Shadowed Heart (18 page)

“
Yes
.” Summer kneaded her belly some more. “Sometimes you feel like one of those women in bad movies who has been possessed by an alien. And then you feel guilty, because it’s your baby.”

He’d never known she thought that way. Why hadn’t she told him? It was funny and sweet and understandable all at once, and he would have kind of liked to put his cheek against her belly at night and tease her about their little alien until she was laughing instead of worried.

When would she have told you? When have you relaxed and let her?

Merde, when have you put your cheek against her belly and teased and believed in her?

God, all the ways she tried to support him every day. Summer Corey, one of the wealthiest heirs on the planet, folding his napkins and joking with the staff while she helped. The utter confidence she gave him that he could accomplish anything he set out to do.

What would it feel like, if he didn’t have that?

Maybe she needs you to believe in her, too.

She even said so once. “If you can trust me, I can trust you. And if not, it all falls apart.”

Jaime laughed. “I remember one of the execs at Corey did that 3D ultrasound, and when she was showing the pictures, it was all I could do not to say it looked like a goblin. Fortunately, it turned out to be a cute little baby girl.”

“When will you know if it’s a boy or a girl?” Cade asked. “You’re going to find out, aren’t you?”

Were they going to find out? Would it be more fun to know or not? But Summer was already nodding eagerly. When she hadn’t even talked to him about it.

Well, it was her body, of course, but...sometimes she let him have a say in what happened to her body. Sometimes she liked letting him have
all
the say. Granted, it wasn’t quite the same context, but...

When would she have talked with you?

He frowned and walked back over to the terrace wall, to lean against it between Dom and Sylvain. The two men always left a sizable space between themselves, which was kind of funny, considering how they always seemed to be on the same side of the room. Together against the world, as long as they didn’t have to admit it.

He missed Patrick so badly it hurt his heart. People latched onto your heart that way. And as soon as they had sunk their fingers in deep, they ripped out a great chunk and walked off with it, leaving what was left of the heart bleeding and broken. He looked at Summer again, at that baffled, hungry smile that was starting to relax her face as her cousins kept asking her fascinated questions.

“How did you do it?” Dom asked suddenly, low.

“Get my wife pregnant?” Luc asked dryly, because he had no idea how to answer the real question. He’d believed in her. In them. That was how he had done it. He’d believed she wouldn’t walk away with a chunk of his torn-to-pieces heart.

He’d believed that against all possible evidence from every single other important relationship he had ever had in his life.

Well, he’d
tried
to believe it. He’d meant to.

“Get up the courage.” Dom looked down at one of his big, scarred hands, curled around the stone of the terrace wall. “You weren’t scared out of your mind?”

“I had this vision.” It bloomed in him again, beautiful: black-haired kids running up to greet him when he got home, chasing each other through lavender as he and Summer walked hand in hand behind them. “It was perfect.” He looked at Summer again, her smile growing stronger and truer the more she answered eager questions. “Now I’m scared,” he admitted softly.

Just like her.

“I wondered. I mean, it’s not as if your own dad was—” Dom broke off.

Thank you. I know.
And he was pretty sure Dom’s own father was even worse. Luc’s father had slapped him a few times, grabbed him too hard in a temper, used him to beg for money in the Métro and the streets, and blamed him when they didn’t have enough, and eventually he’d lost him to the foster care system, but…well…he’d
tried.
Luc was pretty sure Marko had and still did genuinely love him, as best he could.

It was terrifying. Because if that was the best his own father could do,
merde
...

“You’ll do perfectly,” Dom said abruptly, firmly. “You always get everything perfect.”

“I practice,” Luc said, driven. “And you can’t practice on your
kids
. You’ve only got one chance.”

I guess we should have had another kid so we could have gotten that one right
, Summer’s father Sam Corey had once said, and it had been all Luc could do not to punch him.

“No, you don’t.” On Luc’s left, Sylvain thrust away from the wall, sounding exasperated.

Luc and Dom both looked at him.

