Shadowed Heart (21 page)

“Maybe it’s that Corey
merde
their mother was tortured with. That’s got to be it,” Sylvain said. “Probably she would have loved
good
chocolate.”

“‘Feed her before she gets out of bed’,” Dom read, ignoring Sylvain. “Have you tried that?”

“Have you tried asking her what she wants?” Patrick asked, with the air of a man suggesting a radical new medical approach to curing cancer. Luc slanted him a glance.

Patrick widened his eyes. “What? I hear there are men who talk to their wives about what they want. It’s not a widespread practice or anything yet, don’t worry, but it might have potential.”

God, he had missed the regular urge to throw something at Patrick’s head. All those years in the kitchen, and he’d restrained himself every time. So many interesting foods around to dump on a guy’s head, too.

“
Pickles
,” Luc said carefully in English, since the damn things she liked had no resemblance at all to any
cornichons
he knew of. He couldn’t say a single full sentence in English—except
I love you,
which he’d been fortunate enough to be exposed to a lot recently—but he’d picked up a fair amount of food vocabulary in the past fifteen years in top kitchens. “That’s what she said she wanted. And
peanut butter. Peaches. Popsicles.
”

“Wow.” Patrick put a hand over his heart. “That accent. Say something else?” He fanned himself.

Luc sighed heavily.

Patrick grinned.

The corners of Luc’s lips kicked up, and all that anxiety that had weighed on his heart felt so damn
light.

“So we’ve discovered she likes alliteration,” Patrick said with great thoughtfulness. “What other things start with P in English?” He made an elaborate show of searching on his phone. “Oh, look, peas. And pretzels. There you go, Luc. Have you tried that?”

“Pretzels is on this list,” Dom said, from his laptop. He turned it toward them. “Really.”

“It’s practically poetry,” Patrick said, awed. “How about potatoes?”

Luc almost laughed.

Patrick’s grin deepened. “If Sylvain and Gabe and I get any drunker, you won’t have an inhibition left. Ignore Dom brooding over there in the corner. We’ll drug his water.” He put up a hand for an exaggerated stage-whisper to Dom. “
It’s in the ice cubes
.”

Dom flicked a melting fragment of ice at him.

“
Ice!
” Patrick exclaimed, sucking the fragment into his mouth. “That’s on the lists! You’re a genius! And here I thought you were nothing more than brute muscle.”

Dom sighed so heavily that it made Luc’s sigh seem a shallow breath. Luc discovered a grin on his face and couldn’t even figure out how it had gotten there.

He looked up at movement in the doorway. Summer, in yoga pants and a silky top, ready for bed except for the bra she had kept on in honor of their guests. “Are you guys still up?” Her gaze rested on Luc.

He grinned at her from the floor, feeling so relaxed he was almost foolish with it.
Hey, we’re all right, did you know that? Our worries are silly, not serious.

Summer’s expression softened, bemused. She tilted her head, blue gaze tracing over him, curious and warm.

He blew her a tiny kiss.

“Are you drunk?” she asked curiously.

“Oh, you know, five sips,” Patrick said. “About the same amount he had that night he met you.”

“You only had five sips the night you met me?” Summer asked. “You always told me you’d been drinking champagne!”

“Hmm. Such a strange sensitivity to alcohol, don’t you think?” Patrick rolled his eyes to heaven. “Almost as if that’s nothing to do with what’s going on at all.”

Summer took a step into the room and then hesitated and stepped back to the door. “I won’t interrupt your—your guy thing.”

Luc patted the floor beside him.

“Hell, no,” Patrick said. “If you get to have Summer in here, I get to have Sarah. No fair.”

“You’re the one who told me to ask her what she wants,” Luc pointed out to him.

Patrick took another swallow of his wine. “That conversation was intended for your more private moments,” he said loftily.

A black head appeared behind Summer and then slipped past her in the doorway. Patrick grinned in delight and lifted an arm so that Sarah could more comfortably tuck herself up within it when she sat beside him. How they had all ended up on the floor when they had perfectly good furniture, Luc wasn’t entirely sure.

