Shadowed Heart (6 page)

Decades.

A lifetime, at the rate he himself was going.

A vision of Summer’s face, the patience and warmth as she sat there with those kids.

He grabbed the image and fed it to the insane him he was keeping locked in a padded cell.
She’s maternal, you fucked-up idiot. She
loves
kids. She would never, ever run out on her baby.

What do you know?
Insane Him asked.
Maybe your mother was maternal, too. Before she had you. And then you were so damned difficult, you ruined that for her.

He slammed the cell door back on the bastard.

“Listen, is Cade there? I have an American question.” Maybe he should have called Jaime. She and Dom had been together for over a year now, and Dom was starting to act mildly sane about her. It gave a man hope for his own case.

Sylvain laughed. “All right, but you only get one minute. I’m timing you!”

“Ignore him,” Cade said as she came on the phone. “It’s the only thing to do. What do you need?”

“Pickles,” Luc said.

A tiny silence on the other end of the connection. Possibly a choked sound. “Pickles?”

“Whatever kind of American pickles that you and Jaime and Summer would have been eating as kids, I assume. Can’t you eat normal pickles like the rest of us?”

More amusement on the other end. “Well, one person’s idea of normal, Luc, is another person’s crazy.”

When they were talking about food, he was pretty sure the French got to decide what was good and what was crazy. For God’s sake, her country had invented peanut butter! And then put it with chocolate! But he needed a favor, so he resisted rubbing it in. She got touchy about those ghastly Corey products sometimes. “Whatever you consider normal pickles. I think that’s what I need.” And, realizing that required some explanation: “Summer’s pregnant.”

At the startled gasp and then the squeal of excitement, he suddenly realized he should have let Summer break that news. “No way!” Cade was exclaiming. “Is she really? That was fast! You guys just got married! Oh, man, wait until I tell Jamie! When’s it due? Is it a boy or a girl? Do you need a—”

Luc held the phone away from his ear and stared at it. Cade knew how to squeal? Cade Corey? Damn, he really should have let Summer be the one to receive that first burst of delighted enthusiasm from her cousin. Shit, he just hadn’t realized. The news had hit
him
with terror. “I need pickles,” he said firmly. “American pickles. With dill.”

“There’s an American store here in Paris,” Cade said. “Can I overnight them or do you want a courier to bring them down today?”

Sometimes he just loved knowing so many billionaires. “Today,” he said. Made for kind of expensive pickles, but he’d never had a particularly good grasp of money anyway, and ever since he’d married Summer, the excessive amounts floating around all these Coreys had completely lost him. Whatever it cost, he was pretty sure it wouldn’t break anyone’s bank account.

When Summer got her pickles, she
devoured
them. He nibbled one, puzzled, watching the pleasure on her face, trying to imagine what was going on in her mouth, that the crunchy burst of acid would feel so good to it. Then she threw her arms around him and kissed him to say thank you, and he tasted the vinegar on her lips and almost, for a second, knew.

Summer was still smiling a little bit, a jar of pickles in one hand and a plastic box of lime ice pops under one arm, when she let herself into their house up on one of those rugged, Mediterranean cliffs, where lavender and stone walls framed the garden and terrace from which she could look out over the sea. The silence of the house echoed back at her, and her smile faded before she could stop it.

She didn’t want it to. She clutched at her jar of pickles and said,
No. We’re fine.
But her smile defied her and wouldn’t come back out.
No one’s here to see. I don’t have to come out if I don’t want to.

You’re all alone.

She set the jar of pickles down slowly on the kitchen counter, and the little noise it made clicked all the way through the silent house. It made her skin prickle, how completely no other sound responded to it. She set down her purse, in as bustling a way as she could, turning on music. Oh, was that the right music for the baby? Was she supposed to be listening to classical music or something? She put the lime ice pops in the freezer and went online to download Beethoven’s Ninth.

Then she went out on the terrace and gazed down at the twilit sea, brushing her hand back and forth across the lavender in the nearest pot to release the scent. Solitude felt more normal on the terrace than inside. Thoughtful, quiet. A choice.

