“What about dinner?”
“That roast has a couple hours yet. It can just simmer,” she said, the last word coming out more sexually than she intended.
She would take the memory of the way he looked at her—a gaze rich with lust, gratitude and anticipation—to her grave.
The loud sound of an engine and the hissing of air brakes made her jump, and they stared at each other in confusion before she looked at the clock and realized.
“You’re expecting someone?” Reece asked.
“Yes! I completely forgot—it’s the trees,” she said, scrambling to get her bra on and trying to find her blouse before the nursery delivery guy came to the door. “Trees?”
“Christmas trees. I completely forgot he was bringing them today,” she explained.
Reece looked bemused, but followed her lead and grabbed his shirt, buttoning up his jeans.
“You mean, tree, singular?”
“No, sixteen of them,” she said, and washed her hands quickly, grabbing a coat from the hook where she had left it earlier.
“Sixteen?” he echoed.
She grinned, her lusty thoughts fading to the background. “Three for the tasting rooms, a dozen for the decorating contest and one for the house. C’mon, you can help me with them.”
As they walked out into the crisp air where two men unloaded a flatbed truck loaded with trees, Abby couldn’t help but feel that their arrival might just have saved her from herself. As much as she wanted Reece, and wanted to give in, it would make her life an even greater mess. Right now, that was something she didn’t need. As they spent the next few hours setting up Christmas trees, she tried to convince herself she was okay with that.
5
REECE FROWNED AT THE jungle of boxes and bins that crowded the main room of his house. Even more so since there was a huge tree in the corner, by the two front windows, and then more bags of new ornaments Abby had purchased. He looked at the tree again. It had to be eight feet tall. It had taken two hours to get the trees off the truck and in place. Two hours when he could have been making love to Abby, but while he had been helping with setting up trees, she had been hauling out decorations, apparently having forgotten their moment in the kitchen.
Now he knew how much work it had been for his dad, who always brought the trees home and spent hours struggling to erect them, to get the “right side” showing—a tree quality that only his mother seemed able to assess.
“You really didn’t have to get a tree for in here,” he said, trying to be tactful. He would have skipped it, personally.
“It’s your last Christmas in this house. There should be a tree,” she said, as if that was the most logical thing in the world.
Luckily, most of Abby’s family ornaments and decorations had been salvageable, contained neatly in plastic bins in her basement where the water from the fire hoses hadn’t damaged them.
He’d had to call his mother, but found several boxes of their own, including several that he remembered from childhood. After a fantastic dinner of succulent pork that was one of the best things he had eaten in a long time, they had opened up the boxes and pulled everything out, which created what appeared to be utter chaos to Reece’s eyes.
But Abby apparently had that special, female, Christmas sense that told her what ornaments should go where, and why.
Did it really make a difference?
He could tell from the intense concentration on Abby’s face and the way she bit her lip—which was sexy, as well as completely endearing—that if she had lost these bins in the fire, it would have been a terrible thing. They were clearly meaningful to her.
It wasn’t that he disliked Christmas, but he’d managed to tactfully avoid it this year by staying here, alone, and now it looked like it had found him anyway. Normally he would spend most of his holiday—when he didn’t come home—working, and just have dinner with friends on the day, call his family, relax. But it had been his idea to have Abby here, and so he sucked it up.
A few hours later, having strung all the lights, they were now picking through the decorations, deciding what should go where.
“The silver and white should go in the back room, for the wedding reception, and the grapes will go on the tree in the tasting room, of course,” she said, pulling several boxes aside.
“Grapes? You have grape ornaments?”
“There’s a little store down on the Commons, the one that sells Christmas stuff all year round—you know the one?” she said, looking at him askance.
“I don’t think I was ever in there,” he admitted. When he was a student, he spent more time partying than shopping, and in the years since, even when he came home, spent most of his time with his family and never went into town too much.
“Oh, they have the most unusual ornaments. All kinds of characters, food items, just…whatever. And every year we would go down to see if they had some different grape ornaments, or ones that maybe looked like tiny wine bottles—we have fewer of those. Eventually the owner just called us when he got new things in, and he would trade us ornaments for bottles of wine. We had enough to decorate one tree with them.”
Reece smiled, enjoying her enthusiasm about such a simple thing. “It sounds great—I can’t wait to see it.”
“Well, we can do that one first then.”
“Tonight?” he said, surprised.
“Yes—I don’t know that we can get all four done, but I’d like to try. There aren’t any tastings until Friday, thank God, but I have dozens of other things to do.”
Reece hadn’t been aware he was going to spend the entire evening decorating Christmas trees—he had planned on much more interesting activities, like getting Abby in his bed. But she seemed genuinely excited about the trees, and all things considered, he decided, why not?
“Okay, I’m in.”
His agreement was worth the smile it elicited.
So, after all of the ornaments were separated, they hauled the boxes over to the tasting room, which in the case of Winston wineries, was completely separate from the house and a much more modern construction, with shining oak beams and plate glass windows around their sales area.
