Shadowed Heart (16 page)

The restaurant was their future, too, though, right? Or was it only his? But if he didn’t make it the best in the world, how would his little girl know her daddy was worth anything? How would his wife?

He’d married a woman who had he-wasn’t-sure-how-many million dollars in her own portfolio and was heir to one of the wealthiest self-made men in the world. How did he prove he was worth her, except with, well, his own worth? What he
was good at?

“Well…” Summer started to smile a little bit, half-embarrassed, half-excited. “I kind of went a different direction.”

He glanced from the sheets to the computer to the wall of a calendar that went through six weeks after the baby was due. “Ordering online?” He could sit in front of a computer and look over choices with her, too, couldn’t he? He could take a
minute
,
merde.
Why had he found it easier to go gleaning with Nico than to sit down and talk baby names and swing choices with his wife?

Wait, why the name Sarah and a phone number there? Surely not his old intern, Patrick’s fiancée, Sarah? It was a common name.

“I’m starting a company!” It burst out of Summer happily. She bounced off the desk, pointing to some of the photos on the corkboard. “Well, I’ll be the venture capitalist for it. I couldn’t find the right swing, I looked and looked, and I finally realized it still hadn’t been
made
yet. And—I don’t know, we’re starting with swings, but these two at Caltech are already excited about other things parents might want. That perfect thing, with quality. But I want to make it affordable, you know? I mean—a real person’s affordable. Not something you have to spend two thousand dollars on to get the right thing. These two, here, I recruited from an entrepreneurship program at Berkeley, so they’re all
very excited about this.”

Luc stared at her as she almost
babbled
, gesturing excitedly to pictures and dates on the calendar—apparently the team was being flown over here next week, for example.

He started to grin, her energy both enthralling and reassuring. She was excited. Looking to
their
future.

Even if he hadn’t known a thing about it.

“You know, you have a lot more of your father in you than you realize,” he said admiringly.

Her face shut down that fast, as if he had slapped her.

Which—granted, maybe her father wasn’t the best comparison for him to make, but… “The good part of him. His brains. His way of looking at the world and being able to get a project off the ground or turn a company around with a few savvy decisions.”

Summer gave him a slightly stiff smile and nodded, shifting away to study her calendar. Her damn father. But it was true that she had his brilliant mind, and that she undervalued herself all the time. Thanks, of course, primarily to her damn father.

Maybe even thanks to people like Luc himself, her own husband, who even though he
knew
better, still tended to look at her and think how pretty she was, how sweet, how sexy, and forget to think about how smart and capable she was, too.

“Like you’ve helped me with the restaurant,” he said, following her to put his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

It was hard for him to say, to let her know that he really might not be able to make it without her, but the pleasure on her face was worth it. “Really?” she asked shyly.

“Oh, God, Summer…the accounts. When I try to do them—”

She lifted her hand to pet his hair back from his face, his misstep over her father forgiven and forgotten. “Don’t do the accounts,” she told him. “Just trust me on this. One accountant per set of account books. I’ll let you know if I start embezzling.”

He laughed, and the laughter felt so good, as if all of the stress and panic of the past few days might just be dissolving away, and…his gaze flicked over the calendar beyond her, and a note a few weeks out just slammed into him:
Manunui??

His hand tightened so hard on her shoulder that Summer made a little sound and tried to jerk free.

And he didn’t let
her.

“Luc!” She pried at his fingers.

He forced them loose—only to press his hand against the calendar, walling her in. “Are you planning a trip?” He could barely hear his own voice. But it cut, coming out. Cut his throat, the edges of his too-tight lips.

“No, I decided to make the Caltech grads come to me,” Summer said. “They’ll love the trip to Provence, who wouldn’t, in the middle of grad school, and I started thinking about how sick I might get on a plane flight…”

His finger tapped the name of her island once, hard. “What’s this?”

“Oh.” She looked from it to his face and back, her happiness faltering more and more. As if she knew something was wrong, but had no clue what. “I was hoping by then my stomach would be calmed down enough that I could make a trip to see everyone.”

