“Mack,” she sighed in some exasperation, turning her head up to his. He’d run a washcloth over his face and abandoned his tuxedo jacket, but he still retained a fair amount of chocolate damage. Not as much as she did, though, thanks to him.
He grinned down at her. “Chocolate’s a cute look on you, Anne.”
Oh, for God’s sake. “Now I’m cute?”
“Adorable, honey.”
Adorable. Honey. “You do know why these heels are called stilettos, don’t you? That’s what they feel like, stomped into an instep.”
He laughed and, without warning, flipped her back against the trellis between two climbing roses, lifting one of her calves up before she even had time to react and pulling off her shoe. “That’s one danger avoided.” He held it up in front of her nose, grinning at her as he stepped back. Exactly how much alcohol had the man put into his system tonight?
“Mack Corey,” she said between her teeth, putting that foot back down on the ground, all lopsided and definitely ruining her fine hose, if that hose had survived the chocolate. “Give me back my shoe.”
In answer, he threw it over the trellis, so hard that that she couldn’t even hear the thump as it landed somewhere in the distance on her property.
“Better give me the other one now,” Mack said. “You’ll look ridiculous otherwise. We can pretend you’re Cinderella.”
About to give in, rather than hobble lopsided all the way to her house, she stopped with her shod foot half-lifted. “Cinderella?”
“Well.” He laughed. “I admit the humble, submissive, ash-girl wannabe-princess bit is a stretch for you, but I could be Prince Charming.”
“Mack. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t be prince of anything.”
He contrived to look genuinely wounded.
Idiot. She rolled her eyes. “It’s too low a rank for you.” That wasn’t obvious?
“Too low a rank for you,” he said so casually and cheerfully that it took a moment for the compliment to sink in.
And even then she had to think about it. What did he mean by for her? Was he saying she was more than a prince herself, or was he by any chance suggesting that a man had to be better than a prince to deserve her? And if he was, what, exactly, did that mean here?
“I guess that lets out Sleeping Beauty, too,” he added. “Despite all the roses.” He touched one of the pink ones by her head, stirring their scent in the air.
“Sleeping Beauty was fifteen, Mack.”
“Then Prince Charming was kind of a pervert, wasn’t he? Breaking into her room and kissing her while she was sleeping. Maybe we should just play ourselves.” He gave a shrug of those wide shoulders that always made him look too big for his skin. “I’m okay with being me.”
What, and she wasn’t? She took her other shoe off and handed it to him like a queen to a servant, just to do something annoying.
He took it easily in one hand and draped the other arm right back around her shoulders. Damn it. She really needed to find a way to get him to behave, but Mack was notoriously difficult to control and…it brushed across her mind that the angle of her head, right now as she looked up at him, the angle of his, was just like Kai’s and Kurt’s as they had looked at each other a moment ago.
“I’d better walk you home,” Mack said. “The wedding organizer can handle the cleanup part.”
“I can get home on my own.” Anne brushed her dress. But she didn’t twist out from under his arm.
Well…he was warm. The night was getting chilly. In the distance, she could see Kurt and Kai moving behind one of the warm windows of the guest cottage. And in the main house, she could see all the lights she had left on to make a warm welcome home for herself and nobody moving there at all.
“I’ll walk you.” Mack shrugged. With his arm still across her shoulders, she felt that easy ripple of power in the movement all the way through her body.
It was kind of aggravating. No matter how much power and wealth she amassed for herself and her one heir, she would never be able to impact a man’s entire body just by her smallest movement. She would never have been able to flip him back against a trellis and steal his shoe before he could stop her.
“There are security guards, Mack.”
“I like to see my dates home,” Mack said, smugly. “Plus, the state your yard is in, you might bruise a toe and need me to carry you.”
The state her yard was in? Her immaculate gardens? She gave him her most withering look.
And, as usual, he failed to wither. He rather looked as if he thrived on it. “We can go around the beach way if you like.”
