Page 14 of Fierce-Matt

Wow, that wasn’t anything like he expected.

He would have liked to stay longer, but Ben said, “Let’s get out of the way. That was anticlimactic.”

He looked over his shoulder back at Anya, but she wasn’t paying attention to him.

Talk about an ego crusher. You’d think that even if she was angry with him, she would still watch to make sure he left.

“I like this second one better.”

“Me too,” Ben said. “The first is a fruity summer IPA.”

“A chick drink in my eyes,” he said.

His brother laughed. “I think the same, but don’t say that too much in the back. A lot of the guys love it and it’s a big seller right out of the gate.”

“To each their own,” he said.

“That’s what I always say. Got any plans this weekend?” Ben asked.

“Nah. I’ve got a few cases I’ve got to get shit done on.”

He could’ve gone into the office now, but it was better this way, coming here.

He’d thought he’d gotten Anya out of his system years ago when he lost track of her.

Seeing her again brought it all back.

The women he compared her to, the ones who reacted the same as she did.

Shit. He should dial it back and knew that, but he was so serious with his job all the time, that when he wasn’t working, he wanted to cut loose.

Not everyone enjoyed it or had the same sense of humor as he did. It took him a long time to realize that.

“The life you chose,” Ben said. “I never complain about working on the weekends.”

“Who the hell would if they spend it brewing and drinking beer?”

Ben slapped him on the back. “Exactly. Now who is the smart one?”

“We all have to do what we were meant for,” he said.

“Were you really meant for this or you let pressure push you in that direction?”

“Unlike you, I didn’t give two shits about what Grandpa said or thought about me,” he said.

“Because you were going to follow in the family footsteps anyway,” Ben said. “I was never meant to.”

“You weren’t,” he said. “Everyone recognized it but you.”

“I recognized it with the help of Eve,” Ben said.

Their grandfather had started Kelly Law and was a mean chauvinistic son of a bitch who wanted things his way.

Thankfully their father didn’t feel that way and Matt wanted to be likethatman, not the one before him.

“Guess a good woman would do that to you,” he said, sipping the amber liquid he liked.

Ben took the other out of his hand to finish. “You’d know that if you didn’t joke about everything in life.”