Large leather chairs were strewn around the actual tasting area, inviting guests to enjoy the view and the wine. There was a fireplace near the bar, behind which the bottles of wine were arranged. Hidden track lighting put a soft golden glow over the room, rather than anything harsh or too bright. There were double French doors at the back that led to a reception area and an outdoor deck that overlooked the lake.
“It’s so pretty and spacious here. I feel like our little tasting room was about the size of your closet,” Abby said with a laugh, setting down her box of ornaments with a sigh. “I hope I have enough business to justify you letting us use all this space. I’ll need to run through a tour with you, too, if you don’t mind, so that I can train Hannah and Carl, and we need to set up the wine displays still, and—”
Reece put both hands on her shoulders. “Abby. Stop. Right now, focus on the tree, just this tree. One thing. Tomorrow there will be time to think about the rest.”
“I know, but there’s so much—”
“I know there is. But we can’t do it tonight, and anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve decorated a tree, let alone four of them,” he said with a grin. He leaned in to brush a kiss over her mouth when she seemed ready to argue again. “Let’s enjoy it.”
Taking a deep breath, her cheeks pink from the kiss—something he planned to repeat as often as possible—she nodded, smiling, too.
“Sorry. Once my mind gets rolling, I can’t stop sometimes,” she admitted.
“I know the feeling. I used to be like that before a race. The day before, the night before, I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking of everything, double- and triple-checking every detail. But I had to learn to trust my team, and also, I needed to sleep. A tired driver isn’t a good driver. By trying to do everything, I wasn’t doing my job as well as I needed to.”
“I know. It was easier before, when Mom and Dad were here, and Sarah, but then it seemed like it all just landed in my lap, and I got so used to thinking about it all, all the time.” She cast a glance over her shoulder, back toward her burned winery, though she couldn’t see it in the dark. “Now I don’t know what to think.”
“It will all work out,” Reece said steadily. “Speaking of your mom and dad, have you talked to them yet?” He guessed that, depending on where her parents were exactly in earthquake-torn Haiti, communication could be a real challenge.
He was sorry he asked, as her face crumpled with distress. “No, I don’t want to worry them with vague emails, so I certainly don’t want to deliver the news to them that way. I have left messages, and I’m just waiting for them to call me back,” she said, wringing her fingers together. “I’m dreading it. I hate that I let this happen. They’ll be so upset,” she said.
“I’m sure all that they’ll care about is that you are okay. Everything else can be rebuilt. But it might be another sign you are overworked—you start trying to handle too many things, you miss important details, and that’s when bad things happen.”
“Like you were just saying, about racing. I know you don’t like to talk about it,” she said quickly, looking away as she pulled some ornaments from a box and turned toward the tree, motioning him to do the same. “But is that what happened with your accident? You were trying to do too much?”
He swallowed hard. In the middle of seducing Abby in the kitchen, Christmas tree chaos and having their wonderful dinner, he realized he hadn’t thought about his accident once in several hours, maybe for the first time in a long time. He hated bringing it back up again, but he supposed it was only fair to at least answer her question.
“No, not this time. This was just one of those crazy, unfortunate things…. I actually can’t remember the crash.”
“You have amnesia?” she said with some surprise.
He nodded shortly. “They say it’s normal in traumatic situations, like car crashes, and I had pretty serious head injuries. You probably know I was in a coma for a while,” he said.
She nodded, and as they put ornaments on the tree, it was easier to share the things he didn’t normally talk with anyone about, except for his doctors.
“I watched the video footage for the first time a month ago. I blew out a tire and the roads were wet, but I don’t know why I lost control so completely, and I guess I might never know. I’ve had tires go before and controlled it. This time…” he said, trailing off, shaking his head. “I just don’t know.”
Her hand was on his arm then, squeezing in a way meant to comfort, but he felt his pulse jump. Any touch from Abby seemed to make that happen.
“My dad always says the only control we have in life is self-control. We can control how we react, what we do, and that’s it. You were—” she paused, catching her slip “—are a fantastic driver. Even if you can’t remember, I’m sure you did everything you could. Like you said, sometimes things just happen.”
“Your dad always was a smart guy. How would you know what kind of driver I am?” he asked, hanging his last ornament on the tree.
“Uh, um, well…” She took her hand from his arm and reached into the box for more decorations. “It stands to reason, right? You’re one of the major players. They said you could be the next Clark or Stewart.”
His eyes widened. “You follow racing?”
She paused, leaning into the box, and he realized she’d let on more than she meant to. It warmed him in a whole different way that she had followed his career. He never would have guessed.
“I just caught things on the news. Hometown boy makes it big in Europe, you know, and you came back and drove at the Glen that one time,” she said, gathering an armful of ornaments and returning to the tree.
“Did you come to that race?” he asked. It had only been an exhibition run, a charity event, but he’d had no idea she was there.
“Some friends wanted to go, so I tagged along.”
“I see.”
“You see what?”
