Worth the Wait (Kingston Ale House) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover more Entangled Select Contemporary titles… Compromising Positions

  12 Steps to Mr. Right

  A Friendly Flirtation

  Stolen Away

  Discover the Kingston Ale House series… The One That Got Away

  Six Month Rule

  Three Simple Words

  If Only

  What If

  I Do

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by A.J Pine. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Select Contemporary is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Karen Grove

  Cover design by Sommer Stein with Perfect Pear Creative Covers

  Cover art from iStock

  ISBN 978-1-63375-795-0

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition January 2016

  To the city of Chicago and all the amazing microbreweries in the area…and to Jamie, Brynn, Will, Holly, Wes, Annie, Jeremy, and Grace. Cheers.

  Chicago Tribune: Arts and Entertainment

  Saturday, December 17, 8:00 a.m.

  City Dweller’s Man Cleanse Ends in Bar Brawl

  By Jennifer Bloom

  Popular microbrew and neighborhood eatery Kingston Ale House was home not only to owner Jamie Kingston’s wedding rehearsal last night but also to local reality television history.

  Grace Bailey—daughter of the dynamic prosecuting duo behind the Law Offices of Bailey, Bailey, and Dawson (Dawson being Bailey’s older sister)—was set to end her six-month cleanse by introducing local viewers to Mr. Right, the man she’d chosen to kiss on live television after six months of no sex, last night at Kingston Ale House. Bailey had been following the tenets of the New York Times best-seller, Man Cleanse: Six Months to a Healthy, Happy You…and the Road to True Love, by Suzanne Summerville. Additionally, she’d partnered with Whitney Gaines at local news affiliate WBN to chronicle her cleanse and search for Mr. Right with the promise of a $25,000 prize if she remained steadfast in her abstinence and had her first kiss on air. The local public followed Bailey’s journey on the Facebook page set up by the station, which was supposed to culminate in a live broadcast last night. Instead the evening ended with one arrest, one trip to the ER, an impromptu press conference, but—you guessed it—no kiss.

  Did Grace Bailey find her Mr. Right? Did she win that twenty-five grand? Or did her six-month man cleanse leave her empty-handed? The sponsored Facebook page has been deactivated, and despite numerous pleas on social media for the end of the story—including a fan page that has popped up titled Grace’s HEA (Happily Ever After)—WBN has remained tight-lipped about the situation. Additionally, as of this story going live, Grace Bailey has declined to comment as well. How do you think the story ends, Chicago? We’ll be monitoring the HEA page ourselves for any new developments.

  Chapter One

  Three months earlier…

  Jeremy Denning strode right past the hotel desk clerk, which was saying something because she was a freaking knockout, and headed straight to the elevator. He couldn’t muster the energy to jog up the stairs to his second-floor room. His back was sore. His legs were stiff. Shit, even his brain hurt. He’d considered going for a run in the hotel’s workout room, but now he was mentally crossing that item off his list.

  “Science is stupid,” he mumbled to himself like a frustrated child, even though he knew science was very, very important to the art of brewing beer. He’d admit that in thought, just in case his boss had somehow wiretapped his brain.

  Shit. He was delirious.

  The elevator doors opened and welcomed him in.

  A host of other hotel patrons, who were nowhere to be seen seconds ago when he pressed the up button, flooded into the small compartment, pinning him against the back wall. The man in front of him was wider than he was tall, and although Jeremy could see over his balding head, he found no feasible exit route around the guy, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a fragile-looking elderly woman with salmon-colored hair on one side and a young father wearing a baby in some sort of front backpack on the other. Would you call it a front pack? Why did everyone wear their kids, by the way?

  Actually, Jeremy wouldn’t mind if someone was wearing him at this point. And no. Contrary to popular belief, his thoughts did not tend toward euphemism, regardless of today being a day that ended in y.

  He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He just wanted the hotel bed. A nap. Possibly some room service. Then he’d consider the whole wearing situation from the euphemistic perspective.

  Seconds later, the elevator came to a stop at the second floor. The only other button lit on the number panel was six, and as if the doors were in the rear of the packed sardine can of a vessel, the sixth-floor residents all turned to see who the asshole was who took the elevator to the second floor.

  “That’d be me,” Jeremy said aloud. And because there was no possible way for the folks in front of him to part in order to let him through, they all just stood there and stared at him. Even the baby.

  He half expected one of them to spout, “None shall pass,” and then challenge him to a bloody duel where he’d either end up limbless or the victor. But instead the salmon-haired woman gave him the slow head shake before backing out of the elevator. The rest of the occupants followed until finally he was able to walk free.

  “I have no quarrel with you,” Jeremy said to the whole lot, all with judging, narrowed eyes. Not one of them even hinted at a smile. It was like they were channeling his mother or sister.

