Love in Numbers: An Enemies to Lovers Romance (Love Distilled Book 1)

by Scarlett Cole

  “So tight,” he groaned. “You feel so perfect.”

  Emerson placed her hand behind her and gripped his hip, encouraging him to take her hard. “Please, Connor.”

  Needing no further encouragement, Connor spared her nothing. His hand returned to her clit, applying pressure just the way she liked, spreading her wetness until it was a frictionless spiral of pleasure.

  “Just like that,” she gasped.

  Thrusting vigorously, she could feel his muscles clench and release as he pushed in and out, driving deeper until she could no sooner figure out where she ended and he began.

  Stars began to circle her vision.

  “I’m gonna come any second,” he grunted. “It feels too fucking good.”

  As he began to jerk against her, forcing himself as deep as he could go, she came around him, gasping for air at the intensity.

  “Ah, ah,” she cried, shuddering.

  Connor wrapped his arms around her, pulling her flush with his body, occasionally pushing against her, eking out the last sparks of pleasure.

  “Holy shit, Em. I think I just had an out-of-body experience.”

  The thought that it had been as intense for him as it had been for her made her smile. “It just keeps getting better,” she said. “As we get to know each other’s bodies.”

  Connor kissed her cheek and slid out of her. “And I look forward to exploring more of you later. I don’t know that I have any energy left after that to work out with. I wish every workout ended quite so spectacularly.”

  He disappeared into the bathroom, and she shamelessly watched his ass until the door closed.

  “Should I run and get us some breakfast while you get cleaned up?” he asked when he came out again.

  Emerson stretched lazily, then dragged her butt out of bed. “I have a surprise for you for breakfast.”

  Before she could put her robe on, he pulled her in for a hug, nipping playfully at her ear. “Is it you? Do I get to eat you for breakfast?”

  Emerson giggled. “No, but I got you the next best thing. Waffles and all the trimmings.”

  Connor grinned. “Morning sex and waffles. You might be the perfect woman, Emerson.”

  “I wondered if it fit with your….thing.” She waved her hand in the direction of his chest down to his abs.

  Connor laughed loudly. He reached for her hand and kissed her fingers. “It’s so cute the way talking about my body flusters you. Plus, I brought my trail bike with me. Three waffles with cream and syrup is about seven hundred calories. I’ll burn that in a little over an hour. So, all good.”

  He took the robe from her hand and helped her put it on, then playfully tapped her ass, sending her in the direction of the kitchen. “Go feed me, woman. Sex with you has me dying of starvation.”

  Ninety minutes later, she let herself into her father’s house with her key. He’d insisted they all keep one and had encouraged them to visit anytime.

  This will always be your home, even if you live somewhere else, he’d said.

  “Jake, Liv?” she shouted.

  “I’m in the living room,” Olivia yelled in reply.

  Emerson walked into the room to find all the doors to the media center that ran along one wall open. “How had I never noticed that Dad held on to so much junk?”

  Olivia, dressed in leggings and a long-sleeved T-shirt, hugged her. “I don’t know, but I’m already getting jitters about clearing this stuff out. It’s foolish to expect this to all be a mistake and for him to walk back in through the door, right?”

  Emerson shook her head. “It’s not foolish. I think it’s human. If this is too soon, we don’t—”

  “No,” Olivia said firmly. “I want to start this process. I’m just being silly.”

  Emerson reached for her sister’s hand. “Not silly, either. I’m sure we’re going to find all kinds of stuff that make us pause today. He was a sentimental man. I’m sure there are going to be all kinds of mementos.”

  Olivia nodded. “I guess so. Jake is out in the garage and toolshed; he’s got four tarps in the backyard. Keep. Sell. Donate. Toss. We figured we’d each take an area and give it a go. Then go through the piles together and divide up what we want to keep or sell.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Emerson said. There wasn’t a ton of room in her own home. She had all the furniture she needed and was happy for Liv to take it all to set up her own place. There were some personal items she’d love, like their grandfather’s fountain pen that had become her father’s. After their mother’s death, most of her things had been divided by the three of them, but her father had been reluctant to part with her engagement and wedding rings. Perhaps the engagement ring should pass to Jake, but she’d love her mother’s wedding ring if Olivia was okay with it. “I’ll make a start on the office,” she said.

