Against the Grain: A Rivals to Lovers Romance Book Box

EILA

I didn’t like that job anyway.

It’s going to be fine. 

Everything is different this time—I’ve got a good plan, and it’s going to work. I just need to convince my sisters…and a whole bunch of other people. 

But my sisters are the easiest, so I gathered most of them at our favorite dive bar for post-work drinks on sticky chairs, with sticky tables, and a damned good ceiling fan.

Eden, who’s just ten months younger than me and my closest confidant, bites her lip and shakes the ice in her rum and Coke. “Are you sure you don’t want to ask Esther for a job at her bar?” 

I shake my head. The last thing I want to do is go crawling to our oldest sister looking for work. She’d want to analyze what happened at my last job and workshop my soft skills or something.

Eden sighs. “Explain it all to me again.”

I sigh back at her and try to smooth out the paper where I took my frenzied notes. “We’re going to take over the abandoned lot next door and plant hops there. We will then sell the hops.”

Eliza wrinkles her nose. “Sounds illegal.”

I wave a hand at this. “Who checks on the abandoned lots?” Eden and I live next to a ramshackle strip of land that gets excellent sun. It also gets excellent truckloads full of tires and weird garbage. I’m guessing from contractors who don’t want to pay for commercial waste removal. “If we clean up the lot and plant shit there, people will stop using it as a dump site. Think of the earth!”

My sisters don’t seem convinced. Probably because they haven’t been obsessing about this for months like I have. 

Eliza frowns. “Why hops, though? Since when is that a cash crop?”

I huff at her. “You run an urban goat business and you seem financially independent.” 

She tips her glass at me to acknowledge my point and I smile. I mean, she’s not wrong—hops aren’t the first thing that springs to mind when I envision a lucrative business model. But it’s not like I have the license required for medical marijuana, so I picked the next best vice.

“We don’t need to be millionaires. We just want to be stable, right?”

Eva, the youngest, arches a dark brow as she slurps at her screwdriver. “What’s all this we? I don’t want to be involved.”

I wave this comment aside. “Me. I want to be stable. But, you know, I’ll always be there for all of you. Once I can afford it.”

Eden pats my hand. “We know, Eila. And, same. As you know. But … hops? It’s weird.”

“It’s no weirder than keeping bees or goats in the city.” My sisters roll their eyes. “I’ve done a lot of research on this.” 

I hate working for other people. They always wind up trying to screw me over, whether it’s giving me the worst shifts or stealing tips. I’m ready for my own business and this one will combine all my expertise: plants and beer. “The hops will grow pretty much anywhere. I’ve been doing recon on that farm up in Slippery Rock.”

Eden gestures for me to continue, droplets of condensation from her drink splashing onto my manifesto, smearing the faint pencil lines even more than the pocket of my overalls, where the paper had been shoved all day. 

My sisters are my entire support network, and we’re tight. If they disapprove of something I’m doing, I’ll feel that impact every second of every day. Eden and I moved into our own place over a year ago, but I still feel a bit unmoored. Or maybe I feel too moored? Our oldest sister basically raised us, but living in Esther’s house was tough. It always felt like she had more chores to hand out than hugs. But who needs hugs, really?

I’m in a serious relationship with plants; I just haven’t quite managed to turn that hobby into anything more lucrative than the retail and nursery jobs I cycle through like toilet paper.

I tap the paper with my plans. “The way it works is it takes three years for the plants to mature. I’m sure the soil is crappy now, but the roots and leaves will absorb all the bad shit and it won’t transfer through to the hops’ cones. I’m telling you the research shakes out.”

Eliza squints through the smudges at the rough numbers I scrawled on the bottom of the page. “You really think you can sell a crop of hops for that amount? To a brewery here?”

I roll my eyes at her, a leftover teenage habit I can’t seem to shake. “In three years when the plants mature, yeah. There’s a big push for buy local. You see it everywhere. I see it every weekend at the market.” Saw, I guess. I don’t work there anymore.

My sisters nod. Eden especially. “People do love local honey.” Eden keeps bees in our back yard. 

I pump my fist in solidarity. “Hell yeah, they do. Look, you don’t even have to do anything. I will clean up that vacant lot next to our house, I’ll plant the hops, and your bees can pollinate them or whatever.”

Eden only meant to have one hive, but she keeps getting called in to remove swarms of honeybees from people’s property and she’s running out of places to take the bees. Last I checked we had four hives out back.

“The hops repel mites. I’m telling you. Everyone wins!”

Eliza shrugs. “I have no horse in this race. Me and my goats are doing just fine, thank you. With permits.”

