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“And now you think you need to—what?—make a big impact on Louret to prove your worth?”
“No, I just need to do something positive. For myself, mostly, and to put the past behind me.”
“There’s something to be said for knocking down old walls and rebuilding.”
A smile ghosted across her lips, as if she appreciated the metaphor, although her eyes remained serious. “Sometimes when the old walls collapse around you, it takes a while to clear the rubble.”
“Sometimes that clearing is more than one person can handle.”
“And sometimes the only person avail—” She stopped abruptly and pressed her lips together.
No way was she getting away with that! Eyes narrowed, Seth leaned closer. “The only person available…what? Spit it out, Jillian.”
“Charges into the rubble and stirs up a whole lot more dust!”
“I don’t get your point,” he said heavily. “A couple of minutes ago you were thanking me for clearing up Jason’s mess.”
“Yes, and my thanks weren’t insincere. It’s just…how your efficiency made me feel. The way you took over and cleared everything so effortlessly when I was still operating in this fog. You made me feel insignificant and useless.”
All he’d done was take matters out of her hands so she wouldn’t have to deal with the whole nasty truth—so he could protect her from the nastiest of those truths. She’d been operating in a fog. Her words. Yet he’d made her feel—
Seth rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. Hell, he couldn’t repeat the words she’d used, they were so much bunk. “Do I still make you feel the same way?”
“No.”
He stared at her, probably scowling, still struggling with what she’d revealed. And not believing her quick answer.
After a couple of seconds she sighed and her shoulders slumped a little, relenting. “Okay, you don’t make me feel insignificant and whatever else I said. You just make me feel…uncomfortable. Sometimes.”
“Because I’m Jason’s brother?”
“Yes. That’s one thing.”
“And the other?” he prompted, thinking about that knowledge in her eyes earlier. Feeling his whole body tighten with expectation.
“You’re so serious. And intense.” She paused, the frown between her brows drawing tight with concentration as if she were unsure of what to say or how to say it. “You have this way of looking at me and I have no idea what you’re thinking.”
So much for bedroom awareness.
She did not have a clue, and for one barely constrained moment Seth felt like shocking that frown of concentration right off her face. He ached to tell her all about what he was thinking when the heat seared his veins and the tension burned in every cell of his body.
Except he’d shaken hands with her brothers ten minutes earlier. They had a deal to work together, for better, for worse. And he’d made a deal with himself to keep business and personal apart.
“Is working together on this project going to be a problem?” he asked.
“I thought it would be, that day I came to see you at Villa Firenze. But after this week and especially after today—” She blew out a breath and straightened her shoulders, although her eyes still looked troubled. “Yes, Seth. I can work with you.”
“Especially if I lighten up?”
“That would help.” Relief chased some of the uncertainty from her expression. “Are we good, then?”
Not that good, Seth thought, but she sounded so hopeful, what could he do but lie? “Yeah, we’re good.”
His reward was her smile. Big and open and warm, it streamed over him and through him, stirring something rich and deep in his very core. Something he wasn’t used to feeling—and damn sure wasn’t comfortable feeling—from any source other than his daughter.
His daughter. Damn. Frowning he shot back his sleeve to study his watch. How could he have forgotten about Rachel? “I need to get going, to pick up Rachel, or my sister will beat us home.”
Her eyes widened a trace, as if she too had forgotten. “If you don’t mind waiting a few minutes, I’ll change into my riding gear and come down to the stables with you.”
“You’re going riding? Now?”
With her hand on the banister and one foot on the bottom step, she paused and cut him a look across her shoulder. “If I have time before dark, but mostly I need to help you pry your daughter off Monty. I won’t take more than a minute to change into my jodhpurs.”
“Only a minute?” he muttered as he watched her ascend the stairs at full speed. Her skirt fluttered around her legs and he thought about her stretching those skintight riding breeches all the way up those long limbs and over her hips. “I’ve seen how tight those jodhpurs are.”
Five
Surely he hadn’t meant her to hear that muttered closing quip…had he?
Jillian kicked aside her work skirt and flopped onto her bed, jodhpurs clutched in her fingers. Heat flared with the vivid and visceral memory of how he’d come to see—and feel—exactly how tight her jodhpurs were. Talk about your over-the-top fireworks response! At the time she’d put it down to her after-gallop high, her euphoric mood, her adrenaline-revved senses.
Now she knew better.
It was time to come clean with herself, something she hadn’t done downstairs. Yes, he made her uncomfortable, much more often than she’d admitted to, and only in part because of that serious, intense thing he had down pat.
It didn’t matter if he lightened up or not. She was attracted to him. Physically, irrationally, but there it was.
Her hormones had stretched and yawned and fluttered back to life, reminding her that once upon a time she’d enjoyed the heat of flirtation and the intimacy of man-woman contact. Back when she’d had a sex life. Back when she’d thought her husband loved her and cherished her and wanted to make a life and a family and a home with her.
Back when she’d been a naive, love-struck fool.
