d have to research that a bit more now that I’d accepted the position. It was a pain in the ass to go all the way to the Northeastern half of the state to the visit the Catskills when Central New York was ripe for a wine and spirit expo.
I made a mental note to look into that as well. New York was a big state and I didn’t know all the ins and outs of how things worked here. I was surprised just how long it took to drive across the state lines.
I’d lived most of my life in major cities where apples were trucked into the markets and grocery stores and that was about it. Unless you took a road trip to check out the foliage and for a bit of time travel into rural America.
The last few years I’d lived in Chicago with a pit stop in Milwaukee to learn from the major beer markets from the ground up.