The other women followed, laughing, Cade and Jaime and Jolie maybe just the tiniest bit over-relaxed from liquor. Dom pulled Jaime down to sit between his knees with her back against his chest, and Cade took the corner of the couch behind Sylvain, folding her legs up and rubbing his head when he rested it back against her calves.

Nico shifted, this slightest angling of his body away from all that couple-happiness in the room. His relaxed demeanor closed just a little, but that was the only sign he gave that he was the odd man out—the one person there who didn’t have someone to curl up with him.

Well, and Luc.

Luc patted the floor again, his heart starting to tighten as it braced for rejection. His wife was the only one still standing in the doorway.

“We’ve got beds for everyone if anyone is getting tired,” Summer said. “That’s what I came to tell you.”

“The night’s young,” Luc said with a wave of his hand. Well, for chefs it was young. Barely midnight.

Sylvain smiled in this slight way, amusement packed with understanding. “We’re staying tomorrow, too, you know.”
You don’t have to get all the friendship and support you can out of us tonight.

“Sarah and I were just planning to move in,” Patrick said. “I mean, I only have this big a glimpse of Notre-Dame from my apartment.” He held up thumb and forefinger. “And you guys have the whole Mediterranean. Plus, I hear you’re going to need an
au pair
soon to help take care of that baby.”

The tiniest stiffening on Summer’s part. Luc’s focus on her sharpened.

“
And
I freeze fantastic ice cubes,” Patrick said, and Luc knew he’d caught that stiffening, too, and was easing it away. “Which I hear is all you’re eating these days.
Way
better ice cubes than this guy. His are all—dense. He uses inferior water.”

Summer laughed, a surprised, delighted sound, and Luc relaxed again. Damn, it was good to have Patrick around. He didn’t even feel jealous of the laughter, just…happy. Happy that Summer was genuinely smiling.

Patrick folded an arm behind his head. “Now if
Sarah
were pregnant, I’d have to make all her ice cubes in the form of…hearts.” He turned his head to gaze down at his girlfriend a moment, his smile sinking inward, to secrets, as his hand rubbed her shoulder. “Yeah. But you
know
how bad Luc is at putting his heart out there through food.”

Summer actually giggled, her hand covering her mouth, her eyes sparkling at Luc. All the love in those eyes, all softened and freed by humor.

Oh.

Oh…we’re going to be all right.

Thank you, Patrick. For getting my head back on straight.

“I suppose you’d make the pickles heart-shaped, too?” Luc asked dryly, but he couldn’t pull his gaze away from Summer.

“No, I never mess with a good phallic shape,” Patrick said, with an airy and outrageous wave of his hand. He sent Summer a limpidly innocent look. “Do you?” He lifted Sarah’s hand to his and kissed it, automatically reassuring her that his teasing of another woman had no serious undertones.

Summer gave another little gulp of a giggle and then just burst out laughing, her eyes dancing even as she tried to make them wide and innocent, shaking her head as if she had no idea even what a phallic shape was.

“I’m going to have to hit you again,” Luc mentioned to Patrick.

“And I don’t even work for you anymore this time.” Patrick sighed despairingly. “What a waste of a chance for a lawsuit.”

Summer slipped into the room and curled up against Luc, laughing more and more as Patrick expanded into the laughter with great enjoyment, growing more and more outrageous with each success. Luc covered her hand, resting on his abdomen, and played with it gently while her laughter grew first more relaxed, then softer and softer. It must have been an hour later when he looked down and discovered she was fast asleep.

Patrick slouched back against the base of the chair, with Sarah asleep against his own shoulder, and toasted his wine glass to—apparently himself. Patrick drank a long swallow of his wine with an expression of smug satisfaction. “You’re an idiot,” he told Luc. “Have I mentioned it to you lately?”

Damn
but he’d missed Patrick. “You’re not supposed to call your chef an idiot, you know.”

Patrick shook his head, but didn’t correct the title of chef to their current relationship. “Go take your wife to bed, idiot.”

God, that felt good, the weight of his wife against his arms and chest, the thought of that little baby, right there in her belly, still so tiny it didn’t add anything to her weight at all. It felt as if he could take care of them. It felt as if they were all his.

