The Ashtons - Cole, Abigail & Megan

a bottle of Louret wine. They’re buying Eli’s nose and a sip of your mother’s heritage.”
    His eyebrows lifted. This didn’t sound like the passionately impractical rebel he’d once known. “Either you’ve gotten into wine or you’ve done some research.”
    “Wine does come up when Mercedes and I talk, but yes, I’ve done research. I paint quickly, but I spend a good deal of time researching my subject before I start.”
    “What happened to your art?” he asked, suddenly curious. “The noncommercial stuff, I mean.”
    She shrugged. “The art world is intensely parochial. If you aren’t playing in whatever stream is fashionable, you aren’t doing ‘significant work’—which means being part of the dialogue between artists, other artists and art critics.”
    “You used to like the avant-garde stuff.”
    “I still do. I just don’t want to play in that stream myself. I want to do representational art—which is only slightly less damning than doing commercial art. Which I also do, obviously.” She chuckled. “An instructor once told me that I have the soul of an illustrator. He did not mean it as a compliment.”
    “Some bastards shouldn’t be allowed to teach.”
    “No, he was right. Of course, I think of Rembrandt as a superb illustrator, too.” She grinned. “I’ve never been accused of false modesty.”
    Or any other kind, he thought, amused. Pity he found that so attractive. “You don’t find it, ah, stifling to your creativity to work on the commercial end of the spectrum?”
    “I’m in a position to pick and choose my jobs these days. I have a good deal of artistic control, and I don’t take work that doesn’t excite me.”
    Yet she’d accepted this job…and for less money, he suspected, than she usually charged. A favor for a friend? “You’re excited about wine?”
    She leveled a long, thoughtful look at him. “Are you going to give me that tour, or not?”
    “By all means.” He pushed open the nearest door.“This is the bottling room. Randy handles things here.”
    Dixie hadn’t changed much. She still had a body that could make a man beg, and a smile that suggested she’d like it if he did. And she still drew people to her, male and female alike. For the next hour, Cole watched her charm everyone she met.
    Randy fell easily, but he was young and born to flirt. Russ, who was foreman at the vineyards, wasn’t much more of a test—he was older, but he was still male. The real challenge came when she met Mrs. McKillup. The crotchety old bookkeeper actually smiled. Cole didn’t think he’d seen her do that over anything less important than a new spreadsheet program.
    And none of it bothered him. That realization gusted in while he was watching her twist Russ around her little finger. Jealousy wasn’t even a smudge on the horizon. It wasn’t there at all.
    The lightness around his heart grew with each introduction. He hadn’t needed proof that he was over her. Once he knew she’d really left him he’d set out to forget her, and had done a damn fine job of it. Some men enjoyed sighing over a lost love. Not him.
    But he hadn’t known for sure he was past the jealousy, not until today. He could stand back and watch her flirt, appreciate her body and her easy laugh, without sinking into that old swamp.
    Maybe he wouldn’t kill his sister.
    “You let me have a look at your laptop,” Mrs.McKillup was saying as they prepared to leave her to her numbers. “I suspect you just need more memory. Very easy to install, if so.”
    “Thanks.” Dixie smiled ruefully. “I’d really appreciate help from someone with a functioning left brain. I think mine gave up on me years ago in disgust.”
    “Not much doubt about the health of Mrs. McKillup’s left brain,” Cole said when they were on the stairs, headed down. “You could cut yourself on it.”
    “What an image.” She grinned as they reached the bottom floor. “She reminds me of my third-grade teacher. The woman terrified me.”
    “You weren’t showing any signs of fear.”
    “Oh, I decided a long time ago that it’s easier to like people, and you know how I hate to waste energy. It’s also much more interesting.”
    And that, he understood, was the root of her charm. It wasn’t about getting people to like her. It was about liking them. Which might be what had gone wrong with them—there’d been too much she hadn’t really liked about him.
    The flash of anger surprised him. He squelched it. Old