Sun-Kissed (18 page)

“Usually some idiot with one of my daughters.”

Her smile deepened. Her hand slipped, all unplanned, around his waist and rubbed his ribs a little. “You like them.”

A rumbling protest under her ear.

Mmm, the vibration. She wanted to make him rumble again. But words took effort, pulling her away from this feeling.

“Anne,” he murmured, wondering. His hand kept petting her nape, a thumb stroking up over the base of her skull. “This is so nice.” He sounded as if he couldn’t believe in it, how nice it was.

Neither could she. And yet it felt so entirely—credible. Real.

“You think we could just stretch out in one of the hammocks?” he asked. Cautiously. Mack Corey, cautious.
Because she could say no.
“I know we’re the hosts, but…that way I wouldn’t have to see when they make a macaron burger, or whatever they’re likely to do next. Let the kids take charge. That’s what I trained them to be able to do.”

A hammock sounded nice.

Really nice.

Really, incredibly nice.

She turned her head. Patrick and his fiancée Sarah lay in one, Patrick smiling up at the sycamore tree above him, one hand behind his head, the other lazily tracing Sarah’s spine.

An empty one, over there, didn’t exactly hide them from any curious younger generation, but it had a gentle sense of seclusion. She always thought about things like that when she was designing gardens: what would be comfortable, what would be inviting.

And it was inviting.

She nodded against Mack’s chest.

His hand tightened just a second on her nape. “Hey, really?”

Before she could answer, he was already seizing the opportunity, heading them toward the hammock.

When he settled back into it and pulled her in after him, his grin was a sunburst inside her. All that happiness just to be with her.

Anne had no idea how to share a hammock, especially in a skirt. Mack took up a heck of a lot of space, and his weight pulled the canvas all toward him, so that she was the one who had to tumble into him. It wasn’t such a bad warmth and strength to be tumbled into, though.

Actually, it felt pretty damn good.

She shifted onto her back so that she could gaze at their hammock’s sycamore tree, with a smile that was probably pretty close to Patrick’s. Relaxed. Blissful. The sycamore’s mottled gray-green bark showed all its struggles to grow—the stretches and the splits, the chunky, rippled way it tried to fill in for the growth of the trunk. It had a hard time growing bigger than itself, the sycamore. And yet it kept on doing it just the same.

Unexpectedly, her mind flashed back to prison, the little things she’d learned from it. Like how much
life
she had, to savor. How
big
the world was, outside an eight by six cube. And, no matter how iconic your look was, how you should always let a woman dreaming of freedom cut your hair.

That even dreams were a privilege. It had driven her completely mad, the need to get permission for the haircut. But she had learned some things.

She’d learned she acted almost the same way in prison as she did everywhere else. Closed off. Walls up. Ready to fight anyone who got too close back from her.

Some people stayed in the eight by six cubes. They got themselves sent back when they were released, because within that routine, that space, they felt safer.

She didn’t have to be that way.

Mack shifted onto his side, head propped on one hand. Of course that messed up her position—big, dominant, bossy man, even when he didn’t realize it—and she shifted sideways, too, restoring her comfort. Now her back nestled against his chest. He rubbed a slow path down her arm. “You’re so hot.” The low rumble of compliment could have been a code for three other words, the way he said it. “Have I mentioned how sexy you are?” His big hand rubbed over her wrist, linked fingers with hers, this tender, stroking motion of that heat and tough palm that sent tremors of pleasure all through her.

She smiled. At fifty-three, it was pretty damn good to be sexy.

“Thanks for the fight,” she murmured.

Mack didn’t answer for a moment, and she twisted back around enough to catch the guilty twist to his lips. “Anne. Half my fantasies for making love to you involved me
making
you
like it.
Taking your
no
and
conquering
it. I’d
kill
any man who had those fantasies about my daughters. Except then you
told
me to and—Christ, that was hot.”

Against her bottom, she could feel him growing aroused again just at the memory. It made her bottom feel—naughty. Like it wanted to wiggle a tiny bit and gloat over his helpless position to do anything about it out in public in this hammock.

