[True North 01.0] Bittersweet Page 3

“What’s so funny?”

  He crossed his bulky, lickable arms. “Look,” he said. “I have a feeling I know why your man at BPG doesn’t have his calls answered too often. His prices are probably bullshit, right? So his new plan is to send a hot sorority girl in a halter top and short skirt to dazzle the poor hicks who grow his food. Your guy thinks I’m a big enough idiot that a nice rack and a bright smile will blind me for long enough to agree to sell apples for a buck a pound.”

  Later I would remember this moment as important. Standing there on Griff’s road, I’d gleaned the first prickle of understanding that a flat tire was just the start of my buzz kill. A brand new sinking feeling kicked in, because I had a hunch that Griff Shipley knew what he was talking about for once. I opened the price list in my hand to see that the first item on the list was, indeed, Apples: $0.99 / lb.

  Fuck. “So you’re saying that a dollar a pound is not the market rate for wholesale apples?” I said it as sweetly as possible, but Griff’s face began to darken like a stormy sky.

  “Listen, princess,” he growled. “You can buy shitty, mealy apples for that price from a giant orchard out west or from a farmer that got swindled into growing only Red Delicious during the eighties and can’t afford to re-graft his trees. But your guy wants organic apples, probably heirloom varietals. He wants bragging rights on the menu—apples grown locally in New England with no pesticides and blessed by virgins in the moonlight. That’s what he wants hand-lettered on the menu, right?”

  “Right,” I agreed reluctantly. That was exactly how it worked.

  “That does not come at a buck a pound. Not from me and not from any of my neighbors.”

  Uh-oh. My heart sank a little further into the dirt, just like my rental car.

  I wasn’t a stupid girl. Maybe business wasn’t exactly my forte, but I’d always been a good listener. And after listening to Griff rant for a minute, I already knew that when I visited the other farms in this county, every price on my page would be too low by half. And yet my job depended on sealing these deals.

  I was so screwed.

  “Now let’s get your shiny new car out of the ditch, shall we?” Griff was glowering at me. For real. Before today I’d never seen anyone actually glower. It was an expression found only in books, and on Griff Shipley’s ridiculously handsome yet grumpy face.

  “It’s a rental,” I said in my own defense. “I can call for roadside service.”

  Glowering Griff gave a weary sigh. “I’ll be rid of you sooner if I do it myself.” He raised two fingers to his mouth and blew an ear-piercing whistle. Then he waited while I tried not to think of those fingers and the things they’d once done to me…

  “Got a problem, Han?” a voice called from the meadow beyond the trees lining the road. A few seconds later an attractive blond dude slipped between the trees to join us. He was big, too. But where Griff was dark, this man was fair with pretty blue eyes.

  Apparently all the people who grew pristine organic food were beautiful themselves.

  “Yeah, we do have a problem,” Griff told him. “We have to pull the princess here out of the ditch and change her tire. Then warp speed her ass back to the Death Star so she can report that the rebels are mutinying.”

  “Jesus, I’d forgotten about your Star Wars obsession.” That just slipped out of my mouth. But as soon as I said it, the other guy’s eyes opened wide, and the look on Griff’s face made it clear that any further references to our tiny sliver of a past together weren’t going to be tolerated.

  Though tiny sliver wasn’t good terminology for the boinking we’d done, because nothing on that man’s body was tiny.

  Moving on.

  “How can I help?” I asked. “I’m happy to get going just as soon as I’m able. After we have a brief discussion about cider and apples.”

  “A brief discussion.” He stared me down.

  “Yes. You repeat things very well. Good job.” I crossed my arms to match his posture. Maybe I’d been sent to Vermont on a fool’s errand, but I wasn’t going to cash in my chips just yet. If this errand could be saved, I’d save it. My future at BPG was at stake, and one grumpy farmer wasn’t going to have the last word.

  “Follow me,” he grunted before turning and marching away.

  “Yes sir.” I saluted the back of his head.

  The blond kid chuckled to himself and went to look at the deflated wheel of my rental car.

  Chapter Three

  Griffin

  I’m a nice guy. Swear to God. But today it was pretty hard to tell.

