Shadowed Heart

by Laura Florand

  Aww, hell. He was so damn lucky.

  “Bonjour, soleil,” he said, and leaned across to kiss her, because he was working and that was the only way he could touch her without washing his hands. Damn, but he had a frustrating career. He could make so many miracles out of it, and in return, it consumed so many of his options. “Want a bite?” he asked, and realized just a second too late how exactly like his puppy-apprentices he sounded as he held out to her a raspberry meant for the dessert he was finishing.

  She took it with just her lips, very carefully not brushing his fingers with them, but he cracked, and his thumb slid with the raspberry to tug at her bottom lip, to stroke her smile.

  Now he would have to wash his hands, but who the hell cared?

  “Mmm,” she said. “I love raspberries.”

  This pure, erotic charge that ran through his body whenever she said mmm.

  “I made you something,” he offered, eager to hear it some more. Eager for that mmm to rise to a passion of appreciation, for it to tell him: Yes, you have set my every sense on fire.

  “Ah.” The oddest flicker on her face that made him hesitate just a second, searching her eyes, but she smiled at him and sank down onto the stool he kept in his kitchens for one purpose only: in case Summer showed up and giving her a place to sit would encourage her to hang out watching him longer. It got the hell in the way, that stool, but he kept it, just the same. “Something special?” Her smile was so delighted, so loving.

  “Of course,” he said, offended. What did she expect him to offer her, a cookie?

  Her smile deepened into something true, affectionate and amused.

  Which would make her previous smile…hold on. Was she faking her smiles with him again?

  Damn it, he hated it when she did that.

  How the hell am I supposed to know what’s wrong and fix it when you do that to me?

  And God. What was wrong?

  His gaze flicked to her belly. And then he shifted away from it in a blur of movement, righting every single thing in those kitchens that could possibly be wrong, making everything perfect, down to the last hair-fine line of the way a plate was patterned or a strand of sugar was posed. I can get it all right, Summer. Just—give me time to practice. Please?

  God, he was going to be such a shitty father.

  No, don’t think that. You can do anything you set your mind to.

  But images flashed through him now, as he worked, not his idealistic father self strolling through lavender fields while his kids played adorably and his wife laughed with happiness and beamed at him as if he had hung the sun, but the fathers he had actually known. The father who had dragged him through streets and Métros begging for change, the foster father who had never smiled at him, just nodded once in firm approval if he practiced something ten thousand times and got it right, and merde, Summer’s father, that son of a bitch. The man who made someone as beautiful and perfect as her believe she was crap.

  He came back to her with his special gift for her today. Not a cage, no, of course not. He’d already made her several variations of cages out of chocolate, all lined with gold and tempting things inside. It had been his perhaps misguided notion of courtship, back when they first met. He was trying to get over that. I protect you, not cage you. The bars of chocolate are to keep you safe. I hold you in my hand to nurture you, to hold you up. Not to crush you into a tiny ball so I can keep you.

  Well, damn it, he was working on it.

  So today he had made a well of chocolate like the bell of a tulip and filled its gentle, protective depths with a liquid mango caramel, and leading into that sticky caramel he’d placed little pomegranate seeds, rich points of red drawing the innocent prey deeper and deeper into the well, closer and closer to that caramel from which there was no escape.

  He stared at the dessert a moment as he set it on the counter between them. Merde. Was he still that messed up?

  “Luc.” Summer lifted a hand to touch his cheek, and pleasure just sank through him. It was so hard for him to touch her while he was working, but she could always touch him. He loved it so much he now knew exactly why puppies acted like such ridiculous animals when someone touched the top of their heads. “Pomegranate seeds?” Her eyes were indulgently chiding.

  He glanced back at them guiltily. He’d promised to stop that.

  Stop thinking of himself as the Lord of Hell who had trapped his hope of sunlight in here with him in the dark.

  “Just, ah, four of them,” he said, ridiculously.

  Her palm settled into a full caress of his cheek. “You know, that story never talks about what Spring gave the Lord of Hell, to lure him into her world, too.”

  “Kisses, probably,” Luc said helplessly, staring at her mouth. It was such a beautiful mouth. And he was working so damn hard. He really missed it. Not quick kisses in the kitchen, where everyone could see them, but sink-into-them-and-take-his-time, hot open kisses that went on forever, until he had all her clothes off, until he had his hand up between her thighs, until, until…

  She blew him a kiss, pursing her lips so sweetly and slowly and drawing it out so long that he could feel the tiny brush of air from it across his lips.

  Oh, God, I love you.

  He licked his lips and had to turn away, to handle things before he lost a handle on himself.

  “And you’re not the Lord of Hell, Luc,” she called after him, although several of his staff looked at her skeptically at that. Summer laughed and winked at them. “Not mine, anyway.”

  Wasn’t he? Even as hard as she was finding it to adjust to being here? She still didn’t think he had dragged her out of her island paradise on earth into his hell?

  She still wasn’t ready to quit on him and run back to where she was happy?

