Her skin was soft, like he had known it would be. Wren was the kind of woman who had never done a day’s worth of manual labor in her whole life. Not that she didn’t work hard, she did. And he knew enough about the inner workings of a job like theirs to be well aware that it took a hell of a lot of mental energy. It was just that he also worked on his own ranch when he wasn’t working on the wine part of things, and he knew that his own hands were rough as hell.
She was too soft. Too cosseted. Snobby. Uppity. Repressed—unless she was giving him a dressing-down with that evil tongue of hers.
And damn he liked it all, as much as he hated it.
The thing was, even if he’d been a different man, a man who had the heart it took to be with someone forever, to do the whole marriage-and-kids thing, if he’d been a man who hadn’t been destroyed a long time ago, it wouldn’t be her.
Couldn’t be her.
A kick of lust shot through him, igniting at the point where their hands still touched. Wren dropped her hold on him quickly. “Well. Good. I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other, then.”
“I guess we will. Looking forward to it.”
“Dear reader,” Wren muttered as she walked back into the family winery showroom. “She was not looking forward to seeing more of his arrogant, annoying, infuriating, ridiculous...”
“I’m sorry, what?”
Wren stopped muttering when her sister Emerson popped up from where she was sitting.
“I was muttering,” Wren replied.
“I know. What exactly were you muttering about?”
“I was muttering,” she restated. “Which means it wasn’t exactly meant to be understood.”
“Well. I’m nosy.”
“I just had my meeting with Creed.”
“Oh,” Emerson said, looking her over. “Huh.”
“What?”
“I’m checking you for burn marks.”
“Why? Because he’s Satan?”
“No. Because the two of you generate enough heat to leave scorched earth.”
She narrowed her eyes at her sister. “You’d better be talking about anger.”
Regrettably, anger was not the only thing that Creed Cooper made her feel.
Oh, Creed Cooper enraged her. She typically found herself wanting to punch him in the face within the first thirty seconds of his company.
He was an asshole. He was insufferable.
He was...without a doubt the sexiest man she had ever encountered in her entire life and when she woke up at night in a cold sweat with her pulse pounding between her thighs, it was always because she had been dreaming of him.
“Yeah,” Emerson said. “Anger.”
“What?” Wren snapped.
“It’s just... I don’t know. The two of you seem to be building up to some kind of hate-sex situation.”
Wren shifted, hating that she felt so seen in the moment. “No.”
“Why not?” Emerson asked.
“Several reasons. The first being that he disgusts me.” Her cheeks turned pink when the bold-faced lie slipped out of her mouth.
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“You would know. You’re...on fleek on the internet. Or whatever.”
“That is an incredibly passé bit of pop culture there, Wren. And I think we both know disgust is not what he makes you feel.”
She pulled a face. “Can we talk about business?”
“Sure, sure. So, what was your conclusion?”
“He’s a dick.”
“Yeah. I know. But what about the initiative?”
“Oh. He’s on board. So I guess we’ll be having a party. But he’s insisting on barbecuing.”
“Barbecuing?” Emerson asked, her sister’s hand rising upward, bent at the wrist, her fingers curled.
“Yes.” Wren lifted her nose. “Beef.”
“I guess that’s what we get for joining forces with cowboys.”
“Says the woman who’s married to one.”
Emerson shrugged. “Sure. But I don’t let him plan my parties. He has many uses, the primary one being that he allows me to do good work and save horses.”
“Save horses?”
She batted her lashes. “Ride a cowboy?”
“For the love of God, Emerson.”
“What? He’s hot.”
She was not here for her sister’s smug married-frequent-sex glow. Emerson had very narrowly escaped an arranged marriage with a man their father had chosen for her. The whole thing with her husband, Holden, had been dramatic, had involved no small amount of blackmail and subterfuge, and had somehow ended in true love.
Wren still didn’t quite understand it.
Wren also didn’t understand why she felt so beset by her Creed fantasies. Or why she was so jealous of Emerson’s glow.
Wren herself wasn’t overly sexual.
It wasn’t her thing. She’d had a few boyfriends, and she enjoyed the physical closeness that came with sex. That much was true. It had been a while since she’d dated anybody though, because she had been so consumed with her job at Maxfield Vineyards. She enjoyed what she did for work quite a lot more than she enjoyed sex, in point of fact.
Her dreams about illicit sex with Creed were better than any sex she’d ever had, and she found that completely disturbing.
Also, proof that her subconscious didn’t know anything. Nothing at all.
“Great,” Wren said. “Good for you and your libido. But I’m talking about wine, which is far more important than how hot your husband is.”
“To you,” Emerson said. “The hotness of my husband is an entirely consuming situation for me.”
“Anyway,” Wren said, her voice firm. “We get our joint party.”
“But with beef.”
“Yes,” Emerson said. “And then hopefully in a few months we’ll have the larger event, which we can presell tickets to. Hopefully we can bring a lot of people into town if we plan it right.”
“I do like the way you’re thinking,” Wren said. “It’s going to be great,” she added, trying to affirm it for herself.
“It will be,” Emerson agreed. “Have you talked to Cricket about it at all?”
Cricket was their youngest sister. She had been... She had been incredibly wounded about the entire scandal with their father.
The situation with their parents had gone from bad to worse. Or maybe it was just that they were all now aware of how bad it had always been.
The reason
