Mack shrugged. “Gave me something to work with.” You could play around with a few million, not to mention you grew up learning the business ropes and forming the initial contacts, understanding the industry and the stock market and knowing what the people who controlled it looked like when they had a bad cold, just like any other person. Anne, starting from her family of middle-class professors, had only managed to get up to a billion so far. Of course, that was also partly because there was only so far an empress could extend her empire without delegating, something Anne had a hard time doing, but still. He bit back a grin. Only managed a billion. He’d have to put it to her that way sometime when he wanted to get her riled up.
Shit, yeah, the erotic charge that went through him at the idea of getting Anne riled up.
“You’re trying to change the subject from your own inadequacies,” Jack Corey said severely, waving a hand.
From his—Mack took a deep breath that just kind of sizzled through his teeth when he let it out. “Dad. You’re pushing it.”
“With women,” his father argued, as if he was perfectly justified, one of his father’s most infuriating paternal traits.
“Dad. I’m warning you.”
“Well. How long have you been mooning over her?”
Mooning? “Dad. She’s my friend! Quit being so damn…sexist.” What the hell had he just said? His father made his brain short-circuit. He was the only person in the whole damn world who could do that to Mack’s brain. Well, Anne, once in a while, but that was usually because his brain had taken a sudden trip south in the middle of a conversation and he was busy trying to hide it.
Jack chortled, entirely delighted at the opening. “It’s not sexist to want a hot woman. It’s human.”
“Dad. I thought we agreed that I got enough of your advice about sex when I was twelve.”
His father gave him a superior look out of a face so deeply wrinkled it was an alarming foreshadowing of what Mack was going to look like if his blood pressure let him survive another thirty years. “Clearly you need more.”
“Oh, good God.” Mack tried to turn away. Mostly because he was pretty sure if he pushed his father into the pool, Jack Corey would manage to grab his ankle or something and drag him in, too. And wouldn’t that photo end up circulating on his daughters’ TV screens forever. He’d go down in legend to their great-grandchildren. Not the guy who had made them multiple billions as a legacy, but the man who pushed his own father into a pool at a wedding. He’d probably be the bad guy in the story, too. Nobody would remember how provoking Jack Corey was.
“Anyway, last I checked, squeezing a woman’s ass was still considered sexist,” Jack Corey said regretfully. “I don’t know how that happened. You could get away with that kind of thing when I was your age.”
“No, you could not, Dad. Maybe when you were twenty, but you’re probably fantasizing the past again.” Mack re-adopted his patronizing, pat-him-on-the-head tone. “I hear old guys tend to do that.”
Jack Corey grinned. Touché. It was always hard to fight with his dad, because his dad tended to like it when his son scored one off him. “So what took you so long to make a move on her?” The elder Corey’s fighting spirit had relaxed with his grin, and now it was a genuine question. We got our sparring out of the way. Now let’s talk about what matters.
For all the old man drove him crazy…damn, but he had a good dad.
Mack hesitated a long moment, his hands in his trouser pockets under his tux jacket. Exactly the way he always stuck his hands in his jeans pockets when he walked on the beach with Anne. So he didn’t reach for something he shouldn’t. His own voice went quiet, like it did sometimes at the oddest moments with his dad. As if he was still a kid, still glad to have a father for counsel. “Dad. I’ve never in my life had a friend as good as she is. I’ll never have another one. If she doesn’t want it, then I’m not going to do it.”
Jack Corey gave that some thought. “But you still did something. There on the dance floor.”
“I know. I just—I can’t—that prison. It still makes me want to rip everything. Rip up the whole world.” And I hugged her. And God damn but does she feel good, nestled up against my damn dick like that. Now I can’t separate the reality anymore from all those years of fantasy. I don’t want to. I want to rip that damn sheet of plastic between us all away. “She stands over there at the edge of things, like none of this has even touched her, like we’re still the same people we were before her trial started, and it makes me want to get to her.”
