The Ashtons: Jillian, Eli & Charlotte: Just a Taste / Awaken the Senses / Estate Affair

“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.”

Nine

“Oh, no, Seth. No, no, no!” Jillian held up both hands in combination denial and horror. “You are not going to open all those bottles.”

“Backing down?”

After growing up with brothers, Jillian could pick a taunt a country mile away. Even when delivered in a deceptively soft and silky tone. She lifted her chin. “I’m trying to stop you doing something completely crazy.”

Seth gathered up the half dozen bottles he’d selected from the mind-blowing collection in his cellar and tilted his head toward the stairs. “After you…Chicken little.”

Jillian only moved to narrow her eyes. “I won’t let you waste thousands of dollars on testing my palate.”

“This—” he lifted the bottles of red gold in his hands “—didn’t cost me a dime.”

“Be that as it may, they’re worth big money. I won’t let you open them.”

Amusement flickered over his face. “How do you plan to stop me? Are you going to confiscate my corkscrew?”

She threw her hands in the air and marched to the stairs. “Your wine. Your money. Your loss.”

“No,” he said softly as she brushed past him. “Not my loss.”

A stinging retort in the making, Jillian paused on the bottom step and looked over her shoulder and into his eyes. Not a glimmer of laughter remained in their deep, dark depths. Only heat and a stunning predatory intent. The breath caught in her lungs, caught and hitched and shifted her mood from foot-stomping aggravation to heart-thumping awareness in one stalled second.

“And on the crazy front—” He leaned in close and shocked her with an open-mouthed kiss to the back of her neck. “Too late.”

By using very specific instructions—left, right, up, up again—she managed to coax her legs into carrying her up the steep staircase.

Too late? Oh, yes, much too late to stop the slide into complete sensual thrall with this man.

Crazy? Oh, yes, crazy to know without a backward glance that he watched her, all the way up those stairs and into his huge open-plan living area, every step of the way. That knowledge emanated from the base of her back and shivered up the length of her spine. Then, like the spill of wine from an upset glass, it spread through her body in red ripples of heat.

Crazy, too, that his watchful intensity no longer made her uncomfortable. All through that wonderful dinner she’d felt his attention with a mixture of quiet nerves and deep self-awareness and secret delight. It had been so long since she’d been on a first date that she’d forgotten the thrill of anticipation.

The not knowing how the night might end.

Well, she still didn’t know. She had come home with him, but this was a family home, shared with a daughter and a housekeeper. She had no reason to believe there’d be anything beyond the wine-tasting test, no grounds for the weird sense of their aloneness as she watched Seth deposit bottles and corkscrew and glasses on a low glass table.

No reason, either, for the leap of her pulse as he reached up to slide his loosened bow tie from his neck. In the taxi they’d shared on the drive back to Napa, he’d shed his jacket and untied the tie. “Feels like I’m trussed and bound,” he’d said.

But now—

“What are you doing?” she asked, her stomach jumping with nerves as he stretched the length of fabric between his hands and started toward her.

“You did say a blind tasting?”

“Yes, but—”

“This is your blindfold.” He stopped in front of her. “If you still want to do this.”

“Yes, I just—” Her gaze skittered toward the staircase and back. “What if someone comes downstairs?”

“Rachel is sleeping over at Rosa’s. We’re all alone.”

Jillian’s pulse raced. Was she ready for this? For being alone with this man and doing all the things he’d told her he wanted to do with her? She sucked in a slow breath. One step at a time, she told herself, starting with the tasting test. This she could do. Blindfolded, she would be better able to concentrate on the wine and not on Seth with his crisp white shirtsleeves and dark male aura.

With an accepting shrug, she turned around. Her belly swam with nerves and anticipation as he moved close behind her and covered her eyes with the slice of black silk.

Oh, how wrong could one girl be?

Instead of blocking him out, the darkness intensified Seth’s nearness. The tie carried his scent—nothing artificial, just earthy, sexy man. And he stood so close that their bodies brushed with charges of electric friction as he worked to fasten the tie.

The task seemed to be taking an extraordinarily long time, between the slippery fabric with its undulating widths and his big hands trying not to catch her flyaway curls in the knot. Her chest constricted, tight with the knowledge that he would take the same care of her, with her, in his bed.

Oh, yes, she could do this. In the dark, with her senses filled with Seth, anything was possible. Anything, except standing here passively while he fiddled and diddled…

“To get the wide part over my eyes, you need to tie it here—” she found his fingers and moved them to her temple “—instead of at the back.”

“Right.”

The word was low and thick; his breath fanned the side of her face; her body gravitated toward the source of heat. Could he be any slower? Any more of a tease?

“Stand still,” he growled. “I’m nearly done.”

Yes, and so am I, she almost growled back. But then his big hands were on her bare shoulders, turning her to face him. “Can you see me?”

I can feel you, smell you, all but taste you in my blood, but…

She shook her head. “No.”

His grip on her shoulders tightened for one long, dizzy moment when she thought he might bend down and kiss her—please, yes!—but then his hands dropped away. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Standing’s fine.” I think.

A low grunt of acknowledgment and he moved away. To the table, she imagined, to the expensive bottles of pinot that waited. A dozen thick, thudding heartbeats later she heard the distinctive suctioning sound of decorking, and that jarred her out of her sensual stupor.

“Please, just start with the one.” She pressed her hands together in entreaty. “I can’t stand to see you waste those.”

No answer, except a clunk—metal corkscrew against glass?—and the liquid slush of pouring. Then the sense of movement, the whisper of fabric, the shift of air, the scent of man in her nostrils.

The sweet tremble of desire deep in her belly.

He pressed a glass into her hand. Wine, Jillian thought, as her fingers folded around the stem, grounding her in a familiar world.

“We’ll start with one,” he said. “Seeing as you asked so nicely.”

Jillian smiled her thanks, for that consideration and for the several steps he took back out of her space. Now she could at least try to concentrate on the wine. Normally she would have let it breathe, but this wasn’t normal. She swirled the wine in her glass, wished she could—

“You need help getting the glass to your mouth?”

“I’m sure I can find my mouth, even in the dark,” she said, surprising herself with her prim tone. She swirled some more. “Since this beauty hasn’t breathed sufficiently, I’m helping release the aroma.” She lifted the glass, surprising herself again, this time with the steadiness of her hand. “And holding it to the light to check the color.”

His low smoky laughter slid through her. “Would you like me to do the honors, seeing as you’re at a disadvantage?”

“Please.”

He didn’t touch her, but she felt his nearness, the nudge to the base of her glass, lifting and tilting it for his inspection.

“Well?” she prompted. “What color do you see?”

“Red.”

Laughter exploded from her throat, laughter and backed-up breath and tension. A whole big barrel full of tension. “You don’t want to try for a more specific description? Like, which shade of red?”

“Like your dress.” Fingertips brushed over the one shoulder strap. “Pinot noir.”

The soft touch shivered through her skin, and the weight of his words echoed through her memory chords. Frowning, she searched for the time he’d said those words in that exact tone. In the tasting room. Yes. “That afternoon with the Red Hat ladies, you described my mood as pinot noir. What did you mean?”

“If you were a wine, that would’ve been my pick. That day, pinot noir.”

“And other days?”

“A cool white, a summer sparkly, a bold red. But as I said, I don’t know wines. Only what I like.”

Jillian pictured the hitch of his shoulders, felt a similar hitch in the region of her heart. He’d really seen that many facets of her personality?

“You’re a bit like a blind tasting.” He fingered the blindfold at her temple. “I never know what’s in store.”