That firm, strong hand tucked her right back up against him. He set her hand onto his other shoulder. And then he wrapped that arm around her, too, snuggling her in close. His freed hand came to rest on her nape.
Big hand, covering all of it, pulling her head close to his chest. It was like being in a spa. Between the warm firm hand on her nape and the warm firm hand on her lower back, her whole spine wanted to dissolve. Just…sink into him. Let him carry her. Just be weight against weight, body against body.
Think about that bed. That quiet, private bed in the little space for two with those sheets that had been slept on so many times…
His hand rubbed over her nape, gentle but firm. Here you are. I’ve got you.
Her neck unstiffened before she could think, her head sinking against his chest. It was a slow dance, one of the love songs Jaime and Dom had chosen. Couples shifted around them on the dance floor, some leaving before they could be forced into too much intimacy, but more filling the floor, all those couples who said, Even we can dance a slow dance. Wives tugging on husbands’ hands. Dance with me.
God, this was nice.
Terrifying how nice it was. She didn’t do this. Trust in another person to hold her, keep her.
And it was…sexy. That rubbing of bodies, that strength and heat of his, friction, friction, friction, slow and steady and heating her more and more. Until her breasts hurt and her sex felt clutching and greedy and soft, and her nape, where he kept that gentle, rubbing hold of it, just sent shivers over and over down her spine. Little, resistance-destroying vibrations that spread out through her body.
Oh, hell. Maybe she should just go with it. As Mack said, what did they have to lose?
Nothing. Right at that moment, it didn’t seem possible that they could ever lose anything. Certainly not twenty years of friendship. Not because of something as hot and sweet as this.
Her lips softened apart, and her head actually started, just started, to turn into his chest so she could kiss it when she realized and took a breath, trying to control herself. But her lips felt funny. As if this static electricity had built up in them from all the rubbing and not been allowed that touch to release.
She curled her lips in so that she could lick them, subtly, without ever showing she had.
Mack’s other hand rubbed firm and gentle lower down her spine and—cupped her ass.
She started.
He squeezed. Shh. Let your ass do what I tell it to.
And damned if she didn’t want to do it. Let him handle her ass however he liked.
Her butt even felt all tight and flexing and eager, as if she might like some of those things he liked, too.
Cade and Sylvain whirled by, at what seemed a pretty fast pace for a slow dance, heading in the direction Anne had last seen Jaime and Dom. Sylvain was laughing at his wife, but as they passed, those chocolate eyes of his met Anne’s, and he winked at her.
Oh, brother.
“Mack,” she hissed.
Mack made a mildly impatient, amused sound and she realized he was looking over her shoulder. He tried not to let her turn, but she managed to twist enough and spotted Cade elbowing Jaime. Jaime looked immediately toward her father, and then her eyes widened to match Cade’s. Anne couldn’t quite figure out their expressions, and maybe they couldn’t figure out what they wanted to feel, either. Astonishment? Glee? Amusement? Confusion? None of the expressions seemed very negative, although Anne found several facets of them aggravating. What was amusing or confusing, exactly? Sylvain just raised a puzzled eyebrow at his wife, when she said something to him, and shrugged one easy shoulder.
Like there was nothing at all unusual in his world at a fifty-three-year-old woman getting her ass grabbed by a man in the middle of the dance floor.
There might be something to be said for the French.
“Sorry,” Mack said to her. “How did you manage to raise a so much better-mannered child?”
That made Anne scan the garden for Kurt, of course. He was standing stock still over there by the cakes, staring at them, or more particularly at Mack’s hand on her butt, both his eyebrows up. Granted, his expression was a lot harder to read, but probably because his reactions were even more complex than Mack’s daughters.
And what business was it of any of theirs anyway? Last she’d looked, they were getting on with their lives in the ways they chose.
She shrugged, that close to telling Mack, Go for it, that she had to bite her teeth closed in astonishment on the G. She was not supposed to be giving Mack any go-ahead signs for this madness.
