Love In Secrets (Love Distilled #3) - Scarlett Cole Page 0,76
a Saturday, which is getting ridiculously drunk at ten in the morning because the woman I love just got on a fucking plane with my heart.”
“Jake,” Anders said, softly. “Man. I know how fucking rough it is. I didn’t even want to come to Denver, but now I’m here, with Liv, I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to be traded away. I know she’ll never leave the distillery, either. Cassie is a wonderful woman, but to love a Dyer is to love the distillery too. Because you can’t have one without the other.”
“Fucking distillery. It’s not like we’re the royal family. It’s not like a tradition you’re born into and can’t escape. It wasn’t pre-ordained at our birth that we had to—”
“Okay. I get your point. But if it isn’t, if you don’t feel the same bond to the distillery as Emerson and Liv do, why don’t you leave? Why don’t you put out an ad for a master distiller, interview them, hire them, stick around for, I don’t know, six months or something to hand everything off, and go do something else instead? Something that takes you to Brooklyn.”
Jake took a large gulp of whiskey. He knew why. Because for all his protestation, he loved the distillery. He loved the hum of the building when he arrived in the morning, as the lights flickered to life. He loved the quiet connection to his father. He loved the scent of lemons, of spruce tips, of verbena. He loved the alchemy of turning natural ingredients into gin. And he loved the bones of the old distillery building, the whispers in the walls of all the ways it had been used before them. He loved the legacy and the tradition and, yeah, he hoped one day there would be kids in the distillery again. He hoped Liv’s and Em’s and his own kids would hide under the table in Em’s office, or behind the stills, or between the barrels.
“Fuck you, Anders,” he muttered.
Anders smiled sadly. “Yeah, well. The reason this all hurts so bad is because it all really fucking matters. To you. All of it. Look. Sit. Drink. I’m gonna shower. Then we’ll do something, if you can still stand up after drinking a quarter of a bottle of scotch that cost two grand.”
Jake looked at the bottle, then back to Anders. “Shit. Sorry.”
“Drink as much as you want. At the rate I drink, it will be thirty years old before I finish it.”
Jake closed his eyes as Anders walked upstairs, grateful his sister was going to marry the guy and make him a permanent part of their family.
Permanent part of their family.
Goddamn, Cass. “Why’d you have to fucking leave?”
Fifteen minutes later, with the whiskey making its presence known, the doorbell rang. Jake cranked his eye open and groaned as he got up to answer it for Anders, who was still upstairs.
“I heard we were day drinking,” Connor said, walking into Anders’s home as he loosened his tie.
Jake glanced up the stairs. “Did Anders call you?”
“No, I’m psychic and felt you were getting drunk somewhere. This was the first place I tried to find you.”
“If you’re psychic, wouldn’t you have known where I was?”
Connor grabbed a glass from the bar and picked up the bottle from the coffee table. “Great taste. When you need to get fucked up, you do it in style.”
Jake watched as Connor poured himself a glass. Instead of the large gulps Jake had taken, Connor sipped it.
“What are you doing? You barely drink. And don’t you have an Ironman thing tomorrow?”
Connor shrugged. “I’m enjoying Anders’s expensive taste in single malt. And, yes, I have a race, but I can cancel. Being here with you is more important.”
“Does Em know you’re here?”
Connor shook his head. “Nope. I had a weekend investor meeting this morning. Figured we’d get you through today then tell her.”
“If Anders called you, I bet he called Liv.”
Anders walked back into the room. His hair was wet, and he wore fresh shorts and a workout T-shirt. “No. I just called him, because I knew seeing your sisters would be complicated.”
Jake looked between them. A Harvard MBA in a suit, a talented hockey player in workout clothes, and himself. A heartbroken distiller in frayed gray jeans and a vintage Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, the one Cassie had slept in.
“I don’t need babysitting,” he said gruffly.
“That’s not what this is,” Connor said.
“No, what is it then? A pity party?” Jake rubbed his forehead as the