The Ashtons - Cole, Abigail & Megan

news. “Some people aren’t easy to like.”
    “True. And a few aren’t worth the effort, but you can’t know that until you’ve tried.” She opened the door to the tasting room. “I’d better get the rest of my stuff unloaded. I’m not sure where to put it, though.”
    “Mother has you in the carriage house. You’ll remember it.”
    She stopped with the door open and aimed a glance over her shoulder at him, her face quite blank. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “Yes, I do.”
    The carriage house was set away from the main house—not far, but enough to offer some privacy. On that long-ago summer, he’d been living in the big house still; Dixie had moved in with her mother after graduating while she looked for work. She’d come to visit Mercedes one day.
    By that night, she and Cole had been lovers. They’d met at the carriage house often. Made love there.
    She gave a little shake of her head, half of a smile settling on her mouth without touching her eyes. He couldn’t decipher the emotion there. “You going to give me a hand with my things, or do you need to get back to work? I warn you—I don’t travel light.”
    “No problem. I love to flex my muscles for the girls.”
    Her gaze wandered over him, head to toe, a spark of mischief replacing the unknown emotion. “Got a tank top? It would be so much more fun to watch you flex in one of those.”
    The rolling rise of heat didn’t surprise him. She was a woman who’d always provoke a response in a man, and when she looked at him like that he’d have to be dead not to respond. But the strength of it was unwelcome. “Still playing with matches, Dixie?” he asked softly.
    “I run with scissors sometimes, too.”
    She was far too amused. For now, he’d let her getaway with that. Later, though…Dixie wasn’t a woman for the long haul. He knew that, and he knew why. But she was hell on wheels for the short term. “Let’s go exercise my muscles,” he said lightly, leaving it up to her to decide what kind of exercise he had in mind.

Chapter Two
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    “Y ou’re driving an SUV.”
    “I prefer to call it a suvvy.” Dixie did not care for the look of unholy delight on Cole’s face. She opened the door on the driver’s side. “Were you going to ride to the carriage house with me, or would you prefer to tote and flex over there on foot?”
    He climbed in, looking around. “I could have pictured you in a Ferrari. Or something tiny and fuel efficient with a bumper sticker asking if I’ve hugged a tree today. But an SUV?” He shook his head, grinning. “It’s so soccer mom.”
    “Nothing wrong with soccer moms.” She hit the accelerator a little too hard. “I do a fair amount of work on location. I needed to be able to haularound my equipment, not to mention the Hulk, and this is the most fuel efficient suvvy on the market.” And why was she so defensive, anyway? “So what are you driving these days? A shiny new Beamer or a Benz?”
    “A five-year-old Jeep Grand Cherokee, eight cylinders, standard,” he answered promptly.
    “An SUV.”
    “Yep.”
    She glanced at him—and they both burst out laughing. “Were we really that shallow before?” she asked. “Arguing about cars as if it mattered.” She shook her head, remembering.
    “Speak for yourself. I wasn’t shallow. Just stupid.”
    Not stupid, she thought. Obsessed, maybe. Ambitious, certainly. Grimly determined to outdo the father who’d walked out on him, to prove that he and his family didn’t need Spencer Ashton in any way—definitely. Dixie had understood that. She just hadn’t been able to live with it.
    The carriage house was located just behind and to the east of the main house, but to get there by car they had to drive well past the house and circle back, passing through a portion of the vineyards and a small grove of olive trees. Even in January, the trees were picturesque with their knotty limbs and graygreen foliage, and the hummingbird sage and licorice plants beneath them were green.
    The grove was even prettier in the summer, surrounded by rows and rows of lush vines, Dixie rememberedwistfully. But perhaps it was just as well she was here in January.
    “So why a suvvy?” she asked lightly as she came to a stop in front of the small stucco building. “You can’t need to haul things around that often.”
    “Not as much these days, no. But for a while I was. I bought a small cabin a few years ago and have been working on it ever since.”
    “A