  “Urgh, you are welcome to it,” Olivia said. “I went in there to clean and walked straight out again. It’s a disaster.”

  Emerson walked down the hallway, running her fingers along the wood paneling below the rail. It was something they’d all done so many times, she swore she could feel the ridges. She pulled the door open and immediately understood Olivia’s point.

  Books on steam engines, Victorian architects, and water wheels. The walls were covered with sepia photographs and line drawings in graying ink of antique equipment and machinery. Her mother had always said stepping back to his office was like stepping back a hundred years in history. Emerson always felt there was something magical in the technical drawings rolled up in cardboard tubes, like hidden treasure to be discovered.

  The rest of the house had been decorated by their mother, but this was all him.

  Emerson began by opening the window to let some air into the musty space. She took down the yellowing net curtains and could see Jake carrying a large and obviously heavy box from the toolshed.

  The bookshelves were likely the easiest place to start, and she began to pull books off and place them in piles in the hallway.

  Keep. Sell. Donate. Toss. She’d follow Jake’s designations.

  It was tempting to run her fingers over every book’s cover, to take a quick flick through the contents. But she knew that as soon as she did, she would end up taking days. Dust left an outline on the shelves of where the books had been, a clear marker of the past and present.

  Everything seemed suddenly temporary in the big scheme of things. Even this house.

  Her father’s legacy was the distillery, and he’d trusted her to ensure it stayed in the family, no matter what it took. She couldn’t let him down, no matter the personal cost.

  Papers, crammed between books and within their pages, fluttered to the ground. Notes and doodles of designs for stills, ratios, and combinations of flavors. They were everywhere. Emerson began a pile on her father’s desk. All of it should belong to Jake.

  There was a personal laptop on his desk, and Emerson placed it in a pile of things to take home with her. She already had his business laptop at home, but there may be family photographs and other things they’d want to keep on there.

  On top of the bookshelf sat two large banker boxes. Emerson pulled the stool over to the shelf. Balanced precariously, she reached for the large box and slid it toward the edge of the shelf. The weight of it threw off her balance when she took the full brunt of it.

  “Shit,” she gasped as she wobbled with it in her hands. Emerson placed the box on one of the lower shelves before she climbed off the stool. As she transferred it to her father’s desk, she noticed her mother’s handwriting on the lid. It must be her things.

  Emerson 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.

&nb
sp; 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 of holding out on a serious relationship had been for a reason. Perhaps Emerson had clouded his vision.

  But he knew that wasn’t true, could feel the truth down to his bones. He knew full well what Dyer’s was worth…he just felt Emerson was worth so much more than all of it. The fact that he didn’t understand why his father was in the goddamn photograph when there was no record of him in the distillery’s history bothered him, but not as much as it maybe should have.

  They’d juggled the weekend. After helping her work through more of her father’s things on Saturday, he’d helped her decorate her home for Halloween. They’d hung small ghosts from the tree in the front garden, set gravestones around its base, and laid cobwebs and black plastic spiders over the bushes beneath the windows. Later that afternoon, he’d driven the two of them back downtown to his condo, where they’d showered, together, and went out for dinner. On Sunday morning, he’d dropped her off at the distillery while he’d gone to work out and collected her when she was done. They’d spent the afternoon hiking before returning to the condo, where she’d helped him prep his meals for the week ahead and had even eaten one for dinner.

  How is it? he’d asked.

  She’d shrugged. Nothing a bottle of sriracha can’t fix.

  After they’d eaten, they’d made love on his sofa as the sun went down. And all he wanted to do was watch the sun go down over Emerson’s naked body for the rest of his life.

