THE WEEK HAD dragged on, but it was Friday evening once again, and Gemma was back in Tom’s arms. Reid and Quin had moved on their plans to target Cain Rum, and every time they mentioned it, she’d felt the guilty pit in her stomach. But she was lying in her large soaker tub, her back to Tom’s warm, muscular chest, and at that moment, life couldn’t be more perfect.
Tom had arrived at her home only an hour earlier. She’d been cooking dinner, but it was left forgotten to cool on the stove top when he’d knocked on the door. They’d undressed each other in the foyer and didn’t make it past the living room before he was inside her.
In the bathtub, Tom cupped some water in his large hand and spilled it over her breasts. As his thumb smoothed over her nipple, she sighed. “The week feels so long now, don’t you think?”
“It’s true. The five days since I saw you last felt like a month,” he told her.
“I guess we have to make the most of our time together, right?”
“Yeah.”
An alarm chimed from somewhere in the house. It wasn’t her security or fire alarm, though. It was her cell phone. “Oh shit,” she said, pushing out of the bathtub. She tried to remember where she’d left it. Her bedroom. She walked quickly, naked and dripping water and soap bubbles on the way.
“Whoa, what’s the rush?” Tom called after her. “Do we have to evacuate?”
She didn’t answer and ran to her room, because she knew it wasn’t a regular cell phone notification. “Goddammit,” she muttered, looking at her phone. It was just as she’d expected.
“What’s wrong?” Tom asked coming up behind her. He had wrapped a towel around his waist and draped her robe over her shoulders.
“It’s the distillery.”
“Everything okay?”
“I don’t know.” She pushed a button to close the app, stopping the noise. “Celia, Quin’s girlfriend, set me up with a digital monitoring app. It’s telling me that there’s a malfunction on one of the tanks and pressure is dropping. I’ve got to get over there. It’s just for a minute. Long enough to check on it. Hopefully there isn’t a huge problem. Do you mind?”
“Of course not. You’ve got to make sure everything is okay.” He dropped the towel, and Gemma was distracted just long enough to slide her gaze up his lean body as he opened his suitcase and took out a pair of jeans. She turned back to her phone. “You had some wine,” he said. “Do you want me to drive?”
“You want to come with me?”
“Yeah. If you want me to.”
She thought about him being in her distillery again. Her brothers definitely wouldn’t like it, especially after hours with no one else around. But if there was a problem with one of the tanks, she would appreciate the second pair of hands. “All right, then. Thanks. You’d better get dressed.”
The ride to the distillery was quiet. She was worried about the equipment, of course, but it was weird to bring Tom there. He’d been there that one time before, but that had been a quick visit. This was different. It was after hours, and she might need his help to fix the equipment. She didn’t know. But she knew that Reid would throw a fit if he knew that she had brought a Cain into their business.
Tom parked in front, and he followed her to the door, which she unlocked. Gemma could hear the hiss from one of the gaskets from outside. She’d been hoping it was a false alarm, but not so. She entered first and stopped, blocking his way before he could enter. “Wait, Tom.”
“What?”
She looked at him carefully. “Can I trust you?” she asked. “In my distillery?” she amended quickly, hoping she could trust him there and in her heart.
“I hope you can.”
“Me too.” She shifted out of the door, and he entered. “Because I have a feeling that I’m going to need your help.”
He cupped her cheek, and didn’t hesitate to respond. “Well, you’ve got it.”
It took several hours, but Tom and Gemma were able to fix the mechanical problem that had threatened to ruin the entire batch. When it was under control, she went into her office to call Reid and Quin to let them know what had happened and to assure them that everything was under control.
When she came back out on the distillery floor, she saw that Tom was standing in front of her quick stills. He bowed his head and she could see his gaze following the tubes, checking out the tanks. She saw his cell phone in his hand. Was he taking a picture of it?
“What are you doing?” she asked, unable to take the accusatory tone out of her voice.
“I realized that we haven’t eaten yet, so I ordered pizza. It’ll be here soon.” He held up his phone and she saw the food delivery app was open.
Sounded logical enough, and she felt bad for thinking the worst. “We sure do order quite a bit of pizza.”
“It’s okay, we can work off the calories later,” he said, winking at her.
“Maybe sometime I’ll actually get around to cooking you a meal.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
“Thanks for your help here. I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own.”
“I’m glad I was here for you.” He looked around. “Man, it’s great to get back into the distillery.”
“You distill?”
“Yeah. Well, I used to. Wiping down the tanks was my first job. But I learned to work alongside our master distiller, when we had one. I would have gladly stayed down there, too. But when we started mass-producing, we shut down the small distillery and moved to a factory. I hate being in the office. The floor is where I was happiest.”
“Why don’t you go back to it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t have time. Also, the way we manufacture now doesn’t really require many hands.”
She frowned.
“You disapprove, don’t you?”
“It’s not for me to say. But I always think about rum as an art. It takes passion, skill, love. I was worried about quick-distilling because I was afraid there would be less of me in my product.”
