The Ashtons: Jillian, Eli & Charlotte

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?”

“Not that I noticed. She came galloping up the hill on all four legs.”

That seemed to offer the reassurance she needed. Her heavy sigh sounded a little shaky, but her posture eased from poker-backed alarm to a relieved slump. When her fingers relaxed their grip on his, Seth couldn’t help stroking his thumbs over the back of her hands. He felt her tremble and knew she was shaken up, no doubt more than her bruised pride would allow her to admit.

“I trust you didn’t come off at that speed?”

“No, and I shouldn’t have come off at all!” With a sound of disgust, she tugged her hands free. It seemed she couldn’t continue her explanation without their contribution. “I was lollygagging, not paying attention, and she shied at a quail in the grass. I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if my carelessness injured Marsanne.”

“What about injuring yourself? Did you spare a thought in that direction?”

“I told you—I only bruised my pride.” She dragged her hands over her backside and feigned a wince. “Or mostly only my pride.”

Okay. He was not going there. Not thinking about checking out that part of her anatomy for injury. Instead he brushed a thumb along her cheekbone, touching what looked like a smudge of dirt. “Looks more like you landed face first.”

“Perhaps I bounced.”

“Perhaps,” he said, and with a will of its own, his hand continued to stroke her face, down over her cheek, tracing the line of her jaw and the point of her chin. Her acceptance of that simple touch, the warmth of her skin, the subtle rhythm of her pulse in her throat—they all combined to stir a deep response, something beyond the usual lust.

He should stop, get his hands the hell back where they belonged, but he couldn’t make himself respond. He didn’t want to respond. Not yet.

“Lucky I was wearing a helmet,” Jillian managed to say in a husky whisper of breath, a perfect match for Seth’s caress, as tender and tantalizing as the stroke of velvet.

Then her words must have registered, because he gripped her chin firmly between thumb and fingers. His eyes locked on hers. “You’re not, you know.”

Not…what? Not covered in dirt? Not being stroked by velvet? Not about to be kissed—

“You’re not wearing a helmet,” he pointed out with indisputable logic. Even more annoyingly, he let her go and it felt as if her whole body sighed with disappointment.

“I was.”

“Did you lose it when you fell off?”

So, okay, she had fallen off, but did he have to remind her? Did he have to douse the lovely ripple of pleasure his touch had stirred in her veins? And did he have to stand there, looking as if no explanation but the complete truth would suffice?

“No, the helmet did its job when I became unseated.” Which, Jillian decided, was a more dignified description than ‘fell off.’ “I lost it afterwards.”

“While you were walking back here?”

“Does it matter? I’ll find it tomorrow. I know exactly where I tossed it.”

Hands on hips, he stared down at her until she caved.

Until she threw her hands in the air and admitted, “Yes, okay, I had this minor temper attack. I don’t like being dumped at the farthest point of my ride, especially when it’s my own fault.”

She should not have mentioned the temper fit. In retrospect, her honest admission sounded childish and apparently it had rendered Seth speechless. So much for her efforts to earn his respect!

Feeling a peculiar sense of letdown, she gestured toward his truck. “I wasn’t looking forward to the long walk. I’ll grab a lift back to the stables, if that’s all right.”

As soon as she climbed into the passenger seat and Seth closed the door on the enclosed intimacy of the cab, she knew it wasn’t all right. Her emotions teetered all over the place, her skin tingled everywhere he’d touched, and now she was drawing his earthy, masculine scent into her body with every breath.

And they weren’t moving, weren’t going anywhere.

Frowning, she turned his way and found him watching her, intently yes, but with a strange expression on his face.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

He shook his head and murmured something that sounded like graciano but couldn’t have been, since that made no sense. Unless she’d landed face first in wine-colored earth.

Self-consciously she lifted a hand and scrubbed at her cheek. “Is my face coated in dirt? Is that what you’re staring at?”

“I was trying to picture you throwing a tantrum.” He shook his head again, put the truck into gear and swung onto the road. “And not succeeding.”

Chastened because—let’s face it—a temper tantrum is not a pretty image, Jillian wriggled in her seat. “If it’s any consolation, this is a rare occurrence.”

He cut her a look. “I hope riding in the dark is also a rare occurrence.”

“I intended being out and back a lot earlier, but…” She shrugged, and in that absent little gesture felt the tension of the afternoon return tenfold and then some.

“But…?”

