opened the box and was immediately hit by the faintest trace of her mother’s perfume, forcing her to bite down on her tongue to prevent tears from forming. Everything still felt so very raw. Even though her mother had been gone for fifteen years, her father’s death had opened up old wounds.
There were envelopes of letters and plastic wallets of documents. Today was probably not the day to go through them.
She was just about to reach for the first wallet when she heard the doorbell ring and then the front door open.
“Hey, you must be Olivia. I’m Connor.”
Shit. Emerson glanced down at her watch. It was lunch already. And he was here as promised. She slammed the lid back on the box. The keepsakes would definitely be better to tackle on a different day.
She clambered over the piles that had begun to grow near the door and down the hallway. “Hey,” she said, as Olivia and Connor shook hands. “Liv, Connor. Connor, Liv,” she said.
Both of them looked at her and laughed. “I think we figured that out, Em,” Olivia said drolly. “Pleased to meet you, Connor.”
Connor carried a couple of bags in one hand, and he held them out to Olivia. “Emerson said to bring lunch.”
“Emerson?” Olivia said, curiously. “Thank you. I’ll take the lunch Emerson thoughtfully asked you to pick up into the kitchen.”
Emerson tried to bite back a grin at the confusion on Connor’s face. “You don’t go by Emerson, do you?”
Then she laughed. “Not around people who know me well, but as I said, you were being an asshole when I told you not to shorten it.”
Connor pulled her playfully toward him and kissed her. “Are you ever going to let me live that down?”
With pursed lips, she shook her head. “Probably not. In case you hadn’t noticed, I kind of like the way you say Emerson.”
He moved his lips to her ear. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I occasionally slip and call you Em when I’m deep inside you.”
“Now, that’s a win-win.”
He smudged his thumb along her cheek. “You had a little dust,” he said, his voice rough at the edges like frayed rope.
“Is he here?” The voice of her brother boomed from the kitchen. There was a moment’s pause and then peals of laughter.
“Ready to meet Jake?” she asked.
“For you, anything.”
For the first time in his life, Connor deliberately and carefully got his numbers wrong.
He sat back and looked at the report for his father on possible acquisitions. Everything in it was meticulously researched, conservatively estimated, and hit all of his father’s objectives.
Except Dyer’s Gin Distillery. There was no way he was going to let his father get his hands on Emerson’s distillery.
No one number was hugely inaccurate. But the sum of every positive number being rounded down, and every negative one being rounded up was just enough to put Dyer’s in the middle of the pack with at least three other distilleries looking better. If he could put his father off the scent, it would solve all his problems.
With Dyer’s out of the picture as a possible asset for acquisition, there would be no conflict of interest with regards to him dating Emerson. And he was deliberately tuning out the irony that the entire exercise to make it look that way was a giant conflict of interest.
He flipped to his Excel spreadsheet and looked at the real numbers, which told a very different story. They had space to expand, capacity, a loyal and capable leadership team with Emerson, Liv, and Jake. They had the combined skills to run the place well and create new products.
The lunch he’d had with Jake and Olivia had proved that.
Jake had been thrilled to see old drawings and papers of his father’s that Emerson had found in the office. He talked excitedly about some of the formulas and how he could combine them with flavor profiles he was already working on.
And learning so much more about Olivia, he could see why Paul Dyer had been so protective of her. She was a whip-smart sweetheart. She mentioned plans and campaigns she’d thought of. Bright, innovative approaches. He found out she was responsible for the Medallion branding he’d admired.
They’d talked about future plans, such as a canning line for Dyer’s on-the-go mixer products and a range of spin-off items for the distillery store.
As a businessman, he would have invested in them in a heartbeat.
But as a man halfway to falling head over heels…
Perhaps he was being a fool.
Perhaps the years