And now her poor deprived hormones wanted to play with a complete non-candidate. One, he had just signed on to work for her. Two, he was her brother-in-law and father of her niece. Three, he was serious and intense and intimidating when she craved warm and comfortable and safe.
When she was ready for another relationship, she wanted what Caroline and Lucas shared. That deep bond that had nothing to do with hormones and everything to do with trust and respect.
She groaned and buried her face in her hands for a second. Then she dropped her hands away to stare fixedly at the ceiling. She was not Jellie, the shy and self-conscious teenager. She wasn’t Jillie Ashton, rebellious twenty-something striking out for independence, either. Nor was she Jillian Ashton-Bennedict, demoralized wife and disabused widow.
She was Jillian Ashton, grown woman and graduate wine expert. She needed to win back the respect she’d lost during her marriage and its dusty, rubble-filled aftermath. She needed to maintain a working relationship with Seth and hopefully, somewhere along the way, she might also earn his respect. After that day in the tasting room, when he’d complimented her work, she thought she was on the right track. Lying here worrying about the man’s view of her backside was not forwarding that cause.
She propelled herself upright and struggled into her skintight jodhpurs. So, she’d put on a few pounds since her competitive days in the saddle. That was ten years ago and she refused to make apologies. Shoulders straight, she marched to the door and pulled it open, balancing on one leg to pull on the first of her riding boots.
Voices drifted up from the foyer and her heartbeat went into instant overdrive, thudding loud and heavy in her ears—most inconvenient for a person trying to eavesdrop. On one socked foot she hopped down the hall closer to the staircase, where she could hear the exchange between Seth and her mother.
Rachel, she surmised from the soft-voiced conversation, had nodded off during the short drive back from the stables.
The chicken in Jillian suggested she hang back a minute longer and they would be gone. She wouldn’t have to face Seth with the brand new recognition of sexual attraction still warm in her face and swirling in her belly.
No need to see him cradling his sleeping daughter in his arms. No need to watch them drive away, her chest aching with what she didn’t have, with all that her marriage had not provided.
Then courage grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and gave her a big old-fashioned wake-up-to-yourself shake. She tugged on her second boot and headed down the stairs. Just before the curve that would bring the foyer into view, she paused to suck in a deep breath, to stiffen her spine and school her features into cool composure. Her heart still beat fast and hard but that wouldn’t show.
She rounded that last spiraling curve as the front door closed, leaving the house empty and silent and Jillian straddling the chasm between intense relief and disappointment.
She’d desperately needed a head-clearing, emotion-leveling, spirit-lifting ride after Seth and Rachel left—it would have been her first since Monday morning—but when she arrived at the stables, the sun was already kissing the Mayacamas Mountains good-night. Tomorrow, she’d promised herself, and as soon as she cleaned up the tasting room after Saturday closing, she rushed back to the Vines with that promise in mind.
Grab a quick snack, change clothes, then straight to the stables.
The old car parked in front of the house gave her a second’s pause, but she shrugged her curiosity aside and hit the kitchen at a near run. Luckily it wasn’t a full run or she would have collided with Mercedes. Since her sister carried a tray set with Caroline’s best crockery, the result would not have been pretty.
“Where’s the fire?” Mercedes asked.
“Where’s the tea party?” Jillian retorted, before she took a close look at her sister’s face. Not smiling, even more serious than usual, the creases between her brows tight with worry. “What’s the matter?”
“Mom has a visitor.”
“A lawyer?” she asked automatically, thinking of Cole’s many meetings these past weeks, then rejecting her ready assumption just as quickly. Lawyers did not drive the kind of beat-up small sedan she’d seen outside.
“Worse.” Mercedes grimaced. “Anna Sheridan.”
Good thing Jillian wasn’t holding the tray. Its contents would now be strewn all over the kitchen floor. “The woman? With the baby?”
“That’s the one. And she has the kid with her.”
The kid who happened to be their half brother. One of their many half brothers, all unmet, sired by the man she refused to call ‘her father.’
Jillian’s stomach churned with anxiety. “Why is she here? What does she want?”
“I have no idea.” Mercedes hiked up the tray. “But if you grab yourself a cup, we can go find out together.”
Seth drove out to the Vines with one intention. To find his daughter’s precious pink pony, inadvertently left behind the previous night. Apparently she’d been so entranced by the real thing she’d discarded Pinky without a second thought. Imagine that?
Except tonight she had remembered. Tonight she refused to go to bed without her favorite toy. And at the end of a hellish day packed floor to ceiling with work snafus, all he’d wanted to do was kick back and enjoy his sister’s company. Dinner, a glass or two of wine, some relaxed conversation that didn’t include anything connected with Jillian Ashton.
When Rachel whined and pouted, he didn’t bother negotiating. Sometimes it was easier to concede defeat. “Yes, I will go find Pinky.” Even if I have to get down on my hands and knees and look under every individual strand of straw.