  Blame it on the stress of running a farm, or the shock of seeing Audrey Kidder there on our road, her legs longer than the drive to town, her fiery eyes staring up at me. Blame it on a sudden spike in the summer day’s temperature.

  Whatever the cause, I started acting like an asshole at the moment I discovered Audrey’s perfect ass sticking out of that car on my dirt road.

  Trying to clear my head, I walked her up our half-mile gravel driveway at a death-march pace. But she had on those little strappy shoes, damn it. So I slowed my pace and tried to find my manners. “How’ve you been for five years?” I barked.

  Maybe I hadn’t quite remembered how to be civilized yet, though, because she looked shocked by the question. “Um, fine, thank you. I, uh, flunked out of BU. Then my mother sent me to Mount Holyoke where I repeated the performance.”

  I shouldn’t have asked, I guess, because her story made me ragey. I’d busted my ass for four years to keep a football scholarship at BU because I knew it would leave more money in the college fund for my three younger siblings.

  But Audrey had been a party girl. Always with her sorority sisters. Always looking for a drunken good time. Good-time party guy was the part I’d tried to play in college, but, meanwhile, I’d slept an average of five hours a night for four years so I could get everything done. Just like I did now.

  “—so after I proved to everyone that a college degree was not for me, I went to cooking school where I graduated as the valedictorian. Go figure.”

  “Nice,” I said. But Audrey Kidder in a kitchen? That was something I had a real hard time visualizing. She might chip a nail.

  “I took the job at Boston Premier Group because I want to start my own restaurant. That’s really hard to do—you need backers. If I kiss the ring for a while, they can help me get started.”

  Interesting. But now she was just buttering me up in order to get what she needed from me. She worked for a bunch of corporate slimeballs who took advantage of everyone they could. And she wanted my approval? Not happening.

  “Why don’t you ask your parents for the startup money?” I asked. Audrey was a rich girl. That’s why the sorority types had liked her so much. “Can’t they help?”

  “No, Griff.” Her voice dipped. “As a matter of fact they can’t.” And a flash of something dark crossed her face.

  Whoops. I’d stuck my foot in my mouth again. “Well,” I grunted. “Let’s talk about my ciders while Zach fixes your car.”

  “Cool! Can I see where you make them?” Her face lit up like a kid’s on Christmas, and I felt a twinge of unfamiliar kinship in my chest. Cider was my passion, and whenever anyone expressed interest, it made me happy.

  Then again, the girl really had enjoyed getting drunk back in the day.

  “Yeah. Of course. This way.” We passed the farmhouse on our right, then I steered Audrey between the bunkhouse and the dairy barn toward my pride and joy—the cider house. My father had always made artisanal cider, but he made it for himself. Every year he’d sold a few gallons just for fun.

  But I’d grown Dad’s tiny operation into something much bigger. Pushing open the door to the barn-like building, I flipped on the old soda lamps overhead.

  “Whoa,” Audrey said, her voice hushed. “Those tanks are serious.”

  “They are,” I agreed, fighting off the rush of pleasure I felt whenever someone admired my babies. “My cider wins awards.” Okay, one award. But I was just getting
started. “Any yokel can brew a decent beer in his garage, but it’s difficult to create a cider with any complexity. And there’s a lot that can go wrong, chemically speaking.”

  “Uh-huh,” Audrey said, wandering over to my bottling machine and picking up an empty bottle. “Nice label.”

  The label was the least interesting thing in the room. “Thanks,” I said tightly. “My brother designed it.”

  She looked up quickly, a grin on her face. “I know you don’t give a fuck about the label, Grouchy Griff,” she said, putting it down again. “But marketing matters to buyers. People need to feel good about plunking down a lot of cash for premium goods. They want a story, because the story lasts longer than it takes to swallow something.”

  “Uh-huh.” This was the kind of mumbo jumbo that made me crazy, because people should be willing to pay for organic quality simply because it’s the right thing to do. “So you’re saying the pretty picture means more to your customers than the fact that my orchard isn’t poisoning Vermont’s groundwater with chemicals and petroleum-based fertilizers? And that I pay my employees a living wage?”

