Shadowed Heart (3 page)

“I—I didn’t know that.” She’d thought it was a done deal. She was pregnant. They were going to have a baby. She needed to find some YouTube videos that would teach her how to change a diaper.

“I had one before you.” Summer blinked at this news. “Just don’t count on anything too much, all right, honey? And I won’t tell your father yet. Oh, he’s coming. Listen, I love you, sweetheart. Let me know once you’re sure!”

I was sure
, Summer thought as the lights on her phone faded at the ended call.
Just for a minute there, in the doctor’s office, before I tried to tell anyone, I was so damn sure.

“Everything all right?” Antoine asked Luc about ten minutes after the sous-chef got in that morning.

Luc glanced up from his work barely long enough to nod at his
second
. He’d done his best to find a replacement for his long-term sous-chef Patrick when he opened LEROI in the south of France. Trim, compact, brown-haired Antoine was a good guy, and did good work, was a careful mentor to their hires, did really all the things an excellent sous-chef should do. And right now, all the sudden, Luc viciously hated him.

For not being Patrick. His
real
right-hand man, who had worked beside him for twelve years, whom Luc had practically raised from the age of fifteen, who had been, in so many ways that had nothing to do with the tiny overlap of their foster home experience, his damn
brother.
He needed Patrick. The flippancy, the humor, the way Patrick would be needling him right now until he got Luc to laugh or crack or even let slip, discreetly, this tiny venting of what was actually wrong.
Everything bright and beautiful always leaves me, damn it
. Luc slammed the mass of chocolate against the counter, breaking it inside its bag.

“It’s fine,” he said briefly. And then: “Why?” Begging his
second
with that one word to be Patrick, to not let it drop, to poke and prod with wicked humor until Luc could let what was wrong escape out of him. Until he could understand that wrongness. Master it.

“Well.” Antoine eyed the sketches, new molds, and chocolate around his chef. “You must have gotten in here at 5:30 in the morning.”

Yes. Slipping out of bed in the dark. Summer had murmured, her hand catching at him, but it was better this way. What if pregnancy changed her rhythms and for once in her life, she got out of bed first in the morning and left
him
?

And he turned into a bawling mess right there, dropping to his knees, clutching her legs, begging her not to leave him?

While she tried delicately to free herself because she needed to go pee.

Yeah.

No.

No, it was better he come in here and work than become that man. He had that man hidden. He had that man compressed down inside him so tiny he’d gotten as close as the universe would allow to undoing matter’s existence. And just because the pressurized containment made that man—that
boy
, that stupid
boy
—seem such dense, intense matter determined to explode outward again right now didn’t mean he had to yield to it. He could keep control.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and went to his favorites. He only had five: the restaurant line, Antoine’s cell, his chef de cuisine Nicolas’s cell, Summer, and Patrick. And then, in the regular contacts, all the dozens of suppliers he had to call every single time a delivery went wrong. For the whole restaurant. It had been rare, at the hotel, that he had to correct a supply issue himself. So rare that up in Paris when Luc himself took the phone, about five words, cool and cutting, were all it took to resolve an issue.

Here he had to call suppliers all the time. It seemed as if half the deliveries a day went wrong, and he’d never even had to think about the savory side of supplies before this. Damn it, Gabriel Delange, the pastry chef for whom he had once been sous, long ago, had become a restaurant owner down here—a three-star executive head chef with a pastry background, something no chef de cuisine wanted to admit was possible at the time. So Luc could, too.

Anything
anyone else could do, Luc could do better. If he set his mind to it. He just had to set his mind
hard enough.
Not get distracted and not let anything drop, no matter how many fragile things he juggled in the air. So he had twice as many fragile sugar balls to juggle these days than he ever had before—he was
Luc Leroi,
damn it. He could handle anything.

He stared at Patrick’s name a minute. But what was he supposed to say?
Hey, I’ve got some terrifying, fascinating, utterly enticing news? Also, I think you might be getting a little godson or goddaughter soon.
That sounded almost like something a normal man would say.

