Turning Up the Heat
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J. Margot Critch
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16,9K
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23
CHAPTER ONE
GEMMA REXFORD COULD feel the attention of everyone on her when she entered the hotel’s banquet hall. She smoothed her hands down the front of her black dress and looked around for her brothers and their girlfriends. They were nowhere to be found in the crowd. As she walked deeper into the mass of people, she could feel them assessing her with open curiosity, jealousy and, as evidenced by the eyes that traveled up and down her figure as she passed, desire. Were they looking at her dress, her hair or the fact that they were all there to celebrate her, despite the fact that she was one of very few women in attendance at the International Rum Sellers and Distillers Convention?
Well, maybe celebrate wasn’t quite the right word to use for the curious, envious glances that were thrown her way by the predominantly older male crowd. As a woman in the rum industry, she was part of a small but growing demographic, but none had been awarded a blending and distilling award from the association. It was a high honor, but even though Reid and Lila, and Quin and Celia were in attendance, Gemma was still the fifth wheel, and she felt incredibly out of place.
Gemma made her way into the room and took a quick look at the stage and saw the large trophy that she would somehow be taking home to the Rexford Rum Distillery in Miami. Like it will even fit in the overhead bin.
Smiling at those who politely waved and nodded in her direction, Gemma realized that she would need liquid fortification to get through the rest of the evening and made her way to the bar. If there was ever a place where one could get a drink, it should be this awards banquet. But when she arrived at the large bar, she found herself next to several men—all sniffing their glasses, swirling, sipping, smacking their lips. They were turning what should have been a casual drink into a spectacle. Owners and CEOs of some of the world’s biggest rum brands drank their own brands, comparing the depth of caramel color and strength of spicy notes, boasting to their contemporaries about their own successes, but they all quieted when she approached, sliding their eyes over to her. Normally, Gemma didn’t mind attention, but at the conference, she saw it as scrutiny. Everyone was trying to figure out the young female distiller who had been called one of the best in the world. She knew she made good rum. But the accolades made her feel uncomfortable.
“Ms. Rexford,” the bartender greeted her, no doubt recognizing her from her photo in the conference’s itinerary. “What can I get you tonight?”
She eyed the rows of bottles behind the bar, where some of the best rums in the world were represented, and she almost asked for a drink from her own bottle—her usual short glass holding a finger or two of the spiced honey blend that had landed her such a prestigious award, but she changed her mind. She wanted something different. “I’ll have a rumrunner.”
The bartender blinked in what she imagined must be surprise. She was pretty sure that she was the only person in the room full of rum connoisseurs who’d dared to order a mixed drink. “With Rexford Rum, I assume?”
“No,” she told him, still scanning the various bottles on display behind the bar. “I’ll have Cain.”
“Well, if that isn’t music to my ears.” The deep, smooth baritone voice spoke from behind her, causing her spine to straighten and making her nerve endings tingle. Gemma took a deep breath and turned around to see Tom Cain, of Cain Rum, standing there, a devilish smirk on his lips. “I always wanted to hear you say those words.”
Gemma wasn’t normally one to be flustered by a man, but with the heir of Cain Rum in front of her, she had to work her hardest at being cool, pretending he didn’t affect her, even though he was easily one of the sexiest men Gemma had ever seen. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she told him, trying not to look directly into those icy blue eyes of his. “I figured if there was a rum that one had to load down with sugar and juice, it might as well be yours.”
Tom clasped his chest dramatically. “Oh! You hurt me,” he said while she laughed and shook her head at his dramatics.
Both of them were figures in the rum industry. While she worked out of the Rexford Rum Distillery, a small family business with her brothers, which had risen to international glory, Tom Cain operated Cain Rum in New York City, but they sold a mass-produced rum. Cain had a large facility and machines that she couldn’t even fit inside the small building where most of their small-batch rum was made. Despite the differences in their companies and families, the Rexfords and the Cains shared quite an intense rivalry—but it was a personal one. Every time she thought of the Cains, Gemma was bitterly reminded of her brother Reid’s ex-wife, Carolina, who’d stolen many of the Rexford family’s rum recipes and then married Tom’s father, John.
