Shadowed Heart (7 page)

Ah, yes, a perfect fit. Lovely. Lovely how this still worked. His mind flashed visions of a bump slowly getting in the way, then getting so big they had to give up this position entirely, and he stroked his hand between them over her belly, cupping it fully for the first time since she had told him, the whole awareness that a baby was in there turned surreal and beautiful. Did it feel beautiful to her? It was
happening
to her. God, how must that feel?

He kissed her again, trying to find out, trying to steal that feeling from right inside her and taste it himself. “You taste just the same,” he murmured. That was strange, too, as if she should taste new and exotic. “I’m glad. I’m glad you taste like mine.”

She pulled back a little, but he kept one hand firm under her butt, to keep that delicious pressure against his groin. “You don’t think you’ll like it when I change?”

“I think you’ll be the most beautiful pregnant woman the world has ever seen,” he said, in complete honesty.
Merde
, they’d probably be trying to get her to pose naked for
Vanity Fair.
And they wouldn’t have to touch her up, either. She’d cause some whole new wave of Madonna paintings among artists. Probably triple next year’s birth rate, with all the women who wanted to look like her.

Her face got all funny, crinkling up, her eyes so wondering it was almost as if a sheen of tears was making them sparkle. “Really?”

“Summer. How can you know so well how beautiful you are and still not
know
it?” Sometimes he hated the whole damn world that had ever gotten to her before he did.

She shrugged, all pleased and embarrassed. So he kissed one of those beautiful, strong swimmer’s shoulders. She could swim much farther than he could. And yet her shoulders would always, always be so much smaller.
Is the Mediterranean enough of a swimming pool for her? Or is she missing the South Pacific?

It was weird how that made her sound so spoiled, even in his head, when it was actually one of the least spoiled things about her. She’d spent four years in the South Pacific, on a remote island, teaching school. Shut as far away as she could from everyone in the world besides her islanders and her school kids.

Her cousin Jaime talked about how it was the only way Summer could be real. She’d warned him about it, actually, in a little moment under a coconut palm tree at their wedding, nibbling at the pork from the great roast the islanders had done for them. Not warned him away, exactly—they were already married by then—just discreetly alluded to a problem he might need to be alert to, if he took Summer away from the place she felt so real and solid to the world where she felt fragile and alone.

You’re not fragile at all
, he told her strong shoulder, rubbing his face against her skin, kissing his way to the curve of it.
I’m here. All around you, see? Feel how my arms have got you? And I’m only fragile for you.

Because somehow, when I give you that fragile part of me, you give me back all my strength.

God, she felt so sweet. She smelled so sweet. She
was
so sweet. He still, to this day, could barely handle the amount of sweetness she had brought into his life, him, the world-famous pastry chef. “I love you,” he whispered into her throat, up to the curve of her jaw.

Her hands climbed up his back to grip his shoulders, pulling her in tight to him. “You do?”

So much reassurance, Summer always needed. He petted her. “Of course I do,” he murmured to that delicate curve of her ear. “I’ll always love you.”

Her arms tightened very hard around him, and she turned her face suddenly into his throat, taking a deep breath. “Even if I’m fat?”

He had a sudden vision of a plump Summer which amused the hell out of him. She was so compulsively slender. But yeah, he was pretty sure he would like it. Why not? Especially if she was comfortable with it herself.

Of course, if she ever even gained five pounds, her mother would stop by and start pinching her waist and smoothing her own clothes over her svelte form in satisfaction at being thinner than her daughter, so it wasn’t like the comfortably plump Summer was ever actually going to
happen.
But—he rubbed his hands over her waist and hips. “You’d still be beautiful,” he told her. “You know that, don’t you?”

But she didn’t. That was part of Summer’s problem. She’d been so damn beautiful her whole life that she had no idea what her actual beauty
was.

“You’ll always be beautiful,” he told her, kneading his hands into her butt, possibly one of his hands’ top five favorite things to do in the whole world. The other four involved her body, too. “Because, Summer: You. Are. Beautiful.”

