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

“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 haven’t told me,” Jillian commenced in a casual, reflective tone that matched their ambling progress through the vineyards, “why you were wandering around the house at the crack of dawn.”

“I woke early.” Her mother smiled, but the effort didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Lord knows I love the man, but Lucas snores loud enough to rattle bottles in the cellar.”

“You’re stewing over this Spencer ruckus, aren’t you?”

“This Spencer ruckus” had blown up in January, when they’d discovered a whole unknown chapter in Spencer Ashton’s past. Another family in Nebraska. An earlier wedding that made his vows to Caroline bigamous.

It hadn’t only blown up within their family circle, either. Every sordid note had played, loud and embellished, through both the tabloid and mainstream media. Ashton-Lattimer shares had hit an all time low after the latest revelation: an illegitimate child born from an affair with his former secretary.

Was that particular association disturbing her mother’s sleep?

“I hope you’re not worried about us, Mom. About us thinking we’re illegitimate or something.” To reinforce the concern she felt tight in her chest, Jillian leaned across and rested a hand atop her mother’s. Just for a second. “I mean, it doesn’t matter whether you were married to Spencer or not as far as I’m concerned. We all think of Lucas as our father.”

“I know, honey. But I can’t help wishing he were your father in the eyes of the law. I wish he could have adopted you, that you all could have taken his name.” Regret coated Caroline’s words, but then she shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Just listen to me, bemoaning what I can’t change.”

“If wishes were horses…?”

Their gazes connected, mother and daughter, and a whole world of understanding flowed from one to the other and back again. A sharing of present strife and past misgivings, some unspoken but none forgotten.

Then, with uncanny timing, Marsanne snorted and jiggled her head, breaking the gravity of the moment and surprising a bark of laughter from Jillian—perhaps simply to release some of her pent-up tension.

“Was that a laugh?” she asked her horse, leaning forward to stroke the gray silk of her neck. “Or a suggestion that it’s past your breakfast time?”

Marsanne didn’t answer, although her ears pricked and her stride lengthened as they turned by the lake to head back to the stables.

“I have been thinking a lot,” Caroline said, after they’d walked in silence for several minutes. Silent but for the hwark of a wood duck they startled from its nest by the water. “And, yes, a lot of it while I should have been sleeping.”

Jillian smiled her acknowledgment.