The air between them turned serious, and they stared at each other in silence. His wavy black hair was pushed back, and he’d put on an extremely well-tailored dark suit for the event. Despite the bad blood that existed between their families, she couldn’t deny that she was attracted to him. Gemma could feel her heart rate speeding up as she looked up at him. He made his interest in her known. His eyes were on her body, and he absently drew the corner of his bottom lip between his teeth. His attention emboldened her, and she took a step closer, teasing him.
“Ma’am, your drink,” the bartender interrupted, disturbing her thoughts as he passed over her glass.
Giving herself a moment to recover from the potency of Tom’s gaze, Gemma turned to fully face the bartender, grateful for the distraction. “I’m too young to be a ma’am, aren’t I?” she lightly scolded him with a smile. “But thank you,” she said, winking as she accepted the drink. When she turned back to Tom, she could tell his eyes were on her mouth. It seemed he was still transfixed by her, and it was thrilling. She stepped a little closer to him as she brought the straw to her lips and drank.
The cocktail was much sweeter than she liked, but it was cool on her parched throat, and she sipped again.
She heard Tom clear his throat. “How’s your drink?”
She took another taste and raised her eyes to meet his. Again, she had to fight to not screw up her face at the drink. There was a reason she never ordered cocktails. When she was done, she shrugged. “It’s quite sweet. But the rum is fine.”
“Especially when you load it down with sugar?” he asked before turning to the bartender. “A double of the Rexford Honey Blend, please. Neat.”
“Exactly. You guys make a pretty good rum. But you already know that, don’t you?”
“I know it’s a good rum. We have great blenders and distillers.”
“But they’re not the best,” she pointed out.
He looked her up and down again. “Apparently not,” he said. “That title belongs to you this year.”
Gemma looked over her shoulder at the dais on the opposite end of the conference room, where she would be accepting her award later that night. “So they tell me. You know, I didn’t realize that you had actual employees. When I think Cain, I just picture a big factory full of automated equipment.” She thought she saw the faintest flinch on his face, so she kept going. “But I guess you have to have someone on the floor, right? Maybe your guys could be the best in the world, too—if you weren’t using my stolen recipes, that is.”
She caught the twitch in his jaw, and she knew she’d hit a nerve alluding to what Carolina had done. He shook his head. “That had nothing to do with me.”
“Your last name is Cain, isn’t it?” she asked, pointing to the bottle behind the bar. “Your name is on that bottle.”
“Trust me, if you taste the rum—not covered up with juice—you’ll see it’s not your recipe. We’ve never used the recipes that Carolina brought to us. I wouldn’t allow it.”
“Well, don’t you suddenly have a whole heaping pile of integrity.” He said nothing, and she smiled. “It’s about time.”
A beat of silence passed between them, and she tried to read his expression. He was impassable, but a grin turned up the corner of his lips. He turned his attention back to the bartender, gesturing to the bottle of Cain Rum behind the bar, and the server handed it over to him, along with a short glass.
“Try it,” he said, pouring the amber liquid into the glass. “I mean, if you think your palate is sophisticated enough to tell the difference,” he challenged, goading her.
“Oh, go fuck yourself,” she told him haughtily. “My palate is plenty sophisticated.”
He blinked, probably surprised at her profanity. “Clearly. Judging by that language.”
She wasn’t sorry. “I was raised with two brothers,” she explained. “You don’t like a woman with a foul mouth? That sounds like a you problem.”
His eyes dipped to her lips again, and he leaned forward so his own lips grazed against her ear. “I don’t have one problem with your mouth,” he whispered, sending a bold shiver down her spine.
