He couldn’t think of a more gratifying way to spend his thirty-eighth birthday than pounding down walls.
Well, okay, so he could think of one.
He’d woken that morning thinking about it, with the remnant shreds of a broken dream hard in his body and hot in his mind.
But then his phone had rung—Lou, foreman on this job, calling in sick—and before he could replace the receiver his daughter had propelled herself onto his bed, bouncing and gabbing with it’s-your-birthday-Daddy excitement.
His phone rang again. Then his housekeeper Rosa appeared, looking for Rachel and breakfast orders. And that was reality.
A thriving business, a phone that never quit, and a three-year-old daughter who owned him heart and soul. No time to indulge his body in anything more than a stray early-morning fantasy—forget the real deal!—which left the only other physical release he was getting any time soon.
Seth squinted through the dust of demolition, fixed his gaze on the target wall and lifted his hammer.
“Boss.”
He turned to find one of his younger laborers standing in what remained of the doorway.
“You have a…uh…visitor.” Tony thumbed over his shoulder and shuffled his feet in a way that invoked ghosts of birthdays past.
Seth released his breath on a sigh. He was too old for this—for whatever this turned out to be. Reluctantly, he downed tools, removed his dust mask and goggles, and schooled his expression to take in good humor whatever strip-o-gram surprise came sashaying through the door.
Please, just let her keep her hands off of me.
But when he looked up, genuine surprise wiped all expression from his face and a good amount of cognitive function from his brain. Possibly because every early-morning fantasy of the last year exploded through his blood.
He did notice that Jillian Ashton-Bennedict was over-dressed…for both his fantasies and for the reality of a building site. She wore a dress the color of sandstone, a slender column of material that ended just shy of her knees. She wasn’t sashaying. Instead she picked her graceful way through the rubble, all long legs and high heels and cool female elegance.
No one did cool elegance like Jillian Ashton-Bennedict.
And nothing turned Seth on quicker or hotter than her particular brand of femininity.
With one hand she smoothed her hair—shorter than last time he’d seen her, curling around the elegant length of her throat in soft ash-brown layers—and he caught the glint of gold on her ring finger. Then she looked up and her eyes met his across the pile of century-old bricks and timber that separated them.
Debris of the past. How appropriate.
It never changed, this first stilted moment born of their shared history. The hurt to her pride because he’d witnessed her lowest point. His forced restraint, hiding the fact that she turned him on just by walking into a room.
And underlying both, the knowledge of what bound them together—the accident that had killed both their spouses.
“Stay there,” he said, more sharply than he intended or wanted. Damn. And she still wore his dead brother’s wedding band. “Tony shouldn’t have let you in here without a hard hat.”
“I told him I wouldn’t be long.”
“Which doesn’t change a blessed thing. He knows the rules.”
“Don’t blame Tony,” she said quickly. “I sort of lied.”
Seth peeled off his gloves as he started toward her. After five years with Jason, he knew how highly she valued honesty. Knew her bending of the truth would barely register on any fib-o-meter. He stopped in front of her. Waited for her explanation.
“I said you were expecting me.”
Which, while no whopper, did qualify as extremely untrue. He hadn’t seen her since a few days before Christmas, and on that occasion only by chance. She’d brought a present for Rachel and hadn’t expected to find him home.
Seth stopped in front of her. “I haven’t seen you in over three months. I was starting to think you were avoiding me.”
“No.” She shook her head in denial, but her eyes didn’t quite meet his.
“I’m surprised Tony believed you. Since you’re such a lousy liar.”
“Oh.”
Oh, indeed.
The whisper of a sigh escaped her lips. “You’re right, I am, and I suspect Tony thought the same. He said he was only letting me in here because it’s your birthday.”
“Did he think you might have brought me some sort of birthday surprise?”
She met his gaze then, a momentary connection before she blinked and looked away. Seth didn’t blame her, since he imagined his eyes burned with all kinds of erotic birthday surprises.
Most of them included her. Naked and gift-wrapped.
“Sorry.” And, dammit, she really did look sorry. “I should have remembered.”
Seth tried but he couldn’t stop himself asking, “And if you had?”
“I’d have at least brought you a card. Or maybe even a cake.”
“With candles?”
“Wouldn’t that constitute a fire hazard?”
Only to Seth’s imagination.
Somewhere during their birthday-cake banter, he’d started to picture Jillian wearing nothing but teeny tassels and those sexy high heels, bursting from the top of a tacky surprise cake. The kind his buddy Lou might have arranged had he not been out sick. The kind he had no right placing in the same fantasy as Jillian, the sister-in-law he had no right lusting after. But since he’d done so from the first moment he laid eyes on her, and since she’d never shown any sign of being anything other than uncomfortable in his company, he figured he’d keep right on lusting from afar.
Part of the ongoing penance for coveting his brother’s wife.
She looked uncomfortable now, no doubt because he couldn’t help staring—yeah, and lusting—and because the silence between them had stretched into the realms of long and awkward.
“I called in at your office,” she said, bridging that conversational gap while casually widening the gap between them. “Mel told me you were working out here. She didn’t say you were destroying Villa Firenze.”
To indicate the scene of carnage, she did this little gesture thing with her hands. They were elegant and eloquent, Jillian’s hands, and one of the many, many things he’d noticed that first time he met her as Jason’s new bride.
One of the many, many things that turned him on.
“The Maldinis are converting the ground floor