Because it
was
a choice. Not an easy choice, not a walk-in-the-park choice, but a definite choice she had made. To leave her island, for Luc. To face solitude at first. To support him, while he worked like a dog to build a new restaurant, a new reputation here, and to believe in him, that he would not have to work that hard and leave her this alone forever.

To draw on all the strength and sense of self she had built in those islands to help her get through the first, toughest part until she could build strength and value here, too.

She covered her belly with her hand.
So quit whining, Summer. Grow up. Quit needing so much attention. Don’t be so spoiled.

A little hiccup of hurt in her heart at the word.

She repeated it to herself, harshly, like her dad:
Spoiled.

Right.

She bent her head, stroking her belly.
I want to spoil you. But I’m not supposed to. Not supposed to ruin you that way. I want you to turn out—perfect. So everyone will love you.

A ripple of profound shock, her head jerking up. That last part had sounded like her mother.

No. No, no, no. I’m not doing that to my baby. Not teaching her how to be perfect as if that’s the only way she can hope to earn love.

Oh, hell, how am I supposed to get this right?

***

A light was glowing on the terrace outside their bedroom when Luc got home, the doors between bedroom and terrace wide open so that the indoor and outdoor spaces blurred. Lavender scented the space, from the pots tucked against the walls, and stone, and maybe a distant hint of the sea. Summer sat at the tall table there, her laptop open.

“You’re still up?” Luc came behind her to put a hand on her nape, rubbing her silky hair as he bent to kiss her. She closed the laptop right away, though. Had that been a glimpse of a coconut palm on that web page? His stomach knotted. “Shouldn’t you be getting your rest?” Pregnant women got tired, right? He himself only rested when Summer dragged him down into a hammock, so it was hard to wrap his mind around the idea of rest as an actual need. He had made it to the age of thirty without ever having a moment’s true rest, so how could it be a need? No, it was this special gift, this privilege, that Summer gave him.

“You’re up late, too,” she said, a tiny, rough grain of sand in the silk of her. She must be sleepy. He smiled, thinking about ways he could make her sleepier—all soft and heavy and curling up satisfied—and gave her nape another pet before he started to undress.

“Bloom,” he explained as he pulled off his shirt. Discovering those should-have-been gorgeous chocolate domes covered with the pale, splotchy shades of chocolate improperly tempered, a discovery he’d made half an hour before the service started, still made him want to gnash his teeth. “That’s why I’m late. On all the chocolate domes. It’s our most popular dessert, Summer, and…every single one. I swear to God you have to watch this team
every single second.
Who doesn’t know how to temper chocolate?”

“Me.” A glimmer of a smile, just this elusive shimmer of it over his skin. God, he missed her. He knew it was bad of him to try to dominate all her time and attention that way, but he loved when she came to hang out all evening in the restaurant, helping where she could, tucking herself into a corner when things got so crazy she was in the way. It made his whole evening just kind of—
sing.

And
God
, but she was good at handling customers. Whenever she stood in for the maître d’, people acted as if they’d been suddenly invited into the private home of a princess and allowed to dine there, welcomed with that elusive friendliness of hers that seemed to say:
This is a rare and special grace for you, to dine here with us this evening. Isn’t it wonderful to be so lucky? What special people you must be.

He was pretty sure she even believed that about him, that anyone who tasted his food was blessed by the gods.

“I’ll teach you.” Oh, yeah, what a delicious idea. Him standing behind Summer, hand around her wrist, guiding her as they lifted and spread melted chocolate over marble. As she dipped a knuckle in it to learn when the temperature was right…as she sucked it off…or offered it to him. “Whenever you want.”

A tiny flicker of a glance that confused him, as if she didn’t believe him, when he was already being sucked right into that fantasy so deeply that his mouth watered from it and it was all he could do not to bend over her right now and suck on far more of her than just a knuckle
.
He could start with a knuckle.

“You’ve been working late a lot,” she murmured to her laptop, open again now that he was at an angle where he could no longer see it.

