Shadowed Heart

by Laura Florand

  The phone in Summer’s hand rang, and her eyes opened as she started to answer it—and then she saw Luc.

  Her face just lit. “Luc?” she said wonderingly, as if he’d just shown up alive after he’d been declared MIA for years.

  And before he could figure out how to digest that, she was across the room in a lunge of delight, her hands clasping behind his neck, the phone’s new “Roar” ringtone continuing in one of them, ignored. “Hey!” she said happily, squeezing him. “You came to see me. What are you doing here? It can’t be three yet, can it?” Sometimes he could take a couple of hours’ break at three. He’d made a point of it that brief period they were in Paris, but starting the new restaurant here had completely swamped him, and she’d adapted to his inability to get away without complaint, coming instead to him.

  She’d acted so completely compliant about it and yet—this much happiness and surprise because he had taken a fifteen-minute break and walked over from the restaurant?

  “Hey,” he said and wrapped his free arm around her, holding her in close. Her body felt so sweet and warm against his. Right where her belly is pressed against me, that’s where our baby is. And he felt instantly guilty that his penis was right at that level. “I brought you something.” He lifted his basket.

  “Peaches.” She grabbed one, pausing just long enough to kiss her lips to its skin and close her eyes in anticipation.

  He parted his lips to offer to peel it for her, but it was too late. Her teeth sank deep into it, in one luscious, hungry bite. The sound she made in her throat charged every erogenous zone in his body. He tried to angle his body a little so that his damn penis wouldn’t poke his baby in the head.

  “Oh, God, that tastes so good. I haven’t managed to eat more than crackers all morning. This is perfect.” Summer licked the juice that was running down the skin.

  Luc wet his own lips.

  “Did Nico bring them in?” she asked.

  “No, I—I picked them.”

  Her head drew back in surprise. “You did?”

  He shrugged awkwardly. “Also I made you some ice pops. I put them in the freezer.”

  “Peach?” she asked hungrily.

  His teeth tried very hard not to set. “Lime.”

  “Oh.” Her face tried very hard not to fall.

  He gazed down at her a moment. And then he lifted his hand and gently stroked her hair from her face. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t I make you some in half a dozen flavors. If you want a dozen different ones, just let me know.”

  Her face softened. She rubbed her face against his fingers and then just nestled her head against his shoulder, still holding her half-eaten peach in one hand. “You still love me, then?”

  “I—” God, it scared the hell out of him, how often he had to reassure her about that. What if one day he forgot, and she just slipped through his careless fingers? You, of all people, have no excuse for ever having careless fingers. But still…it would be nice to relax once in a while. “Summer. Can we just take that as a given? Please.”

  But he caught the way her expression drooped, even half hidden by his chest, the way her head bent. So apparently they couldn’t.

  She nodded, though, as if they could. Damn it, it would make his life so much easier if Summer wasn’t such a compulsive liar about her feelings.

  “Soleil. I’ll always love you. No matter how terrible I am at proving it to you, it will always be true.”

  She drew a little breath of relief and sighed it out against his chest, nestling her face into him. It drove him absolutely crazy that she would be relieved to hear he still loved her. When he had just told her the day before. How could she be that insecure?

  “Me, too,” she whispered. “I’ll always love you, too.”

  His heart started to beat very fast. God, to just tell him that, when she could take herself and their baby away from him so easily and leave him with nothing. It was cruel.

  “Hey.” She looked up at him. “I will.”

  “I know.” He smiled down at her. Part of him knew. The ever-shrinking part of him that was sane. That said to the rest of him: She’s not your mother, you idiot. How can you be that insecure?

  She stroked his face. “I really will.”

  He smiled wryly. “Because I’m so lovable, right.”

  “Well, yes. Exactly.” She leaned up onto her toes to kiss him.

  Mmm, that was good. Arousal, already punched awake by her dance and her bite of that peach, surged more eagerly. He wanted to wrap her up and bury himself deep and never, ever let go, but…no. He was here to check on her. To talk, not have a quickie and run back to work.

  She relaxed down out of the kiss, smiling up at him, still caressing his face. “And you’re not terrible at proving you love me, Luc. I’m just, you know, a little screwed up, and also I think this pregnancy stuff must be making me hormonal.”

  He turned his face into her hand and held it to him as he kissed her wrist. “You’re not terrible at proving it to me either, soleil. I just—well, likewise.”

  A flicker of a teasing smile. “You’re hormonal?”

  “I certainly feel as if I am,” he said, heartfelt.

