Shadowed Heart (22 page)

Her eyes widened. “I gave this to you?”

“We talked about it once.” Maybe they had never talked about it more because it was too delicate a fancy. What if on closer inspection, it turned out they were wrong? That he hadn’t been the dark-haired little boy she remembered from that park, and his little golden princess was some other little girl.

Her fingers tightened on it. “I guess I didn’t—” She broke off.

Yeah.
Didn’t want to question it too closely. Didn’t want to risk believing in it enough to put it to the test.

“I got in trouble,” she remembered suddenly. “For being careless with my things. For being…spoiled.” Her smile twisted. “I think I was sent to my room alone and denied dessert.”

Her goddamn parents. “It made all the difference to me,” he said fiercely. “Back then. You don’t know how hard I held onto it, when I needed to dream of being something better. Of having something beautiful.”

Her eyes shimmered. “Luc.” She touched his face. “
You
are the beauty. You have no idea, do you, how beautiful you
are. Not the things you make. You.” Her hand cupped his cheek. “So you see…you did, indeed, make a thing of beauty that no one could ever steal from you.”

God, she hurt his heart. It was as if that heart couldn’t get used to thumping so hard from joy and kept bruising itself on its own happiness. Who knew that even happiness required you to be tough enough to brave it? He lifted her hand, clutched around his bracelet, and kissed it. “You’ve got all the desserts you want now.”

“Oh, Luc.” She petted his chest. “All this heart in you. Sometimes I just can’t believe it’s all for me.”

He covered her hand, holding it tight to the beat of his heart. “It is, though.”

She was trying not to cry, her face so soft from tenderness and emotion. She brought her head in to rest against the join of his shoulder, and a little sigh escaped against his throat. Barely louder than a breath, she whispered, “I’m still alone sometimes, though.”

He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer to him, even though it crushed a battered corner of his box. He’d crushed that carton in his arms so many times. It was good to have something that was his that wasn’t a thing, and that couldn’t fit in a carton. Even if it was terrifying that his very special non-thing had legs and could walk away. “I’m sorry,” he said very softly. “I just—I think I’m still a little messed up.”

“Yeah.” She brought his hand to her mouth and cradled it there, so that he could feel the soft pressure of her lips as she spoke. “Me, too.”

“I’m really sorry,” he whispered to her. “I want that baby so bad, it’s just…I can’t stand it. All the ways I can lose you both just keep clawing their way out of this box I try to lock them in and crawling through my brain. I
hate them.
” Those damn crawling monster thoughts. “
And I can’t stop them.
”

She loosed his hand to place both of hers on his shoulders, stroking downward in soothing, petting motions. As if he was in a nightmare.

Yeah, he had monsters in his head with an IQ of ten. Summer didn’t have an atom in her capable of abandoning her child to unhappiness.

“That’s why I work so late,” he said, low. “I can control that. Whether that restaurant succeeds or not is entirely in my power.”

“It’s okay, Luc,” she whispered. “I told you it was okay.”

“I know,” he admitted. He just…couldn’t make himself believe her. Kept seeing it all shatter in his hands or get eaten by a greedy world.

She eased the bracelet from between their bodies and looked at it, gleaming and pretty and so little-girlish in her hand.

“Why did you give it to him?” Luc asked.

“Because he was so nice to me,” she said. “He made me feel so special. He was like this superhero. He could do
everything
, climb all the bars, and he took time and lifted me up for them. He played with me. He was special.” Her thumb traced over his cheekbones. “Why did you keep it?”

“I wanted to keep her,” he said very low. “And I couldn’t.”

She shifted the box enough that it was on her lap and she could nestle completely into his, wrapping her arms around him hard.

“I’ve never been able to keep anything,” he said through his tight throat, into her hair.

Her arms tightened still harder. “You’ve got
me
,” she said. Then brought his hand to her belly. “Us.”

“Your island—”

“A visit, Luc. A
visit.
Because they’re my friends, and I miss them, and I want to tell them the news in person and see them be
happy
for me. You knew I’d miss them and want to go back to see them sometimes. We talked about it. You even said once you might try to close the new restaurant for a month every year, in August, and we would spend that month together on Manunui.”