He couldn’t even feel his own heart beating.

“I want to go
now
,” she said wistfully, completely oblivious to his frozen heart, as if she didn’t even care if she destroyed
him, as if she wouldn’t even
notice.
“But those sea planes make me sick even when I’m not
pregnant. And let’s not even talk about boat travel.”

“
You can’t go.
” The words sliced through the air.

Summer stared at him in confusion, fingering her throat as if he’d just sliced through that, too.

He scrambled for anything to keep her here. Her fears. The thing hidden on those tabs on her computer, the thing she was most afraid of. “You need to be near a doctor! What if something goes wrong?”

She gave a little gasp of breath and tried to step back. Her shoulders hit the calendar behind her, and he grabbed them.

“You know how high the chances are of something going wrong the first trimester! And you’re so sick, Summer. What if that’s a bad sign? What if you had a
miscarriage,
Summer? You
can’t
go.”

Her face went white. She stared at him, this thing rising in her eyes, as if he had just knifed her. Her hands went up to fold over her belly, as if that was where his knife had stabbed.

Her eyes were already damp with the rise of tears when they started to blaze. The force of the look shocked through him. They’d had a hard road to understand each other, when they first met, but he had never seen her look at him with this much rage, this much betrayal. Summer was
passive
-aggressive. She absorbed blows and hid their hurt under a smile, until so much rage built up in her that it exploded out destructively.

It was exploding out now.

“Go away.” Her hands rose and slammed into his shoulders with all her force, trying to shove him back from her. “
You get away from me.
”

He didn’t want to release her, oh, God, he didn’t. But he realized suddenly how very hard his hands were gripping her shoulders. Shit. He jerked them away.

She slid fast along the wall away from him, holding his eyes as if she needed to be ready to dodge his next knife blow. “Don’t you
talk
to me.” The peach got in her way as she tried to reach for the sliding screen door out onto the terrace, and she
threw
it at him. It hit him in the shoulder. He didn’t even try to catch it or avoid it. His reflexes had abandoned him.

She
was abandoning him.

She had just
thrown
something at him. Fine, it wasn’t something that could really hurt, but…the gesture hurt.

Her eyes blazed with rage and pain. As if he’d literally struck her, as if he’d destroyed something. “You go back to your restaurant, since that’s all you care about anyway, and you
stay away from me.
Don’t you
ever
talk to me again.”

His heart beat so fast and hard it made him sick. He had to put a hand up to his chest to try to keep it from ripping out of his body in panic. “Summer—”

The screen stuck a little and she had to push it hard. He had just started forward instinctively to help her when she got it wide enough to slip her slim form through. She looked back at him as she got through the crack, with another surge of that wild, bitter rage as her hand came back to cover her belly protectively again: “
Fuck you.
”

“Summer—” He went after her, shoving the door wider, but she threw him another bitter look and took off on the path down the cliff to their little
calenque
, their sheltered beach.

He stopped on the terrace, gripping stone wall too thick even for his hands, but he found a grip on it anyway, dragging his fingers raw. Pain and fear and betrayal squeezed down on him until he felt compressed, as agonized as the minute speck of matter that contained all the universe just before it blew up. Even his breaths came short and tight, as if he had been locked in a space too small for his lungs to fill.

Everything struggled inside that tightness, too many things: Summer’s happiness on her island; a childhood dragged through the Métro and sleeping in the streets, imagining a mother he had never known, who had abandoned him for her island happiness; the look on Summer’s face when he had said, when he had said—

How could he have said that to her? Even to protect himself, even to keep her trapped here, how could he have said that?

He pulled out his phone suddenly and sent three texts. Patrick. Sylvain. Dom.
I need your help.

Summer wrote, “10 am: Maia, Skype” on Tuesday on her calendar, her whole arm heavy. It was Sunday morning, the day Luc could take off, they day they could talk.