  She tossed her hair. “Does it matter how I respond? I wouldn’t want to interrupt your sermon.” She came closer, her big blue eyes looking up at me, a challenge gleaming in them. “And don’t tell me you’ve never tried to gussy up your cider house to appeal to the masses. If you don’t believe in marketing, what’s that?”

  She pointed at a framed photograph on the wall. It was the first part of an informative display explaining how cider was made. We held tastings here during our busy apple-picking season. “My sister took that last fall. That’s our fruit in the wheelbarrow. So what?”

  Audrey grinned like she’d caught me with my hand in the cash drawer. “The apples in that picture did not go into your big, manly cider tanks. These—” She jabbed one pink fingernail at the photo. “—are fancy grade, flawless fruit. You sold those apples to tourists. And in there”—she pointed at my tanks, and raised her voice—“you put apples that look like they got their asses kicked in an alleyway! So don’t even try to pretend you have no fucks to give when it comes to marketing!”

  Christ on a cracker. The way her shapely mouth looked when she said fuck was ridiculously distracting. And I’d just been schooled by a girl who must have paid attention at least once in a while in culinary school.

  Weirdly, I didn’t care that much. I just wanted her to say fuck again, preferably while riding my dick in the hayloft.

  “What?” she snapped. “You’re staring at me.”

  “Did you call me Grouchy Griff a minute ago?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Maybe. Does it make you want to sell me cider at a competitive price?”

  The truth was that I wanted very much to sell cider to the Big Corporate Assholes Group of where-the-fuck-ever. Unlike my fruit, the cider could become a brand name, and it needed to find its special market. If fancy restaurants carried my cider, I’d have an easier time convincing Boston wine shops to stock it.

  Taking a small loss on the cider was probably a good business decision. If I could stomach it. “Dare I ask?” I walked closer to Audrey where she stood by the bottler. “What price does your employer expect to pay for a bottle of Vermont’s finest hard cider?”

  For a moment she blinked up at me, then licked her lips.

  Do not look at her lips. Do not think about them. Do not remember what she once did with… Fuck.

  “My pricing sheet says three dollars for a seven-hundred-fifty-milliliter bottle.”

  Well, that was a libido killer. “Three bucks? So they can mark it up to twenty? You’re shitting me. The bottle and the cork alone cost a buck fifty.”

  Her shoulders sagged, and when she spoke again, it was in a soft voice. “I will tell my boss he’s insane, okay? But if you want me to change his mind, you need to give me something to go on. I need information, not another rant.”

  Hell, the girl had a point. “All right. First, let’s taste.”

  Audrey clasped her hands together. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Right.

  I fetched a bottle from the cooler, untwisted its wire clasp and then slowly removed the cork. To preserve the natural effervescence of my product, I used a champagne cork in every bottle. It cost more than a twist-off top, but the product had a better shelf life.

  I grabbed a couple of glasses from the tasting counter and poured us each a half portion. Audrey took hers and smiled at me. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” I grunted. It was hard to remember the last time I had a drink with an attractive female. A couple months ago I’d broken things off with my fuck buddy, and since then I’d been living like a monk. Tasting cider before lunch in the hopes of making a sale wasn’t exactly a social occasion. But it was as close as I’d come in a while.

  Pathetic much?

  Audrey held her glass up to the dusty beam of light filtering down through the skylight. “A nice amber color.” She swirled the class under her nose like a pro. “Pleasant, musky odor. More tannic than fruity.” She sipped, her gaze drifting off to the side as she concentrated on the tart, complicated flavors of my product. I saw her delicate throat pulse as she swallowed. “Wow. That’s some fine apple juice you’ve got there, Griff.”

  “What?” I yelped. “Apple j—”

  She grinned. “Joking! It’s magnificent. I get notes of oak and apricot. Nice finish. I can see why you’re proud of it.”

  For a second, my chest swelled from the praise. But then I remembered she was trying to buy the stuff for peanuts. Obviously, she was just buttering me up. “It tastes like eight dollars a bottle at wholesale, fifteen at retail.”

