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

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      Two

      The sun was still sleeping when Jillian rose. She tiptoed from her second-story bedroom and down the winding staircase without missing a step in the near-dark. She’d taken the same path so many times she imagined she could do it blindfolded. This was her family home, where she’d grown up and lived into her twenties, and she’d moved back after Jason’s death.

      She didn’t mind living with her parents. It wasn’t as if she had a social life—or, Lord help her, a sex life—to consider. Safe, secure and nonthreatening, her life at The Vines was everything she’d rushed to escape in her early twenties and everything she wanted in her future.

      At the foot of the stairs, she swung toward the kitchen…and barreled right into her mother.

      The solid impact drove a whoomph of breath from Caroline Sheppard’s lungs. Surprise startled a squeak from Jillian’s. With one hand flattened over her wildly thumping heart, she peered through the wan predawn light into her mother’s face.

      “Good grief, Mom, you scared a year off my life! What are you doing skulking around at this hour?”

      “I might ask the same of you.”

      “As it happens, I do have a reason.” Jillian held the riding boots she carried aloft. “I’m on stable duty this morning and I have to be finished before eight.”

      “Another builder?”

      “Yes.” Unfortunately.

      The sigh in her answer must have sounded as weary as she felt because her mother’s hands came up to gently squeeze her shoulders. “Don’t put too much pressure on yourself, Jillie. There’s no rush.”

      “After dealing with the crush over Easter?” She shook her head ruefully. “The remodel needs to be done before summer, Mom, and the sooner the better.”

      Yesterday seemed about perfect to Jillian.

      After a week of calling and chasing and calling again, she had exhausted her A-list of builders. Every morning she woke with nothing more concrete than, “I’ll do a quote and get back to you.” And today she faced Louret’s weekly business meeting with no solid quotes and only one builder of questionable reputation showing any solid interest. Cole might well decide that he should be overseeing the job.

      “I can do this, Mom,” she said, straightening her shoulders. And she would, once she found a builder who wasn’t booked solid right through summer. Or who didn’t think he knew better than she how her tasting room should look and function.

      “I know you can do it, hon.” Her mother gave another reassuring squeeze. “So, who is it this morning?”

      “Travis Carmody.”

      Caroline frowned. “I can’t say I know him.”

      “He hasn’t been in California long.”

      “Is he any good?”

      “He’s available.” Which, somehow, had moved way up Jillian’s priority list. She bit her bottom lip, worried all over again. “Or at least he says he is.”

      “You don’t trust his word? Isn’t that telling you something?”

      “That I have deep-seated trust issues?”

      Caroline smiled at her wry attempt at humor, but it was a small smile tempered with maternal concern. “Or perhaps he’s not the right man to hire. Have you tried Seth Bennedict?”

      “He gave me a straight ‘can’t do it.’”

      Her mother’s finely shaped brows arched expressively. “Well, I am surprised that Seth wouldn’t help you out.”

      “I didn’t want him to help me out, Mom. I wanted him to quote the same as anyone else. A business deal. No special favors.”

      She met Caroline’s eyes, and the circumstances of her previous dealings with Seth Bennedict arced between them. They had never discussed the nitty-gritty of Jillian’s marriage, and her mother, God bless her, had never asked for explanations. She’d simply offered her love, the sanctuary of her childhood home and a shoulder to cry on.

      Yet Caroline had been in a similar place herself after the crushing demise of her marriage to Spencer Ashton. Jillian saw that empathy in her mother’s eyes now, and her throat tightened with emotion.

      She flung her arms, boots and all, around her neck and held on tight.

      “What’s this for?” Caroline managed to gasp around that constrictive hug.

      “Just because.” Jillian’s smile wavered and her vision misted for a second before she blinked the gathering moisture away. “And I haven’t had enough sleep to do emotion real well at the moment.”

      “Oh, honey.” Her mother gathered her into an even tighter hug, then saved the moment and both their tears by suddenly pulling clear. “You know what you need?”

      Jillian shook her head, her emotional state too rocky to chance words.

      “A good bracing gallop to clear your head.”

      Oh, yes. That sounded perfect. She and Marsanne both needed a rousing blowout.

      Instantly enthused, she dropped down on the bottom step and pulled on her boots. Then was struck by an even better idea. “Why don’t you come too, Mom? We haven’t been out riding together in ages.”

      They’d galloped, a little more sedately than Jillian’s long-legged thoroughbred would have liked, but she’d held Marsanne back in deference to her mother’s elderly mount.

      Now, with that initial burst of energy spent, both horses were content to walk on a loose rein. Their elevated breathing puffed clouds of steam into the air, adding warmth to the cool ribbons of mist that wisped off the lake.

      A perfect spring morning, Jillian decided, breathing the commingled scents of warm horse and fresh growth and the crisp chill of the dawn air. Perfect both from her own perspective and that of the vines that stretched in flawlessly drilled lines to their left and right.

      The frost alarms had remained silent last night. Good news for the sensitive new growth that grew apace with the warmer, lengthening days. Good news too for the vineyard staff, including Jillian, who bounded out of bed to turn on overhead sprinklers at the first shrill of those temperature-triggered alarms.

      “That smile looks good on you,” her mother commented.

      “Well, it feels good, too.” Jillian’s smile turned into a laugh of pure and simple pleasure. “Thank you for suggesting this, Mom. You always have the best ideas.”

      Something changed in her mother’s expression, the tiniest hint that she didn’t agree. Jillian felt it as much as she saw it, and her ebullient mood faltered. Caught up in her own troubles, she hadn’t considered her mother’s state of mind. And an awful lot had happened in the last months—the last week, even—to trouble Caroline’s mind.

      “You СКАЧАТЬ