Bronwyn Jameson - The Ashtons - Jillian, Eli & Charlotte

“I know these stairs like the back of my hand.” She glanced over her shoulder, all cool and haughty until she realized that Seth lagged two stairs behind. Which meant she copped a nice eyeful of strong thighs gloved in faded denim. Big and bold and full-bodied.

“I could take them with my eyes closed,” she finished, turning smartly to face front. “Them” meaning stairs, not his jeans.

“Well, don’t,” he said dryly. “I’m not up for dusting off your backside again.”

Jillian scooted down the rest of the stairs without a word. She did not think about his hands on her backside or about taking his jeans with her eyes closed. Much.

She deposited her box on the long table she’d coaxed Eli into setting up that morning and watched Seth follow suit. A new tension seeped into her body, as sultry and musty as the cellar atmosphere with its rich scents of aging wine and earth and timber.

Empty hands, alone with this man, in the place where her senses sang with the spirit of wine.

Not good, Jillian, not good.

Leaning her hips against the edge of the table, she forced herself to relax. She would not run away. She would face temptation with mature, rational calm. “This,” she said, patting the table with one hand, “is where we’ll be doing the tastings while you’re working upstairs.”

Apparently he took that table pat as an invitation, since he parked his denims right beside her, not touching but close enough for her hormones to rattle and hum with near-Seth stimulation. To flex muscles of their own as they sucked in deep drafts of his body heat.

She should move. She didn’t.

Seth was looking around through narrowed eyes, a long, slow sweep of their high-ceilinged subterranean world, and Jillian followed his gaze. Attempted to experience it with fresh senses, as he was doing now and as her tasting-room visitors would over the next few weeks.

“The controlled temperature and the low light are ideal for the wine. For aging and storage,” she said.

“But not so good for your tastings?”

“I’m looking forward to the change, actually, and I’ve always loved the atmosphere down here. My brothers locked me in once, when I was eight or nine, and they hated that I didn’t dissolve with terror.” A soft smile curved her lips as she remembered. “I asked Lucas that night if I could move in down here.”

“Did he let you?”

“He convinced me my ponies would hate it.”

One dark brow arched. “You had a collection back then?”

“Lucas gave me my first the year we moved here. I wasn’t much older than Rachel,” she said softly. “My stepfather is responsible for my two grand passions. Horses and wine.”

“Your only two passions?”

She turned then, found him studying her. Dark, silent, still. A tiny ripple of excitement raced over her skin. Did she want to answer that question? Did she even know the answer?

Two things she did know.

He was going to kiss her. And she was going to let him.

“Just a taste,” Seth murmured as their eyes met and held and his body resounded with the knowledge that she wasn’t going to stiffen or turn away, that she wasn’t going to reject his kiss.

One sip, he promised himself, as his lips slanted over hers and stilled in surprise. Unexpectedly cool, those lips, when her reminiscent smile had warmed him right through. Cool and exquisitely soft, like the first sip of a delicate white.

“Another,” she whispered against his lips and when Seth hesitated, her breath hitched and caught at his willpower.

No, he cautioned himself. Bad idea.

But then her hand crept up his arm, her fingers curled around his biceps, and her mouth moved against his. “One more taste,” she pleaded, a low, husky appeal that curled through his blood like liquid temptation.

What harm could one small sample do? One sip of the passion he felt simmering beneath his mouth and his hands?

When his lips moved over hers, changing the angle and deepening the contact, she made a tiny yielding sound. Barely a sigh, it echoed through his body, bouncing off every tense, hard surface—and there were plenty—until it thundered in time with his pulse. It didn’t help that her other hand had fastened around his neck, holding him tight, urging him to forget every take-it-slow vow he’d ever made to himself.

Then her mouth opened under his and he was a goner.

Their tongues met and the essence of the kiss changed in one stroke of heat. Like one of her big California reds, she exploded in his mouth. Hot, intense, packed with complex flavors he knew would linger long after this kiss had ended.

End it now, he told himself. While you can.

Ah, but he couldn’t, not when this had been so many years coming, this chance to get his hands and his mouth on Jillian Ashton. He nipped at her bottom lip and dived back into her mouth. He eased back to taste her lips with his tongue, to press kisses to the corner of her mouth, to her chin, to her lips again. He kissed her throat because he couldn’t stop himself, and she tasted as he’d imagined, as addictively sweet and supple as the flesh under his fingertips. The flesh that curved in wicked torment—

He stopped cold.

He had his hands inside her jeans?

What had happened to take it slow, earn her trust, give her time? How far did he think he could stretch his willpower before it snapped? Before he lay her down on this table and ripped away her clothes and tasted the wine and woman on her body, in places he’d dreamed about, in ways he’d only fantasized about, for so many years.

Not the kind of horizontal tasting this table was intended for.

Carefully he slid his hands from the curves of her backside and up to her waist. He put her away from him and watched her faraway green gaze struggle to refocus as her grip loosened and slipped away from his neck.

And there they sat in an awkward afterward vacuum, their breathing ragged, her face flushed with sensual heat and his feeling about the same. Seth figured he should keep his mouth zipped until his brain started being helpful. Anything would be better than his current mental blame game. It didn’t matter who started the kiss or who goaded whom for more, only that he’d extinguished the hot connection before it burned out of control.

He should apologize—she probably expected at least a sorry, won’t happen again —but, dammit, he wasn’t sorry.

“I’d forgotten about kissing.”

Huh? Seth stared back at her for a second, completely thrown by her comment. “You’d forgotten what?” he asked, since she clearly hadn’t forgotten the how-to part. Maybe, like him, she was having trouble with cognitive function.

“The things that stir my juices,” she murmured absently. “Like a good wine or a hot gallop.”

He hadn’t known what to expect from Jillian, what reaction, which first words. Fair to say he hadn’t expected that comparison. “Are you saying that kissing should be on your short list of passions?”

“Possibly.” She pressed her fingertips to her lips, then— holy Moses —she reached up and touched him the exact same way. “And it should be on your list of skills.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.”

God, she was turning him inside out. The candor of her words, the heat in her eyes, the gliding touch of her fingertips across his cheek. Seth covered her hand with his, trapping it against his cheek and savoring its smooth warmth for the time it took him to feel something else.

The smooth warmth of her wedding band.

It lay flush against his skin, a real and visceral reminder of why he shouldn’t have been kissing her. Why he shouldn’t have been dreaming up some go-slow, win-herover fantasy, either. His brother’s widow still wore the symbol of her love, of her enduring connection to a man who’d scorned the sanctity of marriage.