As if by breaking it down into small words, she could understand.

And she did for a minute. Her head lifted, and her face lit. She kissed him, long and sweet and deep.

“But if, when you say
fat,
you’re talking about being pregnant—
merde
, Summer, I’ve always wanted to see you pregnant out to”—he leaned her backward over his arm, which ground her hips so very nicely against his, and then backwards and backwards until there was as much room as he could imagine for a baby bump, which left her horizontal to the floor and clutching at his arms, all her security and stability dependent on him. He smiled at her, a fierce, sharp shard of joy—“here.”

He’d wanted to see her pregnant so much that he’d never understood how, once he actually got it, the panic of having so much happiness to lose would reach up into his throat and
choke
him.

“Luc.” Summer pulled at his arms, perturbed by her precarious position. But it wasn’t precarious. It all depended on him, a tantalizing, arousing power. She could depend on him. He wouldn’t let her drop.

He walked her backward toward the bed, still keeping her horizontal to the floor, laughing at her unease.
I’ve got you. You’re mine. I won’t let you fall, but you have to put yourself entirely in my hands. You’re mine.

Arousal pressed through him at the way their hips ground together with each step, at how vulnerable she was to him.

“Luc, stop,” Summer said, her eyes flickering with anxiety, and he laughed and rested her on the bed.

I’ve got you, you know. Quit worrying. Shh, soleil. I promise you’re safe with me.

But laying her back on the bed made it far too easy for her to wriggle away and escape, so he drew one hand up her arms and caught her wrists, pinning them to the bed. Oh, yes. Yes, he liked her this way, stretched out for him, his. That dark thing rose up in him, that starved, old need to ravage her, fighting for freedom from his control.
No
, he told that dark thing. He needed that control to make sure she came and came and came, to make sure every beautiful sensation in her body came from him. To keep her addicted.

“Luc,” she protested, pulling at her wrists. “Let me go.”

He laughed. “Use your safe word,” he teased, letting his other hand trail as delicate and tantalizing as he could make it from the hollow of her throat in a little dancing pattern down her breastbone, under her breasts, down her belly.

He loved her “safe word”.
Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime.
She’d thrown it out there ironically once in one of the more dangerous moments of their developing relationship, when everything seemed to keep going entirely wrong. These days, it had lost all sense as a “safe word”, provoking him to do more and more of whatever was making her say it and not stop, but that was okay. They were just playing. Playing that he’d captured her, playing that she couldn’t break free. She liked it as much as he did. He’d know if she ever really wanted him to stop.

He felt quite sure.

“Luc, I
mean it
.” She twisted with sudden, desperate strength.

His hand hardened on her wrists in instant reaction, and she made a pleading, angry sound—and his hand jerked back as he realized what he was doing.

She scrambled away from him, while his world swirled around one hard time and stopped dead again.

Summer dove off the bed and ran toward the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

“Summer!” He hadn’t—had she felt
threatened
? He—

Then the unmistakable sounds of retching came through the door.

Oh.

His stupid, possessive games had made her throw up. All the arousal and confusion slid off him in defeated shame.

He tried to open the door and found it locked.
Damn it, Summer.
He pulled a credit card out of his wallet and wriggled it through the crack to force the lock free.

“Don’t come in here!” Summer cried as he pulled the door open.

He stopped. She hadn’t made it to the toilet in time and knelt with vomit in her hair and on her pretty silk pajama top. She met his eyes for one defeated second, and then flinched into herself, throwing her arms over her face and turning away, trying to hide, as she started to cry.

“Summer.
Soleil.
” He stroked her curved back. “Shh. It’s all right. I’m so stupid. Shh. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, but she didn’t lift it from the arms that hid it.