She hadn’t drunk anything more than a glass, after all. She was supposed to be keeping their heads for them.
“How long does this song last exactly?” Because she was starting to feel drunk. All soft and…smooshy. Holdable, squeezable. And she didn’t do those things. She just didn’t.
Ever.
Do those things.
“If the band is smart about where their biggest tip is likely to come from, a long time,” Mack said.
And indeed, the band drew out a long crooning of “loooove” and cycled around again.
“Haven’t they already sung that verse?”
Mack shrugged. “Apparently, they’re smart.”
“Is that band helping you sexually harass me?”
He snorted. “I’d have to have power over you to do that, Anne. You know what? Maybe we should go back to me just thinking, not talking. Talking seems to give you something to fight.”
She should probably twist free and walk off.
But she didn’t.
Because she felt too soft and smooshy and holdable. And what if her bones didn’t work? What if they just folded up under her the second she tried to stand without support, all floppy, the way they felt?
Also, how thin was her skirt? Was it at all possible a damp spot could show through if this rubbing kept up? She’d never, ever had to worry about that kind of question before.
“Maybe I should dump the ice in one of those champagne buckets on your head. Or whatever part of your anatomy needs it.” Again.
“Shhhh,” Mack whispered, long and low, so that the sound just shivered everywhere. He pressed her finger to his mouth this time. “I’m thinking.” And he bit it, a firm, tiny pinch of teeth.
Fire raced through her, an unfamiliar burning she had no idea how to put out. “Malcolm Anthony Corey, you are messing with the wrong person.” Yes, dare him. Dare him. She knew exactly how Mack Corey responded to dares. To being told he couldn’t do something.
“Anne. Shut up and dance.”
Chapter 4
Anne peeked through the roses, not really spying, no, just…checking up on things. Making sure everything was all right.
Rich, sweet, lemony scent surrounded her. She’d planted the beautiful, pink climber rose with her own hands, to replace a dying one that Julie had planted. It and many of the other roses in her gardens and the Corey ones were in the middle of their spectacular second burst of blooms for September. Anne had helped Julie design these gardens long ago, and given that Mack didn’t pay much attention to house and garden design, had had to keep tinkering with and maintaining them ever since. First because somebody had to step in and help the family get through those initial years without Julie and then just because…well, that was what she did. Design spaces. Make the world perfect.
And she’d had time, because somehow, the periods she spent at this house compared to any of the others kept stretching, and so did Mack’s. Especially after the girls went away to college, and his house in Corey grew so empty, Mack came here more and more, and somehow they just always stretched their stays at the same time, shifting many aspects of their operations here so they could linger longer. It was when Mack wasn’t there, though, that Anne usually came over and worked on his gardens. She didn’t know why, but when she didn’t have those beach walks with him, something about working in his gardens instead of her own eased her skin.
The Corey beach house had a ni
ce, large, dramatic layout to work with: that line of great French doors that opened the whole house to the sea and sun when the weather was right, and that were filled with glowing, golden promise when you came toward them from the sea at night; the garden that was not too grandiose but that lent itself to a landscape of cozy spots and adventurous, fairytale corners for the girls, and even an old, shared platform for pirate adventures that had a ladder reaching up to it from both yards.
Cade stood under it now, a hand on the ladder as if she was half thinking about climbing up into it despite her sea-green, matron-of-honor finery and high heels, but she turned back to Sylvain instead. He bent his black head to her and lifted his hand to her face, and Anne’s mouth softened a little, this strange mix of happiness and wistfulness, as she watched them. She would have liked to have a daughter. Maybe, somewhere, she would have liked to have a man like Sylvain Marquis lifting a tender hand to her cheek.