Jack Corey nodded and considered another long moment. Suddenly he grinned again and shook his head. “You’re a funny kid.”
“What?” Was he ever going to get through a conversation with his father without pounding his head against a wall? And yet—it was kind of disorientingly reassuring to still have one person alive in the world who was capable of seeing him as a funny kid.
“Well, you say she’s your best friend. You’ve known each other twenty years. And you still don’t realize that if you try to get to Anne Winters and she doesn’t want you to, she’ll stop you?”
Chapter 5
Oh, good God. There was happiness all over this place. Anne stopped again in the shadow of a tree, smiling a little. Still pretending to herself that she wasn’t doing this on purpose, spying on the people under her wing, but she really was. Slipping from place to place in the gardens she had designed to be a refuge for group laughter and intimate moments both, reassuring herself from the confusion of Mack’s behavior with sighting after sighting of contentment. I made the space for them to have that.
The lighting she had designed for the wedding played beautifully over Jaime and Dom, soft and sheltering, a gentle cocoon of mellow gold against the darkness. The sound of the sea shushed steadily over the dunes, and the little waterfall in this nook trickled in sweet counterpoint.
Jaime brought her hands up over her head and twirled with joy, spinning away from her big, rough-looking new husband as if there was too much of that happiness to stand still for it, whirling back to land with a rush against his chest as if she had to hurry back to that joy’s source. Dom caught her. Anne was pretty sure that man would always catch her.
And it gave her a solid feeling in her stomach, a belief that maybe some joys in this world, some couples, could make it through.
Jaime danced a little against Dom as she clasped her hands behind his neck, and he cooperated, rocking them gently as if they could still hear the last love song in their heads.
Jaime snuggled against his chest, and Anne was considering her possible avenues for retreat without disturbing them, when Jaime laughed, in almost sleepy contentment. “Did you see my dad? Do you think he’s drunk?”
Dom grunted, this remnant of an irascibility that too much happiness had almost drugged to sleep. Dom dealt poorly with Mack. Didn’t trust a man that powerful so close to him or to Jaime, Anne was pretty sure. Mack did a little better with Dom from his side, mostly because, as he had explained to Anne one morning on the beach, whatever Dom’s faults, and there are many Mack’s gravel morning voice had added, he was pretty sure the man would do anything for Jaime.
“I thought you told me those two were already together,” Dom said.
Anne’s eyebrows went up.
“Well, they’re discreet about it,” Jaime said. “I guess they didn’t want to upset me and Cade when we were teenagers. Or maybe just didn’t want to let the world into their business, because the world is pretty damn nosy about us. But I’m pretty sure they’ve been a lot more than friends for, what, probably a decade now.”
What?
“It’s sweet,” Jaime said. “I think it makes them both so much happier. Although they’re both a hard read.”
Dom shook that black head of his. He was fresh-shaved and very elegant in a tuxedo for his wedding, although a secret rebel’s tuxedo, with an open neck to his white shirt. But he would always have this sexy, big, dangerous thing going on.
Well, what? A
nne’s mouth curved in her shadows. If her sons-in-law—if Mack’s sons-in-law—were going around thinking she was hot, she had the right to admit to herself they were pretty hot, too, didn’t she?
“I don’t know what they might have had when you were a teenager, but if they did have something going on, he screwed up or something happened, and she cut him off,” Dom said definitely. “And he’s been cut off for a while. Your dad looks at her like she’s a castle he’s about to bring down.”
Oh, he did, did he? All Anne’s forces manned her walls in defensive instinct, just at the thought. She hadn’t built those castle walls to be penetrable. She’d built them to withstand a siege.
And somewhere, deeper, lower down, like this secret tunnel that some spy inside her wanted to open to the enemy: He did, did he? He wanted in that badly?
Jaime laughed. “Well, she’d better watch out then. Because once my dad starts his pieces across a chessboard, he wins. Even if he has to knock the whole damn table over and go for the other player’s throat to do it.”
