Love In Secrets (Love Distilled #3) - Scarlett Cole Page 0,65

full of waffles.”

“And I’m not even sorry,” Emerson replied with a shrug. “He drinks all this awful-looking green juice and meal preps stuff. He spends more time calculating macros than I could ever be bothered with. I love pastry. And wine. And cheese. God, I love cheese, perhaps more than I love Connor.”

“And yet I still love you,” Connor said.

Cassie loved the way her friend went all gooey at Connor’s words. In fact, she loved all of it. She loved the idea of a life beyond work. She missed Orla, but normally they were both too busy to do anything during the week. A day on the building site would wipe her out. Hard work, fresh air, and hours on her feet would do that. Then there was her commute home on the subway. By the time she grabbed groceries or figured out what to eat for dinner, there would be just enough time for a glass of wine and an hour of mindless binge-watching before bed.

Here, despite the hard work, long hours, and commitment to all of their respective careers, they found a way to come together, in a way that was re-energizing, not draining.

They had proper homes. She glanced over to Connor’s living room with its sumptuous sofa and great artwork. Her friends were all on the property ladder, while the only property ladder she could claim was the fire escape she could access from the kitchen window of her tiny Brooklyn apartment.

Conversation carried on around her, but it suddenly seemed muted. She could feel the warmth of Jake’s body next to hers, but somehow, she felt as though she were hovering somewhere above the kitchen island. Nothing was quite in focus.

This was what normal looked like.

It wasn’t perfect. They all had issues. With the distillery, with their sense of self. But they had each other.

This is what happiness looks like.

She landed back in her own body with a thud so real that it made Jake place his hand on her back. “You okay, love?”

“Yeah,” she said, perhaps a little too quickly.

But she couldn’t say any more until she considered what it all meant.

“Fuck me, that was a day,” Jake said as he stepped in Emerson’s office a few days later.

Emerson looked up from her laptop. “Tell me about it. Do we need to have someone come out and look at Patience?”

Jake shook his head, thinking about the temperamental still. “Nah. I managed to get her going again, but I could have done without losing ninety minutes of production time to get it figured out, though.”

Emerson closed the lid of the laptop. “I spent time with the accountant this afternoon. If you can believe it, the tide’s turning.”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “What do you mean?”

“He helped me build out this model for the renovation, the loan, operating costs, et cetera. We’re ahead, Jake. Not in an out-of-debt way, obviously, but in a cash-flow-positive kind of way. We’re making way more than we are spending on the distillery operation side of things.”

“Wow. Amazing fucking news.”

“Yeah. I thought so too. If we keep it up, purchasing a fourth still looks really good. I think it’s running the shorter second shift. I know it’s more work for you to set up, but we are getting about sixty percent more production volumes.”

“And we can sell it all, obviously?”

Emerson nodded. “Yeah. Connor has a list of new clients who want to get their hands on volumes, and some of our existing customers want more. He thinks we should divide it between them, and I tend to agree. We need to balance both, so we don’t put all of our eggs in one basket.”

“If we get a fourth still and install it first, we could have a full strip out and refurb of our three existing stills before they get moved to the new building. If we are managing on three cranky stills now, we’ll still be better off. One new, larger, more productive still, and two existing ones at any one time.”

“Exactly. And we can fund that from the extra production. I know it’s a lot, asking you to carry on doing this, but it’s just until the end of the year . . . or spring maybe, so we can get ahead of paying back the loan.”

“It’s been exhausting, not going to lie.” He’d been feeling itchy about the whole thing of late. He only had a couple more weeks left with Cassie and was running out of time