Sun-Kissed (4 page)

A man once, who had fallen to his knees in the sand and clawed up chunks of it that he threw into the water, threw and threw, beating himself against sand while he sobbed, his face red with rage and pain, after Jaime had been found beaten in Côte d’Ivoire and airlifted out.

Anne hadn’t had the slightest idea what to do. You couldn’t calm that pain or tell it to go away. He needed to throw sand at the sea and weep and rage. So she’d just sat on the sand beside him, so that she wasn’t looking down at his helpless rage from some position of superiority, and lifted her own handful of sand over and over, squeezing it, watching it trickle away from her fingers, waiting. When he’d finally calmed, she’d reached out a hand and closed it over his. He’d sniffled helplessly and lifted their joined hands to cover his eyes, just staying there, bowed, exhausted with rage and grief, for ages.

Yeah, she was pathetic. The man’s daughter had been beaten within an inch of her life, and the best Anne could manage was to sit beside him on the sand and touch his hand. Well, and she’d baked Jaime one hell of a lot of cookies.

“You two need to go back on your trip around the world,” she told her son and daughter-in-law. Sometimes, in secret in her head, she liked to skip that awkward “son and daughter-in-law” phrasing and just call them her children. Pretend her son had brought her that daughter she’d always wanted back in the day when that want had been so important to her that she’d let its unfulfillment break her whole world. “Weren’t you going to spend a year?”

“The last time I tried to leave you alone, you got arrested for insider trading,” Kurt said.

Anne frowned at him. How had that kid grown up with such a gift for modulated irony? “You could hardly have stopped it.”

“I could probably have advised you not to
do
it, if I’d been aware.”

“Advised me not to be seen talking with people and then making business decisions the next day based on what I picked up in the conversations?” Anne asked dryly.
Thanks, kid. How
did
I build a billion-dollar empire without you?

“Advised you not to mislead investigators about it, at least.”

It had been what she’d actually gotten convicted on. “They were being nosy,” Anne said. “And pissing me the hell off.”

Kurt opened a hand. “Thus the usefulness of a lawyer.”

Anne’s mouth curved in a smile, despite the best she could do to press it down. She did like her son. Obviously, she loved him, but she
liked
him, too, that wry, firm way he stood up to her and still loved her, even though she was apparently so far from his ideal of womanhood that he’d sought out her exact opposite as his wife. “Go to Cambodia or something, Kurt. Didn’t you two say you wanted to see Angkor?”

They’d only been gone a month on their trip around the world before her arrest and the whole trial mess started, and then the trial had dragged on
forever.
Until her empire had fallen under that billion-dollar mark as her stock deteriorated in all the uncertainty, and Anne had realized it would be better for her company to quit fighting and get it over with.

But all through the trial, she’d at least been able to see Kurt and Kai were back
together.
After that terrible rift between them, as if they were ice floes sundered and drifting apart over Arctic water, they now seemed to be a whole of two again and kissed by the sun. It had been a knowledge to take with her into the courtroom every day, and later to carry in a snug knot inside her in prison:
Whatever shit I have to deal with, at least my son is happy. So…Fuck. You.

“I’ve been out three months,” she added, dryly. It didn’t seem that long to her. Sometimes it felt as if she’d just barely escaped from the Gates of Hell. But she refused to look back. No point getting turned into a pillar of salt. “We’ve established that I’m not going to have a nervous breakdown, right? Go ahead and go.”

“Maybe we will,” Kurt said and tightened his hand just a little on Kai’s. Kai jerked her gaze back from Summer’s gently rounded belly and smiled at Kurt, nodding.

Kurt lifted her hand and kissed it, which made Anne bite back another grin. These French chefs were starting to infect the whole place.

If Mack Corey kissed
her
hand next, she’d know it was an unstoppable plague.

He’d damn well better not do that. A poky penis was one thing, but hand-kissing—they’d been allies and friends for at least fifteen years. Twenty, if you counted the neighborly relationship that had started before Julie’s death. Sexual arousal was manageable. In fact, the thought of that sexual arousal still had all kinds of little private muscles squeezing in this achy, restless way. But tenderness—the very idea of it made her lungs feel ragged and shaky, as if air was just whistling through their perforations and leaving them agonizingly empty.

