“No, Jewel, not always, in fact, mostly never. You’ve had tremendously bad luck. I know you had some tough experiences but no matter what Douglas is, and he’s a lot of things,” she noted with her usual bluntness, “he isn’t the type of man who would hurt you.”
“How do you know?” Julia was thinking about the accident Douglas had ordered Sean to have, the gunshot wound he never explained, the two years when he’d disappeared. She remembered his words, “Because I need something warm and soft and alive beside me tonight. Something that smells good and feels good. After what I’ve seen…”
He had secrets, dark ones.
She had no idea what he was capable of and she figured Charlie didn’t either.
“Because he’d never hurt Tammy and to hurt you would hurt Tammy. He had great respect for Gavin too.”
Oh God. She had a point there.
“Charlie –” Julia tried to interject.
“Honestly, Jewel, don’t you understand from what you’ve just told me that even not having it all with Douglas is a damn sight better than anything you’d get from anyone else?”
Julia was struck silent at Charlie’s stunning proclamation. And before she let the truth of it edge into her mind, she shut it out completely.
“Think about it,” Charlie urged. “I’ll call you later,” and she hung up.
Miserable, Julia spent (hiding, she knew), the whole day in her rooms. She kept her mind obsessively busy by wrapping presents and making unnecessary lists and when the children came home, they rushed in to say hello and out again because Douglas was taking them horseback riding.
She wasn’t alone in the room, she knew. The Mistress was there with her, freezing her ankles, trying to tell her something Julia couldn’t understand, probably didn’t want to understand. Julia did her best to ignore her and she finally went away.
Much later, when the sun was setting, to her amazement, Julia saw The Master, clear as day, pacing, agitated, back and forth in front of Julia’s windows.
Julia shut the curtains.
When she became used to the impossibility of living with two ghosts, she did not know and she didn’t have the energy to worry about it.
It was Veronika’s shift at the house and Julia let her go early. She made a big vat of Texas chilli for dinner, spending the entire time she cooked mentally preparing for any upcoming confrontation with Douglas at supper.
The children screamed in, still jazzed from a day of physical activity and she met them in the hallway. She was wiping her hands on a dishtowel as the kids started to scatter this way and that. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Douglas saunter in but didn’t acknowledge him.
“Everyone get cleaned up. Dinner is in half an hour,” she announced.
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.