  Audrey took another dainty sip while I tried not to find her ridiculously attractive. “I think it’s delicious, and I’d pay your price any day. But the guys I work for are going to fire me if I come back with a number that’s more than double theirs.”

  The truth was that I could do a little better than eight bucks. I just wasn’t ready to admit it. “BPG will do really well with this bottle. It’s still cheaper than ninety percent of the wines on their list. And we’re not exactly in Napa Valley. If they want to impress the Beacon Hill set, this is the way to go. The Massachusetts Bay colonists had too little grain to make the beer they’d drunk in England, so they made hard cider instead. This right here is our history.” I held up the bottle.

  She took it out of my hand and put it back on the counter. “I may have flunked out of BU, but I did finish the fifth grade, where they taught us that John Adams drank hard cider with breakfast. I get it, okay? You’ve got the perfect regional beverage for my corporate overlords. I shall report back to the Death Star, where Darth Vader will express his disappointment and then strangle me for quoting eight bucks a bottle.”

  Damn this girl. Not only did she know her stuff, she was smiling at me now over the rim of her glass. The other two times we’d been this close together, our clothes had come off in a big fucking hurry.

  Focus, Griffin.

  “I could show you seven dollars. Why don’t you just see what their limit really is?”

  “Well…”

  Behind me, the door opened suddenly. “Griff?” my sister called. “Angelo just drove up with the new guy.”

  “Be right there,” I said, taking a step back from Audrey. I felt oddly guilty, as if my sister had caught us doing something more furtive than discussing the price of cider.

  You wish.

  “Hi!” May said, catching a glimpse of Audrey. “Are you going to introduce me to your friend?” My sister’s voice was oddly bright. It was her snooping voice. I’d been hearing it her whole life.

  “I thought we had a drug addict to meet,” I grumbled, setting down my glass and heading for the door. Nudging May and her big mouth out of the way, I watched the back door of Angelo’s old sedan open. “Excuse me a minute, Audrey.”

  “Audrey?” My sister’s curiosity was in full swing. “I’m May, Griffin’s sister…”

>   I had no choice but to leave the two of them to chat. I hoped Audrey wouldn’t divulge our former entanglement, because everyone on the farm would be talking about it by dinnertime, even the dairy cattle. But in the grand scheme of things I had bigger problems.

  One of them was climbing out of Angelo’s car.

  What does an addict look like, anyway? To me he looked like any kid in his twenties. He had a serious face and a lot of tattoos, but so did half the men in Vermont. He was a little thin for farm work. But that was really the worst I could say about my first impression. He pulled a small duffel bag out of the trunk, then lifted his chin to look around.

  “Hi,” I said, greeting our friend Angelo. Now here was a guy with a tough job. The next time I found myself grumbling about an invasion of apple maggot fly, I would try to remember that I could be hunting down ex-cons instead.

  His dark skin crinkled at the corners of his eyes when he smiled at me. “Haven’t seen you at church lately,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “What, now you’re moonlighting as Father Pat’s truant officer?”

  He laughed. “Sorry. Occupational hazard.”

  “I’ll bet.” I turned my attention to the newcomer, offering my hand. “I’m Griffin Shipley.”

  “Jude Nickel.” He had a surprisingly firm handshake. “Thank you for giving me a try. I need the job.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. Translation: we’re desperate. “If you don’t mind the outdoors, it’s not bad work.”

  “Just spent three years in jail and rehab. I could use a little outdoors.”

  His candor took me by surprise. “Well okay then. We pay twelve bucks an hour if you’re living on site, or fourteen if you’re a day worker. Lunch is free for everyone, but those who live with us get docked ten bucks a day total for breakfast and supper. The food is great, though, and we provide a lot of it. Like Guinness World Record quantities.”

  “Damn,” said a chirpy voice behind me. “Got any more openings? You pay better than my corporate overlords.”

  Audrey was listening in on my little HR speech, and I didn’t know quite how to feel about that. I paid my employees as well as I possibly could, though nobody was getting rich working here. Least of all me.