“But I wasn’t.” She waved a hand dismissively, then sat up straight because he wasn’t slowing. “The turn’s coming up. To the stables. You’d better slow down.”

“I’m taking you home.”

“There’s no need to do that.”

“You’ve just fallen off your horse.”

“I didn’t hurt myself, Seth.” She reached across and put her hand on his arm, forcing him to look at her, since he’d developed that rigid steel-jawed, I’m-in-charge look she recognized. Her brothers had turned it into an art form. “I have a horse to attend to, and then I will take myself home.”

He didn’t answer, although he did pull over to the side of the road. Carefully she took her hand away and folded her fingers into her palm, enclosing the delicious warm charge from that contact. Sad, but she couldn’t stop herself anymore than she could stop herself continuing on her theme.

“I don’t need you or anyone to make decisions for me, Seth. I know I admitted to a minor tantrum before, but I’m not a child.”

“I know that, Jillian.” He turned to face her, a movement so deliberate and measured it could have been slow-mo. “Believe me, I know.”

Suddenly the space in his cab seemed to shrink, or perhaps the air just thickened with a meaning that sucked up all the spare oxygen. He was talking about seeing her as a woman. He was looking at her as a woman, and her body responded with an embarrassing lack of restraint.

Her heartbeat ran amok, heat rioted through her blood, her hormones went completely ape.

It had been a long, long time since she’d experienced anything so involving and exciting and terrifying all at once. The terrifying part came from the notion that he wanted her, and that changed everything. Her own one-sided crush she could handle, but Seth Bennedict? An unrestrained shiver raced through her blood.

She did not know if she could handle a man like Seth, or even if she had the courage to try.

Nervous and panicky, she straightened her backbone and pushed her chin up, in full defensive mode. “Will you take me to the stables or will I get out and walk?”

“Sure I’ll take you to the stables,” he said without moving a muscle.

Jillian’s pulse thudded in her ears. She knew there was a proviso coming; knew he wouldn’t give in so easily.

“After you tell me why you were out riding so late.”

That was it? No tricky questions about the simmering tension between them? About whether she still saw him as Jason’s scary big brother or as a man?

“I’ll tell you why I was out riding,” she said, mimicking his even tone. “After you tell me why you were at the stables tonight.”

He huffed out a breath. “Search and rescue mission.”

“What?”

“Rachel left that pony toy of hers at the stables last night.” He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, his frown turning introspective. “She refused to go to bed tonight without the damn thing.”

“Pinky Pony?”

“Yeah. I don’t suppose you know where I can put my hands on it?”

“No, but I will help you look after I put Marsanne away. I’m sorry to have held you up with this second search and rescue mission.”

“Find that pony and you’re forgiven,” he said with an unexpected quirk of humor.

Attractive, so deadly attractive, especially on top of all this tenderhearted concern. Not only for her, but for his daughter. Jillian’s chest felt tight, dangerously constricted and breathless.

“Worse comes to worst,” she said, forcing herself to concentrate on the conversation. On Rachel. “I have a whole collection in my bedroom. If we can’t find Pinky I happen to know which would work best as a substitute.”

“Substitutes don’t cut it with Rachel.” His gaze seared into hers, so dark and hot and intense she swore her heart stalled in her chest. “They’re never the same as the real thing.”

Six

Pinky Pony wasn’t at the stables, it turned out. After returning to the Vines for a substitute, Jillian had found Rachel’s toy amongst the others in her bedroom. Of course, being Jillian, she’d insisted on sending the surrogate home with Seth, too.

Of course, being Rachel, his daughter insisted that Pinky should visit Aunt Jellie to express his gratitude for the new playmate. She’d been at Seth since breakfast and now, fresh from an after-lunch nap, she climbed onto his knee and started in again. “You said saying thank you is good manners, Daddy. You said I should always wemember to say thank you. You said…”

And so it went, wearing into the fabric of his patience with unrelenting and finely tuned precision. His own three-year-old version of the power sander. Finally, to buy some Sunday afternoon peace, he agreed to an over-the-phone thank you. “But Jillian’s working today. We can’t call until she’s finished,” he cautioned.

“I call you at work.”

“I have a cell phone. Jillian does not.”

Rachel’s brow puckered. Seth sighed and prepared himself for the next…“Why?”

“Because I have a chatterbox daughter who likes to call me at work.” He tweaked one of her pigtails, already askew from her nap. “That’s why I have a cell phone.”