He grasped, dimly and distantly, that the actual morning sickness might not be his immediate fault—he’d put that morning sickness in motion a little over six weeks ago, or longer, if you counted all the times he had teased and coaxed about children and drawn visions in the air for her of how happy they were going to be as a family. But the fact that she had not made it to the toilet in time, her current agonizing shame, was most definitely due to him.

To his need to claim her. Thinking with his fucking dick.

Only it hadn’t felt like just his dick at the time; it had felt more like his desperate heart.

“Shh.” He drew her up by the waist, because she still kept herself as hidden as she could, and guided her to the shower, turning it on. “Shh.”

“Luc, please go away,” Summer said miserably.

“You know, Summer,” he said very, very gently, easing the soiled pajama top up over her resistant arms, trying to make sure he didn’t smear any more of the stuff on her. “You’re still beautiful to me. Even right this second—
especially
right this second—you’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

Her head did lift a little at that, and she stared at him over the arms that still hid most of her face, her eyes wet with tears.

“Shh.” He stroked her bare spine. Then slid her pajama bottoms and sexy lace panties off with the ease of considerable practice and put her under the shower. “Summer. Sometimes I still think that when I say I love you, you have no idea what it means.”

And it scared him, because it made him want to turn into a teenage boy in one of his old, disastrous, desperate relationships again, trying to
force
his love onto her, trying to
make
her understand how important it was:
I love you! You can’t leave me because I love you!

Because if she didn’t know, she might give up on it too easily when things got tough and run away.

“It’s not just because of this.” He stretched his arm under the shower, his shirtsleeve getting soaked as he touched one of those delicate, photogenic cheekbones. He stripped his shirt off, wishing he could just strip everything off and step into that shower with her, but—

Yeah. She probably wasn’t in the mood.

But she might pretend to be in the mood, because she faked things when she was insecure. Faked things just to please him, because she loved him so much that she was afraid of losing him, too. It drove him mad, because unless he managed to catch her at it, that skill at faking things made it, in fact, really hard to know when she was feeling insecure. And her insecurity was the great, giant weakness in his happiness, the thing that could bring it tumbling down.

Wasn’t it? Or was that thing that always felt on the brink of tearing everything apart his own insecurity?

“It’s not just because of this.” He let his fingers slide with the water down her side, just brushing the curve of her breast and hip. “So if your body or your face changed, I would still love you.”

Summer pressed her forearms against the shower wall, letting the water stream down over her bent head and curved back. Arousal beat in him at the view. God, he could think of
all kinds
of things to do with that view, all kinds of ways to re-assert his possession of her and make her enjoy it.

Except what kind of bastard inflicted himself on his pregnant wife minutes after she’d been throwing up and sobbing? He angled his head to better see her face. Were those shower droplets running over her cheeks or was she still crying? “You love beautiful things,” she muttered to the shower. “You know you do.”

“You’re not a thing,” he pointed out to her. She’d told him so once herself. And he’d lifted his finger to arrange a lock of her hair, just as he was doing now. Not because he thought she was a thing, but because he loved to touch her as if she was his, and he couldn’t stop himself. “Remember?”

Her mouth twisted into what was at least half a smile, and she lowered her forehead to rest it on the shower wall. A sigh ran through her body.

I could make her sigh. I could make her sigh in just that position, with the water running down all over us, and I’d have to hold her up because all her muscles would give up and let me take over...

Bastard. Sometimes the insane him and the him he tried to keep in control became far too hard to distinguish. Was his current hunger for her, despite and
because
of her vulnerability, a little nuts, or would every man be that much of a jerk?

Merde,
what was he thinking? Half the world fantasized about his wife. Yes, every man would be that much of a jerk, if standing right here. And it didn’t make him feel better about himself at all.

“I love you,” he repeated out loud firmly. Because in that he did have all the other men in the world beat. He loved her more than anyone else ever possibly could.

(Although her islanders loved her, that masochistic son of a bitch he hid inside him pointed out. Loved her in a relaxed way, a sane, swing in a hammock and drink a beer and chat way. A way that made her very happy.)