He paused with his hands at the waist of his pants and searched her face, but he could only see that exquisite, delicate profile, as she focused on what she was typing. “It’s just getting everything started. We’ve only been running two months.” He hesitated, feeling ridiculous and awkward, all things he had trained himself long ago not to feel and definitely not to show. But he could show them to Summer, surely. “I want to have a star for the baby,” he admitted, trying not to flush. He shrugged his shoulders to make them more comfortable. But he could expose this to Summer. She was the only person in the world to whom he could expose his heart in words, and not just food. “I want her daddy to have a star.” The heat grew in his cheeks.

She looked up at that, and her expression softened. The warmth of it reached out to him, curling tendrils around his bare, tired body. Making it less tired. Making him want to hurry up with that shower so he could come back over to her. “You’ve had three already,” she said gently. “Luc—she won’t care about a star.”

Oh, God, he hoped Summer was wrong about that. Because that was what he was
good
at, getting stars. He didn’t have anything else he was sure he could get right. “She’ll be proud when she’s older,” he tried, more tentative than he liked. She would, wouldn’t she?

“Maybe,” Summer said. “But an adult child’s pride in her father is a small compensation for feeling loved by him when she’s young.”

Oh. And Summer would know, wouldn’t she? He flexed his fingers into his palms and ran through all the things he used to tell himself, when he was glaring at his father-in-law, that he
would do better as a father. Play with his little girl on the monkey bars, let her sit in his lap whenever she wanted, sit her on the counter while he worked so he could make her beautiful, special things just for her. He could still do all those things. He could.

And they might even work, too. They couldn’t be worse than the way his and Summer’s parents had raised—or abandoned raising—them. Right?

Shit, how did he get this parenting thing perfect before they had the actual baby? What was he supposed to practice on?

“It will be better by the time she—or he—is born,” Luc promised. “The restaurant will be running more smoothly, and I’ll be more sure I can count on Antoine and the staff when I’m not there.”

She nodded understandingly and looked back at her computer. “Don’t worry, I’m used to it,” she murmured to her screen. “All my boyfriends were the same way.”

He stopped dead in the bathroom door, the needle sliding delicate and silver right through his ribs and lodging there. She hadn’t needled him that way in a long time. He’d forgotten how good she was at it. Smiling and sweet and silky, so that you kept wondering if maybe you’d stabbed
yourself
with the needle or something, since it couldn’t possibly have come from her.

He walked back across the room to her, a thin sliver of steel seeming to shift in his rib muscles with every stride. “I’m not one of your boyfriends, Summer.” He leaned across the table, planting his forearms on either side of her computer, dominating her space. “I’m your husband.”

Something flashed in her eyes, this bitten-back thing too ugly to say, that tightened his stomach into a knot as he stared down at her.
Don’t say that, Summer. Whatever you almost said about me being your husband, don’t say it.

Oh, God, what was she going to say?

“I
thought
I had one somewhere,” she murmured instead to her computer, tapping it thoughtfully.

He leaned in closer and snatched a kiss—just stole it, fierce and hard and not letting her resist it. She pulled back and looked at him. And then she shook her head a little and leaned back toward him. He tried to kiss her hard again, just take her over,
I own you, you’re
my
wife, you’re
mine, and she shook her head again, twisting her mouth free and then bringing it back, softer. Gentling him. Seeking what
she
wanted.

Oh. As the softness and warmth caressed through his own possessive anger, the tension in him unwound. He could do this, too. He shifted around the table, pulling her into his arms. Tension coiled back up again at the feel of her body, but such a healthier tension, whole and hungry instead of jagged and starved. “I should take a shower,” he murmured.

She licked the hollow of his throat. “You taste like salt,” she whispered. “And you smell like—mmm, lime?”

He petted her back, and she snuggled more deeply into him, tightening all the muscles in his body while her own muscles softened. Oh, that was a perfect fit, his growing hardness, her growing softness. “Since when have you liked lime so much?”

“Since it smells like you,” she said, and bit him. Arousal jolted through him at the tiny, hungry pressure of her teeth against his collarbone. He lifted her up into him, pulling her thighs around his hips.