Because—control. Because he wasn’t an animal. Because he—“Stop asking questions,” he told her, rubbing her clitoris just delicately as his finger probed a long, slick way into her.
She gasped and moaned, her muscles clenching around him, her hips lifting. He leaned over her, coming closer and closer to her face, watching her eyes as his fingers dipped into her again, as his thumb played and teased. “Luc!” she gasped as his thumb danced away again.
He kissed her, lush and deep as his fingers in her body, taking his time, taking her over. She wriggled her arms up enough to clutch at the edge of the towel, preparatory to breaking free, and he pulled back enough, remembering what had happened the last time he had trapped her.
But she didn’t look as if she was fighting with revulsion. Oh, no. Not at all. She was softened and desperate, as if his yielding to her in the shower had made her all ready to yield to him.
“I love you,” he remembered to tell her out loud, not just in his head. She sometimes had trouble hearing it, when it was just in his head. Even when he was showing her. Showing her just like this, for example. He pushed her legs wider, studying her sex. Damn, he loved seeing her so hot and open.
“Luc.” Her voice changed to a husky, delicious sound that just rubbed all over a man’s skin, waking his arousal up again.
Oh, yes, beg me. He laughed, so much happiness built up inside him that it had to escape.
“It’s not funny!” She twisted her hips.
Oh, she felt that, too? That vulnerability and frustration, as her need built and he could still laugh?
His laugh deepened, a low, almost growling sound. “It’s fun, though.”
“Luc.”
Wrong technique, soleil. I can keep doing this forever if you keep saying my name like that.
Except that his arousal was starting to grow more determined again, pushing at him to take her just like this, all wrapped up like a present for him. No, he told it sharply. I have other plans first.
“Now I want you to imagine that what’s exploring all this hot, tight wetness”—he ran his fingers teasingly over her and then more slowly and deeply dragged them the other way as he lowered his head—“is my mouth.” He blew a hot breath over her.
She tried to throw an arm up, maybe to hide her face as she often did when she was close to coming, but it got caught, still trapped in the towel.
“Oh, look.” He braced her thighs apart with his forearms and knelt between her legs. “You don’t have to use your imagination anymore.”
Damn, it was fun, running through all the different tones of frustration and desperation and convulsive, shaking pleasure with which she could say his name.
I love you, he thought, as they fell asleep, still tangled in each other, the towel that had trapped her long since kicked to the floor. Everything about the entanglement of their satiated bodies eased him. No room left for nightmares in this bed. Only love.
We really are going to be so happy.
Chapter 16
Summer woke up happy. Well, she woke up nauseated, but somewhere in there was happiness. Then she figured out, from the silence, that what had woken her was that tiny, carefully soft sound of the door shutting as Luc snuck out of the house, trying not to wake her, and her happiness wavered.
She rallied it. Hey, Summer. Guess what? No matter what Luc or anyone else does, you know who you and this baby can count on? Yourself.
So she hopped out of bed in a surge of energy, which sent her straight to the bathroom to hang over the toilet for five minutes. It was hard to keep your courage up when your day started like that and swung back to it at random but frequent intervals all day.
Still…it’s you or no one, Summer. Get on your feet.
Roar.
Sorry, kid, she whispered, patting her belly as she switched the Beethoven out for Katy Perry and Gloria Estefan. We’ll get back to Beethoven later.
Anyway, seriously, how well could its auditory functions possibly be developed at the age of six weeks? She looked it up on the web, and…aww. It was over an inch long now! It looked so…weird and tiny and alien and scary. And cute.
Big bold titles on the Wikipedia page drew her eye: Weeks 1-3, Weeks 4-5, Weeks 6-8, MISCARRIAGE. Bolded extra big, jumping out at her.
Damn you, Wikipedia. Twenty-five percent of pregnancies failed in the first six weeks, eight percent after…
She shut the Wikipedia page and stood there a moment. Then she thrust her jaw out. Yeah, well, fuck you, world! Eat your fucking heart out, wanting something to go wrong with my baby. It won’t. I’ll take care of her.
