Making him seem more playful than ever.
Infinitely more interesting.
And infinitely more dangerous.
Did she dare test it?
She’d never been so tempted.
But what kind of fool would she look if she gave in to temptation. What was in it for her? Making love to this man—a Chatsfield of all people—after all she’d said about the family? Wasn’t that some kind of surrender after he’d blown into their lives, practically demanding the keys to the estate, and she’d done everything she possibly could to fight him off?
How would it look if she slept with the man now?
And yet still she felt the pull and the lure of him, with every fibre of her being.
‘Let’s see how far we get,’ she said, not even wanting to think how that could be construed as she jumped from the car.
The air was cold and sharp, her breath turning to mist. They only needed ten dozen bottles and a couple extra for the cellar door supply. It shouldn’t take long with Franco to help her.
And they could be back on the road again tonight, or they wouldn’t …
She took the path around the house and headed straight to the stone building behind, and if the outside of it reminded him of an old French barn, the inside was some kind of sparkling wine lover’s paradise. She snapped on lights and the bottle neck freezer and went to fiddle with a fireplace and get some heat into the place while he was content to turn in a circle and breathe it all in.
Slate floor, exposed timber beams and riddling racks lining the stone walls, the racks set on a gentle slope with bottles standing upside down inside them on an angle. Hundreds and hundreds of bottles. Instinctively his hand reached out for one bottle, giving it the slightest of shakes and a quarter turn.
Apparently she noticed. ‘You can give me a hand with the riddling while we’re waiting for the freezer to get cold enough for the disgorging,’ she said as the fire in the stove caught, sending an orange glow into the room and illuminating artworks hanging above the racks.
‘This is something,’ he said, honestly impressed. ‘I knew you had a vineyard up here, but this?’
‘You like it? I don’t get to spend a whole lot of time here, but this baby is my pride and joy. Gus wasn’t keen being so far from our Coonawarra operation, but a decent sparkling was the one thing we didn’t have in our arsenal.’
‘What does he think now?’
She lifted an eyebrow. ‘Seriously?’
He smiled back. She was right, stupid question. The longer he was here, the more he was impressed with what this woman had achieved with her vines and her wines. He could scarcely believe he’d ever thought of her as drab. Maybe because that was before he’d stumbled upon the colour in her turquoise eyes and her pink lips. Maybe because, when she smiled, she looked anything but drab.
He forced his attention back to the bottles lining the wall. ‘When was this lot bottled?’
He watched her lightly run her hand over a row of bottles as she walked along, almost as if she was caressing them. The wine whisperer at work. But that wasn’t the only thing he noticed. Because there was a sway in those hips as she moved. Subtle but there. And he knew that somewhere under those khaki clothes hid the body of a woman, curvy and lush.
She was mad if she thought they were going anywhere tonight.
‘If you’re talking this year’s vintage, not that long ago. After we picked, the juice spent five months in new French oak barrels before being bottled. So they’re still young and we’ll just leave them on lees. The longer on lees, the more biscuity the wine, so there’s no rush.’ And then she stopped and smiled. ‘But you know all that already.’
He did, but he liked listening to her nonetheless. He’d met plenty of winemakers in his time, some of them pompous old toads who liked to think themselves geniuses. But Holly made what she did sound simple, as if anyone could do it. He knew differently. There was a science to winemaking, of course, but there was also an art. A magic.
Holly had that magic, in spades.
And he itched to hold that magic in his hands and feel it when she came apart. Was there a chance it might happen tonight?
With a wrench he forced his mind back to the wine.
‘You do all your disgorging here?’ It seemed hard to believe they could run such a successful operation from two such modest sites.
‘Mostly. It works fine. Unless someone makes a big order, we usually only dosage a few dozen at a time. We’ll fill this order from last year’s vintage and I reckon it’ll go down a treat at that wedding.’
‘How do you propose filling the Chatsfield order the way you now work?’
The lights in her eyes flared. ‘You mean, how do I propose filling the order if I sign the contract?’