  A vision slashed across his sub-conscious, so deep he didn’t even have to acknowledge it, those fragments like a tumbling mirror shard orbiting fast and deep somewhere down there around the center of his soul: a black-haired baby being abandoned before he was old enough to sit up, a mother going off to her easier, happier life without him in the islands.

  God, he wished he could clean those jagged, slashing fragments out of his soul.

  She’s maternal, he told his screwed-up soul. She adores kids. She would never, ever abandon her baby.

  So that secret vision deep down in his soul changed, obligingly, entirely obedient. Now it wasn’t of a black-haired woman leaving a black-haired baby for the islands, but of something so vicious and cruel he couldn’t breathe: a golden-haired woman taking her black-haired baby with her and leaving the black-haired father entirely alone.

  Oh, God. Fuck you, he told his imagination. Fuck you to hell. I’ve got a happy marriage, with a happy wife, who is happily pregnant. Leave me the fuck alone.

  He glanced up into the mirror set high on one wall to allow him to keep an eye on the pass from the far side of the kitchen.

  And saw Summer quickly dig her spoon under the dessert and scrape the entire thing into the trash, grabbing scraps from Antoine to cover it up so he wouldn’t see it.

  When he turned around, she was sucking on her spoon as if she’d just devoured the whole thing and was lingering over the last bite, smiling at him as if everything in her life was delicious.

  And that smile was a lie.

  Chapter 6

  Thank God Luc hadn’t caught her, Summer thought, installing herself behind his desk in his office. Throwing one of his desserts away, holy crap. His brain might have exploded. Or, worse, his heart.

  She pressed her hand to her belly as if she could squoosh out queasiness. You’ve got to get along with me, kid. You’ve got a very sensitive father.

  She wiggled the mouse and Luc’s computer screen came alive. With his accounting program open.

  Oh, crap.

  Why did he do that to her? Did he not trust her with his freaking accounts, or what was it? Granted, she didn’t have an accountant’s training, but she’d gotten a summa cum laude in economics at H
arvard, had funded multiple start-ups whose success following her business plans had grown her portfolio into the tens of millions, and was the daughter of one of the richest self-made investors on the planet. So she was a little more comfortable with the ins and outs of money than Luc was.

  He always made such a mess of the accounts when he attacked them.

  He was kind of adorable, actually, with how frustrated he got. He’d be a lot more adorable if he’d just relax and trust her to take control of this, but she’d known she was marrying a control freak before she took her vows.

  So she sighed and shook her head, smiling just a little. Then set about straightening the mess out. If she didn’t pour herself into the restaurant for Luc…well, it wasn’t as if she had anything else to do with her time here but paint her nails. She tutored the apprentices Jaime sent, but all the local schools had kept their doors closed firmly in her face. No certification to teach in France and a bad reputation as a media-hungry socialite to go with it.

  Accounts straightened, she set up a password access to the files with the login name “CallYourWife” and the password “kisses”.

  Okay, fine, she was sappy. But it made Luc smile, things like that. It relaxed, for just a minute, all the tension he accumulated in him in a day in the restaurant.

  Summer flexed her shoulders and looked at the time. Lunch was approaching. She went out onto the floor to help prep the tables.

  She’d get a chance to talk to Luc eventually today. No point interrupting his work just so he could help her recover from a conversation with her mother. No point sharing that worry about something going wrong at all, actually.

  It would be fine.

  She could handle this. A smile broke out on her face all at once, and she touched her belly as she realized that, for the first time in her life, Someone is really counting on me.

  Chapter 7

  Luc worked late. He had to. They were swamped, and the new team couldn’t handle a damn thing without him, and there had been an issue with the grease trap. The grease trap. At the Hôtel de Leucé, they didn’t have problems with grease traps. People made sure problems like that stayed out of their top chef’s way.

  He worked late, proving he could do this. Proving his desserts were irresistible, trying not to think about Summer’s face as she scraped hers off into the trash.

  The trash.

  All the time he’d pursued her in Paris, all the desserts she had refused, she’d never gone so far as to throw one in the trash.

  Let’s not think about it.

  Anyway, merde, he didn’t have any time to waste now, to make this restaurant famous. Hell, he was still dependent on his multibillion-dollar heiress wife to wait tables and do accounts to help get the place going. He had to get his act together.

  He had a baby on the way. He couldn’t slack off and go home early now.

  So he was surprised to find Summer still awake when he got home, in bed with her laptop on her knees.

  She slapped it closed it as soon as she saw him—and smiled.

  His heart started to beat too fast. Why was she smiling at him like that? He’d thought they’d gotten over that. The fake smile.

  The way they’d gotten over his pomegranate seeds.

  The pomegranate seeds she hadn’t eaten.

  Will you stop!! he told his damn imagination.

  “What are you looking at? Baby names?” he asked hopefully as he undressed. Which, fine, he did do in the bedroom instead of the bathroom just so she would watch him. He loved it when she was still awake when he got home and watched him. It made all his muscles feel—alive.

  He loved when she got up and came to him right away and pressed her face into his throat with a little humming sound as she breathed in his scent. Mmm, let me guess. What were you working on today?

  It flattened him out, when she didn’t. Left him feeling deflated and—wistful. Like tonight. Tonight she just shook her head, kneading her belly. “We should wait to think of names.”