I flick up my middle finger at her and start to fold the paper. “I can’t keep working multiple jobs while I figure out my life.”

Eliza squints and says, “Aren’t we here because you currently don’t have any jobs?” 

I flip her the bird again.

Eden pats my hand. “Why don’t you sign on with the medical marijuana farmers from your program?”

Eliza laughs, but it’s not really a joke. Half the people I graduated horticulture school with are making bank tending ganja crops. The truth is that they didn’t invite me to join them, and they had to pay big bucks for all the licensures. As per usual, I was left behind by the people around me who were supposed to care. Except my sisters. They’ve never let me down, and they’re the only ones. I sigh and reach for my drink, finding the glass empty. 

Eden leans toward me and whisper-yells, “Hey, Eila. Don’t turn around.”

I contract all my muscles. “You can’t just say that, Eden. Telling someone not to turn around makes them desperate to turn around.”

She squeezes Eliza’s arm and the two of them peer over my shoulder. “That frowny guy is totally staring at Eila, right?”

Eliza’s eyes widen. “Oh, totally.” She tries to talk without moving her lips. “He doesn’t even seem to care that we caught him.”

I shake the glass again. “If there’s a guy staring at me, he should at least buy me a drink.”

I turn around in my seat and sure enough, there’s a dark-haired guy looking at me intently above the top of his menu. “Someone should tell him not to bother with the menu here.” I wave at him, and he pulls the menu up higher, covering his whole face.

Eliza kicks me under the table. “We should have gone to Esther’s place for drinks.”

“Since when can we afford to go to Bridges and Bitters?” Our big sister’s bar serves high-end cocktails at a premium. “And don’t tell me she’d let us drink free, because you know she’d make us work it all off scrubbing floors or something. Trust me, this is better.”

I rise out of my seat, muscles groaning after a full day moving soil around at the plant nursery. Of course, they waited to fire me until after I worked a full shift. 

I don’t understand why anyone would be staring at me out of anything other than morbid curiosity. I reach up to my dark, messy bun, and sure enough, I have actual plants poking out of my knots. Whatever. Free drinks are free drinks. 

I walk over to the guy. “Hey,” I say, dropping into the chair opposite him. “You gonna just look at me in wonder or were you going to buy me a beer?”

He lowers the menu and blinks. “You like beer?”

I shrug. “Sure. Doesn’t everyone like beer?”

He shakes his head rapidly. “No. Not at all. Most women seem to prefer wine. Or clear liquor.” He looks at me intently. It’s mildly uncomfortable, like he is trying to read my mind. 

“Hm. Maybe. But I like beer. I’m a beer gal.” I offer him my dirty, callused hand. “I’m Eila Storm.”

He stares at my hand for a beat and then puts his own callused hand into it, shaking exactly three times before retracting his arm. “Ben.”

He doesn’t really invite conversation, so I lean back in my chair, studying him. He’s wearing a polo shirt and nice jeans with Timbs, but they’re not dirty. So, he’s obviously done manual labor in the past, just not in these clothes, today. “You live here in Garfield?”

My neighborhood has all kinds of people living here these days, but this guy doesn’t strike me as the type to come from out of town and buy a flipped house sight unseen. I thought I detected a hint of a Pittsburgh accent.

He clears his throat. “Greenfield.”

I smile at his reference to the blue-collar neighborhood, home to my favorite hockey bar. If possible, my smile seems to have made him stare even harder. “Well, Ben from Greenfield. Here in Garfield, it’s customary to buy a girl a beer after you stare at her.”

I’ve spent my whole life as an outsider, a man bound by rules and social norms I don’t understand. 

But there’s one truth I definitely grasp: Eila Storm is the one for me. 

She’s wild and unpredictable and that usually sends me into a tailspin, yet I’m drawn to her like rain to a drainpipe. Eila gets me in a way nobody ever has, but she’s also chaos incarnate—determined to start an urban farm on an abandoned lot … without permits. 

The problem? Once I know she never filed the paperwork, I can’t look away. I don’t know how to turn off my rigid need to follow the rules, even if that means shutting down her business.

She says I’m choking her like a weed. So how can I let things go to earn her trust? She supercharges my central nervous system when I’m usually allergic to surprise. I crave her fiery passion more than the comfort of standard operating procedures.

I just need a little help to rewrite my own code so I can wrap Eila in understanding…and my arms.

A buttoned-up inspector falls for his polar opposite in Against the Grain, book one of the Planted and Plowed series of romantic comedies starring the Storm sisters. Love takes roots in the cracks of life’s pavement and stems get spliced in these steamy books full of small-town swoon in a big city setting.