As he pulled up outside the stables, he noticed the absence of vehicles. The big white barn slumbered in the encroaching darkness, seemingly empty of all but its equine residents. Good. Although help might shorten the needle-in-a-haystack search, he wasn’t in the mood for polite chitchat with Caroline Sheppard or for pretending to lighten up around her daughter.
Not tonight.
“We’re not that good,” he muttered as he strode into the barn…through doors slung wide open.
No lights, no activity save the rustle of straw beneath hooves and a distinctive pony snicker, yet those doors had to be open for a reason. Seth ignored Ed, his narrowed gaze fixing on the adjacent empty stall. A quick head tally confirmed the absence of the gray she’d been riding on Monday.
It was too late for riding, too dark for safety, too dangerous for the speed she’d favored that morning. He retraced his steps outside and halted, hands on hips and head lifted, all his senses on high alert. First he felt it, the rumbling in the ground under his feet, and then he heard the thunder of hooves.
Déjà vu.
The horse appeared like a gray ghost in the twilight, galloping at breakneck speed. Not controlled this time, no way, and everything inside Seth roiled in a volatile mix of fear and fury.
“You reckless fool,” he muttered. “If you don’t break your neck, I will wring—”
The threat caught in his throat, choked by pure dread, as he realized why the horse approached at such helter-skelter speed. This time it was out of control, the reins dangling uselessly around its forelegs, the saddle on its back empty.
Fear clenched deep in Seth’s gut as he raced to his truck and wrenched open the door. Without pausing to close it, he fired the engine and sent the back wheels spinning and spitting up gravel. The door slammed shut when he swung into the driveway at bone-jarring speed, spinning his back end so far out he almost collected a gatepost. His headlights sliced through the dusk and bounced off the white railing fence that bordered the lane, close—too close—to his right-hand fender, warning him to get a grip.
He needed to slow down, to think about where the horse had come from, to search with more method and less foolhardy haste.
Ahead he thought he saw a dark shape beside the road, and an image of Jillian’s unmoving body jammed his mind with dread. But it was nothing. A shadow, perhaps, or a darker patch in the roadside vegetation. He sucked in a deep breath, eased his foot off the accelerator and loosened his punishing grip on the wheel. His breath, he realized, was still ratcheting in his lungs from that short, sharp sprint through the stable yard.
Or simply from the adrenaline shock of fear.
On a mental flip of the coin—Left? Right? No, left—he turned and followed the dirt road all the way to the cottage at its end. No lights, no sign of life, but whichever Louret worker lived here could be out or away for the weekend. Vaguely he remembered a time when Saturday night meant something besides fewer work calls. More clearly he remembered this end of Louret from driving by on Route 29. He’d noticed the cottage and beyond it an artificial lake, postcard pretty in the blue-skied daylight, now an eerie hole of darkness as night stole over the land.
And there was no way of knowing if Jillian had taken a tumble into that eerie darkness.
Realistically, she could have been riding anywhere on the acreage, in any of the vineyards or down one of the many tracks cut for machinery access. He needed help. Cursing the frustrated speed of his departure from the stables and the cell phone left back in Napa, he turned his truck in a slow circle, scanning the wide arc of his headlights one last time as he prepared to head back to the Vines.
And there she was, a slender silhouette shading her eyes from the blinding glare of the high beams. Relief surged through Seth, overpowering in its intensity. Then he sucked it up and got moving, switching his lights to low before bursting from the truck and striding forward to meet her.
She was frowning—scowling even—but he didn’t give her time for more than, “Seth? What are you—” before his hands skated over her shoulders, down her arms and back again, tipping her face up and into the light.
“What are you do—”
“I’m checking you’re all right,” he cut in. Abruptly, harshly, but he had cause.
“Doing here?” She finished her question on a lame note, then drew an audible breath as he cradled her face between his hands.
“Are you hurt?” He dipped down closer, scouring her face and her eyes for any sign of injury.
“No.” But she must have sensed his lingering doubt because she lifted her hands to his and pried them from her face. “Apart from my bruised pride, I’m fine. See?”
Yeah, he saw. And he let his breath, his fear, his earlier crazed worry go in one solid exhalation. She was fine. She was standing there frowning up at him with a peculiar expression on her face, but since he’d turned his grip around, trapping her hands in his, she was probably trying to work out how to free herself without an undignified arm wrestle.
Right now it’d likely take that.
If he let go of her hands, he might yield to the real temptation of hauling her into his arms and holding her tight against his body. Of kissing her brow and her face and her mouth in a combination of repressed need and thank-you-God relief.
He figured he’d better keep holding her hands.
“What are you doing here, Seth?”
“Performing search and rescue, apparently.” Seth tried for levity but failed. Light humor, he decided, is a hard task when your heart’s still pounding with a crazy, dark dread.
Jillian shook her head slowly. “I don’t understand.”
“I was up at the stables when your horse came in.”
“Is she all right?” Her fingers clutched at his, suddenly tense and agitated. “Marsanne? My horse? She wasn’t lame?”