He watched her. “I love hearing you talk about rum. You have a passion that I once felt for it.”
“You miss it, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Are you any good?”
“At what?”
“Basketball,” she said, deadpan. “No, rum. Distilling, dumbass. Are you any good?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t blended anything in years.”
“Why don’t we have a little competition? We’ll see who makes the best batch.”
“Who makes the best between me, who hasn’t mixed a batch in over a decade, and you, who was just recognized as the best distiller in the world?”
“What? Are you afraid?”
“Afraid, no. I’m just realistic. I’m not a man who wastes his time.”
“It’s not a waste of time if you’re having fun. You said yourself, the distillery makes you happy. Okay, I have a better idea than a competition,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Why don’t we mix a batch together?”
“Why? You’re afraid I’ll beat you?”
“Shut up,” she teased. “I just don’t want to embarrass you too badly,” she said.
A couple of hours later, they sat at the workbench in the distillery, eating their pizza with their new rum in a fermentation tank.
“Why rum?” he asked. “There aren’t many women in the field at your level.”
She pointed at him. “That’s exactly why,” she told him. “And it’s in our family. Rexford Rum goes back generations, but there aren’t many female characters in the family lore.”
“Tell me about your family,” Tom said.
“It goes back to Joseph Rexford, the Scottish scoundrel who ended up in the Bahamas and made a career of mixing and bootlegging rum from there. He was one of the first notorious distillers and bootleggers—a profession he passed on to his sons, who passed it on to their children and so on. In fact, our family was also responsible for sneaking large amounts of rum into the US during Prohibition in the ’20s.”
Tom still seemed interested, so Gemma continued on. “Rexford Rum operated on a small scale through the generations. But after Prohibition, our great-grandfather legitimized the business. By the time my mom and dad took it over, there wasn’t much left, but they made it a success. Reid, Quin and I took over when our dad retired after our mother died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks.” She missed her mother every day, but she didn’t normally let herself dwell on the feelings for long. “But anyway, I was a quiet kid. I didn’t have a lot of friends, so I started hanging out in this building with my grandfather and dad. They taught me literally everything I know. Since then, I’ve traveled all over the world. Training with the masters. And here I am,” she finished. “So how about you?”
“The Cain story isn’t quite as long or storied, but we go back a few generations as well. When I was little, I wanted to be just like my old man. He always seemed so powerful, unrelenting. I thought that was the life I wanted. So, everything I did, I did to get his attention or praise. It’s stupid.”
“No, it isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the approval of your hero.”
“For all the good it did me,” he scoffed. “No matter what I did, it wasn’t enough. And the older I got, the more invested in the company I became, but I started to see that my father wasn’t the good, upstanding citizen I thought he was. That culminated with the emergence of Carolina in our lives.” He frowned. “I know she isn’t totally to blame for it. My father left my mother for her.”
“Where’s your mother now?”
“St. Barts, or Saint-Tropez, or Monte Carlo,” he said with a shrug. “Wherever it’s trendy for a professional socialite to go in the winter.”
“I’m sorry,” Gemma said.
“We were never a tight family, and I’m not even that mad at Dad for marrying Carolina, but it was the recipes that came from you that were the final straw. That’s what proved her character to me, and made me question my father’s. They were ready to put your recipes into production and manufacture clones of your hard work. I actually paid off the guys on the floor not to. I made them hand over the recipes, and no one else saw them.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I’ll be right back.” He stood and went to his coat. When he returned, he was holding a flash drive. “Here,” he said, handing it over. “I was going to do this later, but those plans got waylaid and I didn’t want to wait any longer.”
“What is this?”
“Your recipes. I opened it and saw they were there, but I’ve never opened the files. I was guaranteed that there are no more copies.”
“Thank you.” She clasped her fingers around the drive. “This means a lot.”
“I’m sorry about what happened.”
Gemma nodded and crossed her arms. “We were both hurt by her and your father.”
He went to her and put his hands on her hips. She wasn’t sure how he did it, but she felt immediately disarmed. “If only your brothers were as easy to win over,” he said with a low chuckle.
She shrugged and wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing him in for a kiss. “I like you,” she said when they pulled apart. “You don’t need their approval, but I promise they’ll come around.” Gemma paused, she had an idea, but she wasn’t sure if it was a good one, or a terrible one. “You know, Reid and Lila have an engagement party coming up in a couple of weeks. Want to be my date?”
“Do you think that would be smart? I’m not exactly Reid’s favorite person.”
“Actually, it was Lila’s idea. At least if Reid’s busy with his other guests, he won’t have any time to think about how much he hates you.” She smoothed her hands down from his shoulders to his chest. His shirt was a barrier that kept her from feeling his skin under her fingers. She wanted it gone and thought about ripping it from his body.
That’s how it was with Tom. The second she got near him, she just couldn’t keep her hands off him. Her body was in full control—her brain just gave out the second he was near.
Tom laughed. “I’ll think about it,” he told her. He wrapped a finger around one of the belt loops of her jeans and tugged her closer. “But for now, let’s clean up and get out of here?”