Neat (Becker Brothers, #2)(32)

I nodded, sliding the coffee I’d brought for her across the desk. “Here. A peace offering. So we can stop arguing about who was wrong and whose fault it is and focus on today’s tasks. Deal?”

Mallory sighed, like she wanted to keep arguing and apologizing rather than accept my offer. It was kind of adorable, seeing the woman who’d given me so much hell look so upset that she’d let me down. And truthfully — she hadn’t. It’d been my own damn self that had let me down.

Regardless of whose fault it was, the whole thing was in our past — and that’s where I wanted to keep it. The sooner we got the storage closet cleaned out, the sooner we could both get back to tours.

I edged the coffee a little closer, waggling my brows. “It’s mochaaa,” I sang.

After a long pause, she reached forward for the cup with a long sigh, wrapping her hands around it. She nodded once, smiling a little more genuinely now, her shoulders visibly relaxing.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Deal.”





“Where do we even start?” Mallory asked, squinting through the dusty fluorescent light of the oversized storage closet. She hung her hands on her hips, surveying the mountainous stacks of file boxes and plastic storage containers that lined every single wall and filled three rows in the middle.

I followed her gaze with my own sigh. “I guess we pick a corner and go from there.”

“And we’re supposed to decide what’s worth keeping and archiving, and what we can pitch?” She wrinkled her nose. “I feel like this is a job for a secretary who’s been here for a long time and knows more about this stuff.”

I tapped the printed list on top of my clipboard. “Lucy gave us a guide to go by, with a list of what to keep and what to pitch,” I said, referencing the closest thing to a secretary the distillery had. Lucy sat in the front lobby, greeting guests and getting them ready for their tours, as well as handling all the admin tasks for our officers in her down time. “She said if we had any questions to call her or stop by the front desk.”

Mallory shook her head, still not convinced, before pulling the highest box she could reach from the corner stack. “This sucks.”

I chuckled. “It does, but hey,” I offered, pulling my Bluetooth speaker from my backpack and propping it on one of the middle rows of boxes. “At least we have music.”

I hit play on one of my go-to playlists on my phone, the familiar sound of “Fever” by The Black Keys filling the closet. Mallory paused where she was opening the first box, brows popping up into her hairline as she assessed me.

“You listen to The Black Keys?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Why is that hard to believe?”

“I don’t know, I just took you for more of a country boy… you know, George Strait and the like.”

“George Strait is the fucking man,” I said, grabbing a box of my own off the stack she’d started on. “But so is Dan Auerbach.”

She smirked, amusement dancing in her eyes as she assessed me. She took a step toward me, then another, and I hadn’t noticed how small that closet felt until her chest was nearly touching mine.

“I couldn’t agree more,” she said, reaching behind me and turning up the volume on the speaker.

She backed away then, mouthing the words and moving her hips to the beat. My gaze fell to those hips, watching them sway like a hypnotizing pendulum. With her arms up over her head, a sliver of her toned stomach peeked out from under the Scooter Whiskey polo she wore, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that stripe of bronze skin.

Not until her arms dropped, the sliver disappearing, and when I looked up, she was watching me with an even more amused smile.

“Let’s get started, shall we?”

I swallowed, murmuring something close to a yeah before I turned and opened the box I’d pulled down from the stack. Mallory chuckled from behind me, but I didn’t dare look back — not with my cheeks as hot as they were. I just bobbed my head along to the music, pulling the first file from the box.

And then we got to work.

As the morning stretched between us, it became overtly clear to me just how different Mallory and I were. Where she was huffing with each new box she opened, and sighing with each file she slapped down on the archive pile, and groaning when she came across something she couldn’t decipher easily whether to keep or toss — I was in my own version of organizational heaven. The music helped me zone out, and I hummed or sang along to each new song as I filtered through the boxes, making neat piles, labeling anything that didn’t already have an identifier, organizing by color and size so I could figure out the exact best way to re-pack it all in the end.

It was definitely a punishment for her, but as much as I wanted to be outside giving a tour, our task was something close to therapy for me.

I was still in the zone, flipping through some photographs from the Scooter Whiskey Single Barrel Soirée of 2004 when Mallory let out a larger sigh than usual, turning the music down a little and flopping down on the floor. She leaned her back against a stack of boxes, looking up at me with a pout.

“Can we take a break?”

I chuckled. “You can. I’m in a rhythm.”

I wrote on a lime green label with Sharpie, sticking it to the folder of photos and placing it on top of the other files of photos I’d found that morning. I glanced at Mallory before I grabbed the next file in the box, and she smiled.