The Ashtons: Jillian, Eli & Charlotte

He might as well have slapped her, she recoiled so sharply. “Of course I don’t want anything like that.”

Cool tone, haughty expression, hurt eyes. And Seth realized what he’d accused her of and how that would sit. Jason had used her that way. He’d pursued her and married her for a shot at the Ashton name and money and connections with the wine industry.

And that’s exactly why Seth had never broadcast his close friendship with the couple behind the world-famous Casinelli label. Jason would have used that, too. Jillian wouldn’t—she had too much class, too much pride, too much self-respect.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was way out of line.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“Yeah, I do.” And he also needed to do something to repair the damage of his thoughtless words, to wipe away the cool detachment that he knew was her defense. To bring back the sass and the heat of the cab sav woman. He bent down and touched her shoulder. “Hey. I really am sorry.”

“I shouldn’t have pried. I just got carried away by the notion of the Casinelli dinner.” A wry smile quirked her lips. “I guess I poured the enthusiasm with a heavy hand.”

Don’t do it, Seth. You don’t want a date; you don’t even know if you want to risk the complications of uncomplicated sex with this woman. “You’d like to go?”

She went very still. “Don’t mess with me, Seth.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“Sophia Neumann is a goddess. I worship the grapes she walks upon.”

“But?”

Slowly she shook her head. “But I feel as if I’ve finagled this invitation and that’s—”

“Do you want to go or not?” He looked into her face and saw the suppressed gleam of longing. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

She opened her mouth, probably to object, then closed it again. Smart girl. He’d made up his mind—she was going. And right now he had to be going. He’d stayed far longer than intended and Rachel would be testing Rosa’s considerable patience with her heavy-duty where’s Daddy nagging.

Later he would deal with Jillian’s okay, I want to do it bolt from the blue. Because for all his big talk about how many ways he wanted to make her come, the notion of booking a room for a sexual tryst didn’t sit right. She was his sister-in-law, his daughter’s Aunt Jellie, his seven-year fantasy, his—

“Wait.”

Scowling, Seth stopped in the doorway and turned back.

“What will I wear on Saturday night? I mean, what’s the dress code?”

“Black tie,” he said, amused by her very female reaction despite himself. “There’ll be plenty of serious money on show, so don’t be afraid to knock yourself out.”

Knock yourself out? Man, she knocked him out when she came down the winding staircase at The Vines, looking like his idea of a goddess in a dress that draped around her body and flowed with her long legs. It was red, as in the cherry-rich hue of a young cabernet. Red, as in the color of passion. Red, as in, the blood hurtling through his veins and the haze that clouded his vision.

When he whistled through his teeth, she stopped a couple of stairs from the bottom, her brows pinched together. “Is it too much? Too ‘look-at-me?’”

“Take off the wrap and turn around.”

After only a beat of hesitation she did. And, yeah, with the one shoulder strap and a low-cut back that bared about an acre of silky skin and with whatever the hell she’d done with her hair to draw attention to the elegant length of her neck—

How could she look so cool and classy and so damn hot at the same time?

“Well?” she asked, still frowning.

“Yeah, it’s ‘look-at-me,’” he said slowly. “But not too much.”

That seemed to please her, or at least to reassure her. She relaxed enough to almost smile—and to give him a covert once-over through her lashes—as she came down those last steps.

“Do I pass muster?” he asked.

A delicate flush climbed her cheeks. “I haven’t ever seen you in a tux. It’s…well, it’s a change from the jeans and toolbelt I last saw you wearing.”

At the cottage.

Reference to that place and time weighted the mood as he took the wrap from her hands and moved around her, draping it over her shoulders as he went.

“I like your hair.” Better, he liked the way it curled around her ears and exposed that sexy bite-me neck. He traced its silky length with the knuckles of one hand and leaned closer to breathe the warm scent of her skin. “And the way you smell.”

“I’m not wearing any perfume. I never do. It interferes with the tasting.”

“I know.” He stepped back. “Ready?”

A pulse fluttered at the base of her throat, but she lifted her chin and met his eyes. “Ready as I’m ever going to be.”

Yeah, but was he?

Seth rarely enjoyed this kind of function, no matter how lauded the chef or the wines. He’d accepted the invitation because it was a charity fundraiser and because Robert had caught him at a weak moment. He didn’t expect to enjoy himself, yet that’s exactly what he was doing.

How could he not get a kick out of watching Jillian?

Surrounded by winemakers and wine lovers and, yeah, the wine snobs these events attracted like ants to a picnic, she was in her element. Seth sat back and watched as the tension from their taxi drive up to Oakville unraveled in a shimmering ribbon of wine talk.

