The Last Barrel — Della Rourke

The Last Barrel hardcover beside a glass of rye

Closed-door · standalone · HEA

Devlin Marsh fixes dying companies and is gone before the paint dries. Ninety days at a failing rye distillery in the Monongahela valley, a clean turnaround, a partner's chair waiting back in the city, then gone, the way she's always gone.

Except she isn't there to help. She's a condition of the loan. The bank that holds the note sent her, and Cole Aldergrove can't fire the woman brought in to decide whether four generations of his family are worth saving or worth selling for parts.

He watched an outsider in a good suit talk his grandfather out of everything once. The old man didn't survive it. So wherever Devlin goes on his property, Cole goes: ledgers, still house, rickhouse, a step behind her the whole quarter. He means it as a cage. He doesn't count on wanting her in the room.

Ninety days to save the distillery, and the only fix that works is the one thing Cole swore he'd never allow and the one thing Devlin has spent her whole life refusing. The last barrel his grandfather never lived to empty is still in the rickhouse, the old man's chalk on the head. Before the quarter is out, someone has to decide whose name gets cut in beside his. And whether the woman with the packed bag is finally going to unpack it.

Closed-door · slow burn · enemies to lovers · forced proximity · standalone · happily ever after

From the book

The opening

Devlin Marsh kept her bag packed by the door of every room she rented, strap turned out, the way some people keep a fire extinguisher on the wall. She had been in the valley four hours and had not yet decided which room that would be. The drive in had been two hours of river on her left and hills on her right, the road bending where the water bent, small towns strung along it like beads that had lost their string. She had passed a shuttered glass plant, a shuttered mill, and a diner that was not shuttered, which told her most of what the file had already told her. A place did not keep one diner open by accident.

The standoff

“Morning,” he said. She set the box down on the empty desk, unhurried, and took her time squaring it to the edge, because the box was the whole argument and she wanted him to watch her make it. One box, set down. A person did not carry in a box to leave that afternoon. A person carried in a box to stay.

The turn

Cole stood in the doorway with the light behind him and did not go in. He had meant to say her name and get the count and go back to the office, and he did not do any of that. The chalk had got up past her wrist and into the loose hair and along the side of her jaw where she’d pushed it back, and she wore it the way a kid wears it who’s been turned loose at a chalkboard, and did not know, and would have hated to. Her hands did the counting for her, one finger keeping the tier in the air, the other pressed flat against her leg, and somewhere in the last minute he had quit counting barrels and started counting the things she did with her hands.