“How’s my favorite ad person?” Hunter asked, strolling onto set.

“Uh, I’m the only ad person you even remotely consider human,” I told him, trying to ignore how delectable he looked in a loose white linen shirt that set off his tan, and jeans that hugged his ass in all the right ways. “And I’m great! I mean, I’m being eaten alive by this schedule and judging by their hungry looks, possibly eventually also by the actors, but I’m great—”

“Excuse me!” Our director bustled up, a feisty woman with horn-rimmed glasses, short spiky blue hair, and the drive of Napoleon. “We still need footage of the distillery, and if we don’t leave now, we’ll lose the light, and of course the lighting people will do their best to fill it in, but artificial is never the same as—”

“Right, right,” I said. “Well, if you’re all ready, I’ll lead you there…”

“One minute!” She bustled off again, shouting for cameramen and personal assistants and lighting directors and sound guys.

Hunter touched my arm. “May I tag along?”

I raised my eyebrow in mock outrage. “On your own plantation? How dare you suggest such a thing!”

He laughed and linked his arm with mine, strolling along with me as the director corralled her minions and began to follow us to the distillery. On the way there I talked almost entirely to the director—scenes we should shoot, shots we should cut, lighting, color, camera angles—and yet I never lost track of the sensation of Hunter’s strong arm through mine, Hunter’s strong presence at my side. The heat coming off his skin, the heat coming through his eyes.

It was a sensation I believed I could get extremely used to.

As we strolled—well, as Hunter and I strolled; I don’t think the director was capable of less than a full-on bustle, and her assistants scurried after her—we passed some of her colleagues conducting interviews with the workers. One fellow, on the older side, self-conscious in his denim overalls, shuffled his feet and said to his interviewer as we passed, “Well, it’s the taste of the South and that’s no mistake.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked Hunter. “I love it; it’s perfect for a tag line!”

“I defer to your expertise,” Hunter said with a formal bow and a teasing smile.

“It’s certainly one possibility,” the director said grumpily. Earlier in the day, I might have taken umbrage at her tone, but by now I knew it was just how she communicated. Compared to some of the things she’d said earlier, this was practically a ringing endorsement.

“There it is, coming right up on your left,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” she said distractedly. “Good…”

As we reached the distillery, the director was frowning thoughtfully up at Hunter, clearly mentally checking off items on a list in her head. “We haven’t got footage of you yet, either,” she said abruptly. “We’ll need that. Bartlett, you got a recommendation for rooms we should use?”

I glowed a little bit inside at this acknowledgment of my understanding of her work.

“The cask room,” I said. “You’ll want to do it after anything that needs natural light, of course, but it’ll be easy to set up the main lights in there, and there’ll be a good color contrast with his outfit.”

Hunter fidgeted. “I’m not sure about an interview…”

“Don’t tell me you’re nervous,” I teased.

“You already have an unfair advantage over me with all your psychological advertising knowledge,” Hunter defended himself. “How can I just give away all my secrets?”

I raised an eyebrow, and trailed a finger down his chest. “Well, if you don’t tell me, I might just go…looking.”

“And is that supposed to be a disincentive?”

The director cleared her throat. “No need to be nervous, Mr. Knox. It’ll be a pretty standard set of questions. The history of the brand, the values, where you get your inspiration, that kind of thing. People will love it. The face of the Knox legacy.”

“That does sound easy,” Hunter agreed, not taking his eyes off mine. A warm smile spread across his face like honey. “There’s inspiration around me every day.”

And I grinned back up at him like a fool, and didn’t care who saw me. “I could say the same.”

* * *

Long story short, the shoot went great. Sure, we’d be single-handedly supporting some coffee plantation with the amount of caffeine the editing team ingested as they made visual poetry out of the raw footage, but damn, the raw footage in itself was beautiful. It seemed like every worker they’d interviewed had some surprisingly meaningful thing to say about the company and the bourbon and what both meant to them. And our director might have been gruff, but I would have taken a thousand times worse from her to get some of the shots she had captured—the casks stretching on like proud lines of soldiers, the wind ruffling the fields of wheat like fine-spun gold, the sun sinking over the horizon, turning the exact color of the bourbon as it poured out of the large copper still.

It was the afternoon now, and I personally thought we had enough footage to splice together the next Oscar-winning documentary, but our director was relentless, and insisted on one more shoot: the stables. It was there that I was enfolded in a hug by none other than Homer from the bar.

