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