The kids raced up the stairs and Julia turned to see Douglas standing in the hallway watching her, his arms crossed on his chest and his feet planted apart.
He looked exactly what he was, lord of the manor, master of all he surveyed. With that sexy scar on his lip and that even sexier glint in his eye, instead of looking like a man who was born to it, he looked like a man who had seized it.
This thrilled her, annoyed her and scared the living daylights out of her all at the same time.
He wore a soft suede jacket the colour of clay and a forest green turtleneck over faded blue jeans and boots. Slap a cowboy hat on his head and he was the GQ version of the damned Marlboro Man.
“Dinner is in half an hour,” she repeated tersely.
“I heard you,” he replied.
She walked away, hoping that he wouldn’t follow her.
He didn’t.
Then she hoped for the disappointment that came from him not following her would go away.
It didn’t either.
* * * * *
“And he sits the best horse ever,” Lizzie enthused with the fervour of a zealot.
Everyone was sitting around the huge dining room table eating dinner. Even though Julia loved chilli, she found she wasn’t hungry. This was probably because she was extremely aware that Douglas was sitting to her left side. Every time she looked at his hands, she thought of what they could do to her body. Every time she looked at his face, her eyes dropped to his lips and then she thought about what they could do (and, as if he could read her mind, those lips twitched at the corners which then made her want to crash the nearest, undoubtedly priceless vase over his head).
Since their return that afternoon, she had gone from worrying about what Douglas would do next to worrying about what she would do if she was pregnant. Then she started to get angry about what Sean had likely done. Now, she was frustrated at Lizzie who seemed to want to convince Julia that Douglas was, at any moment, going to walk calmly outside and fly, such were his superhuman powers.
“He’s going to teach me to play polo,” Willie said through a mouthful of chilli.
Et tu, Willie? Julia thought, her eyes rolling to the ceiling.
“I’m gonna play polo too!” Ruby shouted, not wanting to be left out.
“Do you know how to ride, Julia?” Douglas asked, his deep baritone rumbling over her like a caress.
She ignored the caress and answered the question. “No.”
“You do too!” Lizzie accused. “We all went riding at Pokagon State Park.”
Julia watched the girl closely to see if there would be any negative response to a verbally acknowledged memory that involved her parents. None of the children seemed to notice and she allowed her quick bout of tenseness to subside.
Julia swept a glance passed Douglas who was looking at her with what appeared, to her stunned disbelief, to be smugness.
She turned her attention to her chilli, pretending to go about the business of actually eating it when she’d only been able to manage two mouthfuls and she stirred it around.
“Lizzie-babe, I hardly think some cowboy getting me up on a two hundred year old horse by pushing me up with a shove on my behind and then riding it docilely in a line with ten other people for half an hour constitutes as ‘knowing how to ride’.”
“Yeah, that was funny. Even in the line, you nearly fell off,” Willie added then turned to inform Douglas, “She didn’t take her hands off the pommel the entire time. The cowboy guy eventually had to ride beside her the whole way.”
Another glance showed that Douglas no longer looked smug, he looked annoyed.
Willie, now a veritable font of information, told Douglas, “And she walked around for the rest of the day like she had a tree between her legs.”
Julia gritted her teeth.
Douglas grinned.
“What’s for pudding?” Ruby screeched and Julia could have kissed her youngest niece for changing the subject even if Julia wasn’t certain she’d ever stop the ringing in her ears.
“All right, everyone,” Julia ordered, “plates rinsed and in the washer.”
She managed dessert without too much of an effort and Douglas thankfully disappeared for the rest of the evening, leaving her to take care of the kids and then hurry to her own room in an attempt to avoid him.
Even though it was early, she prepared for bed. In a gesture toward confidence-building, she pulled on her favourite nightie, a short, spaghetti-strapped, strawberry-coloured cotton wisp of material with little embroidered peach flowers and peach lace around the hem and neckline.
She tried to read but all she could do was think.
So she quit reading and turned off the light and tried to sleep.
Still, all she could do was think.
She wasn’t falling in love with Douglas Ashton.
Julia was in love with him.
In fact, there was a very good possibility she’d been in love with him for fifteen years.
She probably even married Sean because he reminded her of Douglas (she decided it was a good idea to blame Douglas for her first marriage fiasco, it helped her stay focused).
She was in love with Douglas and forced to live with him for, at least, the next twelve years of her life. What on earth she had done to deserve this dastardly end, she did not know. And, if the last two months were anything to go by, she didn’t think she would make it for another two months let alone more than a decade.
If he didn’t leave her alone, she wouldn’t be able to resist him.
And she had to resist him. No matter what Charlie said, Lizzie wanted or even Mrs. K apparently hoped for, she had long since vowed to herself she was never going to let another man like Douglas into her heart. He wasn’t Sean, she knew, and he wasn’t her father either.
But he wasn’t Gavin.
Gavin had loved his wife with a powerful distraction that was unlike anything Julia had ever seen and definitely nothing she’d ever known. When he married Tamsin and he said his vows, he nearly shouted the roof off the Cathedral, he was so proud to say them. Any other man would have looked the fool, but not Gav, and Julia knew every woman’s heart in that church melted because that’s what happened to her own.
Julia wanted a man like that and if she couldn’t have it (which she knew she couldn’t), then she wanted no man at all.
She was self-sufficient and capable and didn’t mind being alone.
But she was tired of her loneliness, tired of fending for herself, tired of not having anyone to talk to her about her day or help her if the car had a flat tire.
She wanted to be cared for and protected; she admitted to herself this was true.