  He adjusted himself, suit trousers not being the best material for hiding the makings of a hard-on.

  Once the documents were printed and he’d gathered his wits, Connor made his way up to his father’s office on the floor above his. Cameron was in the office next door, with his chair facing away from Connor. He appeared to be in the middle of a phone call, with the hand gesturing he was doing, which was perfect. The last thing he needed was Cameron trying to force his way into the meeting.

  “Dad,” he said, tapping on the door as he pushed it open.

  His father motioned for him to take a seat as he said goodbye to whomever he was speaking to on the phone.

  Connor could hear the faint strains of Cameron in the office next door. Why had he never noticed that before? He wondered how easily his own voice carried into Cameron’s office.

  His father slapped the phone down on the desk. “What have you got for me?” he asked, holding out his hand for the report.

  Connor handed it to him. “This is the updated report on potential acquisition targets. Do you have time for me to take you through it?”

  “CliffsNotes version, please.”

  “Flip it open, and we can dive in. We looked at thirteen assets. Seven from our original list, five new adds, and Dyer’s, as requested.”

  Donovan mumbled in agreement. “Good, good.”

  “Page three has the list of criteria and scoring process. Read through it and tell me if it makes sense.”

  Connor leaned back in the chair. His father always did better with guided reading rather than Connor explaining it verbally to him.

  “What’s this?” Donovan asked, pointing to one of the columns.

  “Estimated bottle production. We don’t know for sure beyond publicly available sources from news interviews, company websites, et cetera, what the exact production volumes are for the privately owned distilleries…such as Dyer’s, for example.”

  His father sniffed at the mention of the name. “And Paul Dyer is bound to have inflated the numbers on their site.”

  Connor didn’t correct him that he’d gotten the number from Emerson when she’d been reviewing the production schedule while eating breakfast on Sunday. He’d knocked ten percent off the production volumes in the report. Let his father think the number was actually inflated when it was understated, he’d only think even worse of the company.

  “This is good, Connor. Where are the recommendations?”

 
Connor flicked through his own copy of the document. “Page thirteen. All the backup is in the appendix.”

  Donovan flicked to the page, studied it for a moment, then closed it and slapped it down on the table. “Dyer’s goes to the top of the list,” he said, suddenly.

  “Sorry, what?” he asked, his skull feeling like a giant rock had landed on it.

  “Dyer’s. I want it. And word on the street is we could get a great fucking deal for it.”

  Emerson. Shit. Whatever his father knew had put a glint in his eye.

  Play the fucking game, Connor.

  “What’s the word you heard?” Did his voice sound tinny? Jesus Christ. He’d walked up those stairs ten minutes ago convinced he’d done a good enough job at hiding Dyer’s success, and without even reading the presentation thoroughly, his father wanted the company anyway. He needed to find his poker face. “I know I was pushing to acquire Dyer’s earlier, but it doesn’t make sense looking at these numbers.”

  “They’re about to owe the bank. Loan gone wrong. Misappropriated funds. Who knows? Paul Dyer always was a crook. He stole from me, who knows who else he’d steal from.”

  What the fuck. Dad knows already.

  “Cameron caught wind of it through a friend at the bank,” he continued. “Apparently, Dyer borrowed some money to renovate and then siphoned it away somewhere.”

  Man. Emerson was going to lose her shit when she found out his father knew. Wait, what was he saying? Emerson would never know because he couldn’t tell her about any of this. Fuck, how could he explain all this to her?

  “I don’t want to move yet,” Donovan continued. “I want to wait until the deadline for the repayment has passed. Those Dyer kids will be either short of cash or screwed completely. Either way, I’ll get a better price than if we go in now. Knowing that, can you rework these figures on the company value and risk? I want the lowest of lowballs.”

  Connor stood. “Got it,” he said as he walked toward the door. The sooner he was out of there, the less chance his father had of realizing something was wrong. “I’ll get it back to you as soon as possible.”