He shrugged, unable to resist the temptation to egg her on a little. “You followed my racing, you came to my exhibition…clearly you never quite got over your crush on me,” he said with a grin.
Abby’s jaw dropped and she huffed something about his “intolerable ego” until she saw the barely restrained glee in his eyes.
Then her gorgeous lips quirked at the edges, too. “You really enjoy getting me worked up, don’t you?”
Reece took that as his cue, and stepped around the tree to pull her up close. “You have no idea,” he said, serious now as he dipped in for another kiss.
“You’re wicked,” she said against his mouth, a little breathless. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright, and Reece couldn’t seem to get enough of taking her in.
“I know,” he admitted. He seemed to be having especially wicked thoughts at the moment.
“I kind of like it,” she said with a grin that made his heart flip inside his chest. “But I…I’ve never done this,” she said, looking nervous.
His eyebrows flew up. He was pretty certain that…but was he wrong? “You mean you’ve never, uh—”
“Oh, no! I’ve had sex, sure. But never when I knew it was going to end before it started. Never without at least the vague promise of something more that could happen,” she said, and then broke away, looking embarrassed.
“We have a relationship, Abby. We have history, even. We’re friends. That won’t change.”
She smiled a little. “It’s already changed. We were barely friends in high school, and we’ve barely started a friendship now. We’re leaping right into being lovers.”
He knew she was right, but didn’t say a word.
“I want you,” she admitted. “But I don’t know if I can get into this knowing you’re going to sell this place and leave. I know it’s stupid, and unsophisticated, but I…um, I—”
Don’t want to get hurt, he finished for her in his head.
“I know, Abby. I understand,” he said, though he didn’t want to. He wanted Abby more than he wanted just about anything except getting back in a car, but he didn’t want to hurt her, either.
She wasn’t like the women he took to bed and found gone in the morning. She wasn’t just using him for a thrill or some notoriety. Abby was the kind of woman you took to bed and then woke up with in the morning—every morning—for a long time.
And he wasn’t that guy. Maybe someday, but not now.
“It’s sweet, actually,” he said, closing the gap between them and pulling her into the circle of his arms. “I can’t make any promises about anything, Abby, I can only be as upfront as possible. I want you, too, a lot. But it’s your choice, okay?”
She nodded against his chest, her small hands moving over his back, making him crazy, but he reined in his desire.
“Thanks, Reece. I wish I could—”
“It’s okay, really. How about we finish these trees?” he said cheerfully, planting a kiss on her hair and wondering if that was the last time he’d ever have Abby in his arms.
6
ABBY WRENCHED UPWARD, an unfamiliar noise pulling her out of a restless dream.
The thud sounded again, and she sat up, hand to her slamming heart. Looking at the clock, she saw it was two-thirty in the morning. She’d only been sleeping for a few hours. Living alone for several years now had fine-tuned her senses to any noise in the house at night, and she listened closer.
She didn’t need to wonder if she had imagined it when it was followed by a large crash, and glass breaking. She leapt from the bed, opening her door to peek down the hall toward Reece’s room, but didn’t see him. Had he slept through the noise? Heard it at all?
Moving on tiptoe down the hall, she stopped by his door, lifting her hand, then pausing. She couldn’t knock if there was an intruder downstairs, they might hear.
She pushed Reece’s door open just slightly, poking her head into th
e dark room.
“Reece?” she whispered as loudly as she dared.
A loud shout met her whisper, making her jump out of her skin, but also launching her inside the room and closing the door behind her. She saw immediately that the noise she’d heard hadn’t been from an intruder, but from Reece, who had knocked the hurricane lamp off of his nightstand. He still appeared to be sleeping, and not well.
Venturing toward the bed, she bit her lip in concern.
“Reece, are you okay?”
He twisted in the sheets, as if trying to push them off, though he couldn’t. He was murmuring, then shouting again, then whimpering in a way that told her he was in some kind of pain—or dreaming about it. She rushed to the side of the bed and put a calming hand on his shoulder, saying his name again, only to have him wrench away. He started saying things, his tone low and business-like, something with numbers and other mumbled words she couldn’t understand.
Silver light shone through the window, and she could see his face was contorted in the agony of his dream and didn’t know what to do. Then her eye caught sight of a small bottle on the dresser. She picked it up and held it close to the window—sleep aids. Those would knock him out and she probably didn’t stand much chance of waking him up, she figured.
Still, she couldn’t just leave him here like this, even if it was just a dream. Scooting into the empty space next to him, Abby knew she was playing with fire—especially when she realized he wasn’t wearing anything but his briefs.
“God help me,” she muttered, but settled down next to him and cuddled up behind, hoping to offer some kind of comfort. Maybe she could not let him be alone through the worst of it and then go back to her room.
Reece would never know. She rubbed his back with her palm, hoping to soothe, and after a few minutes, he did seem to quiet down. Her own body relaxed and her breathing returned to almost normal. Except that she was laying here in bed with a mostly naked, absolutely gorgeous man—still, she focused on just helping him back into a restful place.
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