“Summer.” He could barely say it out loud. “It’s all I can do not to cut your passport into shreds. Fifty times a day I have to stop myself. I know what I promised you, about seeing your island. You just—you don’t know how bad I am. Inside.”

Her eyes had widened, at the threat to her passport. She frowned a little at him and sat up to frame both his cheeks with her hands, the bracelet pressing between her palm and his skin. “Yeah, that’s not good. You’ve got to build a little more trust than that, Luc. I can’t be your prisoner.”

“I know,” he said, defeated. He just didn’t know how to do it. Even right now, with her in his lap making it so obvious that she loved him, panic raked claws along his insides at the thought of her going to that island without him.

She gazed at him a long moment, and he tried not to close his eyes in shame. She was trying to make a life with him and all that mess he hid inside his soul. He had to have the guts to let her see what that mess was. To let her know that he was so damn far from that perfect he wished he could be.

“Sometimes,” she said softly, “when trust muscles have been atrophied, they take a long, long time to grow. And a lot of work. And it’s painful and it hurts, and you have to keep going. You have to yell at yourself to push harder sometimes and not give up. Go through trust physical therapy.”

“Is that what you do?” he realized, stroking his hands over her hair. “Force yourself over and over to keep going, whenever you start believing I can’t possibly love you?”

Her eyes filled with tears, just like that. It was so easy to touch something vulnerable, with Summer, when you touched close to her heart. She blinked them back, but admitted, low, “There’s always this other voice. That says I’m not worth that, so how can you?”

“Do you tell it to shut the hell up?”

“I do,” she said firmly.

“Yes.” He sighed. “Me, too.”

She curled against him, petting his chest, easing with every stroke the fear and tension in him, calming those monster thoughts into quiescence. They slipped away from her touch and scent, like shadows fleeing light. Oh, God, he needed so much more of this—this talking, this stroking. Even if he never won another star in his life, he had to make time for this.

“I’m going to make you a new bracelet,” she whispered. “Something you can look at and be reminded that I’ll always love you.”

“I think that’s what my wedding ring is supposed to do,” he admitted, stretching the fingers of his left hand.

She stroked it. God, he loved the feel of her fingers there at those hypersensitive, hypertense bases of his. Sometimes it was all he could do not to beg her to keep rubbing his hand forever. “So you need more,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s okay.”

“You, too, don’t you?” He rubbed his fingers over her own wedding ring. “You need more from me.”

She was silent for a moment. “I just need you, Luc.” She looked up at him. “You to touch me. You to go shopping with me. You to hold my hand and talk to me about the baby. I don’t need you to do greater, bigger, more perfect and amazing things. I just need you to be there sometimes when I’m scared and lonely.”

It hurt him in this fierce, deep way, to think that he had left her scared and lonely. He hugged her in tight, rubbing her back. “What scares
you
?”

Again the threat of tears shimmered, all those pregnancy hormones finding all her vulnerabilities and playing them up. “Luc. Sometimes
everything
scares me. I try so hard to be like Cade and Jaime, with all their confidence, or like Jolie, just cheerful and happy, or like Sarah, so strong and persistent. And I just—I’m not like
any
of them. I’m
scared
I’ll mess up my baby. I’m scared I’ll make her turn out like me.” And then she did start to cry, breaking Luc’s heart.

“Giving?” Luc said, so
furious
with all the world, with her parents. He’d fucking
hit
her father if Sam Corey dared come down for their baby’s birth. “Sweet? Smart? Kind to small children?”

Summer shook her head. “That’s not enough, Luc. I want her to be
brave.
”

“Brave enough to risk her heart over and over? Brave enough to make a new life for herself on a remote island in the South Pacific? Brave enough to make another new life here, for love?”

“Luc,” she protested, almost angry. “You know that’s not—I mean
really brave.
Tough. Sure of herself.”

