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