Shadowed Heart (20 page)

The women sat by the infinity pool, its edge seeming to flow right over into the starry yachts floating in the Mediterranean below. It wasn’t the Southern Cross, but with friendly female voices floating around Summer—it was a pretty nice view. Because after all, it wasn’t the stars that made the Southern Cross so beautiful. It was the people.

“Cade, while you and Sarah are over there making five-year plans, Jolie and I are going to figure out how to get Summer through the first trimester. Have you tried eating crackers before you get out of bed?” Jaime asked Summer. “That’s one of the tips here. Pretzels, for example.”

“These ice pops are pretty good.” Cade waved one of the ones Summer had shared. “Luc’s onto something here.”

Summer sucked on her own lime ice pop, riding one of those evening waves of nausea again. Leaning back in one of the great canvas chairs, she put her feet up while the other women clicked through web pages. Which made her feel like a fool, of course, the incapable, weak one surrounded by capable women, but every time she tried to lean over to look at the computer screens with them, nausea started winning the battle.

“I don’t know if we can trust these lists, though,” Cade said. “This one says chocolate is a top craving, and remember what it did to Mom?”

Chocolate. Ugh. Summer tightened her hold on her tummy.

“Exactly,” Cade said. “But we’d better not tell Sylvain.”

“What about ginger?” Jaime asked. “Ginger ale? I’m sure Luc could make you some with real ginger.”

“If you ask Luc Leroi to make ginger ale, he’ll do a reverse spherification of it or something like that,” Sarah Lin said with a quiet thread of amusement. As one of Luc’s former interns, she knew a lot more about what Luc was capable of than even Summer herself did, although Summer was learning as fast as she could.

Summer smiled at Sarah. It was good not to have to be wary of the other woman. Maybe it was the discussions over the phone as Summer tracked down engineering students who could help her, or maybe it was some security Sarah had about Patrick, but Sarah didn’t seem to hold that time Patrick had kissed Summer against Summer at all. As if it was just…in the past or something. No threat to her present.

If Summer’s tummy wasn’t feeling so queasy, she might have hugged her knees with how happy that made her. Just to have…almost
friends.

“How do you think you do it?” she asked out loud suddenly. “Get a baby right? Not mess it up?”
Not make it turn out lonely and vulnerable, like me. Make sure she knows how to have friends.

The Corey sisters stopped talking, caught by that question. “You just love it, I guess?” Jaime suggested tentatively.

“Really?” Summer asked, startled with hope. “That’s all it takes?”
I can do that!

Although her parents had always insisted they loved her. This beautiful, delicious forbidden dessert of love that was
supposed
to be hers, if she behaved well enough, and yet somehow, she could never quite taste it.

“I’m pretty sure they have books that expand on the details.” Cade tapped into her computer. “Look!
How to Talk So Your Kid Will Listen
. Too bad Dad didn’t find that one when you were a kid,” she told her sister dryly. “Oh, and here’s a whole series about
What to Expect
at every single month of their lives.” She opened the sample of one of the books and raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Week by week even. Well, that’s helpful. This is great stuff.”

“Why do you want to get it right?” Sarah Lin asked suddenly.

“I, well—because it’s my baby?” Summer said.

Sarah reached into a little leather backpack purse at the wall by her feet and pulled out a small leather notebook, its cover embossed with a silver heart signed with the initial P. “Could I show you something?”

She opened it and held it out to Summer. The other women leaned in, and they all looked in some puzzlement at notes about sugar sculpting, written so carefully the letters looked like print.

“My mother wanted to get my sister and me right.” Sarah traced the letters with her finger. “That’s why I write like this. She didn’t know. She was illiterate herself back then, training herself at the same time as us. But she looked at books and thought if we could write exactly like the letters in books, we would be writing perfectly. She wanted the world to love us.” Sarah flipped a few pages to a sprawling signature, the only legible part of which was a big P that matched the silver-embossed P on the journal’s cover and there, possibly, a capital C. “That’s how Patrick writes. And really, of the two of us, who do you find easier to love?”

Patrick. He swept everyone into his charm, while Sarah Lin kept in this contained, quiet space of hers, into which no one could step very easily.

