Bring it on, Seth Bennedict. Do your worst. I’m ready for you and your macho sex appeal.
Except five minutes later, when she heard heavy footsteps crossing the tasting-room floor, she realized that while she’d prepared herself mentally, her body hadn’t been listening. Did it not understand the meaning of professional behavior? Ignoring the champagne fizz in her blood and the sultry tango of her heartbeat, she turned around just as his footsteps halted at her bar.
So.
That was as much as she could force from her brain in that first electric second of eye contact. Then she blinked the charge from her eyes and gave herself a mental shake. She needed to stop staring and start breathing or smiling or talking.
Or something.
It would help, no doubt, if she stopped staring at his eyes, his mouth, the stretch of a cornflower-blue T-shirt across his broad chest. His anything, really.
“How are you?” he asked. “After your fall?”
“I’m fine, thanks. It was only a tumble, barely a fall.” She cleared her throat. “Where’s Rachel?”
“Up at the stables. I bet she’s feeding your pony rice cakes with peanut butter right about now.”
“In which case my pony will be her slave for life.” Jillian felt his gaze dip to her mouth, to her smile, and her heart warmed in her chest. “It also puts me in my place.”
His brows lifted in a silent question.
“I thought her visit this afternoon was to thank me. At least, that’s what my mother implied. Do you suppose it was a ruse to visit Monty?”
“I don’t doubt it for a second.”
Before she could do more than moisten her lips—and feel his gaze follow the sweep of her tongue in another flutter of heat—he said, “Your mother was right.”
“About the purpose of your visit or something else?”
“She guessed you’d be packing up.” He inclined his head toward the boxes of glasses stacked on the bar. “She thought I could be useful. Where does this have to go?”
“The cellar.”
“Now?”
“Well, I have a builder starting here some time tomorrow, ” she said, straight-faced. “Everything has to be moved out beforehand.”
“You’re not intending to do that by yourself?”
“Eli’s organized some cellar staff to come in later and clear out all the big stuff. I’m only taking care of the glasses and bottles.”
One dark brow lifted. “You don’t trust anyone else with the glassware?”
Jillian smiled and prodded one of the boxes down the bar toward him. “I trust you.”
A throwaway line in an exchange of banter should not have imbued the room with heavy meaning. And perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps it was his response, his still intensity as he locked eyes with her.
“Do you?” he asked slowly.
Yes, she trusted him with her tools of the trade. She had complete faith in his word and his straightforwardness and his honesty. And, she realized with a pang of surprise, she would turn to Seth Bennedict again. She trusted him as a builder, as a friend of sorts, and as a person she could depend upon and borrow strength from in a crisis.
But as a man, as a potential lover?
Her heart danced a couple of hot, heavy steps. No, it wasn’t Seth she feared. It was herself, her own lack of judgment, her own inability to tell lust from love. And she certainly didn’t trust this sensual soul he’d awakened from its long, deep slumber.
“Do you trust me, Jillian?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I do.”
He nodded, just once. Then he stacked three boxes together and picked them up. “Good. While we’re taking these down to your cellar, you can tell me what was going on with you yesterday evening.”
Jillian blinked at the rapid change in mood, in pace, in topic. “What do you mean?”
“You promised to tell me why you were out riding so late. And why you were so distracted that you fell off.”
“Was unseated,” she muttered. Then, when he looked askance, she waved her nit-picking comment aside and slipped out from behind the bar. “I imagine you’ve heard the latest about Spencer Ashton?”
“There’s talk your family’s taking him to court.”
She picked up one box of bottles from the bar and headed toward the winery. “I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. For Mom’s sake.”
“From what I’ve heard, the Ashton estate should have been hers.” Seth nudged the swinging door open with his hip and elbow and motioned for her to go first. “Seems like she has cause to sue.”
“That’s what Eli says, and I know it’s not right that she lost all the Lattimer assets, but she hates what could happen in the backlash. To our family and to his other family. Families,” she amended on a note of disgust. “Lord knows how many more of those he has hidden away!”
They kept moving, down the narrow hallway, through another door and into the winery. Just talking and thinking about Anna Sheridan’s story—and Grant Ashton’s beforehand—tied her stomach in knots.
She bore Spencer Ashton’s genes. This unprincipled, unfaithful, cheating bastard was her birth father. In the mirror every morning and every night she saw his eyes, his nose, his height and his long, lean bones. And at least once every day she thanked the Lord for her mother’s steady, loving influence that had balanced the brew.
Her mother, who now had so much to deal with, all over again.
“When I got home from work yesterday afternoon, we had a visitor,” she said. “At least, Mom had a visitor.”
“Anna Sheridan?”
Jillian stopped dead in her tracks, eyes widening as she rounded on him. “You know Anna?”
“I met her back at the house just now.”
Well, of course he had. If her brain weren’t so addled she would have worked that out herself. “Did you happen to meet Jack?”
“Yeah. Cute kid.” Steady, perceptive eyes fixed on hers. “I’m guessing this is one of those hidden families you mentioned.”
“Nice guess.” She exhaled heavily. “The cute kid’s mother was Spencer’s secretary. She died not long after having the baby.”
“Anna’s not his mother?”
“His aunt. She’s had custody ever since her sister died. She was doing just fine without Spencer’s help until the news about Jack’s paternity hit the tabloids. Then she had the pleasure of a raft of photographers staking out her doorstep.
“Oh, and some nutso is sending her threatening letters.”
With a box of glassware occupying her hands, Jillian couldn’t throw them in the air to illustrate her frustrated impotence. So she growled instead. Growled and swung away, stalking off toward the cellar entrance.
Seth caught up in three long-legged strides.
“And she came to Caroline for help? Why not the police?”
His puzzlement echoed her own reaction the previous day, when Mercedes dropped the clanger on her. “Apparently the police investigated and came up with zip. She thought Spencer might be able to use his influence, to get the police to take the threats more seriously or something, except she couldn’t get to see him and she had to get