Or of him.
(A little black-haired boy, not careful or wary at all, so sure he was loved he laughed with it. He got sulky and stomped his feet and got into trouble, because he knew the worst that could happen to him was he might get a time-out.)
Were time-outs okay punishment?
One thing at a time, Summer. You can figure that one out later.
She spread her print-outs of different baby swings around her on her desk, along with her bolded list of criteria. Then she looked up the phone number of the department of mechanical engineering at MIT. The name “Corey” was enough to get most department heads’ time. Well, the department heads themselves could be kind of oblivious, but their deans usually understood how university bread was buttered.
But at the last second, she hesitated and searched through her contact list. Because she actually kind of knew someone who was an engineer in materials science, who had graduated from another top engineering school in the US, and who might have more personal contacts with people she could recommend.
“Hey, Patrick.”
“Well, hello there, Miss Sunshine.” Patrick’s voice was warm, easy, with just a faint hint of wariness. They used to flirt with each other and now they were both in their happy ever afters, but nobody trusted Summer Corey to actually mean hers. And he was, after all, Luc’s closest friend in the world, more than a friend, really. A brother. Almost literally a right arm that had been cut off. Summer had never had a best friend, but she liked to imagine it sometimes, and when she did, her heart hurt for Luc and Patrick now. “How are you doing?”
Had Luc told him? Summer hesitated, not sure she should be the one to break the news, when Luc was the one who was so close to him. “Not too bad, all things considered.”
“Homesick?” he asked sympathetically.
Luc hadn’t told him then? Why hadn’t Luc told him? Was it that far down on his list of things he believed in and wanted to focus on?
“A little bit.” She frowned into that vision of Luc, cut off from his best friend for her, seeming to handle everything so perfectly as he always did and yet maybe…at heart as lonely and uprooted as she was? “So when are you and Sarah coming to visit?”
A little silence. One of those moments when she hated using a phone, when she wanted to see the face of the person who wasn’t speaking.
“It’s really beautiful here in June,” she said awkwardly.
“I had no idea you’d miss me so much,” Patrick managed in that lazy, amused voice of his. But a question lurked under it.
“Oh, well, you know…” Not me, you idiot. Could she expose a weakness she wasn’t even entirely sure Luc had? How much she thought he might be missing Patrick? “I mean, it’s lovely here, and the house has plenty of room. We’re always happy to have people to visit.”
“Are you,” Patrick said thoughtfully.
Summer sighed. “Well, anyway. Listen, Patrick, I was wondering if I could talk to Sarah.”
***
“So we just pick the peaches?” Snatch them off the tree as if they were starving? Like a little kid might once have snatched abandoned food out of the trash? Bile rose in Luc’s gorge, and he forced it down, but it was like forcing down this great, huge glob of food only half-chewed because his stomach was so desperate for it.
“It’s an abandoned orchard,” Nico said easily, bending down to pick up a fallen peach. �
��Look at that. Fresh in the sun like that.” He bit into it, and his eyes closed, all his senses sinking into that flavor in his mouth, that big-shouldered, stocky farmer’s body of his lost in sensuality. “God, that’s good.”
Luc’s mouth watered. But even that rubbed all his nerves backward. It was so exactly the same way his mouth had once watered as he watched other people enjoy the food he had to steal or beg for. Or just never got at all.
“Here.” Nico picked a fruit off the tree and handed it to him, as if he knew Luc needed baby steps to this. Probably couldn’t guess the reason, though. Luc had not worn jeans with holes.
And his T-shirt was Dior, too.
He bit into the peach, and—merde, yes, that was good. So good. The burst of pleasure in his mouth relaxed the muscles in his neck, and the shiver of release ran all through his body. He tilted his head back, gazing at the green leaves and the dangling gold-pink fruit.