“Well, there you are, girlie!”

“Homer! I’m glad I ran into you!”

A few days earlier, I’d been walking around with the director doing a preliminary look at the scenery, and been surprised to run into my drinking/crying buddy from the little dive bar—who, as it turned out, just dispensed homespun wisdom as a sideline, and spent the majority of his time breeding horses for folks all over the county, Hunter included.

“Well, what can I do for you fine ladies and gentlemen?” Homer asked.

“I need some action shots,” our director cut in. “Something dramatic, majestic. You got a good mount for Mr. Knox to ride?”

“Do I ever! Come take a gander at this piece of horseflesh, you ain’t never seen better—”

Homer began to lead them off to the stall with his prize stallion, a majestic coal-black beast with fiery eyes but a loyal heart. I was about to follow, when I heard a gentle whicker. I looked into the stall it was coming from, and saw the most beautiful horse I could have ever imagined.

Her coat was freshly brushed and shone like moonstone, her mane long and silver-white like my childhood dreams of unicorns. Her eyes were deep dark pools, and she clopped right up to the bars and gently lipped them, as if saying hello.

“Ah, I see I can’t keep the jewel of the crown away from you,” Homer said from behind me.

I started. How long had I been standing in one place, entranced by this beautiful mare? Hunter was already leading his horse out the door, and he grinned back at me with a playfully challenging air.

“Want to ride?” he asked.

I waved him off, shaking my head. “Nah, they don’t need footage of me.”

Hunter mounted his horse in one smooth motion, the muscles of his back rippling. “Your loss.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “The view from this angle is no loss at all.”

* * *

Hunter put on an excellent show. It was a good thing there were other professionals there, because there were several moments when I became too occupied with drooling to do a single damn thing. His glistening skin under the hot sun, the way his shirt stretched over his muscled torso, his firm but gentle hold on the reins…what can I say? There’s just something really hot about good horsemanship.

Even as everyone else wrapped up, Hunter seemed reluctant to leave. Finally, when it was just the two of us and one actor scarfing down the leftover sandwiches from craft service, I rolled my eyes and went over to him. “Come on, Hunter, we still need to sign the last of the paperwork.”

“It’ll keep ‘til tomorrow,” he said.

Despite his words, he had started trotting towards the stables, so I assumed he was going along with the plan when suddenly, he just stopped.

I stopped too, and looked up at him.

“Well, I don’t know what you’re looking at me for,” he said. “I’m the one waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me to do what?” I asked. “Develop telepathy?”

He grinned, and guided his horse in a quick little circle around me. “Come on, I saw you eyeing that mare. You had a horse phase as a little girl, admit it.”

“It was hardly a phase—” I started.

“There’s no shame in it. I understand most girls have a horse phase, or a wolf phase. Sometimes a dragon phase, is that true?”

“You know what’s not hot?” I shot back in my best monotone. “How well you know the psyches of little girls.”

He smirked. “Come on, Ally! Saddle up. You don’t know what you’re missing!”

“I do, actually,” I said, “but some of us have responsibilities—”

“I’ll show you the ropes,” he offered. “Take it nice and easy on you, I promise.”

Did he just…

He did just.

Oh hell no.

“Excuse me?” And with a raised eyebrow I walked into the stables and to the stall of that gorgeous mare, opened the door, and mounted her in a single smooth motion.

In fairness to Hunter, he was outside and didn’t see that, so it wasn’t entirely condescending when he started to try explaining how to control the animal: “Now, you want to imagine that your body and the horse’s are one—”

On the other hand, I’d never been much for lectures on subject matter I already knew, even from guys so hot they could make the sun explode.

So I cut the matter to the chase by running a ring around him and jumping three fences in a row.

You know, beginner stuff.

Then my mare and I galloped away, leaving Hunter in the dust, before wheeling to a stop atop the hill. I laughed out loud in exhilaration, the wind rifling wildly through my hair, the air muggy and hot and scented with ripe earth and pine needles and promise.

And why shouldn’t I be exhilarated? If Hunter knew anything about my mom, he should have realized that she would have insisted on a proper young lady having knowledge of the equine arts, a.k.a. horseback-riding lessons since I was three.

Hunter was currently at the bottom of the hill, gape-mouthed.

“What’s the matter, Richie Rich?” I called back. “Can’t keep up?”

He grinned a grin of pure joy, and spurred his horse after me.