For a moment, the rest of the room fell away—the noise, lights and people disappeared as Gemma was caught in the moment. She imagined pulling him closer, inviting him up to her room and ripping off his clothing. Gemma might be attracted to Tom Cain—a bit of a crush she might have been harboring for a few years now—but there was no way she could act on it. Not with everything the Cains had done to her family. Whether Tom was telling the truth that they didn’t use her recipes—she didn’t know for sure—that act alone could have completely ruined her family and everything they’d worked for.
Tom nudged the glass closer to her, the sound of it scraping along the top of the wooden bar filled her ears. “You going to try that or not? It’ll prove to you that we don’t use your recipes.”
“Why should I drink your rum? Just to appease you?”
“I want to clear my name,” he told her. “I want you to get a taste of what Cain is doing right now. I never approved of what went down with Carolina and how we acquired those recipes.”
“You acquired them through theft,” she reminded him, keeping her voice low. She didn’t want anyone to overhear their drama. While there’d been questions and rumors within the insular spirits community about Reid’s ex-wife marrying John Cain, the full extent of what had happened, the theft, had never been revealed.
Tom flinched. Maybe he did have some remorse after all. “Listen, Gemma, I didn’t even know about the theft until months after it happened.” She didn’t respond, not really caring what had happened to the recipes once they left her distillery. She’d moved on, creating new recipes for award-winning batches.
“If you say so. It doesn’t matter what you did. Any blender can follow a recipe. But it takes a master to make the rum I do.”
“Don’t I know it,” he admitted.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Probably not. But if it means anything, soon I’ll be in control of Cain Rum, and I’m making changes.”
“How nice for you.”
“And we’re coming for you, Rexford. Once I make the necessary changes, you won’t be on top for long.”
Gemma’s mind briefly flittered to an image of her naked, on top of Tom, riding him. She needed to get away from the guy. Even when she was supposed to be locked in battle with the man, she couldn’t stop her hormones from taking over. When she blinked back to reality, she realized that he’d said something and was waiting for her response. Right, he’d challenged her. But it didn’t bother her. Sure, Cain Rum was the biggest competitor on the East Coast; they mass-produced their rum and had vast distribution networks, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she and her brothers made a vastly superior product. “Well, I’m not going to make it easy for you.”
He grinned again, and the smile creased his eyes. “I wouldn’t expect you to. Especially with where you guys are at the moment. You have had one hell of a year.”
She nodded. It had been Rexford Rum’s biggest year yet. Business had never been better, and professionally, she’d reached many of her goals. Over the course of the last year, Rexford had seen an unprecedented increase in demand, and they hadn’t had anywhere near enough stock to meet it. As a solution, she’d devised a way to quick-distill rum without sacrificing quality. The quick-distilled rum, while it only took a short time to create, still tasted like the handcrafted, barrel-aged rum that made them a highly sought-after commodity and had kept them in enough supply to meet the demand. And now she had almost every distillery in the world clamoring for her to design systems for them.
Tom pushed the glass a little closer to her, and Gemma realized that she’d forgotten all about the finger of rum he’d poured for her. “Drink it,” he insisted. “On its own, without all of that mix. Actually taste it, and tell me that you believe it’s your recipe.”
“Why is it so important to you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just want to impress you.”
“Unlikely,” she said, but still Gemma’s fingers encircled the short glass, smoothing over the bumps and edges of the fine crystal. She didn’t even need to taste it. That moment between her and Tom, the way his eyes bored directly into hers, was far more potent than anything that was in the glass. It could have been the scent of his cologne, his deep voice, his sure, almost-fluid movements that oozed sex appeal, that mischievous glint in his blue eyes or a mixture of all of the above... Whatever it was, there was something completely intoxicating about him. She looked at the glass in her hand and thought about how she would much rather taste Tom Cain than anything that came out of a bottle.
She raised the glass, but before she could lift it to her lips to taste, a voice stopped her. “Well, if it isn’t the woman of the hour.”
Gemma was pulled from Tom’s influence and looked up at the familiar voice to see her brothers, Reid and Quin, approaching with their girlfriends, Lila and Celia.
