Love In Secrets (Love Distilled #3) - Scarlett Cole Page 0,23

him of a raven’s wing.

And, fuck, his dick stirred. Again. He’d not been this horny since he’d found a stash of Playboy magazines when he was fourteen.

And every reason why thinking of Cassie like that was a bad thing poured into his brain like alcohol into the still. Fast, furious, and sloshing around.

Their family relationship was older than he was. Cassie, by extension, was like an extra older sister. Her father was the lead on the distillery reno. And she lived in fucking New York. And from everything he’d seen and heard so far, she couldn’t wait to get back there.

But her eyes. And the way she’d looked at him after their lips had touched, like it was something she’d wanted.

“Jake?”

Olivia wandered over to him, carrying her purse and coat. He glanced at the clock on the wall . . . nearly four p.m. “Aren’t you supposed to be with Cassie?”

“I was. But she asked me to leave.”

Jake stopped grinding the botanicals and placed the pestle down on the table. “She asked you to leave? Why?”

Olivia shook her head and sighed as she put her purse and denim jacket down on his table. “She was getting progressively more agitated. If I got the gist of it, Chris asked her to come home and take over the company while he gets on his feet, and her boss wouldn’t like it.”

“She told you this?”

Olivia shook her head. “No, I overhead snatches of it. So much, it was starting to become uncomfortable for everyone, including me.”

Jake checked the timer on his phone. It was another hour before he could cut the tail on the Medallion batch currently running.

“Tell me.” He grabbed the stool by the desk.

Olivia tapped the tabletop with her fingers for a moment. “When I got there, Cassie was on a bench outside the hospital. She had her head in her hands, but I assumed it was worry, stress, whatever. If she seemed a little distracted, I figured it was because it was close to the time of her dad’s surgery. But as soon as he was taken to the OR, she turned into this hyper-productive demon. Honestly, watching her was exhausting. New York has changed her, Jake. It was weird.”

In the four days she’d been staying with him, Jake had noticed she was as connected to her work as he was. Calls late at night, early in the morning. Checking her emails. The thought of being without connectivity seemed to be a preoccupation.

“You said her dad had asked her to help him out?”

Olivia nodded. “Something like that. She called a friend, Orla, and told her he’d asked, and she owed it to him to explore what it would mean for her job if she took a leave of absence. She didn’t think her boss would be happy.”

“She’s definitely under tremendous pressure. I guess she had some big projects going on in New York. And there were some problems with a new project she’d picked up, something to do with a school.”

“I did hear her talk to her boss about a school. How it wasn’t her fault it was a clusterfuck and to not blame her for some other guy’s screw-up. When she hung up, I asked if she was okay, she said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Jake sat silently for a moment, processing what Liv had said. But his heart. It was telling him he should be with her. He should go and take her in his arms and tell her it was all going to be okay because . . .

You’ll be there for her.

Perhaps it was time he stopped trying to add the words “as a friend” to the end of everything to do with Cassie.

“Were you able to console her at all?” he asked.

Liv shook her head. “She wouldn’t let me. I tried to sympathize, to listen, even to hug her which I’ve done a thousand times, but she told me she was fine and she needed space to figure some stuff out. Eventually, she told me I was a good friend, and if I knew her at all, I’d understand and would leave. So, I did.”

“I’ll go pick her up when I’m done here. She’s like a pressure cooker about to explode and doesn’t even see it.”

“I think I might tell Em that Cassie needs her. They were always the closest. I know Em’s been calling Cassie, but Cassie isn’t answering.”

“Which is weird, because her phone is so attached to her, it might