***
Mack nodded at the guard stationed near the boardwalk coming in over the dunes and walked down it until he came to the bend in it, a couple of benches and a space where people wanting to get closer to the ocean but not quite in the mood to get sand in their feet could sit and watch it. He shrugged his shoulders, glad to escape the noise and wedding hustle for a while, shaking his dad’s aggravation off him but letting the thoughts from it sink in.
The moon and starlight shone bright on the water. He made way for a shadowy couple coming up the ramp from the beach, a couple that resolved itself into Summer and Luc. The moonlight shone off Summer’s golden hair, her hand in Luc’s as Luc angled them a little so that she could precede him up the boardwalk while they still held hands. Summer’s luminous gold and Luc’s black hair and black eyes made it look as if light was being trailed by shadow up the walk. Summer had Luc’s tuxedo jacket over her shoulders, and Luc’s white shirt was open several buttons at the neck. The wind or maybe fingers had ruffled his hair.
Summer had that gentle half-smile on her face that made Mack kind of mentally snap a picture of it and send it to Julie. Not that he exactly believed Julie was somewhere getting those mental emails of his, but he didn’t exactly not believe it, either. He’d always had that habit of thinking out to her at some moments, like a little nudge through death: You see Cade giving that valedictorian speech? Shit, you would have been proud. Or, Good God, Julie, tear-gassed at a G8 summit. What the hell am I going to do with that girl? We should never have named her after my father. I told you that was asking for trouble.
And now, no words, really, just a nudge of Summer’s smile toward that memory of Julie. Because Julie had always worried about Summer, when she was still alive, and Mack thought she’d like to see how happy the girl was now. That fake, silky smile thing she had had going on for so long—that smile-for-the-tabloids—had always made him want to just grab her father Sam’s head and beat it against something. But this—this was quieter. Easier. A real happiness.
Maybe he could kind of see how that rounded belly and smile could wrench pain right through a woman who didn’t have it.
Summer lifted a hand in acknowledgement, her smile changing for her honorary uncle Mack but still a warm smile, still a real one, Mack was proud to say. She sure as hell didn’t smile with real warmth for her own dad. Luc nodded briefly at him as they passed. “Monsieur.”
Good kid. Arrogant as hell, like Sylvain and Dom, but good manners on him about it. Mack had genuine trouble dealing with men who weren’t arrogant, mostly because they just kind of disappeared before him without him even noticing they existed. Kind of like the straw house for the big bad wolf. Worse than that, really. More like the big bad wolf talking a breath in front of a house, only to have it waver out of existence like smoke just from that intake into his lungs. It was nice to run up against someone made of actual brick from time to time.
He thought of Anne, that lofty, beautiful castle made of smooth, impenetrable stone, and grinned, resting his folded arms on the rail. The ocean looked beautiful at night, all dark and quiet but with the moonlight shining off it. Anne hadn’t escaped to here, either. He’d find her in a minute. There was only so far Anne could allow herself to retreat—she’d built herself into a castle to hold her ground, not yield it—and anyway, give her two minutes away from the wedding celebration and all the thoughts of what the wedding organizer might be screwing up would start eating her brain alive, if she didn’t go make sure.
He turned and leaned back against the rail, gazing at his house. It felt good to be the owner of that house right about now. It felt as if he’d built this great, big shelter and invited warmth and happiness to come in and stay. Laughter and voices came from the terrace and verandas, the open windows, the tables and the dance floor in the middle of the fairytale-lit gardens and the clusters of people all over the place, a mix of Corey-side guests and all those chef frenemies of Dom’s. He didn’t know whether Jaime had just been trying to pad Dom’s side of the church so he wouldn’t stand so isolated, or what, but it felt as if she’d invited half the arrogant chefs in France. Since Cade had been up there as the maid—grrr, matron, a word Mack couldn’t wrap his mind around when it came to his daughter—of honor, Sylvain had sat on Dom’s side of the church, too. Sometimes Mack was afraid he might just have to start liking Sylvain.