“Uh-oh, you’re busted now, Rexford,” Tom murmured with a chuckle. “You’re caught fraternizing with the enemy.”
She frowned at her brothers’ intrusion. “You haven’t seen fraternizing yet,” she told him, looking him square in the eyes.
“Hopefully I will sometime soon,” he said before her brothers got to them.
She knew what her brothers thought of the Cains, and she knew she’d have some explaining to do when they saw her cavorting with the competition. Well, she wasn’t exactly cavorting. She was conversing, maybe undressing him with her eyes, definitely imagining all of the things she might do to him if they were alone, and different people, pushed together in different circumstances. But not cavorting. She would never cavort with an enemy of her family.
Quin and Reid both pulled her in for hugs, as did Celia and Lila, before they even noticed whom she was with.
Reid saw Tom first. Gemma could tell when her oldest brother’s mood shifted. His smile quickly turned down into a frown, and she noted the way his spine and shoulders straightened formally as he regarded the man she’d been speaking to. “Tom.”
“Reid,” Tom returned.
Gemma watched the battle of wills between the two men, wondering who would budge first. She didn’t have to wonder, because Quin stood next to Reid.
“Cain,” Quin held out his hand for Tom to shake. When Tom met his hand, Quin smiled cordially. “How’s your mother? I never imagined Carolina to be the maternal type.”
Gemma couldn’t help but snicker at Quin’s crack.
Tom, however, didn’t smile. But still he shook Quin’s hand. “She’s not my mother,” he said.
“Carolina left my brother and married your father,” Quin pointed out. “Sounds like she’s your mother to me.”
Tom smirked and looked at Reid. “Trust me, what my father and your ex-wife do is certainly none of my business, nor do I want it to be.” He then nodded at Gemma. “I should be moving on.” He picked up the glass of Rexford Honey that he’d ordered and clinked it against the one that was still in her hand—the one that held the Cain rum he’d poured for her. “Congratulations on the award. I’ll be seeing you, Rexford.”
Gemma said nothing as she watched him walk away. Both regret and relief filled her, but at least she was finally able to breathe.
Reid turned to her. He looked pissed. “What did he want?”
Gemma’s eyes narrowed as she tried to recall what they’d even talked about that hadn’t been innuendo-laced flirting and fighting. She shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. We barely spoke about anything important. He just wanted to provoke me.”
She saw that Lila, Reid’s girlfriend, was watching her. “Based on the way you’re blushing, mission accomplished, I guess.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Instead of answering, Lila grinned and looked away and innocently sipped from her champagne glass.
“The guy’s an asshole,” Quin added, moving past her to the bar. He ordered two glasses of rum—the spiced honey, as well—and passed one to Reid. “Anything for you, Gem?”
She held up the glass in her hand—the rum that Tom had poured for her—and shook her head. “I’m good. Thanks.”
Reid drank his own rum and nodded at the one that Gemma held with a white-knuckle grip. “What’s that?”
She looked down at the glass. “Uh, just some rum.” She still hadn’t managed to drink even a sip of the Cain rum she’d been poured. She held the glass up to the lights and regarded it with a critical eye. The rum was clear—no impurities. She brought the glass to her lips and inhaled before taking a sip. It smelled clean, natural. When she tasted the rum, however, she was impressed. Instead of swallowing right away, she held the liquid in her mouth. The flavor was light but still had weight and substance, there was no trace of burn, and she swished it around in her mouth, over her tongue. It was sweet but smoky, smooth as silk. It wasn’t as good as her own rum, but it was good enough to surprise her.
She raised her eyes to the crowd and found Tom Cain immediately. He was watching her, his eyes intense and a lazy grin on his face, as she drank his rum. He raised his glass and turned away from her and she missed the silent connection as she watched Tom cross the floor on the far end of the large banquet hall. Gemma finally swallowed the mouthful of rum. It flowed down her throat, warming her along the way as she watched him disappear into the crowd.