“Happy?” Sylvain asked his wife, in that low, warm voice of his that made Anne think of chocolate with a French accent. One of Paris’s top chocolatiers—the top chocolatier, he preferred to claim—he had a gorgeous poet look going on that made him a media darling. She needed to get him on her show. She’d bet he would make a nice boost to her post-prison-comeback ratings. Her viewers would go wild.
Cade nodded, that smile on her face caught by the moonlight and the lights Anne had had woven through the garden. Her light brown hair had been coerced into an elegant updo for her role as matron of honor, including elegant strands twining gently down by her face. Sylvain clearly didn’t like it—his long, pianist’s fingers would start to touch the sculpted hair, hover, then curl back toward his palms and find another target. Her cheekbone, her eyebrow, a rub over the join of her neck and shoulder that made Cade’s shoulder and neck flex a little in pleasure.
Anne suspected that Sylvain’s reluctance to touch her hairdo was less out of respect for its elegance than because only a heavy coating of hairspray had gotten Cade’s silky fine, straight hair to stay up. Cade’s first ballet recital after her mother’s death, Anne had been the one to take over Julie’s role and glue Cade’s hair to her head to last the performance. Well, someone had to fly into Corey and help out in the wake of that car wreck. The family had fallen to pieces. Anne knew how to pick up pieces.
Carefully. Trying not to get anyone cut on them.
Someone always did get cut, though. Cade, in the middle of Anne’s careful work on her hair, had suddenly bowed her head into her hands and started crying. But she’d had a lead role in the performance, and she’d forced herself on anyway, that way she did. She’d started crying onstage again, in the middle of one of her solos, tears running down her cheeks as she danced determinedly through. Probably Mack, as griefstruck and lost as his girls, had encouraged her to go on, convinced it would be good for her to pursue the ballet like normal, and his encouragement had operated on Cade with the usual force expectations had on her: she always wanted to fulfill them, surpass them. So she’d felt it was her duty to do this next ballet performance, rather than just something her father was hoping would help get her through the grief. It had been, in the end, a bit too much for a thirteen-year-old used to having her mother there beaming at her for every performance.
“I can’t believe my dad,” Cade said now.
Anne winced and started to step back.
Sylvain laughed. “What? Your belle-mère is hot. Or not your mother-in-law, but whatever you call her.”
Anne’s eyebrows shot up. Sexy poet-chocolatier, media darling, and expert flirt Sylvain Marquis thought she was hot? He was younger than her own son!
Also, he thought she was in some way in the role of a mother-in-law?
“Hey,” Cade protested, but she was smiling, secure and unthreatened. “You’re married.”
“Caught,” Sylvain agreed with great mournfulness, pulling his wife more snugly into his arms and rocking her against him. “My days of flirting with hot, elegant older women are over.”
“Not so they’d notice,” Cade said dryly.
Anne bit back a laugh. It was true. Sylvain didn’t think he was flirting? What did he do to women when he ramped it up?
Sylvain leaned back against one of the tables and pulled Cade between his legs. “Are you serious that your dad has known her twenty years? And this is the first time he’s hit on her? Do you think I should give him tips or something?”
Cade started to chortle. Anne almost did, too. Her nostrils stung with the effort to hold back this eruption of, of giggles at the thought of the expression on Mack’s face as Sylvain Marquis gave him lessons in flirting.
“They’re friends, Sylvain.”
Sylvain gave her a look as if she’d been dropped on her head. “Pardon, but if I’d been fantasizing about a friend that hot for twenty years, I’d have done something about it long before this.”
“Sylvain. My mother was still alive twenty years ago.”
Sylvain squeezed his wife’s shoulder in apology, reconsidered, and waved one hand. “Enfin, at some point in the past ten years, at least.”
“Do you really think he’s been fantasizing about her for at least ten years?”
“Has she looked that hot for the past ten years?”
You know, Anne had always liked the French. She’d been having a few doubts about that affection ever since she had to actually deal with a horde of them in her kitchens, but maybe her original instincts had been right. Great culture.
“Sylvain! She’s—that’s just rude, to even think of her that way.”