Sure, it helped knowing he was responsible for bringing her here and for the animated pleasure in her eyes and the glow of heat in her skin. Because while she seemed riveted to the conversation that flowed across the table and back, she was also very aware of Seth at her side. Without words, without more than a fleeting touch and a momentary sizzle of eye contact, he knew she was as finely attuned to his presence as he was to hers. And, in a warped kind of way, he was enjoying the torture of a body already turned on by anticipation.

She was, after all, going home with him.

A waiter appeared at her elbow to clear away the second course, disrupting her discussion with an intense-looking vintner on her right.

“Enjoying yourself?” he asked.

Her response, a guttural mmmm of pleasure, played nasty games with his state of semi-arousal. “Only one bad moment so far.”

Seth lifted a brow.

“That French winemaker we met earlier? He works for my—” Her brows came together in a half frown. “For Spencer. For Ashton Estates.”

“And?”

“I had a moment, a tiny panic, thinking this is exactly the sort of function Spencer might be at.” She huffed out a soft sound of derision. “Ridiculous, since even if he were here, I wouldn’t need worry my cheeks about it.”

“He avoids you?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say ‘avoids.’ That would denote action when he just doesn’t notice we exist. Anyway—” she waved a dismissive hand and her tone turned upbeat “—I am enjoying myself, immensely, so let’s forget I mentioned it.”

Seth wouldn’t forget, not when the vulnerability behind her remark caught hard in his chest, but he could pretend. The last thing he wanted was for the mood to turn serious and intense. The second-last thing he wanted was the shadow of Spencer Ashton—the man she took such pains not to describe as “my father”—darkening her enjoyment.

“Forgotten,” he lied, and she rewarded him with a wide smile.

“Thank you for inviting me, Seth.”

“My pleasure.”

He met her eyes and didn’t bother hiding that pleasure was, indeed, front and center in his mind. Heat sparked in that knowledge and smoldered between them until a waiter risked third-degree burns by leaning in to pour the next wine. Jillian thanked him and the waiter departed, his job done.

Seth touched the back of her hand with his knuckles and inclined his head toward the newly poured wine, left to breathe as they awaited the next course of food. “Well, there it is. Your reason for coming tonight.”

“Not the only reason.” She moved her hand against his—just a brush of contact but it sizzled through his knuckles like hot solder. “Not the only reason, but a nice incentive.”

A smile whispered over her lips as she touched her wine glass, fingertips to stem in a delicate gliding contact. Probably innocent. Probably not meant to provoke, but that’s what it did. Already he was one sorry case of aroused red corpuscles, and with three courses still to go. He swallowed hard. Better than groaning out loud, he figured.

“I’m like a child at Christmas,” she said softly, “waiting to open my Santa present.”

Yeah, he agreed silently. Same. He inclined his head toward the wine. “What is so special about this Santa present?”

“Everything.”

“You want to expand on that?”

“Oh, I could expand on that for hours,” she said through a smile, “but I don’t want to put you to sleep.”

Not that that was a remote possibility, but Seth played along. “Give me the abridged version and I’ll take my chances.”

“Okay.” She tilted her head, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Everyone’s trying to make a pinot noir these days. It’s like the wine of the moment, the new chardonnay, but pinot’s an unforgiving little beggar. It’s not only a matter of vinifying the grapes—which Sophia does better than anyone on this side of the world—but in growing them right, since it’s a terroir wine.”

“Meaning?”

“It expresses the vineyard conditions more than other varieties. If you can find the right soil and microclimate, and you can plant your vines thick enough, and if you can get into that pocket of hell-dirt to tend and pick the grapes, then you stand a chance of making a pinot like this.”

She picked up her glass by the stem, tilted it so the color stood out in stark contrast to the white tablecloth. Like the cherry-red silk of her dress against porcelain pale skin.

“Look at that,” she said in raw reverence. “Beautiful.”

Yeah. Beautiful.

“This is the wine I want to make one day.” Gently she swirled her glass, and the set of her mouth turned rueful. “Well, not this wine, precisely, since Sophia has already made it. But my own thing of divine beauty.”

“Louret makes a decent pinot.”

“Eli does,” she corrected, “and he’d thank you not to refer to it as merely decent.”

So, she wanted to make her own wine, and not just any wine, but a great wine. From what sounded like the fussiest grapes. “Your own label?” he asked, “Or for Louret?”

“I’d love to make for Louret, but Eli’s got that covered. Then there’s Mason waiting in the wings.”

Matter-of-fact, no bitterness, but just a hint of yearning in her eyes. Not for the first time, Seth considered the family dynamics and what it must be like to work in such an environment. Yeah, there was a lot of love and support, but tough for the youngest to prove herself with such dominant forces as Eli and Cole Ashton running the show.

