Shadowed Heart (23 page)

He leaned back against the coats, so that her weight settled more onto him as he petted her. The weight of her head on his heart made that stupid, paranoid organ slowly calm down and beat correctly, with some kind of sane rhythm. His eyes closed, and he concentrated on the textures under his fingers as he drew them over her shoulder, down her arm, all the way down to her slender wrist. He circled it, tracing the bones.

“There’s a story,” he said. “About a man who let a woman go, when she wanted to go so desperately. And she didn’t come back, and she didn’t come back…and he died.”

“Beauty and the Beast?” she asked doubtfully, pushing herself up onto an elbow to look down at him. Her elbow applied pressure at just the wrong point on his chest, but he didn’t tell her it hurt. He liked knowing he could handle any kind of pain as long as she was there.

“That’s the one.”

“He didn’t die. She came back.”

“Oh.” He’d read all the fairy stories to himself, as research for desserts. Because, as he told Patrick when they were teenagers, and as his own chef Gabriel Delange had once told him,
If we want to make people’s dreams, we have to know what those are.
But somehow he always saw that Beast dying of despair. “Not until he’d given up on her and nearly died of loss. Not until after she’d betrayed him.”

“Maybe he didn’t trust her enough, or himself,” Summer said quietly and firmly, holding his eyes. “I mean, in the story, she only went to see her family and stayed a couple of days longer than she originally planned. That’s kind of a lot to die over, don’t you think? Maybe he was acting kind of nuts.”

His mouth twisted. “I’m not sure I’m entirely sane, Summer.”

She touched his twisted lips, tracing over them until they softened again. God, that felt so good. He held still for it, soaking up every bit of sensation from her fingertips into him. “You could go with me,” she said softly. “You’re not actually the Beast or the Lord of Hell, Luc, who can’t step free into the sunlit world. But it’s true that I assumed you couldn’t get away.”

He couldn’t. But, God, he’d far rather trust his restaurant to the hands of an inexperienced
second
and a chef de cuisine who wanted to turn it into a soup kitchen than trust her to go back to a place she was happy and still return to him.

And,
merde
, but was that ever a sad reflection on his ability to handle a relationship. “I should trust you, I know,” he said.

“You should,” she agreed. “But I guess you don’t know how yet. Trust therapy still in order.”

The tense muscles in his face eased at her quiet tone. That was Summer. She denigrated every single negative feeling she had, but she accepted even his most inappropriate, craziest ones as just the way he was.
You’re all right. I love you just the way you are.
But she never quite believed he could do the same.

“You’re like one of your brand-new interns,” she said. “You have to practice at this relationship stuff.”

His heart lightened. That was…oddly apt. Envisioning himself as a clumsy intern in love made him want to laugh. He’d
been
a clumsy beginner in pastry once, after all. He’d gotten where he was today, from that clumsy beginning.

She held up her pinched thumb and forefinger. “Maybe next year, or the year after, your trust muscles will have grown bigger.” Judging by the three-centimeter gap to which she opened thumb and forefinger, she wasn’t expecting any huge trust-on-steroids growth there.

He caught her hand and pulled it back to his lips to kiss it. “You don’t mind my baby steps?”

“Luc.” She sighed. But patiently. A sigh filled with patience. “You know, I really, really love you.”

That made the biggest smile break out on his face. He couldn’t help it. He knew it probably looked ridiculous—he wasn’t, by nature, someone full of smiles—and yet sometimes she made every cell in his body glow.

“Besides, I kind of like you being clumsy at it. I mean, sometimes it hurts, but it also means it’s all new to you, and important enough for you to try with all your heart.”

Well…yes. He laid his hand over her heart. That fragile, stubborn heart that had let itself get broken over and over in her search for love, until she found him. “You realize you’re kind of an intern at all this, too?”

“Oh, God, yes.” She dropped her head to his chest. “We
really
rushed into things, didn’t we?”

He petted her head and twined a lock of her hair around his fingers to give her a little tug so she would let him see her face again. “But we’ll manage,” he told her firmly.

It seemed to be the right thing to say. Her eyes lit, and a real smile blazed out. “Yes,” she agreed, equally firmly. And then: “But you have to help me shop for baby things.”

