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.”