It felt strong, and it felt awkward, too, this new, fresh caution about all the things that he might do or be wrong. Was the scent of him, or the motion, stirring up nausea? Odd and disturbing, how much the changes inside her could change their relationship, when he hadn’t changed at all—the scent of her still made him feel as if he had come home.

Until he found her, or she found him, the kitchen had been the only home he had, his apartment no more than a place to eat potato chips, watch TV until the adrenaline released him, and sleep.

Now he had her, for his home. But…

“It’s my security,” he whispered to her. “The restaurant. When I’m worried, it’s where I know I can get everything right.”

“Mmm?” A sleepy, questioning noise from Summer as he lowered her onto the mattress. He folded the comforter over her and knelt by the side of the bed. Maybe he knelt because he still didn’t feel he had the right to get back in that bed with her, or maybe it was because it put his face so much nearer her belly. She patted sleepily with her hand, her eyes still closed, trying to pat him, ending up patting his head. “‘Sokay,” she mumbled. “I know.”

Of course she forgave him.

Of course she did.

She loves me.

He curved his hand over her belly. It was warm and flat, just her ordinary belly, and yet life beat out of it suddenly into his palm like a pulsing sun.
God, mine? Mine. Some of me, right there. Growing.

“Thanks for inviting everyone,” she murmured and snuggled her head into the pillow. He sat on the edge of the bed, watching his hand on her belly, watching her face as she fell completely back asleep.

After a long time, he went to their closet. The walk-in was much bigger than any closet he’d ever had outside restaurant pantries, and in it, he could move down this short, lovely alley between his clothes and Summer’s. His fingers brushed over her dresses, releasing soft hints of her scent into the air, soft memories of her body being touched by him through those clothes.

He’d changed lodgings several times since he first started collecting treasures, but he always tucked this box into the same place: the deepest corner of the closet, the last thing in the house anyone might find, if they wanted to steal it.

A small, worn cardboard box that he had pulled out of the trash just after he was first fostered, its flaps all bent from being opened and tucked into each other again and again, its corners battered. In clumsy marker, it said “Luc”. Then, a little older and neater above it, “Luc Leroi.” “Mine,” he had written in another spot, bolding it, shaping the letters into a stamp. Around the words were drawn layers of things: monsters and sharks and superheroes in different colored markers and with different levels of skill, whatever he believed in, at that particular age, whatever he placed his hopes in, to protect that box.

He opened it slowly. Every time he opened that old carton his heart tightened with panic, until that sudden, blissful release when he saw that his little collection was all still there. A teddy-bear a child had forgotten in a park and he had kept for his, an old Hot Wheels car he’d found under a Métro seat. A shell he’d found and used at school once to pretend he’d been to the beach.

And…a little girl’s bracelet. He drew it out as carefully as if the jewels and gold could shatter like sugar. He used to assume the gold was fake, the jewels that formed the flowers only crystal. Now he knew better. He knew that his father could have sold it for enough to feed them for weeks, maybe months.

Luc had gone hungry often back then. But he was glad he had never shown it to his father, glad neither of them had realized that he could have traded this for a hundred of those éclairs that he had always dreamed about in the shop windows.

“Luc?” Summer asked very softly, from the closet door.

He tried to smile at her, but he couldn’t quite. His heart was too full.

She twisted the knob for the closet lighting just enough to provide a gentle dimness and came to kneel in front of him. “Hey,” she said, and touched his cheek. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” But his eyes stung, and his throat felt too tight.

So she didn’t believe him, because she
loved
him, she cared about him, and her hand stroked his cheek as her gaze went over what was in his lap and in his hand. He’d never shown the box to her, his meager treasures too vulnerable to share with his heiress wife. “What’s this?” She touched his wrist very gently but didn’t quite touch the bracelet in it. As if she knew it might be too precious for him to share even with her.

“You don’t recognize it?”

She shook her head, puzzled. But she touched it now, just delicately, then lifted it a little in her fingers, studying it.

Of course she wouldn’t. She would have been five or six, as he had been nine or ten. The bracelet would have been replaced, would have blurred with all the other jewels she would have had. “You gave it one day to a boy you met in a park. A dark-haired boy. Remember?”