“Aunt Jellie doesn’t.”

He thought Rachel was talking about cells, until she fixed him with her big, solemn eyes—the look that did him in every time—and said, “That’s why she lets me share her ponies. She hasn’t got a daughter of her own.”

Okay. He did not need to know if that insight parroted Jillian or came directly from a fertile three-year-old mind. And he did not need his fertile imagination fostering notions of Jillian and babies and activities for making babies. Bad enough that it infiltrated his nights without seeping into his days.

He set Rachel off his knee and onto her feet in front of him. He fixed her with his best I-mean-business face. “Let’s make a compromise.”

“What’s that?” she asked suspiciously.

“A deal. If you promise to quit nagging me, I’ll call Caroline and find out when Jillian finishes work. Then we’ll know what time to call her and say thank you. Deal?”

“Can we call her now?”

“We can call Caroline now.”

His daughter shook hands on the deal like a pro, and skipped off to fetch the phone and the pony friends who “might want to listen, Daddy.”

While he waited for Rachel’s return—and she could take a while, given the audience she was assembling—he recalled his other recent deal with a female. Last night, in return for his lift to the stables, Jillian had promised to tell him why she’d been out riding so late.

No handshake, but a deal just the same, and one she’d welshed on.

In the distraction of finding Pinky Pony, he’d let it slide. Today it nagged at his sense of fair play with a persistency rivaled only by his daughter…and the temptation to give in so he could visit Jillian.

Problem was he wanted to see her a little too much. Hell, and that was a straight-out lie. He wanted to see her a lot too much. He ached to test the sexual energy he’d felt between them last night. He needed confirmation that the buzz of attraction didn’t exist only in his mind and his blood and his too-long-without flesh.

He wanted her, but he knew the ferocity of that want would scare her off as quick as look at her. Send her scurrying back behind that cool, aloof facade that for years he’d assumed was the real Jillian Ashton. Well, now he knew otherwise and he wanted the otherwise.

He wanted the woman who slid from horseback into his hands, hot with the thrill of the ride. He wanted to taste her teasing smile and sink into her warmth while she hummed with passion for her wines. He even wanted her stormyeyed with pique after she’d kissed the earth and hurled her helmet at some innocent bystanding vine.

Oh, yeah, he could almost taste the pleasure of taking her, right there on the soft spring earth, with only the vines and the moon and his own driving desire as their witness.

Of course that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet.

Late last night, long after Eve had left him alone with his turbulent emotions and a second bottle of Australian Shiraz, he’d determined to take it slow. To foster Jillian’s trust through their working relationship and not to compromise that trust. The job meant too much to her. And he’d wanted her for too long to blow it—as it were—with his body’s impatient need to make up for lost time and for all the substitutes that never proved any substitute.

That’s why he hadn’t caved to temptation today. The next few weeks in her proximity would test him seriously, he knew. Lucky his wells of willpower and endurance ran deep.

Standing by that arms-length decision sounded all well and good in theory…until Caroline Sheppard’s gentle method of persuasion turned it on its ear.

Half an hour later, Seth was still shaking his head with rueful how-did-that-happen bafflement as he took the turn off Route 29 and headed toward Louret for the third time in three days.

“We’re only saying a quick thank you,” he reminded Rachel, who was already wriggling with impatience in her car seat.

“And saying hullo to Monty.”

“A quick hello.”

This prompted a chorus of hellos, at various speeds, as Rachel attempted to settle on his meaning of “quick.” Seth shook his head again, but this time with a slow grin.

How had he gotten so lucky? What had he done right to end up with such a crackerjack kid? And what would his life be without her sudden spurts of insight and humor, or these sudden kicks of chest-squeezing love that reminded him of what really mattered?

“I’ll just say hi,” Rachel announced finally, “’stead of hullo.”

“That should work.” Although he didn’t know how anything else would work this afternoon.

He drove between the stone gateposts and open iron gates at the entrance to the Vines and saw Caroline and a redheaded stranger bending over a flower bed. They both straightened when they heard his vehicle, Caroline waving and smiling as she pulled off her gardening gloves.

No, despite his quick-hello warnings to Rachel, he didn’t know how this visit would pan out. He turned off the engine and scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck as he tracked Caroline Sheppard’s smiling approach. He had a strong suspicion that the outcome was about to be neatly charmed out of his hands.