“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.
Jillian received ample warning of Seth’s and Rachel’s Sunday afternoon visit. Her mother had called with the information. “I suggested four-thirty. That will give you enough time to clean up after closing. I’ll send Seth down to pick you up and we’ll have coffee in the garden.”
Enough time, also, to engage in a little self-indulgence, some harmless recollections of his last visit to the tasting room and the whole surreal encounter after her tumble last night. Then she packed away another layer of chardonnay glasses and, with each, she tucked away a layer of sensual memory.
His Tokay voice, deep, thick, intoxicating. The smooth curves of muscle in his folded arms. The bold burn of his gaze and a dozen imprints of his touch on her face.
Then she closed the lid of the packing case and gave it a solid