She maybe didn’t wiggle it, exactly, but she shifted position carefully to make herself comfortable. Naturally her butt had to shift a little back and forth for that, too.

A deep sound of approval vibrated into her spine from his chest.

Her smile felt secret and smug. “Well. You know how much I love a good fight,” she said to the hammock fabric.

Mack’s laughter was a delicious texture against her back. “I might have a tiny taste for battle, too.”

Her smile deepened. She might even have let her gluteus maximus squeeze a little bit against a certain hardness. “Maybe we’re made for each other.”

His fingers flexed against hers, his thumb rubbing along the side of her palm. His breath brushed across her temple. “You’re a self-made woman, Anne.”

Yes.

“And not to discount my father’s achievements before I took over the company, but I’m pretty much a self-made man.”

Yes. He’d started on the shoulders of giants, as it were, with his family’s multimillion-dollar company, but he was the one who had forged it into the multibillion-dollar global power it was today.

“So we made ourselves for each other?” Mack asked.

Anne found herself smiling foolishly, half her smile pressed into the hammock, too happy even to turn around.

Mack lifted her hand, fingers still linked, his hand still covering the back of hers, and kissed the bend of her wrist. “Been wanting to do that,” he murmured, and tucked both their hands back against her belly, embracing her.

His head sank onto the hammock. His body eased around hers, strength relaxing. “This is really nice, Anne,” he sighed.

Sun and shadow blurred against her eyelids as she fell asleep.

Chapter 12

Mack woke her involuntarily, trying to slip out of the hammock. “Sorry.” He laid his palm over her forehead and stroked it down over her eyes, closing them. His thumb grazed over her temple, and her eyelashes kept trying to press back open against his hand. Not really fighting the gesture, just wanting to see this strong, tough hand that had come into her world and touched her with so much warmth and gentleness. “Go back to sleep.”

Of course, she couldn’t go back to sleep—it was an astonishing break from habit that she had taken a nap at all—but she didn’t try to sit up. Curled onto her side, she gazed at nothing really, dreams in the air, perhaps, or the astonishing dream-like shape that reality had taken.

Mack’s face appeared in front of hers as he crouched down to bring himself to eye level. His grin flashed. “Notice how easy that was?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, but a smile tried to fight its way up around the corners of her lips. “Sleeping?”

“Sleeping with me.” He ran a thumb over her lips and pressed it into the lower one like a kiss, then he was up and moving away.

“I was tired!” Anne called after him.

He stuck his hand behind his back and shot her a bird.

She burst out laughing. And watched
his
ass as he walked away from her, apparently to resolve something that needed the host’s input. Possibly Sylvain might have raised an eyebrow at the selection of mustard.

Watching his butt made her hands tickle. Like she wanted to be the kind of person who could reach right out and give that butt a pretend smack when he was teasing her.

And maybe she could.

He turned, just before he rounded the corner of the house, and gave her a smug smile over his shoulder, making a gloating show of licking his finger and scoring a point for himself in the air, and she laughed so hard, she had to sit up in the hammock and bury her head in her hands. The laughter swelled out of her like bottled up champagne—shaken up, cork popped off, fizzing out.

I love that man.
It was getting easier to think. Loved him so much it made her helpless with delight, and she hated helplessness. She did.

But just—right at that moment, being helpless with
delight
didn’t seem that bad.

She finally looked up, spotting Kurt.

He was standing at some distance, near the boardwalk over the dunes, as if he’d caught sight of her on his way back from the beach. His face, as their eyes met, slowly split into the most delighted beam. Just boyishly
thrilled
, as if he was ten years old again and she was doing the one cool mom act she had, taking him on all the biggest roller coasters with nerves of steel.

He was that happy…to see
her
happy?

She got up suddenly and hurried across the grass to him, as close to running as that time she’d just spotted him in the airport after he returned from his first two-week summer visit with his father. She’d tried to control herself, tried not to show how ragged his absence had made her feel. Maybe she should have just broken out and run.

His happiness got overtaken by confusion, even some wariness, as she stopped right in front of him. Her beautiful, hazel-eyed son.