“I’ll take time off.” And pray no critics came. Or maybe think about what Nico had said, about priorities.

“And, Luc—if you can’t come to Manunui with me and I go by myself, and after two days of travel to get there I find out someone is getting married the next weekend and they would love it so much if I stayed on a couple of days extra to be part of it—you have to
tough it up
, Luc. Relax. Trust me. You can’t die of despair.”

“Oh, God.” He closed his eyes. Imagining her not showing up when he expected, and not showing up, and… “Will you at least
call
?”

“Sometimes I
can’t,
Luc.” She sat up astride him. “They need another satellite in that region. And my father is not exactly in any hurry to fulfill that promise to invest in one.”

He dragged a hand over his face rather than let her see the truth of him again:
I really don’t know if I can handle that.

Except…the whole point of this conversation was to let her see the truth of him. To let her understand what a mess he was. “I’ll go with you.”

“I’d like it better if you went with me, anyway,” she said softly. “I love it with you on the island. But I’m not trying to threaten you into it.”

“I know.” He pressed his hand against her belly again. “Summer—” This was an even scarier topic than her island. He almost couldn’t broach it. But he had
to. “Why are you so worried about miscarriages?” His voice was barely over a whisper. “Is there a reason?”

Her face shuttered. She tried to cover it with one of her careless, absent smiles, but she couldn’t, quite. “Just something my mother said. And other people say. Almost like they want it to happen.”

Luc stared at her. “Well,
fuck them
,” he said, filled with rage.

She tried a firm nod, mouthing
fuck them
silently.

His hand tightened on her belly. “
I want to talk about baby names
. This is
our
family, and we’re going to be happy.”

When her eyes held his, he knew that here was one of the things she needed from him, that he hadn’t been giving her: solidarity, his strength, his ability to tell the world to go to hell. A real smile started to relax her mouth, and she wormed her hand around to find his and close firmly around it. “Lucie?” she suggested. “If it’s a girl.”

That made him so damn happy, just the thought of a little Lucie. Or Lucienne? “Summer doesn’t work in French,” he said, reaching up to play with her sunshine hair again. Plus, his babies were all bound to have dark hair and dark eyes. Yes, his genes would swamp those blue eyes and blondness she had, but maybe they would get her fine bones. “Maybe…Océane?”

Her face brightened. “I love that name.”

“I guess we shouldn’t rush quite so much into the next one, but you know I would really love to have both a Lucie and
an Océane.”

She pressed one hand to her stomach and held up the other in a warding gesture. “Let’s get through this one first.”

“Did you try the peanut butter?”

“Uh—”

“What about pretzels? Dom found pretzels suggested on a website.”

“
Dom
did?”

“We were brainstorming.” Luc shrugged.

She stared at him. “Is that what you guys were talking about the whole time? Food?”

“What else would we talk about?” he asked blankly.

So that’s how she ended up laughing. And he ended up kissing her to get her to stop laughing at him. And then, and then…God, it felt so good to make love to her while she was laughing, to ease that silky top off, and that bra, and stroke her until the sparkle in her eyes got lost in hazy pleasure.

I can do this part,
he thought, as he watched her, as he breathed in the scent of her arousal and his own surged through him.
I think I have this part down.

It felt so damn good afterward to pull her in close to him, holding her as he fell asleep. As if he were a child pressing his face into a teddy-bear after a nightmare, breathing in a sweet, familiar scent and texture, all his worries just eased away. The last thing he remembered was her hand linking with his and the way all the tension seemed to leave her body in a soft sigh as she nestled between him and her pillow, falling asleep.

“Patrice,” a sandy voice said. Luc closed his hand around the little flower bracelet and looked around. “An excellent name for a baby. Or perhaps Patricia?”

It was five in the morning, but Luc had been fostered by a baker-pastry chef, and he had long since lost the ability to sleep in. Patrick pretended to be better at lazing around, but given that he was up at this hour of the morning even after a late night drinking, the façade was pretty see-through.

“Up early looking for waves?” Luc asked dryly.

Patrick peered at the flat pre-dawn sea below and gave a huge, aggravated sigh. “Damn Mediterranean. You couldn’t have moved to Hawaii?”

