5

SOMEONE DID NOT want her to write. He rested his head on Kelsey’s knees and stared up at her with hopeful brown eyes as if to say, How dare you ignore me for that glowing screen when I’m so much cuter?

“Mama has a job to do,” Kelsey said to Puck, although she wasn’t sure why she bothered. She was emphatically not making any worthwhile progress.

The husky’s ears perked up, probably because he’d sensed he’d won the battle for her attention.

Groaning, Kelsey rubbed the top of his head. The bright yellow she’d painted her office walls glowed in the afternoon light, a cheerful and energetic color, which was why she’d chosen it in the hope it might rub off on her work. Except she was feeling neither cheerful nor energetic at the moment, and her work (or lack thereof) was reflecting that.

“Get your ball.” She pointed to the chewed-up tennis ball in the corner, and Puck scampered over to it, paws skidding on the hardwood floor in his haste.

There were a few reasons Kelsey had opted to adopt older rescue dogs. One was that she felt a kinship with them. She didn’t believe in reincarnation, but she considered herself to be an old soul kind of person. Dogs that had been there and seen that fit her style. Older dogs were also generally less likely to be adopted by others, and although she kept her bleeding heart well hidden, Kelsey understood what it was like to be less wanted, and she empathized.

But the reason she’d have given to anyone who asked why she adopted older dogs was that they were less energetic and demanding than younger ones. Alas, Puck had never gotten that memo. Not only was he a good ten pounds smaller than his siblings, he acted a good five years younger. Basically, he was a fully adult male husky stuck in a teen husky’s body with a puppy husky’s brain. Kelsey would never play favorites among her dogs, but she adored him for it.

Just not so much when she was supposed to be working.

Puck dropped the ball at her feet, and Kelsey obligingly tossed it into her narrow upstairs hallway. The wannabe puppy vanished after it like a supercharged snowball. Puck even fit his name. With pure white fur except for patches of brown around his feet, there was something fey about his appearance.

Her phone barked (a recording of Romeo’s voice) with the arrival of a text while Puck chased the ball. Grumbling, Kelsey picked it up, since it wasn’t like she was doing anything else productive. She should just give up. Clearly she wasn’t going to finish her current chapter today.

The message was from her friend Emily to their college friend group chat. I hate to do this to you guys, but can we postpone our girls’ outing for a few more weeks? Some idiot broke her foot last night.

Assuming the some idiot was none other than Emily herself, Kelsey snickered. Moving the date for their annual get-together, which was supposed to be next weekend, would actually be fantastic. This weekend already marked the beginning of September, making it unofficially fall, and she still had summer tasks to accomplish.

Her maternal grandparents in Wasilla had put aside some furniture for her, and she’d promised them she’d get it soon. That had been two months ago. Her grandparents wanted it gone before the winter so they could put their car in the garage, and Kelsey wanted the furniture in her mostly empty house. (Being able to afford her own place had negated being able to afford furnishing said place. Irony.) The problem was she needed help moving the furniture, and the two men she’d normally depend on for help—Kevin and Josh—had gotten caught up in relationship nonsense over the summer. All of that should be settling down by now though, so she’d just have to bully or bribe one of them into helping next weekend. No problem.

Sure, Kelsey wrote back to Emily. Name the date. It wasn’t as if her book deadline was going to creep any closer regardless of when she took a weekend off, and maybe this way she could knock out whatever crap she was supposed to write for Ian’s brewery before she left.

Ugh. Ian. He wasn’t helping her concentration either. She’d taken time yesterday to look up his family’s brewery website and email him a bunch of questions. In all, this task she’d been volunteered for had taken her about two hours, and she hadn’t written a word yet.

Some of that was her own fault. After she’d discovered a family photo on the About page with a younger-looking Ian, she’d gone poking around the rest of the site. That had eventually led her to a page called The Brewmaster’s Blog, and even though Kelsey didn’t care for beer, she’d mindlessly read a few posts until she’d found the one announcing the opening of their sister brewery in Helen. That post contained another photo of Ian, this time wearing a T-shirt with the name of the brewery on it. A tight T-shirt. One that made it clear that her assumptions about the body he’d been hiding under his sweatshirt on Friday were not at all wrong.

Kelsey had closed the website at that point, but the memory had remained as she typed out her list of questions for him, and it remained today when she was supposed to be writing about a guy who did not look at all like Ian. That was infuriating. She had an excellent imagination, but instead of picturing a rugged mountain man with brown hair and a barely trimmed beard, she kept picturing a tall, muscled beermaker with sandy hair and a puppylike expression.

