Turning Up the Heat (2 page)

He hit the voicemail. “
Coucou, chéri.
” Her voice sounded odd. Wistful and a little nervous. Anxiety tightened again, and he pivoted, still half-searching for signs someone had dragged her off against her will and was now holding her hostage. “I’m sorry to sneak out on you this way. You must be on the plane already. I just—needed to get away for a while.” A little nervous laugh. It made him want to surge out of shadows, eviscerate the man holding a gun to her head while she made this call, a bastard who had sure as hell messed with the wrong knife skills. “I’m, ah—I know you’re going to think this is crazy, but—I’m going to Tahiti. I think I’ll stay a week or two. I’m not sure exactly. I’ll try to call you in a few days. I just need a break. I...” She clearly had no idea what to say next. And suddenly, brightly: “I hope you had a great flight!” The voicemail ended.

Daniel pulled his phone away from his ear and stared at the moonlight over the valley of roses. What?

He hit call back immediately, no longer giving a damn if he woke her up. A cricket chirped from her bedside table. Her phone. He stared at it and actually almost started to leave a message, so intense was his need to talk to her. But then he realized how stupid he was being and slowly hung up.

“Wh—what the hell is going on, Dan?” His neighbor Grégory stumbled as Daniel dragged him out in front of his house two hours later. After listening to that message over and over. After sitting on their bed gnawing at it. After hunting through the house to see exactly what she had taken—not her family heirlooms, at least. A deep breath there. And he didn’t see her wedding rings abandoned anywhere.

“Did you see anything?” Daniel gestured toward the view of his own house. “Any signs of trouble?”

“Danny...it’s not even dawn yet. Wait—what? What do you mean—trouble?”

“Léa is gone.”

“
What?
”

“She said she was going on a little trip,” Daniel said, but then wished he hadn’t. He didn’t want to falsely reassure anyone who might help in the search. “I just—did you see her when she left yesterday?”

“Sure, she waved. She did have a suitcase.”

“Did you see anyone in the back of the car?” Daniel asked tensely.

Grégory gaped. “You mean—like a lover?
Merde
, Dan...do you think...?”

Daniel stared at him in white shock, feeling as if the man had just detonated a grenade in his belly. “A
lover
? You think she has a
lover
?”

“No.” Grégory backed up a step.

Daniel followed. “What the fuck have you seen?”

“
Nothing!
Just...when you said about someone being in the car”—

“Someone forcing her to go! Her voice sounded funny! Not a—
lover
, damn you.”

“No! No. She seemed—fine. Happy, even.”

That stopped Daniel for a moment. He looked back over at his house. “Happy?”

“You know. Like someone going on a vacation, in fact.”

“Oh.” Daniel continued to stare at his house. He couldn’t remember what it was like to go on a vacation. In his teens, his father had taken him camping in the mountains sometimes. He had given all that up for Léa.

And she hadn’t even
invited
him?

Not that he knew when he could have gotten away, but...

He rubbed the back of his neck. “All right. All right. Sorry.”

“Were there
signs
of foul play?” Grégory asked, still worried by Daniel’s worry.

“No, I—no.”

“She had a suitcase. She must have packed.”

“She forgot her toothbrush,” Daniel said lamely. Not really a sign that a woman had been drugged and dragged out of the house, when you looked at it closely.

“You must be jetlagged out of your mind,” Grégory decided finally, giving him a clap on the shoulder. “Give her a call. She probably won’t mind being woken up, if you’re this worried. I’m sure she’s fine.”

Daniel went back into his house, sat down on her side of the bed, and stared at her phone. After a minute, he picked it up, typed in her code, and started checking through all her recent calls.

“So you’re still here,” Daniel said flatly to Matthieu Rosier. Called by Léa at 11:23 a.m. yesterday. Matthieu pulled his big body out from under one of the extractors and stared up at him from flat on the concrete. The whole place stank of solvent. Matt was a third cousin of Léa’s, distant enough that the fact that Léa and he got along so splendidly didn’t always sit well with Daniel. He was also single and went after what he wanted, and Léa was clearly gorgeous. All those angles of her cheekbones and shoulders and wrists, an athlete or a poet, the brown dust of freckles over her skin, the straight straw hair, and the way her smile bloomed out, infectious and shy and enthusiastic. Who could help wanting to please her? Daniel never had been able to.

“What?” Matt growled. “It’s the middle of the rose harvest, and this
putain d’extracteur
is broken. Where do you think I’m going to be? Off in Tahiti?”

Daniel took a hard step forward. “What do you know about Tahiti?”

“Léa seems to think all her problems will be solved there, although personally, it sounds humid and boring to me. Be interesting to see how the tiare flowers grow, though.” Matt wiped grease off his hands and reached for a wrench.

“
What problems?”
Daniel said between his teeth. How the fuck much better could he be for her? He never stopped.
I’ll deserve this.
A very young man with his head lifted high, getting married in a fourteenth-century church, to a girl who was trusting everything she possessed to him.
I promise I’ll deserve you.

Matt looked at him, startled. “Nothing in particular. I think she just wants an adventure, a change of scenery.
Merde
, Danny, why don’t you take your wife on a belated honeymoon or something? Might do the two of you good.”

Daniel stared at him incredulously. “
I’m busy.
” He never, ever, ever stopped. Even the five hours he slept a night, he was usually working in his dreams. “And when have you been talking to Léa?”