“I’ll give you twenty-four hours to pick your own next destination, and if not, I’m buying you tickets,” she told her…children and stood, desperate to shake off that ragged feeling.

Kai bumped Kurt’s knee, and Kurt glanced from her to Anne. “Want to dance?” he asked his mother.

Anne stilled. It was a nice thought on Kai’s part, but she wasn’t entirely sure she did. Those quiet, stolen moments with Kurt as an adult weren’t hers. They could never be hers. He had moved on. Anne was alone, that thing she had prepared herself to be, taught herself to be, from the time Kurt’s father had first divorced her.

But…she looked at her tall, lean son. She was so damn proud of him. “You don’t mind if I steal him?” she asked Kai.

Kai smiled and shook her head gently. “You didn’t mind when I stole him from you.”

Anne looked at her blankly. “Yes, I did.” Kids. They could be so oblivious sometimes.

“Flattered as I am by this notion of ownership, can I mention I’m a grown man?” Kurt asked the world at large. But Anne noticed that he squeezed
Kai
’s hand, letting her know that he did, in fact, belong to
her.

Damn it, letting go of kids was hard.

Sometimes she still wondered if she would have done at all better at it if she’d had a couple more to spread the love around, as she’d wanted.

“Come on, Mom,” Kurt said, and pulled her onto the dance floor.

Her shoulders relaxed involuntarily as she looked up at him. They had to, for the dance position, as he put a hand at the small of her back and took her other hand. Her tall son. She could still remember him learning how to dance, and that weird shift in power when he learned to lead properly—when he got to guide
her.
Dictate
her
steps.

He still had the most beautiful hazel eyes the world had ever made. For a long time she’d been afraid only she would ever understand how precious those hazel eyes were, but her daughter-in-law had figured it out.

She smiled up at him, happy. Increasingly happy with this moment, the way her careful construction of physical beauty in table settings and candles and party favors and flowers now sheltered so much genuine happiness. Sometimes happiness that had been picked back up and put together out of ruins. Sometimes happiness just starting to bloom. The range of it, from new and innocent, to old and tried and wiser, nourished the hope that her son would be okay. Kai would be okay. Jaime and Dom would be okay. They would be happy.

Happy together.

That alien, taunting word.

Chapter 3

“I see you let
him
lead,” Mack complained good-naturedly. His stride seemed to eat up the space between them. It always did, especially, somehow, when he headed toward her.

He’d just finished dancing with Cade. Jaime was just leaving the floor with her grandfather, James Corey, or Jack, as he preferred to be called, eighty-four and still driving Mack as crazy as ever. Anne had been averting a catering disaster. The wedding organizer had only considered it a minor malfunction, which still had Anne’s nerves strung a little tight. If Anne hadn’t been on her, the organizer might not even have bothered
correcting
it.

Mack’s approach buffeted power against her perimeter, as it always did. That man was a walking power source. He had ruled the world most of his life, so he knew you could never take ruling the world for granted. You had to keep your mind on it. Otherwise the world would buck up and throw you the hell off.

Rebellious and ungrateful and wriggly in the hands of its masters and often ugly, that world. Unless Anne smoothed it out. Anne turned the world into something beautiful and made at least some part of it desperately grateful for that beautification, too. She showed them how to paint their tomato posts blue or put their dishwashing liquid in elegant old bottles or frost a cake like a professional or unstick an old drawer, and they said,
Thank you, for turning us into something we can manage.

Mack carried the power in his shoulders, in the long strides of a man who walked and ran and swam his worries off, who beat them into submission via a game of squash, who took half his meetings out onto a golf course. A tux looked good on him, but she liked him better in the jeans and T-shirt he wore on the beach early in the morning, that look that said
I am not working, I am being me,
that look she was one of the few people to see. That look when the corners of his eyes relaxed, and his lips softened, so that you could see the fine lines left by years of tension and determination through the peace in his face.