By the time the girls’ weekend arrived, she was really going to need that vacation—just her and her three closest friends in a secluded cabin with alcohol, junk food, and no internet access. The place belonged to Emily’s parents and was totally off the grid, powered by a generator and heated by a woodstove. Some people might call it a setup for a horror movie, but as long as it didn’t get too cold too quickly, Kelsey called it exactly the sort of break from reality that might keep her sane. There would be no family breathing down her neck, no feud to deal with, and definitely no men.

No hiding or lying either. Emily, Lauren, and Amy were the only three people among her circle of family and friends who knew about her writing.

Sometimes that made Kelsey nervous. What was that saying about how two could keep a secret if one of them was dead? But the three of them had been there during the incident that had set Kelsey down this path. They knew what a dickhead her ex Anthony had turned out to be and why she’d switched from dabbling in writing young adult stories to trying her hand at something steamier. They’d encouraged her, commiserated with her, and celebrated with her along the way. The idea that she should keep her pen name a secret from them had never occurred to Kelsey, just as the possibility that she would end up writing romance as a career hadn’t. Life had simply happened, and by then it was too late.

Puck barked at her, and Kelsey realized she was ignoring him. She promptly tossed his ball again. “Go get it!”

Puck charged down the ball, and oh, why couldn’t humans be as easily entertained as dogs? For that matter, why couldn’t they be as loyal and as friendly? If Anthony had been any one of those things, she might not be in the position she was today.

“Insufferable,” she muttered out loud, saving her file. But no, that wasn’t the correct word for Anthony. That word was more like asshole. Whatever Ian’s faults—and she was certain there were many beyond ruining her little town—he hadn’t earned that word from her yet. He would remain insufferable, however, for as long as he continued to occupy space in her brain that she needed for other endeavors.

On that thought, since she wasn’t writing the words she wanted to write, she might as well check if he’d responded to her email.

Lo and behold, he had. Kelsey was about to award him some minor redemption for promptness, but then she read what he’d sent back. “Nope. Still insufferable.”

Puck dropped his ball at her feet and cocked his head.

“He gave me one-sentence responses to everything,” Kelsey explained. “There’s nowhere near enough for me to work with if he wants something more than a terse, boring summary for the website. For a press release, it’s fine, I suppose. But for an entire newspaper article, or an About page that’s worth clicking on? Forget it.”

A lifetime of assuming the worst about people’s intentions made Kelsey wonder whether Ian had responded the way he did on purpose. To annoy her. Obviously, he had to know how rich and detailed the information on the Florida brewery’s website was; he was the one who’d brought it up. Had he expected her to just plagiarize some of it, substituting his half-assed answers in where appropriate? But even that didn’t make sense. How the brewery had come to be opened in Florida had nothing to do with why Helen had been selected as the site for Northern Charm. Ian’s We were looking for an adventure in a new state did not explain why that state had to be Alaska.

The husky whined in a questioning sort of way, so Kelsey picked up the ball again and waved it around in her agitation. “See? This is like me holding the ball up here where you can’t get it, making you think I’m going to throw it and play with you, but really just being insufferably rude because I’m not.”

Now that Puck was as displeased as she was, he jumped up, trying to catch the ball, and Kelsey sighed. She’d trained her babies (as best she could at their age) to not jump, but this was her fault. She tossed the ball back into the hallway for him.

“He’s even making me be mean to you when he’s not around.”

Almost as bad, Ian was making her email him again, because damn it—if he was going to intentionally piss her off by not taking her questions seriously, she was going to piss him off by rejecting his answers.

Truly, she was a glutton for punishment. The smarter choice, and the passive-aggressive one, would be to use Ian’s responses to write the press release plus something short and boring for the website, as well as a note that she was unable to produce a newspaper article with what he’d given her. But anything she wrote with the scraps he’d tossed her way would reflect poorly on her skills, and besides, Kelsey never liked to take the passive-aggressive option when the active-aggressive one was available.

So nope. She’d suck it up and deal with the man face-to-face one more time in an attempt write something she wasn’t embarrassed by. She was no coward. She wasn’t afraid of Ian getting stuck in her head.

Which was convenient, since he was already there.

Then, to make herself feel better, she’d see if her father had a key to the brewery. For sabotage fantasies, that was. This time, she’d go into the meeting with him better prepared for dealing with the aftermath.