“There you go,” Nico said, in that damn tone of his that made Luc want to say baa. Possibly neigh, like a wild foal being coaxed. A wild foal. When he was quite visibly and obviously the most civilized person possible, damn it. He made a point of it. “I mean, doesn’t it seem a shame to let all this go to waste? When there are people starving?”
It…did, actually. A flashing vision of a black-haired child gazing with craving at the half-eaten apple someone was about to toss in the trash. Sometimes he’d been able to taste someone else’s apple from the far end of a Métro station.
Luc frowned and slowly stroked the fuzz of the peach, tracing a trickle of juice from his bite mark. “Are you trying to convert me or something?”
“Not exactly. But you know—sometimes I care about the star count. Think I’d like to prove to the world that real food, like this, is worth a star. I think I could make a difference that way. Make people think. But sometimes, I mean”—a shrug of burly shoulders—“I’d like to do something more accessible. You know? Or take a day a week or at least a day a month where we just cook out in the open for people. Outside. For everybody. For anybody. For Gypsies and field workers who could never afford our restaurant.”
Luc shot Nico a glance. He didn’t think his chef de cuisine knew Luc was half Roma, and since his other half was Tahitian, he didn’t know if his origins were that obvious just from looking at him. Just some random black-haired, black-eyed exotic, that was him to most of the world. In Paris, he had actually very rarely had to step outside his milieu of high-end luxury where everyone knew exactly who he was and thought he was a god. But when he did, sometimes people guessed he might be Arab or Latin American or…actually, the way his country was changing and people were getting used to it, sometimes these days people just guessed he was French. Kind of weird, but…nice.
Still, Provence was handling the huge influx of immigrant and migrant populations since the European Union even worse than Paris did. If Luc wasn’t careful how he dressed, people driving by these fields would assume he was an illegal migrant worker from Morocco or a “thieving Gypsy”, maybe with the word “filthy” behind it somewhere in their thoughts, even if they didn’t say it out loud.
He’d been there, after all. The black-haired, bronze-skinned gitan with holes in his clothes, invisible or despised, his stomach never, ever full. He’d heard himself called sale gosse because he crept too close to people with food in their hands and eyed that food too hungrily.
“We could probably get funding for doing something like that, so it wouldn’t be at a loss,” Nico said. “I mean, it would even be good publicity for you.”
Luc thought wryly of his wife and her cousins. Yeah, he was pretty sure he could get funding. Hell, Summer would set up a foundation for him to blow dandelions if he asked her, but this…this was more his style, and hers. She would be into it, actually. She would be excited, and start doing that thing she did, asking all kinds of questions about what they wanted to accomplish and how they intended to get there, until they knew.
He remembered making éclairs for those islanders she loved so much, out on the picnic tables a step away from the beach. It had actually been one of the most beautiful moments of cooking in his entire life of three-star chef achievements. And Summer had looked at him as if he had hung the moon.
His lips eased into a smile. He stroked the fuzz again. Were babies’ heads fuzzy? He’d heard them compared to peach fuzz. His thumb touched the dripping juice again. His smile deepened. Also that they leaked a lot of liquids.
“Are you even going to last with me any length of time to get something like that set up?” he asked Nico and reached up to pick his first peach. His hand curved around the fruit in the tree above him, and he paused, savoring something oddly powerful about the moment. He’d spent his whole life in Paris. Fruits arrived in his kitchen in flats, cradled carefully in plastic. Or he’d picked them up himself at four a.m. at the restaurateurs’ market in Rungis. But here he could pick fruit out of a tree. He could plant a seed and watch it grow and from it feed his wife and baby. “Because I keep getting the impression you’re going to ditch me soon for something more your style.”
Nico gave him that nah-I-could-watch-a-cute-lamb-for-hours smile. “You’re pretty interesting. Anyway, I tend to think of things in terms of five-year commitments.”
“What, were you in the Legion étrangère or something?” Luc asked wryly.
Nico just smiled at him benignly and started to fill his basket with peaches. Luc found himself eyeing the edge of the other man’s T-shirt sleeve to see if a Honneur, Fidelité tattoo appeared when it slid up those bulky biceps.