“She ate lunch with us yesterday.” During the rose harvest, as during the jasmine harvest, even those of the Rosier family not usually directly involved with the production of raw materials often pitched in, particularly when there were problems with the short-term labor supply. And the family, as well as some of the closer, long-standing employees, would all eat together under an old oak tree in between the extraction plant and the old patriarchal farmhouse. Léa liked sometimes to join them, boxing up macarons or some special cake from the restaurant to share, and once in a while, on a Monday when the restaurant was closed, Daniel managed to join her.

It was—really nice when he could. Sitting in the shade, talking to their neighbors, her distant cousins, sipping wine someone had thought to set aside ten years ago to bring pleasure to their later selves. It made him feel—young again. It made him turn his head in his chair and smile at Léa in a lazy, easy pleasure, and almost always, if he still had time, he would make love to her later in their room high above the sea and roses. Everything happy. Everything pleasure. Monday afternoon.

If he wasn’t in Japan, or Paris, or tracking down some supply issue before it ruined the restaurant, it was his favorite time of the week.

Lately, especially as Léa grew more detached somehow from the restaurant, it often seemed as if he worked all week just for that one afternoon. Sometimes he worked all month for it, having to work through Monday after Monday but knowing that eventually, a week or two or three from now, he would manage to sink into another Monday with her again.

“What did she say?” Daniel asked.

Matt looked rather blank. “I don’t know. I just remember us talking about Tahiti. Did anyone ever dream of running off there, that kind of thing.”

Léa had never mentioned Tahiti to him in their entire life together. Maybe when they were teenagers, before her father died, she had said something about it being fun to honeymoon in Hawaii? Before they had seriously talked about marriage, two kids playing with the idea without ever really broaching it. He had liked the daydream himself, imagining them snorkeling among bright-colored fish and him being an instant success at surfing, striding cockily out of the waves toward Léa, stretched in a bikini under the shade of a palm tree.

But her father’s death had put paid to any possibility of a honeymoon. Still to this day, when Daniel remembered that time after her father’s funeral and the pressure on him at nineteen not to lose that restaurant for her by losing all its stars, the hair rose all along the back of his neck and his skull tightened.

And Léa.
Putain
, but she had been brave. Putting her trust in him. Setting her shoulder beside his.
We are in this together. And I love you.

Merde
, had she been wanting a honeymoon in the tropics all this time? Why hadn’t she ever said anything?

And rising under that, something colder, deeper, darker, that he didn’t know how to articulate except in hunting for kidnappers or possible adulterous lovers: when a wife disappeared for a “week or two, I don’t know” without even talking about it with her husband first, what did that really mean? Had she
left
him?

Was she thinking about leaving him?

Was she deciding that right now?

Why would she leave him?
What more could he possibly do for her?

* * *

CHAPTER THREE

Léa lay on the wooden deck over the water on day three of her escape, head on her folded arms, gazing at the colored fish swimming in aquamarine water. The heat baked into her back. She felt like a solar panel, energy slowly charging from that sun. Recently constructed on one of the more remote and lesser-known French Polynesian islands, the resort clearly wasn’t drawing the clientele hoped for. Thus the Internet deal that had caught her attention and started her thinking about running away to the tropics, the escape nearly affordable.

Not that they were hard up. Daniel’s fees for consulting and
Top Chef
appearances were outrageous, and the restaurant itself did extremely well. Back when she was terrified she would manage to lose everything her father had worked for before he was even cold in his grave, she had learned how to cut pennies without affecting quality, how to run it efficiently, without waste of people or products. She and Daniel used to fight sometimes, him insisting that some food item had to be absolute top quality, her arguing against the price, until he kissed her desperately and said,
Trust me, trust me, trust me.

So she would try to trust him. Try to relax. And he had deserved that trust and more.

The first tear drops, thinking of that, surprised her. Her eyes opened very wide, staring into the aquamarine, but another drop fell and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, only a long-tailed white bird flying toward the sun.

More tears. A silent rain of them. She didn’t know where they had come from, and the orange fish bobbing up at their plop slipped away frustrated that they could not eat them.

What
was
this? She raised her hand to her cheeks, still not convinced that the tears could be coming from her. But yes...those were her cheeks that were wet.

I’m so tired
. That must be it.
What the hell is wrong with me?
She had even taken a pregnancy test at one point, her stomach knotting, but it had come up negative. She had put her hands over her face, almost sick with relief and something else, an inconsistent grief. It filled her with a strange dread, to think of children. And yet she was twenty-nine and had been married more than ten years.

The dread centered all around Daniel. His gray eyes flashed in the middle of it. But he had never brought up children at all.

She closed her eyes on the tears and the disappointed fish and fell asleep.

Léa’s sister raised her eyebrows to see Daniel in the doorway to her apartment and looked past him down the hall. Her eyebrows knit, and her gaze shot back to his face, searching now, worried.

“You—haven’t seen Léa.” It was obvious already.

Maélys’s eyes widened. His sister-in-law was...what she was. Blonde like her older sister but much more glossy: polished and elegant in that edgy but vaguely academic way, always in some chunky boot heel and fitted jeans. Daniel had liked her and her brother better when they were younger, more innocent, more vulnerable, and less ensconced in the idea that Léa would take care of them. As they grew older and he and Léa supported them while they got their first degrees at the university, and then their second, because, God forbid that
they
should have to do something practical for a living, they had started to set his teeth on edge. Maélys had gotten her
maîtrise
in history, for God’s sake, finishing at the age of twenty-three. When Léa, only three years older, had given up her hope of an art degree at eighteen to take care of them and never once mentioned it again.