It was tempting. The ocean in the dark hours of the night, quiet after the fireworks, waves lapping under the stars. But she didn’t have any pockets in this slim dress. She always stuffed her hands in her pockets, when she walked with Mack on the beach in the morning. Suddenly, the inability to do that seemed too—something. The bareness of her arms in the chill, how glad she was for that heat of his arm over her shoulders, the heat of his body against her side. She couldn’t go for a walk with him like this.
“I’m tired,” she said. Not that she wanted to admit a weakness, but it was better than openly waving a flag of retreat. “I’d just as soon get straight to bed.”
“Me, too.” Mack grinned, deliberately wicked.
And heat lanced through her again.
She rolled her eyes and headed under the arch. Even though the way she walked did not in the least invite his arm to stay across her shoulders, he managed it anyway, tightening his hold and matching his pace to hers.
He managed that even when she climbed the steps to her front porch. Even when she keyed in her code. “Mack.” She sighed, turning. “Look. Tomorrow, I’m going to do you a favor and pretend none of this ever happened.”
“Oh, good,” he said, with a sudden angry, fierce delight, as he dropped her shoe and crowded her right back against her door. “Well, I can do one hell of a lot of things right now, then, if this is all just a fantasy.”
And he kissed her.
Just flat out kissed her. No careful approach, no slow dip in to make sure she was okay with it, no testing the waters. He just took her mouth and took it over, like she was a damn company and he was pissed off.
Like he was just going to seize all her assets and restructure her.
She felt that way. Seized. Restructured.
His mouth molded hers, dipping straight into hers, his arms tightening on either side of her body until she was locked between his forearms on the door. They pressed against her sides, and then they were curving around her back. And then they were hauling her up into him, as he kept on kissing.
Kissed her until she couldn’t think or breathe, until she couldn’t get her hands to either pound on him for freedom or grip him to capture this invader and punish him for his invasion.
He kissed her until she was kissing him back, until when he finally raised his head, she had no strength left. What the hell was she supposed to do without her strength? She always needed it.
Mack was breathing hard, his face all angles and danger in the lights and shadows of the porch. “Anything else you want to pretend never happened tomorrow?” he asked, with that hushed, wicked anger.
She stared up at him, trying to breathe, trying to wet her lips.
“Because I’ve got a few more ideas.”
And suddenly she was so furious she was almost shaking. She could swear the fury was why she was shaking. “Go away,” she said fiercely and shoved at his chest. “Go away. You’re drunk. Go away.”
Mack backed a step, his arms falling away to free her. But he didn’t stop holding her eyes. “I’m not drunk, in fact. Anne.” He reached to touch his thumb to her lower lip.
And that lower lip felt so vulnerable, so exposed and unprotected, that she jerked her head and bit him. A fierce, warning nip of the tip of his thumb. “You are, too. If you had to drive home, I’d confiscate your keys and call a taxi. Now go away. Before you do something we’ll bot
h regret.”
He pulled his thumb back to safety. “There’s nothing I could do that we’d both regret, Anne.”
She folded her arms over her body and glared at him, trying so hard not to shake, trying not to let him see. She hadn’t felt this desperate and vulnerable since they’d announced that she’d be spending six months in prison. At least she’d had time to prepare for that. It had been pretty obvious how much everyone in that courtroom but Mack and Kurt hated her and how much they wanted to see her go down. She’d tried to get Mack to force Kurt out of it, so he wouldn’t see her as the whole world’s goddamn prey, but Kurt, grim-faced, had refused to go.
“Because I wouldn’t regret anything,” Mack said, and sucked that bitten thumb into his mouth, absently nursing it as he watched her.
“Leave me alone.” Anne whipped around and pushed her door open. “Leave me alone, Mack.” That was the way she had always been.
“You know, I probably won’t do that, Anne,” was the last she heard from Mack at her back. “No matter what you say.”
She slammed the door behind her.
And for good measure, shot him a bird through the glass pane.