“I’m not trying to criticize my mother,” Sarah said. “She loves us with everything in her, and she would do anything for us. But I don’t know. Kids aren’t bonsai. Maybe instead of trying to make them beautiful to the rest of the world, you should just love them and let them grow.”

Summer was positive
she could love her child and let the child grow. But…grow how?

“But you have to teach them a work ethic,” Cade pointed out.

“And to look out for those less fortunate than they are,” Jaime said.

“And a certain degree of manners is probably a good idea, to get along with the world,” Summer added uneasily. Although deep down what she really wanted to teach her daughter was how to tell the world
Fuck you.
And mean it. Really not care. That thing Cade and Jaime’s dad and her own did, that let both Mack and Sam Corey stomp right after what they wanted and not give a crap who hated them for it. “Oh, God.” She pressed her hand into her belly. “This is so complicated
.
”

“We all turned out all right,” Cade pointed out, gesturing to include everyone in the group. “Although our parents didn’t get everything perfect. Trust me, that time Jaime stowed away in my car to sneak into a rock concert she was too young for and I was the one who lost driving privileges was completely unfair. Plus, I mentioned about the heels, right?”

Plus, Cade and Jaime’s mother had died
when they were still young, a brutal abandonment beyond her control but also beyond appeal. Julie Corey’s death had made Summer feel as if she’d lost her last hope, so she couldn’t even imagine how hard it had hit Julie’s own daughters.

“Speak for yourselves,” Summer muttered, sinking more deeply into her chair. Her nausea stirred, not liking the way her slump folded her belly. She did not feel “all right” at all.

“You turned out just fine, too, Summer,” Jaime said wryly. “We all feel that way sometimes.”

“You do?” Really? They were so confident
.

“People don’t tend to go on crusades to save the world because they feel just fine with who they are sitting on the couch watching TV,” Sarah pointed out.

Oh. “But you’re amazing,” Summer told crusader Jaime incredulously.

“You know, you’re a pretty cool person yourself,” Jaime said gently. “A lot of kids certainly think so, which is a pretty positive sign, don’t you think, about how well you’ll do with your own?”

Summer gazed out over the sea, trying to digest that. The praise wanted to dissolve through her, wanted to nurture her belief in herself, but there was this dark, bitter doubt that came out to attack it, nastily. “Anyway, I’ve got back-up,” she said wryly, letting it leak out.

“Exactly,” Jaime said. “I mean, if you think Cade would let you get away with doing something she thought was wrong without telling you, boy, do you not know her. I’ll be more discreet, of course.”

Summer stared at the sisters. Warmth flooded her, out of nowhere, so much warmth she didn’t even know what to do with it. It wanted to come out as tears. “I meant—I meant, ah—” She swallowed. “My mother is interviewing nannies for me. It wasn’t my idea,” she added hastily, as all the other women looked taken aback. “She thought I would need one. She promised to find one good enough that I couldn’t screw up the baby.”
Because that worked out so well with me. Here I am, not screwed up at all.

And she’d had a really good nanny, too. Liz. Kind of her lifeline back then.

All the other women were staring at her. She tried to shrug.

“When people shape you when you’re tiny, it can be really hard to break out of that mold, can’t it?” Sarah said very softly, almost to herself.

“Summer, allow me to share with you one of my favorite phrases. My dad taught it to me, for when I have to go into a boardroom and make a decision that I know everyone is going to criticize, everyone is going to call me a bitch for,” Cade said. “You might want to practice it for situations like this. It goes:
Screw you.
”

“That’s not what Dad actually says,” Jaime mentioned, amused.

“Well…his version starts with an F,” Cade admitted. “He felt that
screw
might not be powerful enough for all occasions. So you can use that, too.”

“Yeah, but…you can’t say that to your own mother, Cade,” Jaime protested.

“In your head.” Cade tapped her skull. “It’s the general idea. You think it, when all the worries get to you, and then you roll over and tuck yourself up against Syl—Luc and go to sleep.”

“It does kind of work like that sometimes,” Jaime admitted. “Having that person to tuck yourself into definitely helps handle anything.”

Sarah nodded.

Summer lay back in her chair and sucked on the last little bit of her ice pop. “I wonder if it works the other way?”

The women looked inquiring.