“You have the resources to hand-make a small batch under your own name.”

“Yes and no.” A small frown creased her brow as she swirled the contents of her glass. “I would need to source the grapes.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Getting the right grapes is. They’re low yielding, high cost. Difficult, temperamental, risky. And, Lord knows, I’ve had enough of those things to last the rest of my life!”

“Some risks are worth taking.”

“And some definitely aren’t.” Her gaze swung up from her glass, serious, intense, troubled. “How does a person distinguish which is which?”

Was she talking about wine making? Her low-yielding, high-cost, difficult, temperamental ex-husband? Or about the risk involved in, say, a knee-jerk “okay”? The risk that it wouldn’t be about sex, that once wouldn’t be enough, that there’d be no delineation between fantasy and reality…

“You trust your instincts. Go with your gut or with storybook philosophy—whatever works.” What else could he say? What advice could he give from his own sorry state of flux? “Sometimes they’re all screaming ‘too risky’ and you’ve got to do it anyway. The passion’s got your throat in a choke hold and won’t let go.”

“Maybe I’m not passionate enough.”

“Maybe you just need a gentle shove to remember the passion.”

“Good response,” she said softly after a contemplative pause. Her gaze drifted down to his mouth and then back to his eyes. “You are good with those gentle shoves, aren’t you?”

“They have their uses.”

He placed his hands palms down on the table, and after a moment’s hesitation, she—God help him—spread one of her hands over his. Her left hand, bare of jewelry, and despite those long, elegant bones it looked tiny in contrast.

Pale, tiny and incredibly erotic.

“Big hands,” she said, low and husky, “have their uses.”

Seth picked up her hand and brought it to his lips. More civilized, he decided, than putting it where he wanted it. Then someone—probably Robert, although Seth didn’t bother checking—chimed silver against crystal until the cacophony of conversations and the loud, hammering pulse in his head and between his legs dimmed to a low hum. Amazing. All these other people in the restaurant—at the same table, even—and his focus had narrowed to one. For how long they’d been immersed in their own sensual vacuum, he had no clue.

He turned now, pretended to listen as his friend formally launched Casinelli’s 2001 pinot noir. Robert kept it short and sweet, ending with “let the wine speak for itself.” Much applause then a hundred-odd enophiles reached for their glasses.

Seth watched Jillian go through the motions. Nose in glass, the long inhalation, the longer moment of reflection before she lifted the glass to her mouth. She took her first taste and her eyes drifted shut as she held it in her mouth. The heat of her rapt expression, the subtle movement of her throat as she swallowed, the ruby sheen on her lips: they all combined to create a moment of near-violent longing in Seth.

To generate such passion, to watch those lips part so softly, to see that same rapture when his mouth was on her, tasting her, driving her wild with pleasure.

“As good as anticipated?” he asked, and his voice sounded about how his body felt. Hot, gruff, hard.

“Mmm, better, although that may be partly due to anticipation. ” She sipped again, contemplated, her eyes focused somewhere deep within herself. “Silkier than last year. Big hit of fruit. Rich cherries, some raspberry. And there’s a floral note that reminds me of the ninety-seven.”

Seth picked up his own glass, sniffed. “You can tell the vintages apart?”

“I’ve scored a hundred percent on blind horizontals and verticals.” She frowned. “Does that sound conceited?”

“It sounds…interesting.” And erotic. Jillian, blindfolded and horizontal.

“Interesting in what way?”

He smiled slowly as the idea took form. “Interesting, as in, would you like to prove it?”

She looked up from her glass, a stillness in her eyes, her face, her body. “How?”

“I have a pretty decent collection.”

“Of pinots? Of Sophia’s pinots? How?”

Seth shrugged. “I told you the Neumanns were friends.”

“And, what, they just send over a bottle each Christmas?” Her gaze swung toward their hosts and back at him. She coughed out a strangled laugh. “They do, don’t they? They actually send you bottles as gifts.”

What could he say? She was right.

Slowly, disbelievingly, she shook her head. “And you made out as if you were a complete philistine. You encouraged me to rabbit on about pinot noirs and about Sophia’s wine.”

“I have the wines. Doesn’t mean I know a blessed thing about them.”

She didn’t look convinced.

“It’s a cliché, but I know what I like to drink and that’s my only interest in wine.”

Apart from this fantasy of licking the stuff from your body.

“So.” He turned the glass through his fingers. “Are you up for the challenge?”

“A blind tasting of Casinelli pinots? You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

“You told me not to mess with you over these wines.”

She moistened her lips. “When?”

“Tonight.”

Seth savored the spun-out moment as he waited for her answer, the anticipation, the expectation, the certainty of what she would say.

“Okay.”

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