So the last thing she saw as she glanced back was him leaning both forearms against that glass, laughter breaking out on his face, an appreciative gleam in his eye, as she turned and hurried up her stairs.
Was it just her, or did he watch her ass through the glass the whole climb? Because her butt twitched and burned as if he did.
Chapter 7
Mack rolled his shoulders, easing out the stiffness, and threw the worn stick for the dog again. In addition to last night’s chocolate wrestling match, he had taken his sons-in-law and Summer’s husband to play tennis the morning before the wedding, to try to dissipate their energy before they drove Anne crazy, and also because it was kind of sad seeing a big, bad guy like Dom struggling not to just collapse on the ground and put his head between his knees, hyperventilating. Kid came on all tough when he was facing down a girl’s father with his sins in life, the bastard, but he needed to learn how to handle his nerves.
And since he was going to be Mack’s son-in-law, Mack figured it was his job to give him a little of the mentoring the man clearly hadn’t had from his own asshole of a dad, so…tennis.
As anyone could have predicted, even though Sylvain had played maybe three times in his life and Dom and Luc were barely even aware of what the game was about, they still managed to turn it into an intensely rivalrous morning.
Mack, too, of course. Well, shit, he wasn’t about to get beaten by his own sons-in-law, when they could barely figure out which end of the racquet to hit the ball with. As usual with rampant beginners, they ran him all the hell ragged chasing their wild balls, until they got into the groove of it, at which point the competition got brutal. Those guys did not tire. He wasn’t even sure they understood that most human beings sat down and relaxed occasionally.
And hell but Dom did not want to lose to Sylvain.
So that had been fun.
His kind of fun, anyway. Everyone had survived it, nobody had literally killed anybody, they’d laughed a lot, and they’d managed to vent a few hours of intense competitiveness. Unfortunately, it had barely taken the edge off the chefs’ energy, and they’d still managed to compete all afternoon as to who could make Dom and Jaime the best wedding piece, right in the middle of Anne’s professional kitchen next door. Mack, on the other hand, was still sore.
His mouth twisted wryly. Rueful older men had been warning him for decades: When you’re thirty, you’re sore for two days. When you’re forty, three. When you’re fifty...hell, a week, at least.
He kind of liked it, though. He’d always liked that hint of soreness in his muscles that lingered after he’d really pushed himself. Made him feel alive. Pushing himself was what a man was supposed to do.
The same way that developing Corey Chocolate into the biggest producer of chocolate on the planet made him feel as if he’d pushed himself, or at least flexed his muscles a bit. White knighting for the Firenze brothers and snatching their company out from under Total Foods’ nose while Anne was in prison, for example—that had been fun. Total Foods didn’t know it yet, but they were not getting Europe. Beat my daughter, did you? Let’s see you take on her dad.
Lex came back panting with the stick, brown ears floppy, shaking water all over him, and he gave the stick another long, hard throw.
And a quiet came onto the beach. A wry, understanding strength. A sense of not being alone. A relief from that solitude he often felt in a crowd, that he often felt even with his own daughters. The dad. The person who was supposed to know what to do.
Well, except now he was leftover. Both his daughters had found someone else.
He nodded at Anne, shoving his hands into his pockets, and kind of wished, for a second, that he hadn’t gone so over the line last night. Because what if she—what if he couldn’t talk to her this morning? What if she shut him out? Could you break a friendship like this, by being too offensive? God knew, despite all the perverse fantasies he’d had about Anne, she’d never shown much sign of being a sexual being.
He just kind of felt like he could change that for her.
And, damn, but he had missed her, when she was in prison. He’d felt as if he’d been broken into a million pieces. It made him frantic to put himself all back together again, and fuse her tight into him as he was melding those pieces back, so no one could ever get her away from him again. It wasn’t how life worked—they’d gotten to her despite everything he could do the first time—but it was how he felt.
