Turning Up the Heat (12 page)

She sent him that shy smile of hers. It was funny how sometimes she could still be so shy with him. He liked it. But sometimes he wondered about it.

But then, part of him still felt profoundly shy with her, and he didn’t think she even guessed it. “Love you,” he murmured out loud, to cover even a hint of that shyness, which was not part of his I’ll-be-your-hero role, and her eyes brightened.

Yes, everything was just fine. He was the luckiest man in the damn world.

“To think if my father hadn’t insisted, I would have become a mechanic,” he murmured. “He was right about a lot of things, Papa.”

“A—
mechanic
?” Léa said in utter astonishment.

Had he never even mentioned that to her before? “Or stayed in school and studied, I don’t know, literature or something. He wanted me to do something practical. And once I picked the culinary apprenticeship, he wouldn’t let me quit.”

“You wanted to
quit
?”

Well, it was nice to know he had grown so much that she couldn’t believe in the smaller him. “It was tough, to be suddenly cut off from every single friend I had. You know—no nights, no weekends. And I had a good friend who was doing the mechanic training. And, I mean, I liked motorcycles and beautiful cars as much as the next teenager. I was only fifteen, Léa. But Papa—it’s not fair to say he wouldn’t
let
me quit. But he argued adamantly that a man didn’t quit when things were hard. He just worked harder, to turn what he did into something exceptional.”

Léa brought one sticky hand to her mouth, staring at him.

“So I did turn it into something exceptional.” He shrugged. And if he didn’t quit then, there was nothing else in life he was ever going to quit. As an only child whose mother was dead, his friends had been vitally important to him. The sudden isolation had been horrible. “And then I met you. And I knew my father had been right.” She had been worth the loss of all his other friends. She had been worth honing himself into a bright and shining star.

He was born to do that, really—driven, dominant, intense, perfectionist. To her yielding, sweet warmth. It had felt like the match made in heaven to
him.

He had even felt perfect for her, too. He had, after all, the ideal career for the daughter of a three-star chef, a girl who had grown up thinking that making wonders out of food was the epitome of what a man could be.

“Literature, hunh.” She tilted her head. “I’m trying to imagine you as a professor.” Her head angled to the other side. “Or restoring some old car.”

He blinked and pushed himself up on one elbow, curiously. She didn’t seem turned off by either image.

As if he could have been whatever he wanted to be and still had her.

His insides seemed to whoosh out of him in some gasping freefall plunge into the surreal.

She smiled a little, at whatever images were playing in her head. “You know, you look gorgeous no matter what you do,” she told him and slid off the bed to go wash her hands in the bathroom.

He stared after her, all bearings lost. The thought that she might have loved him still, if he had been a professor or a mechanic instead of a top chef—he couldn’t even process that. Possibly because he couldn’t imagine himself being either of those things anymore. Being a superstar chef was so completely and utterly all he was. Not a father, barely a husband, barely a son to his own father whom he saw so infrequently now, just a chef, chef, chef. So damn good at it. So unbearably, intensely good at it.

He lay back down on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and heard the shower run, briefly.

Hmm. He looked down his own body, realizing suddenly that they might need to have a discussion. Léa wasn’t on the pill. She had tried a couple different versions of it, long ago, and hated them, and he had hated them, too, the way they took his Léa’s moods and changed her into someone different. The first one, with her increased aggression and her decreased interest in sex, had driven him frantic, and the second one...the third time in three days that she burst into tears over something utterly stupid, he had begged her to stop using it. And since then, he had always taken responsibility for contraception, and if that was a little less sure of a method, well—they were married, and he supposed on his end he had always assumed that if an accident did occur, they would adjust to the consequences and that Léa would be a gloriously wonderful mother. And he would figure out a way to tell her that he couldn’t keep this pace anymore as a father, that he, too, deserved to spend time with his family.

None of which made him any less of a bastard to have ignored his responsibilities on this particular occasion. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, but he wasn’t a careless man, and he knew damn well what his subconscious had been trying to do.

Lock her back up to him. Make sure she wouldn’t even think about slipping away.

Putain
, articulated like that in his head it made him seem—vile. Léa could have reminded him, he thought defensively. It wouldn’t be the first time she had to whisper
don’t forget
. So why hadn’t she this time? Just lost in that trust that she gave to him so easily, or was her subconscious trying to do something, too?

He grimaced, running his hands over his face as he heard the shower shut off. Yes, they needed to have a discussion, and
putain
, why did it seem like such a dangerous one?

Coming out of the bathroom, wrapped in a blue hibiscus pareo, Léa grinned at the sight of Daniel on his back with one arm thrown over his face and aloe glistening on his chest. He so hated that stuff.

He had such a gorgeous body, though. It was a damn waste to feel it mostly at one in the morning. They needed to take more vacations. Do more things where she could just stop and enjoy the view of him. A mechanic, hunh. It was oddly easy to imagine it. He would have ended up one of those mechanics who made one-off models for Ferrari auto shows. Or, seeking greater independence, started his own custom-built motorcycle business and ended up with a television show following him around as he turned old plates from the Eiffel Tower into new works of chopper art. Professor was more of a stretch, but it wasn’t a bad one: the thought of him quieter, more cerebral, all that drive poured into his intellect, until he probably would have become the next Sartre. He might not have ended up with quite the same gorgeous definition in his body, but then again, knowing Daniel, he would be quite capable of becoming Sartre while running triathlons on the side. Still, imagining him with a slightly geekier physique made her smile.

