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.”