He tilted her back in his arms to kiss her. “You know the only way I would want our daughter to be different from you, Summer? I want her to believe she’s loved. That I love her. That you love her. And that one day, she’ll deserve someone else’s love, too. And I think we can give her that.”

Yes. All at once, he was absolutely certain. And with that certainty, all the rest of the fears fell away. Yes, he could love his daughter or his son: take time with them, play with them, make special things for them, just, damn it,
love them.

And count on Summer to love them herself, because of course she would, but also—to make sure they knew Luc loved them, too. To guide him, if she thought he wasn’t doing something right. “You’ll help me, won’t you, Summer?” He rubbed that bracelet against her palm.

“Oh, Luc.” She threw her arms suddenly around his shoulders and kissed his neck. “You’re so much better at loving than you realize.”

“I still want your help,” he insisted.

She shook her head a little against his throat, but her lips brushed his skin with each shake. “All right.”

His heart eased. “You could start right now,” he murmured. “You could let me know how I could take care of my baby’s mommy.”

That word.
Maman.
That he had never, ever been able to say, except as an absence.

That was going to become such a beautiful word.

It hurt how beautiful, but…he thought he could learn to stand it. He thought that hurt might change over time into the most extraordinary joy in the world.

“I just need us to talk more.” Summer snuggled into him. “Times like this…that’s all I really need. It helps so much.”

“Yes,” he agreed, this sigh in his voice like a fatigued soldier slumping at last to rest. “It definitely does.” For a little while, they were quiet, just absorbing the scent and feel of each other. That utterly beautiful scent and texture of love.

“You know what else I think?” he asked softly, petting her hair. “You’ll worry too much, and I’ll worry too much, and maybe I’ll need you to remind me to step outside my comfort zone and relax. Maybe you’ll have to nag me about that. Maybe, even, all my life you might have to nag me about that. It’s okay, though, if you nag me, Summer. I’ll still love you, even if you have some needs.”

She bit her lip and gave the tiniest sniffle and that infuriating smile of hers that meant she was trying to hide the sniffle.

“I
want
to be the person you nag, Summer. I
need
you to. It’s good for me. It reminds me there are more parts of me that are important to you than the ones you can eat.”

Now the smile that kicked across her face was real and involuntary. “You idiot,” she said lovingly. “You always get so stuck on that. As if that’s all to you there is.”

Yeah. And it made him feel so weird, and giddy, and
good
to know there was more to him. But vulnerable. God, so exposed, in all his messy insides. Desserts were the only part of him he knew he could get absolutely right. Good enough for her.

Thus his rapid descent into paranoia and obsession when he’d lost that security.

Thank God for Patrick, and Sylvain, and Dom, and Nico, and Gabriel. To wiggle their humor and camaraderie into his life, to remind him that there was more to living than being perfect all the time. “Maybe we’ll even need some friends to help us relax. But it will be all right. We’ve made a few friends in our lives, and—we
made
them, you know? We did things that made them like us and want to help us in return. That’s why people love you so much on your island. Because you taught every one of their kids with your whole heart, and, knowing you, were as polite and smiling as you could possibly be to every single person you met.”

“It’s not working so well here,” she said wistfully.

“We’ve only been here three months. Give it time.” He didn’t quite himself believe it. He’d invested
twelve years
of care and mentoring and fighting and working together, of friendship and more, into Patrick. He might never in his life develop another friend that good.

But…he thought about Nico. Sylvain. Dom. Gabe. There were people around him willing to give a deeper friendship with him a try.

“And I don’t see why it would be so bad for me to take a trip for a week back to see all my friends on Manunui. They’d be thrilled
.
”

Oh, yes, they would show her how thrilled they were so much better than he would. She would feel so happy and secure. It would be quite the contrast to his stupid, screwed-up, obsessive, panicked way of loving her.

Of course, if she got tempted to stay there, he could track her down. Take time to relax himself. Enjoy how happy she was there and bring her back with him, refreshed. He’d chased her down to her island once before and found she had already turned around and headed straight back across the world to him, because she missed him so much.

It was
healthy
that she needed her friends in moments like this. It
didn’t
mean she was leaving him.