Sylvain flung out his hands. “You think my father never screwed up with me? You think
I
never screwed up with him? You don’t get only one chance, for God’s sake. You get five million chances, second after second every day. You don’t have to get every single one of them perfect.
Merde.
It’s not
chocolate.
”

The last word knocked a laugh out of Luc, his whole body relaxing with it. “So as long as it’s not chocolate, it’s okay to mess it up?”

“Well,
yes
,” Sylvain said impatiently. “It’s not the same thing at all.” He considered, moving his hands the way he often did, as if he had to imagine textures in order to process his own words. They all did that, actually. “The only way I could get Cade and me perfect, all the time,” he said finally, “is if I turned her into this thing. Turned
us
into a thing. Chocolate. She wouldn’t let me, of course. But if I
tried
—can’t you see how much harm I would do?”

Summer had several times firmly stopped Luc from treating her like a thing. Like his product to get right. She called him on it immediately when she caught him at it, these days with an amused
Luc!

“You mean, if I try to get everything right,
that
will screw things up, too?”

“Exactly.” Sylvain gave him a wry, sympathetic look. “Sorry, Luc.”

“Then how the hell do I get everything right?” Luc asked between his teeth.

“You don’t. You have to learn to live with
screwing up.
”

Luc just stared at him.

“I think you have to learn to relax,” Sylvain said, with unusual caution, as if he realized he was telling Luc to grow three heads. After a second, with a wry smile, he offered Luc his glass of pastis.

“No, thank you,” Luc said sternly, pushing the alcohol away. If he had to learn how to relax, he sure as hell needed to keep his control.

“Men. Seriously.” Cade paused in front of a shop window in the medieval part of the beautiful hill town of Sainte-Mère—Summer having wanted to share a bit of the region with them—and looked back at the husbands and fiancé who had completely failed to keep up with them. The men had stopped by the wall of the terrace at the top of the town, with the
boules
court just behind them, and stood in a loose circle, framed by the Alps and the sea. Snow clung to the highest peaks, this surreally beautiful white-blue vision when seen from the heated stone and jasmine of the town.

But instead of looking at the view, all three men were focused on their cell phones.

“You’d think they could at least make the effort to talk to each other,” Cade said, exasperated.

“Don’t start asking Dom and Sylvain to talk to each other this early in the day,” Jaime said, amused. “They’ve got a whole weekend to get through without a fight.” Sunday and Monday or Monday and Tuesday counted as weekends for anyone in the restaurant business.

Cade grinned at Summer. “They never do really get in a fight, don’t worry. It’s kind of hilarious how much they like each other but can’t admit it. And don’t you dare tell Sylvain I let anyone know he likes Dominique.”

“Yes, it would be very awkward for everyone,” Jaime agreed. “I can’t tell you how many family dinners would be ruined if those two had to admit they get along. Next thing you know, Dad might have to admit he kind of respects them, and God knows where it could all end.”

Summer bit back a grin at the image of Mack Corey, billionaire bulldozer, trying to handle the two equally arrogant men who had won his daughters. Damn it, the amount of times she’d gnawed her own heart out wishing she’d been born to Jaime and Cade’s parents instead of her own. But maybe Mack would have made mincemeat out of Summer the same way his cousin Sam had. Maybe Jaime and Cade were just made of stronger stuff.

Summer looked at her husband in the distance. Luc had that kind of rapport with Patrick, like Sylvain and Dominique. No, much stronger. The two had pretended to drive each other crazy, while
always
having each other’s backs. Luc had lost him, when he came to the south of France for her. Patrick had chosen to follow his own dream.

Luc and Summer, together against the world.

So beautiful and romantic in concept, and so heartbreaking in fact.

“This whole not knowing the sex business is annoying,” Cade stated, examining a storefront gracefully positioned near an old stone
abreuvoir,
a watering trough. “You can’t even start buying cute clothes yet. And look at that little dress.”