“I try to let you lead,” Anne told him sweetly. “Apparently you just don’t know how to take charge.” She smiled a bit, and the man who liked to take charge of half the world responded to the challenge instantly.

“I’m holding myself back,” he retorted. “Don’t know if you can stand me at full power.”

Anne’s spine stiffened, her eyes narrowing a little. “You think there’s something you can throw at me that I can’t take?”

“Yeah.” Mack waited just long enough for her to simmer and held her eyes. “Me.”

“Really.” All her belly muscles went taut, in a happy way, her core bracing for a challenge. Her fingers itched for her boxing gloves. “You want to try me, Mack Corey?”

His smile was sharp and predatory. “Yes. In fact.”

Her mouth went dry, for no reason she could understand. Something
alive
surged through her, so alive she didn’t know what to do with it. Her hands flexed. “I’ll go as many rounds with you as you care to name.”

“You know, I always thought you would, Anne.” He leaned into her, and just like that, twenty years as neighbors and friends got shifted to another angle—that of a man’s big body leaning over a smaller woman’s, one forearm bracing against the tree. “But I’m not planning on boxing.”

Her heart started to pound so hard it was like that one last minute before she walked out of prison into the flash of cameras everywhere. How had their whole world just tilted this way? Had the last child to leave their friendship-joined nests left them that off-balance? “Good,” she managed, looking him in the eye. Because this was the man who had taught her that—how to look a jury in the eye and think
fuck you
and not back down. She’d honed it through twenty years of looking him in the eye and holding her own. “Because I’d wipe the floor with you.”

“The floor’s for teenagers. They’re always in too much of a hurry to get things right. A bed now, or a table, or a counter—a man can do something with that.”

Her lips parted on the punch of breath that went through her. If they were boxing, then that blow had snuck right in under her guard and gotten her in the gut. “Are you drunk?”

“See.” His grin grew sharper, victorious and angry both. “You’re already ducking and weaving.”

“That’s because I’m getting in a position to punch your head right off. Are you sure you want to mess with me without putting on headgear?”

“Are you sure you’re not going to call foul and leap right out of the ring?”

So much energy zinged through her, it was as if long-amputated nerve endings had suddenly received some drug injection and reconstituted themselves. Sensitive and burning. She wanted to itch at them, or at the very least rub her arms, but she wouldn’t give him the victory. “I can’t believe you’re going to ruin a twenty-year friendship because you got drunk and horny.”

“I can’t believe it either,” he said, and his other arm came up, so that now he had her entirely caged, like those damn French chefs liked to do when they were flirting with their girlfriends or wives. Which they seemed to do every single second they weren’t messing up her wedding cake arrangements. “Our friendship isn’t that goddamn weak.”

She drew a breath that came out almost on a laugh. Because, well—it
wasn’t.
She could haul off and slap him right now, and he’d still be on that beach tomorrow morning. He’d still text her ten minutes from now, with the mark of her palm still red on his jaw, because he’d overheard a rumor on the other side of the room that he thought she should know, so that her business didn’t suffer.

Well, maybe not text, since they’d learned their lesson about subpoenaed records, but he’d get the information to her somehow.

“See? What’s the worst thing that could happen, if I got drunk and horny?” Mack challenged. “Beyond me getting to hear you say
horny
, which, to be honest, sounds way more vulgar than
fuck you.
I
love
the way you say
fuck you.
”

Anne formed her lips around a very sincere F, and then caught herself, her eyes narrowing. He was watching that F-shape of her lips with every appearance of eagerness, and she’d be damned if she’d give him the satisfaction.

“Oh, come
on
,” he begged. “Go for it. Now you’re just taunting me.”

“Mack,” she said between her teeth. “If you think I’m wasting my energy on a slap, you don’t know me very well. I’m going to knee you right in the groin.”

His teeth showed sharp. “Yeah? You going to take it into the physical? Go for it, Anne.”

He looked so damn
hungry.
Nerve endings were shooting alive
everywhere
, and they made her almost frantic with the need to do something. Anything. Knee him in the groin.