“That guys need to roll over and tuck themselves up into the other person sometimes, too. To handle things.”

Everyone considered that. “They don’t tuck very well,” Jaime decided finally. Summer bit back a grin at the image of rough, muscled Dom tucking his head in Jaime’s lap.

Although…that was oddly easy to imagine.

“I think we’re more like their teddy-bear sometimes,” Jolie said. “You know—we get pulled in and held tight. And
that’s
what reassures them.”

Now all the women were blushing a little, looking out to sea, growing thoughtful and quiet.

Maybe Summer and Luc needed to find more time to do these things. Maybe…maybe Summer needed to be the one who made sure they did.

Something eased suddenly, with all these women around her. Luc had always had trouble finding the right way to show his feelings, outside his desserts. He had always panicked. He had always pushed too hard and held on too tight, then let go at the wrong moment because he started fearing his own tight, greedy hold.

But he did love her. Which gave her all the power anyone could ever need. The power to say,
Luc. Let’s talk.

“You know what I think?” Jolie asked suddenly. “I think the most important thing you can do for your baby is give it a happy family. Parents who stick together and spend time with her. That kind of thing.”

Everyone looked at her, and she shrugged a little, visibly uneasy at the attention and probably what she had just revealed about her own childhood. “That’s just my two cents.”

***

“This is ridiculous,” Sylvain said. “This one says chocolate is a top craving, too.” He slumped broodingly on the floor, his back against the couch. “The Corey women were warped from birth,” he muttered. “That’s the only explanation.”

Slouching himself as usual, Patrick took a healthy swallow of his wine and grinned like a man who had no paternal cares in the world. Easy enough for him, Luc thought. It would be far too premature for Patrick and Sarah to be thinking kids already. Patrick had a lot on his plate as he made a new future for himself. And he and Sarah had barely known each other for…

For six months longer than Luc and Summer had. Luc frowned at his wine glass, a little confused by it. It stood resolutely half-full, the way he liked it, and yet he felt so much more relaxed and easy than he had before they had all ended up on the floor with the wine bottle and their computers out. Relaxed, as if the blunt realization that he and Summer had been a
little
fast about jumping into the baby thing wasn’t a question for angst and crises but just a rather funny bit of precipitousness on their part that they now had to deal with.

It might make things a little complicated, a little challenging. But no end of the world, or their relationship, or happiness as he knew it, loomed in sight.

In fact, he felt so much more comfortable at the idea of dealing with it—happy, relaxed—that he kept suspecting alcohol was involved.

But Dom sat on the other side of his wine glass, and Dom never touched alcohol at all much less fed it to unwitting others. And even Patrick couldn’t manage to surreptitiously re-half-fill Luc’s glass regularly from his slouching position on the other side of Sylvain.

Besides, Patrick and Sylvain and Gabriel seemed to be enjoying sharing the bottle themselves.

“You’d think candied ginger dipped in chocolate would be perfect for any sane pregnant woman,” Sylvain said broodingly. “One that wasn’t genetically scarred.” He gave his wedding ring a darkling glance, presumably in lieu of his wife.

“This one says carbonated beverages. I could make a ginger syrup, mix it with spring water, and carbonate it.” Luc rubbed his thumb against the rug under him, tasting variations without ever parting his lips. His taste receptors actually activated for the combinations he imagined, so well-trained by now. But did they activate the same way Summer’s did, now that pregnancy had turned her taste buds so crazy? “Maybe with a squeeze of fresh lime.”

“You could do a frozen reverse spherification of it,” Gabriel said. “The calcium lactate’s probably good for pregnant women, right? Don’t they need extra calcium? You want me to whip something up right now and see if she likes it?”

No
, Luc did not want him to do that,
merde.
All these greedy men around him trying to feed his wife and baby instead of him.
Back off. She’s mine to feed.

“How’d she like the peaches?” asked Nico, who had somehow ended up in the gathering, too. Luc wasn’t even entirely sure how that had happened. They were colleagues, weren’t they? Surely they weren’t friends already? Despite how much Nico seemed to be amused by him. The other person who was frequently amused by Luc, Patrick, kept eyeing the other chef in this lazy, alert way as if he hadn’t decided what he thought about him yet.