“Speaking of things that aren’t anybody’s business,” Nico said easily, “how are you handling imminent fatherhood?”
Luc clutched too hard and bruised his peach. He, who never hurt anything fragile. He could handle things that most people could break by breathing too hard. “It’s not imminent. Seven and a half more months.”
“Ah,” Nico said and laid a couple more peaches oh-so-carefully into his basket, so that never a bruise could touch them. “That well?”
Luc frowned at him.
“How about Summer? I haven’t seen her around the restaurant as much. She feeling all right?”
Luc scowled at his peach. “The scents are getting to her. I guess it’s—I think it’s just normal.” He slid a glance at the other chef. “I don’t suppose you know anything about pregnant women?” After all, the man could probably birth baby lambs with no problem.
A tiny grin almost escaped Luc, as he imagined Summer’s reaction if he compared her to a ewe: laughing, minatory, coming at him with a pretend threat to his person that was really just an excuse to touch him. Damn, he missed his wife.
Nico looked, briefly, rather darkly amused and just shook his head. “You want me to ask my cousins?”
Luc’s grip tightened on the poor peach. No. He could handle this on his own. He had to. He’d never been able to count on anyone but himself. Well, and Patrick, and look where that had gotten him.
“You want me to handle picking these peaches for you, so you can go home and ask your wife?” Nico said. “She might have some thoughts about pregnant women. Considering, you know, that she is one.”
Yeah, but what if she told him that she couldn’t handle it, that she was going to leave him, go back to her islands where she was happy? Luc ran his thumb over the peach again, and at the movement, his lungs eased enough that he could breathe. You’re part of that island happiness now, remember? Their bodies sprawled together last night in their bed… “She’ll like this,” he said. “The peaches. I want to do it for her.”
“Luc.”
Luc looked up at the unwonted seriousness in Nico’s tone. Nicolas held his eyes, this strong, intent gaze Luc hadn’t realized that hazel was capable of. “I hear becoming a parent for the first time is one of those great challenges people hit in their lives. In some cultures, they throw parties, do all kinds of things to organize help for the new parents. So if you want me to pick some peaches for you, so you c
an give them to your wife and still have time to talk to her—it’s okay to let me have your back on this one. You’ll get my back for me on something later, right? That’s how it works. It’s picking peaches, Luc. Trust me, I’ve done worse.”
Yeah, there was a lot of blood and guts on the savory side of the kitchen. Or—Luc slid a glance to that edge of a T-shirt where no tattoo showed at all—in the Foreign Legion.
“You’re not actually going to reach out and scratch me behind the ears at some point, are you?” Luc asked, reaching for another peach.
“Nah.” Nico assessed him head to toe, sidelong, and then smiled. “You’re not tame enough yet. You might bite.”
You know, it was official. No one capable of handling a top kitchen was actually sane.
Chapter 17
Luc found Summer from the music. Bemused, he tracked it to a room he hadn’t even realized they were using.
Summer was…merde, she looked so cute. He leaned in the doorway, the pure, damn adorableness of it punching him in the stomach. She had her eyes closed, and she was bumping and grinding and punching the air. ROAR!
She tried to roar, too.
Oh, hell, that was so cute it was hot, it grabbed him right between the legs and tried to jerk him over to her, and he braced himself against the door jamb, because he had not come over here to take his wife against her—desk?—in a two-minute quickie.
She had a desk?
A huge calendar papered the length of a wall, pages of a great desk calendar torn out and taped side by side, up through March. A big star marked February 12, the date the baby was officially due. Around the star, a heart had been drawn in marker, and it looked as if Summer had traced over that heart again and again, maybe every time she paused in front of it.
A corkboard was full of papers and some photos of people who looked in their early twenties, with that characteristic American softness to their lips, as if they’d never learned to use their facial muscles in anything but a smile. He’d never seen them before, a diverse mix of people who didn’t look any relation to each other or to Summer. More papers were strewn across the desk.
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