Except she wasn’t talking to him. He’d tried to follow her to the beach to tell her he was sorry, and she’d just dived into the water in her underthings, swimming. She could swim around an entire island when she was in the mood. In the South Pacific, she and some of the other islanders used to do that kind of thing for fun. Or just because, particularly on an island, sometimes you just needed to leave behind the world that trapped you and swim and swim.

By the time she’d come back out, Luc had given up, sitting on the beach by her abandoned clothes with his arms locked around his knees, watching her, waiting, not trying to talk again in case she dived right back into the water. That night, she’d slept in the guest bedroom. Luc, intense and pale, hadn’t argued with that either. He’d just dumped a stack of thick towels on her wet body and stood there looking at her a moment, his fists clenching and unclenching, his face in that honed, forged-in-the-fires-of-creation expression of his, and then walked out and left her alone.

Fuck you, Luc.

I’m all alone here. I came here for you. You’re the only person in the world I thought I could trust to fight for this baby, to be on our side, and you, and you…

She swallowed against the burn in her throat.
If I’m all this baby has, then I’ll damn well do a good job on my own.

The scent of the peaches, still in a basket on her desk from the day before, forced their scent on her, ever thicker and sweeter, soon to be rotten and miasmic if she left them.

Voices burst in on her out of nowhere, like a car wreck, this pile of excited feminine sounds.

“There’s the mama!”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”

Summer turned, completely confused, as her cousins swept in on her. Cade and Jaime, Cade in jeans but otherwise looking as efficiently put together as always, her fine, straight, light brown hair twisted on top of her head, and Jaime with that red-caramel hair in a sweeping reverse wedge cut that looked surprisingly good on her. Summer always associated Jaime with ponytails and braids, or she had until Jaime’s hair had to be cut so short after her…accident. But the steeply angled sweep of her hair past her jawline gave her a surprisingly sophisticated prettiness, highlighting the Audrey Hepburn bones of her face, all dusted over with freckles as if the sun hadn’t been able to stop kissing her and had left its marks over every single inch of her skin.

The sun being probably exactly like Dom, Summer thought with an amusement that turned into wistfulness. Luc used to feel that way about her, wanting to kiss her all over. Maybe she shouldn’t be in here wantonly destroying that urge of his out of her own hurt and fear.

“Summer!” Cade
hugged
her, throwing Summer completely off-balance. She knew she’d hugged Cade once, in a quest for asylum, but…were they going to make a habit out of physical affection? Summer had always been desperate for more of it, and the happy Corey sisters had never bothered with it, too secure to need it, too busy with their own spats to want to get that mushy.

Jaime threw an arm over her shoulders and gave them a loose squeeze, as if she knew a full-blown hug might be a bit much, the first time around. “Look at you,” Jaime said affectionately. “A
mama.
You’re going to be the first of us!”

Summer struggled with one of those stupid, sudden threats of tears. Something about the word
mama,
or the hugs, or the friendly admiration in the sisters’ tones got to her so deeply.

“Yeah, you’re the guinea pig,” Cade told her. “I expect you to get this all figured out for us, so we’ll know what to do when it’s our turn.”

Summer stared at her in-charge-of-the-world cousin, completely thrown. Summer was the leader? She was the one her cousins were going to look up to?

But, of course:
They don’t have a mother to help them with this at all. Their mother
died.

Julie Corey. Summer had loved Julie Corey so much, and her death when Summer was twelve had been a brutal blow. But how much worse for her own daughters, of course, than for the second cousin who tried to slip in and just pretend
she was Julie Corey’s daughter whenever she could.

“What’s this?” Cade’s business eye was already drawn to the calendar and the pin-ups of swing designs, probably able to guess at least half the answer to her question just from the glance.

“Well…I couldn’t find the right swing,” Summer admitted. “So now I’m going to fund a start-up.”

Cade laughed out loud. “You go!” She held up her hand, and it took Summer a blank second to realize she was being given a high five. Jaime gave her one, too. The impact on her palm tingled. Felt…warm. “I told you she would figure it out for us,” Cade told Jaime.