“We talked about it.”

“Yeah?” A quick glance. “Sarah and I, too.”

Really. “But we thought the south of France was a good compromise.” Sunshine, and enough of a clientele where he could still be one of the top chefs in the world.

“It’s not too shabby,” Patrick admitted. “Nice change from Paris.”

Yeah, except he’d lost his
second
that way. “How’s the engineering going?”

“Boring.”

Luc blinked.

“There’s no
speed
to it, the textures are all metal and computers and wire, there’s no”—Patrick shoved his hands through his hair suddenly and flung them out—“
flavor.
”

Luc tightened his hand around the little bracelet and turned around.

“And
putain
, but it’s slow.
Merde
, Luc. You have to sit still.”

Luc took a careful moment before he spoke at all. It wasn’t his place to hold Patrick back, clip his wings, discourage him from going for any dream he wanted to. He hadn’t half-raised that kid to trap him in a cage. It wasn’t in his nature to
ask for help
either, damn it. To expose the fact that he
needed
someone. But… “Well, if you get sick of it,” he said very casually, “just let me know.”

Another little silence. Luc carefully didn’t look at Patrick at all, just gazed out at the dark Mediterranean. The stars were fading, a hint of color peeking over the horizon.

“Sarah doesn’t want to work in a three-star kitchen,” Patrick said.

“Really?” Luc said, utterly astonished. “But—she’s
good
. She was born to work in a three-star kitchen.”

Patrick smiled a little, in pleasure at the compliment to his fiancée. “You know, you could tell her that to her face once in a while, you bastard.”

“I let her work in my kitchens!” Luc said incredulously. Hadn’t they been through this once before? “How much clearer a compliment does she need?”

Patrick was starting to grin. “Women. Sometimes you just have to spell it out for them.”

Oh, yes. Over and over and over.

But he kind of needed it spelled out for him, too.

“She could work for me here, while you do some of your engineering studies in the area, too,” Luc said, very, very casually. “I mean—” He shrugged. “If you two want that option. She does need more training.”

This smile was growing deeper and deeper on Patrick’s face, all while Patrick wouldn’t look at him, gazing downward. “Yeah? Is that an option for us?”

Luc shrugged. “Or…I don’t know…I was thinking I might need to spend less time in the restaurant with fatherhood coming up. Might want to take on a partner.” This weird thing was happening to Luc’s cheeks. They felt…
hot.
Was he getting a fever? He touched them surreptitiously.

Patrick’s eyebrows went up. “Not a
second
?”

“I’ve got another
second
these days.” Luc sighed. “He needs a lot of work.”

Patrick slipped his hands in his pockets and gazed at the Mediterranean oh-so-casually. “I like that chef de cuisine you found. Seems as if a man could have fun working with him.”

Fun. Luc started to smile before he could stop it. See, that was what was missing from the kitchen now—Patrick’s sense of fun.

Luc tightened his hand around the bracelet until its little jewels cut into his palm. Maybe he had learned the wrong lesson, a long time ago. Maybe everyone he loved
didn’t
have to leave him. Maybe it didn’t all have to melt, if someone didn’t eat it fast enough.

“Be kind of fun to do a restaurant with two chefs. They could alternate menus and weeks, something like that. Two different takes around the season’s fruits. And that way they could both have some kind of work-life balance. Or one of them could, you know, go to school part-time or something.” Luc cleared his throat. “Personally I think I need to take a little bit more time off for the foreseeable future. Until my kids are all grown up, by which time I’ll be…” His imagination failed him.

“Fifty,” Patrick supplied. “At least.”

Fifty.

Actually, good God, probably more like sixty, if he wanted several.

Basically, the second thirty years of his life.

“Wow,” he said softly. “My life might be really, really different than what I thought it would be like, just last year.”

“Congratulations,” Patrick said, amused. And serious.

“Yeah,” Luc said, more softly still. Wondering. As if he’d just blown gold powder over some dessert, making it all sparkly. He was afraid he would breathe too hard and screw it all up. So he held his breath and tried not to say anything at all, but then said, rough and tight: “It’s just…she’s going to need a godfather.”