She threw her arms around him suddenly and hugged him as tightly as she could. “I love you
so much
,” she told him fiercely. His heart thumped hard under her ear against his chest. She pulled back a little, still holding on. “Have I told you that enough?”

He searched her face cautiously. “Not—not very often, Mom.”

Wait, what? Didn’t he
know
?
She thrust her hands up into his hair, holding his face between her palms, all that love and happiness that had been surging up in her suddenly finding a place where it absolutely needed to go. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. The very best thing.”

His breath caught. Those beautiful, careful, sensitive eyes of his widened, and then he hit something, something painful, in his head, and his lips twisted a little. “Even if you wanted better?”

It shook her so hard it hurt. She stared at him. “I never—there isn’t
better.
”

“Mom.” He turned his head away, his mouth tightening.

“Kurt.” She shook his head a little between her hands. Pain stole her breath. How could he possibly, possibly think that?

“Mom.” His expression tightened, as he tried not to speak. And yet the words slipped out anyway: “I know what happened when you couldn’t have another child after me. I was there, all right? Just—” He shook his head and angled his face farther away.

She gasped. The intense and utter cruelty of so many years of love—failed. Misunderstood. Not expressed enough or right. “Kurt. It wasn’t…I was so happy with you. I knew I needed…more. It was too intense, it was too scary, how much I loved you, how much every single thing about me depended on you. I—I wanted three or four of you. I wanted
spares.
I wanted to see what you would be like if you were a girl, or if you were a wild rebel, or all the variations of you that there could possibly be. I don’t—I wanted more kids because I loved so much the one I
already had.
”

Kurt stood very still, his breath this shallow, tight thing that she recognized so much from when he was a little boy struggling with emotion, trying to be a big boy, because his idiot dad told him big boys didn’t cry. Fuck Clark, anyway. Mack Corey cried. And you didn’t get much bigger than that.

Sometimes you cried because there was too much of you to hold in a human body. Laughter, joy, rage, pain, you had to let some of it out.

“Mom.” His eyes were red, and he was doing that pinching movement of his nose that meant he was fighting with all his might the sting in it.

She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him hard again. Just hugged him as if she could turn back time to when he was still a little boy who loved cuddles and if she hugged him hard enough she would never, ever have to let him go.

Never once, ever, be too busy or too stressed with a growing business or her failing marriage or her post-miscarriage depression and give him just a short, quick hug and tell him to go play.

“Kurt.” She shook her head helplessly. “Every beautiful moment in my life came from you.”

“Mom.” His eyes were definitely dampening now, and his mouth crooked all funny, embarrassed and touched. “You know that can’t possibly be true.”

“You don’t—”
know anything about being a parent
, she had started to say and caught herself just in time. How easily a person could cause careless, cruel wounds, without ever even realizing it. “—understand. From the moment you were born, you just…held my heart.”

From the flicker in his eyes, Kurt realized, at least partially, what she had avoided saying. Or else he was thinking about how some little kid might never hold his heart.

His head turned. He was looking for his wife. For Kai, who might have torn his heart into pieces, but who still held all those pieces in her hand. Anne found herself wanting to glance around for Mack. For that strong, sure hand to help hold
her
heart. To not leave all of her pieces in the hands of a son who clearly needed both hands these days just to hold his wife’s.

They leave you.
It sighed through her like waves on a beach.

And, that vital, utterly strong voice:
Yeah, I don’t do that leaving shit.

She tightened her arms around her son.

“Thank you, Mom,” Kurt said very softly, and bent and kissed the top of her head. He stood for a moment, his hands resting awkwardly on her shoulders, and then, as she kept hugging him, slipped his arms around her and gave her a sudden, fierce squeeze back. “
Thank you.
”

She let him go, reluctantly, and they both took a deep breath. He gave her a shaky, wondering, hopeful smile, and then walked quickly back toward the beach. She watched him stop at the railing out where the benches were. He stood there a while, and then headed out onto the beach. Kai came out of the house in time to spot him, waved at Anne, and headed after him.