  “Black Knight?” he asked, backing down the hall as the last of them filed back into the elevator. “Monty Python? Anyone?”

  A woman brushed past him from the opposite direction, a flurry of flailing arms as she speed-walked toward the elevator while simultaneously pulling her golden waves into a ponytail.

  “Excuse me. Sorry. Hold the elevator, please. Going up!”

  He saw nothing other than the ponytail’s near miss as the elevator doors closed behind h
er. Yet she left something in her wake, the scent of fresh lime. And although salmon-haired lady couldn’t see him, he mimicked her controlled head shake and laughed quietly to himself. He’d worked in a brew pub so long everything smelled like either food or beer to him.

  “I’ll take the damn stairs next time,” he called out to the empty vestibule, then spun back toward the waiting hotel room doors.

  “Helloooo, two-eleven, you sexy, sexy beast,” he said when he stood before his door. “We meet at last.”

  It only took one swipe of his key card to open the door and approximately four seconds for him to barrel into the room and face-plant onto the bed.

  “Fucking finally,” he groaned into a pillow.

  Eight hours of lecture on the chemistry of brewing was enough to drive even the biggest beer enthusiast mad. Okay, fine. His boss, Jamie—and soon to be partner, if Jamie had anything to say about it—would have gotten off on a forty-minute PowerPoint detailing the humulene hop compound and isocohumulone, the isomerized hop alpha acid. And yes, Jeremy could remember those ridiculous words because the professor had droned on about them for forty minutes.

  Did he mention the forty minutes? And that wasn’t even an eighth of the day.

  Jamie had been hinting at wanting to dial back his hours ever since he proposed to his girlfriend, Brynn. With the wedding only three months away, the hints were getting less hint-like and more straightforward.

  “Jeremy, have you ever thought about taking some serious brewing classes?” Jamie had asked a couple months ago. Because yeah, he’d dabbled. That was pretty much the story of his life: dabbling. Jamie was the brewmaster and the ale house owner, one of his sister’s oldest friends and therefore a surrogate big brother. Jamie was the grown-up. Hell, he was almost thirty. But Jeremy? Well, twenty-six was still a kid. Still time to dabble. Still waiting to figure it all out.

  It was only when he overheard Jamie telling his fiancée that he was considering taking on a partner that Jeremy found himself asking, “What about me?”

  The words had flown out of his mouth before he’d considered the ramifications. And before he knew it, Jamie was signing him up for lectures to see if he was up to the task. This was his first one, and Jeremy was feeling anything but.

  He rolled over to his back and grabbed the television remote off the nightstand. Tomorrow would be better. First of all, the class was only four hours instead of eight. Secondly, it would be hands-on…in the lab. No more lecture. He just needed to relax and regroup.

  Jeremy scrolled through the listing of cable channels, opting for halfway through the five o’clock news over the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, especially since there was an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond following the news. He fucking loved that show.

  It should have registered when the anchorwoman said something about Navy Pier that he’d stumbled on a Chicago affiliate even though he was sprawled like a starfish on a bed in southern Wisconsin. But exhaustion, both physical and mental, had gotten the better of him. So when the woman at the desk said, “And now we’ll head over to Whitney Gaines with the weather,” Jeremy thought he must have started dozing off. Because Whitney Gaines didn’t live in Chicago anymore, not since she crushed him like he never thought was possible. No, she was off in some podunk town in Florida, chasing hurricanes and talking about what the humidity did to gators and shit.

  “Thanks, Robin. It sure was unseasonably warm for September today!”

  Jeremy sat bolt upright in his bed, those two sentences—ten little words, really—tugging him forward like a tether. There she was, that silky blond hair resting on her shoulders, a little longer than the last time he’d seen her. Then again, that was three years ago, and he’d heard that hair could do that—grow if given time. Florida must have agreed with her. She had that slightly sun-kissed look without actually being tan. Whitney Gaines cared too much about her skin to subject it to ultraviolet rays for long. And frankly, the thigh-high boots she wore with that form-fitting dress agreed with her, too.

  “We’ll be closing out the weekend with a cold front, though, and you know what that means for Chicago—temperatures dropping to the low fifties and rain. Let’s take a look at the five-day forecast.”

  Jeremy held up the remote in an attempt to silence the voice that all too quickly brought his past to the present. But he froze, thumb on the power button. He didn’t give a shit about the forecast. What he did give quite a few shits about was why she was taking a look at the five-day forecast. In Chicago. Where he lived. Because you don’t just turn down a guy’s proposal, move to Florida because you need to feed my ambition and find a guy who has ambition of his own, and then fucking move back and just show up on a hotel-room television.

