Page 33 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Would that have actually worked?"

"No. Dot would've found a way." He almost smiles, and something about watching him be lightly, easily amused instead of carefully guarded does something warm to my chest that I don't examine too closely.

We talk through dinner in a way that surprises me with how easy it turns out to be, no careful pauses, no rehearsed distance, just conversation that moves wherever it wants to. I ask about the brewery's start, expecting the same clipped, professional answer he'd give a supplier, and instead I get something else entirely.

"The land was my grandfather's first," he says, turning his water glass slowly on the table. "He ran cattle on it before any of this existed. I spent every summer out here as a kid, mucking stalls, mending fence, learning that everything on that ranch broke eventually and somebody had to know how to fix it."

"Sounds exhausting."

"It was. It was also the best part of my year, every year, until I was old enough to enlist instead." He says it plainly, no weight added for effect, just fact laid down like a brick. "He died my second year in. Left me the land in his will, probably assuming I'd sell it the second I got the chance."

"You didn't."

"I couldn't. It felt like the last room in the house nobody else had gotten to yet." He looks up, and there's something unguarded in his face I haven't seen before, not even in the loft. "He kept a recipe book. Beer, mostly, some of it going back to before Prohibition, handwritten, half the measurements in units nobody uses anymore. I taught myself to brew out of that book because it felt like the only conversation I still got to have with him."

"What was he like? Your grandfather."

"Stubborn. Quiet, until he wasn't. He'd go a whole day without saying six words and then talk your ear off about barley for an hour if you got him started." A real smile crosses his face, the kind I haven't seen from him before, open in a way that catches me off guard. "He's the reason I know how to fix almost anything with my hands and the reason I still can't throw away a piece of scrap wood if there's a chance it's useful later. Gunny says I inherited his hoarding along with his land."

"That's where Ridgeline came from."

"Every batch we make starts somewhere in those pages. I've updated the process, obviously, we're not still measuring hops by the handful, but the bones of it are all his." He turns the glass again, slower this time. "I don't tell people that. It sounds sentimental, coming from a guy who spent years in uniform being told sentiment gets people killed."

"It doesn't sound sentimental. It sounds like the truest thing you've said to me since I met you."

He considers me for a long moment, like he's deciding whether to trust that, and something settles in his shoulders that I've genuinely never seen there before, not even close.

"There was a version of me before all of it," he says. "Before the Army, before years of learning to compartmentalize everything I felt into something manageable. A kid who liked cattle dogs and bad radio and thought the ranch was the whole world. I don't let that guy out much anymore."

"He seems like he'd be good company."

"He's rustier than he used to be. But he's still in there." Rafe holds my eyes, steady, none of the careful blankness I've gotten used to reading around. "You're the first person in a long time I've wanted him to meet."

I don't have a clever answer for that, and for once I don't try to build one. I just let it land the way he meant it. This is the first time I've seen him fully unguarded, no checklist, no careful distance, just a man telling me who he used to be. I like what I see enough that it scares me a little, the good kind of scared.

By the time we get back to the cabin, the porch light's on and the twins are long asleep at Maggie's for the night, and the whole world's gone quiet the way it only does out here after dark, crickets and distant dogs and nothing else.

"Thank you," I say, at the door, "for tonight. For all of it."

"Thank the checklist. I nearly failed question three."

"You didn't, though."

"Close call." He steps closer, slow, deliberate, none of the surprise of that first hand-hold at the fireworks or the rush of the loft, both of us choosing this with our eyes fully open under a porch light neither of us is in any hurry to leave.

The kiss is unhurried this time, no interruption waiting to break it, no small stirring body on a couch to pull us apart before we're ready. It's just the two of us on a porch in the quiet, taking exactly as long as we both want to take, and when we finally break apart he doesn't step back right away, forehead nearly resting against mine, both of us breathing like something important just happened, because it did.

"I want to do that again," he says, half disbelieving, already walking backward toward his truck like his feet started moving before the rest of him agreed to it. "Soon. Tomorrow. Whenever you'll let me."

"Drive safe, Rafe."

"Copy that." He almost trips over the porch step, catches himself, and keeps walking backward anyway, grinning in a way I don't think he knows how to stop.

I stand there in the doorway long after the taillights disappear down the gravel road, arms wrapped around myself against the chill, replaying the whole evening from the checklist on down. I can't remember the last time a night left me feeling this full instead of tired. I go inside eventually, lock the door, and lie awake longer than I planned to, smiling at the ceiling like a woman half my age.

16

RAFE