Or:
Look, I know you ditched me and went on to live your own life, but what the fuck am I supposed to
do
? I can’t figure out how this is funny. I need you to tell me, so I can laugh.

Because Patrick was so damn good at that. Luc would be getting all intense, because he was always intense, and Patrick would say something wicked, and suddenly the
light
of the situation shone through so brightly even Luc could see it and laugh and relax.

We’re pregnant. Come hand me a paper bag and push my head down between my knees and make fun of me for being such an idiot, so I feel sane again.

No. He couldn’t text that. Because he was
Luc Leroi
. He could handle everything himself. And because Luc had practically raised Patrick, and still Patrick had found better things in life than his old chef.

And that was
normal
.
Merde
, let Patrick have his wings and not be tethered by some co-dependent chef/foster brother who didn’t know how to laugh at himself. Fathers had to be able to laugh, didn’t they? They had to be able to let people go.

Oh, fuck, no. No, I don’t want to have to let anyone else go out of my life. Please, please, please let me lock them up in a box and keep them forever.

Luc shoved his phone back in his pocket and stared at the burst of desperate creativity all around him on the marble counter. Maybe Summer could come in for lunch today and he could feed her.

He could prove to her:
I can feed you both. You’ll never go hungry with me. You’ll never need to dump us for an easier life. I can take care of both of you.

It was ridiculous, given how much money Summer had and how unlikely it was that her ability to find sustenance would ever affect her choices. But his mind finally settled, as he focused on the special something he was going to make for her today. On the way her face would light as she tasted it.

He could feed her.

Yes. That would be good.

***

Distraction fractured across the steel-boned foment of creation of the kitchens. Luc smiled before he even looked around, his shoulders relaxing. Summer was here.

He glanced sideways, watching her make her way through excited apprentices eagerly offering her their latest accomplishments. She tried everything, smiled at everyone, told them how wonderful they were. Hey, Antoine wasn’t an apprentice, he was Luc’s own damn sous-chef, trying to impress Luc’s wife. Why the hell did all his sous-chefs start flirting with his wife? The one skill Patrick had had that Luc
didn’t
want Antoine to channel.

Summer smiled at Antoine, too, of course, and Luc barely managed not to shout at all of them:
Damn it! Don’t fill her up! She’s
mine
to feed!
Stupid, since everything his apprentices and cooks were making had come from his head. Or, fine, sometimes from the head of Nicolas Delesvaux, the chef de cuisine he had hired for the savory side. She liked Nico.

Sometimes the fact that she liked Nico made Luc want to stab him.

What are you trying to prove? That you can take care of her or that she’d starve without you? Let your chefs feed her.

Watch her smile for them.
They were currently providing internship opportunities to two teenagers from Côte d’Ivoire, in a program Summer had helped her cousins Jaime and Cade Corey develop. It had been via Summer that Jaime got Luc involved—Summer’s eyes glowing with complete trust in Luc’s ability to help as she told him what Jaime had told her, about how few Ivoirian farmers had ever tasted chocolate or even knew what the cacao beans they spent their lives harvesting were for. Luc, Sylvain, Dom, and multiple other top chefs were now training a new generation who could produce chocolate—value-added product—in their own country.

Both the interns had come from exploitive labor situations in their childhood, with almost no schooling, and every afternoon, Luc let them off early so Summer could sit with them on the restaurant terrace and work on reading and math skills and how to set up their own chocolate business one day. The two teenagers adored
her. They loved it when they offered her something they had made and she exclaimed in delight as she tasted it.

The kids needed this. He could share.

He could.

He
could
, he ordered himself, a whiplash of internal command.

“Hi, Gorgeous.” Summer smiled at him, and he had to bend his head to hide this weird, vulnerable, happy feeling that always ran through him at the nickname. She’d started calling him that flippantly when they first met, her way of protecting herself with that shield of superficial flirtation, but now the way she used it made him feel…well, gorgeous.

