"Yeah, Brooke." He touched his hand to my lower back, urging me forward. "Is that a problem?"
"Uh, no," I replied. "I just don't know how I didn't notice a dog."
"Butterscotch conks out around ten o'clock and doesn't wake up until I tell her it's morning. A band of pirates could've stormed my house and she would've slept through every second of it."
I glanced at him as we crossed into the village. "You named your dog Butterscotch?"
"I mean, look at her." He gestured to the dog's golden coat. "Also, she'll steal an ice cream sundae out of your hand if you're not careful."
"I suppose that fits," I conceded. "But I didn't know dogs ate ice cream."
We walked up the hill to my father's house—which sat on a parcel of land that'd been in my family for hundreds of years and covered almost half of Talbott's Cove—in silence. When we reached the entrance, JJ eyed the house and dropped his hand to Butterscotch's head, scratching behind her ears.
I spread my hands out in front of me. "As you can see, no moose."
He snickered. "You're welcome."
"Yes, Jed. Thank you. Your generosity is appreciated."
"Yeah, well…" His voice trailed off as he glanced toward the water. "Good night."
He turned to leave, but I couldn't let him go. Not without killing this with fire. "Jed?"
Stopping, he studied me with a wary smirk. "What is it, Bam Bam?"
"The next time I try to pick someone up at the tavern, you won't interfere." I offered him a sharp grin and marched up the walkway, not waiting for a response.
When I closed the front door behind me, he was still standing on the sidewalk with Butterscotch.
One last shot fired.
Chapter Seven
JJ
Reserve: an accounting entry that properly reflects contingent liabilities.
Barry O'Connor turnedin a wide arc, his head tipped back and his gaze fixed on the exposed beams overhead.
The beams, the birds' nests, the bursts of sunlight streaming in through gaps in the roof. The old cider house presented my business partner with plenty to see.
"You think this will work?" he asked, still staring at the remains of the roof. "Or are you thinking we knock this popsicle stand over and start from scratch?"
"I think this will work," I replied, working hard to keep the impatience out of my tone.
If I’d wanted to start from scratch, I would've shown him any one of the many parcels of vacant land available in this town. This distillery project wasn't about building something new. It was about building on that which already existed.
Barry ambled to the far side of the cider house. He rapped his knuckles on a post, tapped his shoe against the cracked cement floor. "It's gonna need a lot of work," he said. "It might be cheaper to knock it down."
"But that forecloses the possibility of selling on the story," I argued. "No one makes a destination out of a new-construction distillery. That's no different than any number of breweries along the seacoast."
"That's only part of the pitch," he argued back. "Even with new construction, we still have the locally sourced angle, the Prohibition Era bootlegger angle, the charming small town angle. We have enough angles to do without the most expensive one." He frowned at a dark stain on the floor. "Was someone killed here?"
I shoved my hands in my pockets, ignoring the tug of well-used abdominal muscles. I couldn't think about Brooke or the things we did to leave me sore today. Not while I dealt with my part-time pain in the ass business partner. "Ever in the history of the cider house? Probably, yes. That I know of, in recent times? No."
"That's positive," he muttered.
Barry painted himself as a hometown guy, someone who grew up a handful of miles down the coast and cared about seeing this region thrive. These days, he lived in Boston and developed commercial real estate. He talked a big game about investing in Maine-based passion projects intended to grow the local economy, but a solid year after our first meeting and his verbal commitment to this distillery, he hadn't written a single check.