Sylvain’s eyebrows went up. “Sérieusement? Merde, I’m never going to understand what counts as good manners in your country.”
“It’s just that she’s so elegant.”
“I know,” Sylvain said in exaggerated hungry, yummy tones.
Cade gave him a pretend hit on the shoulder. “And she’s so cool, and, and walled-off.”
“Exactly. How has your dad managed to hold off his attack for so long?”
Anne’s whole body was starting to tickle. She’d been hit on by younger men a lot. She had an exceptional degree of money and power, and there were plenty of men who found both those things attractive. Especially if they thought they could sleep their way to having that money and power for themselves. But Sylvain didn’t want her money and power. He didn’t even care about that kind of thing. If you even suggested it, he’d raise those supple eyebrows and go into fits of Gallicness: Moi? Sylvain Marquis? Moi? All black-haired, brown-eyed arrogance and passion.
He didn’t even want her, in fact. He was very happily married. And somehow that all combined together so that this casual discussion of her hotness, by someone that young and sexy himself, while the imprint of a hand still tingled against her butt, made her—
Tickle. Curled her toes. Left her whole body restless.
“What?” Sylvain’s laughing voice, all of him focused on teasing Cade. “When you did that to me, it was all I could think about, how to bring those walls down.”
Anne backed away. And that was not at all because she was fleeing this conversation. She didn’t flee. But she did exercise good manners and object to eavesdropping. Eventually. At least when that eavesdropping got uncomfortable.
Sylvain’s voice caught her one last time as she slipped away. “I’ll bet you a new Cade Marquis line of chocolate bars that it’s all he can think about, too.”
***
“Took you long enough,” Jack Corey said gleefully from the lush greenery that turned their heated pool into a tropical oasis, popping out right in the middle of Mack’s hunt for a certain fleeing prey.
Oh, good God. Mack held up a hand. “Dad. Don’t even start.” They were too near the deep end of that pool. Mack might end up pushing him in.
But of course his father’s eyes just gleamed with more delight, bluer than the chlorine-free water. Everyone swore Mack had inherited Jack’s blue eyes. “I was beginning to think you were scared.”
Mack’s teeth sn
apped together instantly. “I was—what?”
“I was going to start going after her myself. Letting a woman like that go to waste for so long. I don’t know where I went wrong raising you.” Jack Corey shook his white head mournfully. “I tried to teach you to go after what you want.”
Damn it, how did his father still manage to make his head explode within seconds in any conversation, after more than fifty damn years? “Good thing I went ahead and taught myself how to really do it.” Mack made his voice as patronizing as he could and gave a patting motion to the air for good measure. “Not that there’s anything wrong with making a few million, Dad. Don’t get me wrong. You did what you could.” Implication: So did I. And guess whose “could” was bigger?
Jack Corey narrowed his eyes at him. “You’re standing on the shoulders of giants, kid.”
Well…true. His own father and grandfather. It was why Mack had had to get so damn big himself, in order to beat them.
Well, and because his dad was so damn provoking. Mack in his twenties had wanted nothing more than to say: Oh, you think your multimillion-dollar US candy company is something? Watch me take over the world with it.
And he had, hadn’t he? Thirty percent of the cacao production in the world, and so many subsidiaries, doing so many things so smoothly, that he had to keep taking over struggling companies to restructure into something successful just to keep life interesting. The more struggling the better, really. Nobody else can make this work? Watch me.
And his girls didn’t want any of it.
Acted as if it was some kind of goddamn bad thing he’d done, sometimes, capturing the world for them and laying it at their feet.
So it was easier to focus on his aggravating father. Besides, if Jack Corey could say outrageously unfounded things to provoke him, Mack didn’t know why he should have to play nicer. “You gave me a decent handful of change to get started.”
His father’s mouth opened and closed, most satisfyingly like a fish. “A decent amount of change!”
Sun-Kissed Page 5