A feeling something like a blush. Or a…a
dimple.
Something weird he couldn’t possibly allow to show. But his lashes lifted to let their eyes meet and maybe it snuck out of him, that hidden, blushing dimple, because she blew him a kiss, her eyes laughing at him.

Aww, hell. He was so damn lucky.

“
Bonjour, soleil
,” he said, and leaned across to kiss her, because he was working and that was the only way he could touch
her without washing his hands. Damn, but he had a frustrating career. He could make so many miracles out of it, and in return, it consumed so many of his options. “Want a bite?” he asked, and realized just a second too late how exactly like his puppy-apprentices he sounded as he held out to her a raspberry meant for the dessert he was finishing.

She took it with just her lips, very carefully not brushing his fingers with them, but he cracked, and his thumb slid with the raspberry to tug at her bottom lip, to stroke her smile.

Now he would have to wash his hands, but who the hell cared?

“Mmm,” she said. “I love raspberries.”

This pure, erotic charge that ran through his body whenever she said
mmm.

“I made you something,” he offered, eager to hear it some more. Eager for that
mmm
to rise to a passion of appreciation, for it to tell him:
Yes, you have set my every sense on fire.

“Ah.” The oddest flicker on her face that made him hesitate just a second, searching her eyes, but she smiled at him and sank down onto the stool he kept in his kitchens for one purpose only: in case Summer showed up and giving her a place to sit would encourage her to hang out watching him longer. It got the hell in the way, that stool, but he kept it, just the same. “Something special?” Her smile was so delighted, so loving.

“Of course,” he said, offended. What did she expect him to offer her, a cookie?

Her smile deepened into something true, affectionate and amused.

Which would make her previous smile…hold on. Was she faking her smiles with him again?

Damn it, he hated
it when she did that.

How the hell am I supposed to know what’s wrong and fix it when you do that to me?

And God.
What was wrong?

His gaze flicked to her belly. And then he shifted away from it in a blur of movement, righting every single thing in those kitchens that could possibly be wrong, making
everything
perfect, down to the last hair-fine line of the way a plate was patterned or a strand of sugar was posed.
I can get it all right, Summer. Just—give me time to practice. Please?

God, he was going to be such a shitty father.

No, don’t think that. You can do anything you set your mind to.

But images flashed through him now, as he worked, not his idealistic father self strolling through lavender fields while his kids played adorably and his wife laughed with happiness and beamed at him as if he had hung the sun, but the fathers he had actually known. The father who had dragged him through streets and Métros begging for change, the foster father who had never smiled at him, just nodded once in firm approval if he practiced something ten thousand times and got it right, and
merde
, Summer’s father, that son of a bitch. The man who made someone as beautiful and perfect as
her
believe she was crap.

He came back to her with his special gift for her today. Not a cage, no, of course not. He’d already made her several variations of cages out of chocolate, all lined with gold and tempting things inside. It had been his perhaps misguided notion of courtship, back when they first met. He was trying to get over that.
I protect you, not cage you. The bars of chocolate are to keep you safe. I hold you in my hand to nurture you, to hold you up. Not to crush you into a tiny ball so I can keep you.

Well, damn it, he was
working
on it.

So today he had made a well of chocolate like the bell of a tulip and filled its gentle, protective depths with a liquid mango caramel, and leading into that sticky caramel he’d placed little pomegranate seeds, rich points of red drawing the innocent prey deeper and deeper into the well, closer and closer to that caramel from which there was no escape.

He stared at the dessert a moment as he set it on the counter between them.
Merde.
Was he still that messed up?

“Luc.” Summer lifted a hand to touch his cheek, and pleasure just sank through him. It was so hard for him to touch her while he was working, but she could always touch him. He loved it so much he now knew exactly why puppies acted like such ridiculous animals when someone touched the top of their heads. “Pomegranate seeds?” Her eyes were indulgently chiding.