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.
She probably even married Sean because he reminded her of Douglas (she decided it was a good idea to blame Douglas for her first marriage fiasco, it helped her stay focused).
She was in love with Douglas and forced to live with him for, at least, the next twelve years of her life. What on earth she had done to deserve this dastardly end, she did not know. And, if the last two months were anything to go by, she didn’t think she would make it for another two months let alone more than a decade.
If he didn’t leave her alone, she wouldn’t be able to resist him.
And she had to resist him. No matter what Charlie said, Lizzie wanted or even Mrs. K apparently hoped for, she had long since vowed to herself she was never going to let another man like Douglas into her heart. He wasn’t Sean, she knew, and he wasn’t her father either.
But he wasn’t Gavin.
Gavin had loved his wife with a powerful distraction that was unlike anything Julia had ever seen and definitely nothing she’d ever known. When he married Tamsin and he said his vows, he nearly shouted the roof off the Cathedral, he was so proud to say them. Any other man would have looked the fool, but not Gav, and Julia knew every woman’s heart in that church melted because that’s what happened to her own.
Julia wanted a man like that and if she couldn’t have it (which she knew she couldn’t), then she wanted no man at all.
She was self-sufficient and capable and didn’t mind being alone.
But she was tired of her loneliness, tired of fending for herself, tired of not having anyone to talk to her about her day or help her if the car had a flat tire.
She wanted to be cared for and protected; she admitted to herself this was true.
But she wanted it with devotion and in the meantime (which would be for always) she knew she could take care of herself.