Anne nodded to him, too, her hands also in her pockets, and they fell into step, the dog bouncing along beside them from time to time to bring back the stick, Mack throwing it forward. In the morning, Anne always looked like his. No make-up artist polishing her up, whether for a public appearance or on call in the “powder room” she had set up last night so the female guests could stop in for a touch-up. No, in the morning, it was just her skin, dewy from a shower and presumably moisturizer, and some clear, glossy thing she put on her lips. Anne was one of those women who could easily pass for mid-thirties, if she ever managed to carry herself with a little less power and experience. Maybe a Triple AAA personality, sleep-deprived, thirty-something mother of twins some days, but she had these beautiful, elegant strong lines to her bones that were part of the reason she’d done so well on television, and she’d taken good care of her skin and her body. He’d fought the good fight against Botox, when she was tempted in her forties, and won, thank God. Jesus, woman, why would you want to mess with something that gorgeous?
Besides, he had a lot of memories held in those fine lines at the corners of her eyes. All those squinting looks across a sun rising over the sea. All those sidelong, minatory glances at something he said. All those times her eyes crinkled in suppressed amusement, laughter dancing in that elusive green. And those newer, tiny vertical lines that tension had left at the corners of her lips—well, he hadn’t put them there, but he figured they were his, just the same. He’d liked the way they looked last night, when she was staring up at him on her porch, after he’d given that mouth something better to do with itself than be tense.
They walked in silence, as they often did. Seagulls scattered away as Lex dashed after the stick, with a Lab or an Aussie’s energy, although God knew what the dog actually was. Like most of their pets, Lex had appeared on their doorstep in Corey one day, although both the girls had been off to college by the time this particular dog showed up, so Mack had no one to blame for cracking but himself. Brindle brown fur but retriever-shaped, the dog was delirious to be let out now that the bulk of the guests and their no-paw-prints-please reception clothes were gone.
He wondered if Anne had felt like that, when she stepped out of prison. She’d come straight here. Mack had been at the prison with a limo at her release, of course, but she’d been so grim-faced and clearly unwilling to talk yet that he’d left her alone afterward. H
e knew Anne. It had still pissed him off when he woke up the next morning to find she’d flown off to the Hamptons without even texting him to come with, though. He had flown in after her immediately, to find her already in the ocean. Swimming and swimming in the waves for hours, as if she was going to swim across the Atlantic. Mack had sat on the beach keeping an eye on her, the Coast Guard’s number one touch of a call button away, just in case.
Gotten a hell of a sunburn, but then, hers had been worse, out in the water so long after all those months indoors.
“Head hurt?” Anne asked dryly now, at last.
He cut her a glance. A little, amused smile curled her mouth, a woman completely smug about how much of a drunken idiot she hadn’t made of herself the night before. Probably not the moment to tell her he hadn’t had two swallows of that damn champagne. Who the hell had the time, when he was hosting the wedding? Or wanted to dull his brain, when he was challenging Anne Winters?
Except that smug little look on Anne’s face pissed him off, and he wanted to tell her. Wanted her to know how very not drunk he’d been and that she’d better watch out, because he was after her now. His whole body itched with it. What Mack went after, he got.
And his body knew it, too. His body was getting all ready to do every single one of those fantasies in actuality.
“Shoulders,” he said instead of any of that, briefly. “I took my sons-in-law out to play tennis, remember?”
Anne smiled a little more. She was a pretty damn good tennis player herself. Competitive as hell. She’d hunker down, her racquet ready, and just grin as she smashed a shot past him. He’d come so close to locking her up against the tennis court fence and doing obscene things to her when she was all sweaty at the end of some of those matches, she had no idea.
A few more steps, another throw for the dog. “How are you feeling?” Anne asked, that quiet tone. Apparently they really were going to let his kisses and his sexual aggression get buried under elegant discretion.
Well, she was going to try that technique, anyway. And he wasn’t going to challenge it during their beach walk, of all moments. Some things were too sacred to ever risk disturbing.
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