  They should? His stomach tightened. Why would they want to put off thinking of names? Wasn’t that just a way of imagining their lives together? Imagining a boy, imagining a girl, imagining themselves calling someone’s name and that little someone looking straight to them as if they were that little someone’s world?

  “I just made sandwiches,” she said apologetically. “I didn’t feel up to cooking.”

  It still squeezed his heart with this strange, intense joy that she fed him. Nobody ever fed him. “Sandwiches are perfect.”

  She smiled at him as if he’d somehow said something precious and reached out a hand. When he took it, she carried his to her lips and kissed the inside of his fingers. “You’re so far the opposite of spoiled,” she said caressingly.

  It just melted his heart out when she did things like that to him. Every single time. His fingers tingled where she had kissed them, and the tingles darted out in weird little zigzags through his body, as if his nerves had never grown proper pathways for that kind of message to his brain.

  “I don’t spoil you nearly as much as I would like to,” he breathed, bending over her. Ah, that scent—that sweet, tropical scent of her as if he could stretch out in the shade of a palm tree with her and while away a long summer evening in the sand. His mouth sought hers. The kiss deepened until he had forgotten all about the sandwiches or any other hunger but this. He lifted his head to study the lips he had turned so lush and soft.

  “You know what would be really good right now?” those lips asked wistfully. “A Popsicle.”

  Luc blinked. “You want me to make you a Popsicle?” Damn, he’d known they should have installed a blast chiller in their home kitchen. How did amateur cooks even stand it, not to have one? He didn’t even have a can of liquid nitrogen on hand here. The things were so damn dangerous if an amateur mishandled them.

  Definitely not something to have in a house with a small child.

  “Or raspberries,” Summer said, her tone wrapping the word up with such craving it sent an eroticized charge all over his skin. “Raspberries would be nice.”

  Really? Some beautiful great flats of them had been delivered this afternoon at the restaurant, thanks to his early-morning strangling of his supplier the day before. What had he been thinking not to bring some home? “I can go get you some.”

  Yes! Let me feed you. He was starving himself, but he was already imagining how he would arrange the raspberries, maybe a heart because she loved sappy little things like that, and—

  She shook her head, slipping out of bed. “Don’t be silly.” She touched his chest, and his whole body perked up in anticipation of her nose nuzzling into his throat, of that mmm. But she just went into the bathroom. “I’d be asleep by the time you got back.”

  Oh.

  As the water ran behind the closed door, he looked at her laptop. Then sideways at the bathroom door.

  He’d never, ever invaded her privacy this way before. But then, well—she’d never actually slapped her laptop closed when he came into the room with guilty haste before either.

  What was she looking at, mommy porn?

  He’d gathered vague impressions of women’s sex drives changing while they were pregnant—mostly from unmarried line cooks who liked to fantasize out loud while they were working, so he wasn’t sure how accurate his information was. Still, just because Summer might be embarrassed by some new little fantasy she was having didn’t mean he would be. In fact, he’d kind of like to be prepared to surprise her with the satisfaction of it.

  Maybe tonight. While it was fresh in her mind.

  Refusing to acknowledge any other possible reason for invading her privacy, he opened the laptop enough to peek at her screen.

  MISCARRIAGE said the main tab, and the blast of it froze him to the marrow. He slammed the screen closed. What?

  He knocked on the bathroom door. “Summer? Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be out in a minute!” she called, her voice strained.

  “Is eve
rything all right? Do you feel all right?”

  “No!” she snapped. “Luc, go away!”

  And then ragged, horrible sounds.

  He shoved the door open, and Summer was crouched over the toilet, body wrenching miserably.

  Oh, fuck. He landed beside her on his knees, wrapping his arms around her. “Summer. Summer.”

  “Luc, go away,” she wailed, and had to gag again. “Don’t look at me like this,” she said miserably, sagging against his arms and the toilet seat, turning her face away as she tried to wipe it.

  “Shh,” he said, stroking the back of her neck, twisting her hair out of the way. This he could do. Hold her, no matter what went wrong. He could do that. “Is something wrong? Should I call 112?” Is this a miscarriage? Oh, fuck.

  “I just stood up too fast, I think,” she said, still trying to hide her face from him. She flushed the toilet and closed the lid, trying to shut it all away. “I think this is what people call morning sickness.”

  “It’s the middle of the night!”

  “My mother said it could be any time of the day.”

  “You asked your mother for advice?” Hell. That couldn’t be good.

  She looked up at him miserably, still pale and damp from the bout of vomiting. “I don’t have anyone else to ask, Luc.”

  They’d only been here three months. And Summer had always had a hard time making female friends. His heart twisted. Except on that island. She was surrounded by friends on that island.

  “We’ll get some books.” He lifted Summer up in his arms as he stood and carried her the two feet to the sink, then supported her as she washed her face. “You’re all right, aren’t you? You feel”—he touched her belly delicately, all he could bring himself to do, as if he, who could handle the most fragile filament of spun sugar without breaking it, might suddenly do clumsy harm—“all right?”