She stretched out on the bed beside him, cuddling her head against one folded arm, pretending she was a professor’s arty wife, maybe an art professor herself. Letting the vision lull her, content to drift toward sleep with him even though it wasn’t even ten a.m. yet. It was that kind of day, and the bungalow that kind of spot, soft and shady and at peace, filled with sweet scents and the lullaby of waves.

And if she thought too much past
him
and
them
, tried to think about
her
, she felt tired again. So she pushed herself out of her mind, in order to dwell in the more important pleasures of the moment.

Daniel rolled to his side and propped himself on one elbow just as her lashes were drifting closed. Her eyes flickered back open enough to be caught by the brilliance of his, very intent, and for some reason she wanted to squeeze her eyes shut again.

“In answer to your question the other day,” he said, just before her lashes reached her cheeks. “Yes. I would like for us to have kids.”

Her eyes flared wide open, her contentment gone as if he had stabbed straight through it and through her, impaling her to a wall. Oh,
God.
She had known this was coming. She should have known. She was nearing thirty. And she wanted to run
screaming
, please
no, no, no
,
I can’t, I can’t. Daniel—not more
.

He was over her in a second, grabbing her shoulder as she started to roll out of bed, holding her to the mattress. “
What?
” he said between his teeth. “
Why?
Léa. Tell me why you look like that, at the thought of my kids.”

She jerked a little on her shoulder, and her heart rose up in her, strangling her with tears. Oh, those damn tears. “It’s nothing to do with yo”—The tears spilled out, only this time not a quiet secret, this time something ragged and painful.

“God damn it.” He flung himself out of bed and to the nearest open window, silhouetting himself against azure ocean and a coast of tawny volcanic sand and verdant green. “Now my kids have nothing to do with me?” He reached up to grasp the window frame.

Léa sat up and curled over her crossed legs, trying to stop crying. “I’m sorry, it’s so stupid, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

He hung his head, gripping the frame until his knuckles turned white, and watched her. “Léa.” His voice ground, processed with great effort. “You’re killing me.”

“
Why?
” she cried suddenly, frantically. “I told you I just needed a little break. I told you I just wanted to get away on my own for a few days. I told you I love you still.
Why is this so wrong?
We’ve been married for over ten years, and I’ve never taken a break once!”

His hand flexed until it was a wonder the frame didn’t rip right off. “Neither have I,” he said low, harshly.

“But you
wanted
that! My God, Daniel. I know you said you did it for me, but you’re the one who kept driving, long past any reasonable success. You’re never satisfied! You always have to do more!”

His head flung up. He stared at her. “I—
I
wanted that? Léa. You found the TV spots. You cheered when I succeeded. You handed me your father’s restaurant and expected me to save it.”

“We were in it together!” she said, stunned. Him and her, shoulder to shoulder, against the world. There hadn’t been really any way to distinguish what he wanted and she wanted, those first few years, or even who she was and who he was, both focused on the same goal. The restaurant’s success. His success. Not letting the restaurant become the albatross around his neck, the weight he took on too young, but turning it into the tool that let him become all that he could be. She hadn’t realized, until the day before, that Daniel had ever admitted to himself that the restaurant was too much for a nineteen-year-old chef-in-training to take on. But
she
had always known it. And she had so desperately wanted him to be able to fly as high as his oversized ambitions pushed him.

“I know that. I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget how brave you were or how much you trusted me. Léa—when a man climbs a glass mountain, it’s not usually for the damn golden apple. It’s for the person he gives the apple to.”

Her tears sprang out again, harder, but sparkling somehow with the beauty of what he had just said. “Daniel”—

“And I’ve
told
you this already, Léa. Yesterday, I told you. The day before I told you. How many different ways do you need to hear that every damned thing I do is for you?
Putain.
Even if you don’t know what’s wrong,” he said, low and stark. “Just try to tell me what it is. Just try, Léa. I need to know.”

Something snapped. She clutched fistfuls of the quilt suddenly and, when that wouldn’t rip, flung herself off the bed. “How the hell should I
know
, Daniel? I can barely even
see
me. It’s you, and my brother, and my sister, and the restaurant, and the numbers, and the damn personnel issues, and you, you, you. You’re everything, and
you’re
not even there, you’re so busy being so huge, the best of the best of the best, it’s like I wave to you from far away in the stands to cheer you on, hoping you’ll glance up and see my little flag and know I care. Now you say you do it for me, but from where I’m sitting—I
think
you glance up. I
think
it matters, that I be there in the stands cheering. I
think
it makes a difference. But God knows...it’s not about me. I don’t care what you
say,
don’t you think that I would know it, if ever once, in the past eleven years, there had been something really about
me
? Sometimes, Mondays, at lunch with my cousins, I can almost breathe, I can almost feel myself, no, I can almost feel as if I
have
a self—and then someone calls and needs me to solve something, or there’s a consulting request for you and I need to figure out your schedule, or my brother’s girlfriend dumped him, or...you just
look
at me, and I’m all gone again. I love you
so much
and you are
so big
, and I am
nothing.
Just nothing.”

And she stood there, too exhausted to even slump back down on the bed, her head hanging as those silent tears gushed out and dripped wearily down her cheeks.

He just stared at her, stunned. His arm had dropped from the windowframe.

She brought her hands up to cover her face. “And I can’t—I just can’t—have kids on top of it right now. I can’t. I think I’ll drown.”

His face had gone very white. He reached both hands behind him and gripped the lower part of the frame now, for support. “So you do need even less of me.” His voice was stretched and twisted, like some bent, hard-worked piece of metal.