  He was dialing before he had his ear to the phone.

  “Concierge, how can I help you?” a pert, female voice asked.

  So many answers popped into mind.

  Can you point me toward the bar and tell me the quickest way to giving zero fucks about what I just saw?

  Have you ever seen that Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Yeah, can you do that to me? Make my mind all spotless?

  Call my friends and family and tell them I’m moving here. Where am I again? Madison?

  But instead he settled on, “Can you connect me to the spa or tell me if they have any appointments open? I know it’s last-minute, but I’ve been sitting in this lecture class all day, and I think I actually jacked up my back by not moving and—”

  “Actually, sir, one of our massage therapists just had a cancellation. If you hurry up to the sixth floor, they should be able to get you right in. Shall I charge it to your room?”

  Jeremy let out a long breath and shrugged. The room was on Jamie’s business credit card. What would another hundred or so hurt?

  “Yes! Charge me. Sixth floor. Got it. On my way.”

  He was out the door so fast, he might not have even hung up the phone. Several minutes ago he couldn’t get away from the elevator fast enough. Now he needed to put as much distance as he could between himself and what he’d just seen, and that meant going to a place where there’d be no television, where he could close his eyes and shut it all out until the memories in his head decided to shut the fuck up.

  The elevator was empty this time, and he smiled in appreciation at his couple minutes of peace. When the doors opened onto the sixth floor, those couple of minutes were not cut short as he stepped into what was, apparently, peace incarnate.

  He walked out onto what looked like a bamboo floor. The walls were paneled with a darker, warmer wood—fat luxurious planks that ran from seam to seam. The air was warm but not hot, slightly fragrant but not intrusive, and soft tunes piped through overhead speakers—that Irish Celtic sort of music Brynn told Jamie he should play in the ale house for Sunday brunch. But Jamie opted for baseball games on the big screens in the summer and football in the winter.

  He stood in the midst of this Zen-like setting, closing his eyes as he took it all in. He almost didn’t need the massage. Just standing here would be enough.

  “Mr. Denning?”

  Almost.

  “Yeah,” he said, his eyes blinking open as he strode toward the check-in desk. “How did you know?”

  She stood, her blond ponytail swishing across her shoulders as she did.

  “Your appointment just came through on the computer with a note from the concierge saying you sounded like you really needed some help relaxing, and that’s, like, what we’re all about here. Relaxing. And then you got off the elevator and had that look—you know, the one that said you did want some help getting all…relaxed. So I knew it was you.” She reached for something behind the desk and held it out toward him. He willingly accepted. “Here is a robe and slippers and a lavender eye mask if you want to rest those pretty blue peepers while you wait.” She gasped and covered her mouth. “I’m sorry. That was a little forward. You just have great eyes. And”—she leaned over the counter in his direc
tion—“I’m totally into gingers.”

  Jeremy chuckled. “Sounds like you’re still working on—”

  “The whole relaxing thing?” she interrupted. “Yeah. I know.” Her smile turned a bit devilish. “But I can’t help myself when I see something I like.”

  Jeremy’s eyes widened. Maybe he could forget about the blonde from his past by spending some quality time with one in the present.

  “What time do you get off tonight, Kaylee?” he asked, thankful for her name tag.

  She bounced on her toes and grinned. He liked her energy. “Eight,” she said.

  He grinned back. “Well, I just happen to be free at eight as well. Maybe I’ll see you in the bar downstairs?”

  She nodded. “Maybe you will.”

  Chapter Two

  Grace raced up to the sixth floor only to find that her next appointment had canceled. She went from being noticeably late to having almost two hours before her next client.

  Dammit. She needed that tip.

  She had just collapsed onto a chair in the break room, even poured herself a glass of carrot juice, relaxing for the first time she had all day.

  “So, I know you were, like, so upset about that cancellation, so I just squeezed you in a client who needed an emergency appointment. He wants a full-body, hour-long massage. And I’m only saying this because he’s not my client, so I don’t think it’s too inappropriate, but he’s, like, gorgeous.”

  Grace rolled her eyes.

  “He’s a patron of the spa, Kaylee. So it actually is inappropriate.”

  She’d learned early on in her training the importance of distancing herself from her clients, no matter what they looked like. The past several months taught her how to distance herself from men altogether. She had he-who-was-not-worthy-of-being-named to thank for that.

  She shuddered. Even thinking about her terrible lack of judgment—and how it made working to the point of exhaustion necessary just to make rent—was enough to send her spiraling back into that abyss of self-pity.

  Kaylee simply shrugged, taking no note of Grace’s inner turmoil. “He’s only a patron for the next hour. I can handle sixty minutes of impure thoughts that will give me at least a few hours of pleasure later.”