He tried to keep it close to his chest, though. No sense letting Sylvain know. Jesus.
Jaime had basically just packed up one of the family planes with Dom’s chef—was frenemies the right word? They weren’t enemies who pretended to be friends, they were guys who solidly had each other’s back all while pretending to be enemies, and, hell, but Mack would like to have some enemies like that. To those chef-rival-friend-whatevers, she’d added Dom’s staff and the surprisingly large number of other people who actually seemed to like that son-of-a-bitch and flown them over for the wedding.
Which meant Mack had a house packed with men who thought they were gods, and it’s not that he had a problem with the conviction, but it wasn’t like he was running a Greek pantheon here. What the hell would that make him, Zeus?
He smiled a little as the idea sank in, enjoying owning Olympus. There, lounging against the gazebo railing, was Apollo, for example. That blond chef who looked as if he should be out there on the ocean surfing was busy provoking everyone with a lazy grin, his arm always draping over this tiny, black-haired woman’s shoulders as if he needed her to support his weight. Sarah? was that her name? had gotten into the kitchen, too, but apparently Anne had been able to stand her, because she was quiet and perfectionist and not overtly bossy. They were talking to a short woman with spiky, punk hair—Célie, Dom’s saucy head chef chocolatier. A blonde woman with a high-end professional camera was capturing photos of the group as if she couldn’t stop, while an older, dark-haired chocolatier—in his forties, maybe—occasionally reached out and took her by the camera and pulled her into him, smiling down at her and making her come out from behind it.
Standing near them, reacting to some provocation, was that big lion guy who’d caused Anne a fit over the macarons she’d had planned for the reception. Apparently, he’d winced, and then winced, and then winced some more, and then he’d started flinging orders at Anne’s staff and pretty soon he and a couple of those other chefs had taken completely over. Several members of the staff had nearly quit in a huff, and from what Anne said, the Macaron Lion had only shrugged: Good riddance.
Since inherently perfectionist and impossibly demanding Anne agreed with him, once she saw the difference between Macaron Guy’s work and her people’s, it had been pretty funny helping Anne vent her way through the episode. Anne clearly wanted to hit nearly everyone involved over the head, and also find a way to hire Macaron Guy to be on her staff. Something that would never work. Alpha personalities who had to dominate all the space around them and make everything go their way did not deal well with Anne.
<
br /> Well, except him. He gave the guys around the gazebo a smug little smile. Beat you. Mostly, probably, because he was older and while it had made him less flexible in some ways, it had also taught him not to be such a shit-ass.
You could stand to make yourself a bit supple, to have a woman as strong as Anne in your camp.
He scanned the gardens and veranda and the glass windows that let him see inside the great house, waiting to catch a glimpse of her. Instead, he spotted Jaime out in the gardens over there by the little waterfall. Jaime’s red-brown hair was still too short to be put in those braids he’d loved so much when she was a freckle-faced, gap-toothed kid. No, she had this elegant jaw-sweeping thing going on right now that made her look so grown-up. Damn it. But beautiful. He sure as hell had two beautiful daughters.
She was twirling into Dom’s arms, laughing up at him. Like she used to dance up to her daddy and laugh up at him, goddammit. Glumness settled over Mack again.
Paris.
Why the hell did they have to choose Paris?
He could go to Paris, he supposed. They’d bought that damn sterile penthouse apartment there last year just to make it easier on him and his dad to visit, and to make sure his girls always had a refuge if they needed to get away from those idiot boyfriends of theirs. He could pretty much tell that wouldn’t be necessary by now, but back then, what had he known about those arrogant s.o.b.’s?
Looked as if he was stuck with them now. It was a good stuck, he knew it deep down, but…shit. It made his shoulders feel so heavy. As if, for one of the first times in his life, they wanted to sag.
He could set up at least part-time headquarters in Paris, easily enough. Well, easily compared to some of the other things he did running a multibillion-dollar corporation. But if they’d wanted to be on the same side of the ocean as their father, they probably would have said so by now.
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