The little galleries and boutiques catered to the wealthy crowd who came up from the yachts moored at Cannes, and this particular one featured high-end, one-of-a-kind children’s clothes, complete with options for hand-tailoring. A couple passed them, a big brown-haired man with his hand around a smaller blond woman’s, strolling under an arch at one side of the
place
and up a cobblestone street lined with shops and houses framed with bougainvillea and ivy and jasmine, red geraniums in pots on the balconies. Jasmine scented everything.

Jaime slid her older sister a bemused look, one eyebrow going up a little bit. “You have a weakness for cute baby girl clothes?”

Cade gave her a dirty look with no real heat in it—Summer felt that old shaft of jealousy at the Corey sense of sisterhood, wondering if Luc was feeling something of the same thing toward Sylvain and Dom—and switched her attention to some soft leather booties. “Now these would be cute on either sex. You know what I like about France?”

“Sylvain,” Jaime supplied, her lips twitching.

Another of those sisterly, pseudo-annoyed glances as Cade kept on going. “All the
colors
in little girl clothes. Red. Blue.”

“Gray,” Jaime said thoughtfully, eyeing a tiny outfit that was, indeed, gray. “Black. It’s a different take, I’ll grant you.”

The three women grinned at each other as, without even finishing the articulation, they all got a vision of a little French toddler sleeked out in black and looking infinitely classy.

“Your mom used to put you in that kind of thing,” Cade remembered, to Summer. “Our mom mostly stuck us in play clothes. I remember you showing up in the prettiest heels one time, when you were, what, six? Meanwhile,
my
dad absolutely put his foot down. I think I was sixteen before I got to wear heels. And then he let Jaime when she was fourteen, which was completely unfair.”

“I rebelled better than you,” Jaime retorted. “It’s not my fault it was so easy to get you to toe the line.”

“Which do you think you’ll do?” Cade asked Summer, ignoring her sister with that ease that always made Summer just want to squeeze her way into their lives and be a sister, too. “If you have a little girl, will it be play clothes or pretty dresses?”

A little black-haired girl rose in her head so vividly her heart tightened with pleasure and anxiety and hope. If only Summer could do everything right, that little girl was going to be so
beautiful.
Summer tilted her head, considering that little girl carefully. “Both, I think. Whichever she’s in the mood for at the time.” It would be okay if she tore her pretty dresses because she decided she wanted to play. Summer wouldn’t say she was too spoiled to respect her things. It had always been more important to her own father to respect things more than people. She’d gotten denied dessert many, many times because she’d torn the lace on a dress playing or lost an expensive bracelet off a toddler wrist.

Or given her bracelet away to a boy she met on the playground. A nine-year-old black-haired boy who lifted her six-year-old self up to reach the monkey bars, and showed off for her, and acted as if she was a fairy princess.

She turned enough to look at Luc, engrossed in his phone while Sylvain gestured large and Gallic with his own phone in one hand and Dom shook his head.

A little smile eased her mouth, out of the blue. One thing was sure, no matter how much their little girl tore her pretty dress, her daddy would never
deny her dessert.

Her heart softened at the vision of him, making all those beautiful creations for her, making them for some little girl or boy, this great hunger in him for them to be hungry for him. If it was true that whimsical thing she liked to believe, that he was the young dark-haired boy she had met once on a playground in Paris, then even as a little boy playing on the playground, determined to impress the little girl he’d met there, he’d always had that hunger. Always wanted to be her hero.

However badly what he had said had hurt her, he hadn’t meant that hurt. He would never mean that hurt. He was screwed up, just like she was, and he made a lot of mistakes, but he never, ever made them on purpose, never
wanted
to punish her for being. He had so much love in him that he didn’t know what to do with it all, and so he had given it to her.

As if he felt her gaze across the distance, Luc lifted his head suddenly and looked across the
square and down the street straight at her.

She gave him a shy little wave.
Can we make up now?

I’m sorry it took me a while, but—you don’t understand. You don’t understand what it felt like, deep in my womb, when you said something might go wrong.

We just need some moments of peace and quiet together, so that we can understand each other. But I need you to want those moments, too.

Luc lifted a hand. But he forgot to wave with it. Instead, it stretched toward her palm up, fingertips curling.
Come back to me.