  She laughed a little, her hand caressing. Her eyes grew searching but tender about it, careful. “So…are you okay?” she asked, which confused him. That was what he had come home in the middle of the day to ask her.

  “Never better.” Right at that particular second with her pressed against him, it was almost true. “You?”

  She made a so-so gesture with her hand. “Yucky,” she said ruefully. “Most of the time.” She lifted her peach. “Thank you.”

  He bent his head until he could slide his lips right next to her ear. The scent of her hair, that coconut and tiare scent of her, went straight to his head. His heart. His groin. “You go ahead and crave whatever you want,” he breathed. “And I’ll give it to you.”

  Summer’s breath drew in, fast and soft. Her hips nestled against his, seeking different pressures.

  Mmm.

  God, he could so easily keep nudging her right back against that desk right now.

  He did nudge her back, but just so he could prop her on the edge of it and set the basket of peaches down beside her. “Eat your peach, soleil.”

  Yeah, he could sublimate. He could get off on that, just watching her sit there, with her legs spread a little so he could stand between them, eating that peach, licking that juice. Maybe he’d snatch just a little bite of it from her hand.

  Arousal pressed in him again, hungry and sweet. She was his wife. He had all the time in the world with her. Their lives. He could tantalize himself now and linger over the idea until tonight.

  Although if that was the case, why did he always, always feel as if he didn’t have enough time?

  You might want to think about finding time to talk about baby names with your wife.

  “What are you up to?” He picked up one of the papers spread on the desk behind her to see it better. A baby swing. Another. Another. With all their reviews printed up, highlights through different remarks. His heart squeezed. Was Summer getting worried about getting the baby right, too? “Isn’t it a little early to start shopping for swings?” Thirty-three more weeks, right? He could get the restaurant running a bit more smoothly first, and then they could hunt for baby gear together. The thought of it bemused him.

  But Summer’s expression stiffened, this little flash in her eyes as if he had hurt her somehow. What? “Why too early?”

  “Well, I mean—” He opened a hand helplessly. He hadn’t even gotten used to the idea that a baby was going to come, and she was already outfitting them? “I want to help.”

  The stiffness relaxed out of her expression, her eyes crinkling a little with pleasure. “You do?”

  What? “Of course I do.” It sounded…adorable. Fun. Vastly reassuring, to walk hand in hand with her through stores trying to figure out what a baby needed. As if they were in this together, building a solid future,
as if it was all just normal and happy and hopeful. “I really do,” he realized. His schedule rose up before him like a wall, a monster wall with hands that grew out of its stones and grabbed at him greedily. The restaurant. All the demands of perfection that lay between him and that moment shopping for a future with his wife.

  The restaurant was their future, too, though, right? Or was it only his? But if he didn’t make it the best in the world, how would his little girl know her daddy was worth anything? How would his wife?

  He’d married a woman who had he-wasn’t-sure-how-many million dollars in her own portfolio and was heir to one of the wealthiest self-made men in the world. How did he prove he was worth her, except with, well, his own worth? What he was good at?

  “Well…” Summer started to smile a little bit, half-embarrassed, half-excited. “I kind of went a different direction.”

  He glanced from the sheets to the computer to the wall of a calendar that went through six weeks after the baby was due. “Ordering online?” He could sit in front of a computer and look over choices with her, too, couldn’t he? He could take a minute, merde. Why had he found it easier to go gleaning with Nico than to sit down and talk baby names and swing choices with his wife?

  Wait, why the name Sarah and a phone number there? Surely not his old intern, Patrick’s fiancée, Sarah? It was a common name.

  “I’m starting a company!” It burst out of Summer happily. She bounced off the desk, pointing to some of the photos on the corkboard. “Well, I’ll be the venture capitalist for it. I couldn’t find the right swing, I looked and looked, and I finally realized it still hadn’t been made yet. And—I don’t know, we’re starting with swings, but these two at Caltech are already excited about other things parents might want. That perfect thing, with quality. But I want to make it affordable, you know? I mean—a real person’s affordable. Not something you have to spend two thousand dollars on to get the right thing. These two, here, I recruited from an entrepreneurship program at Berkeley, so they’re all very excited about this.”

  Luc stared at her as she almost babbled, gesturing excitedly to pictures and dates on the calendar—apparently the team was being flown over here next week, for example.

  He started to grin, her energy both enthralling and reassuring. She was excited. Looking to their future.

  Even if he hadn’t known a thing about it.

  “You know, you have a lot more of your father in you than you realize,” he said admiringly.

  Her face shut down that fast, as if he had slapped her.

  Which—granted, maybe her father wasn’t the best comparison for him to make, but… “The good part of him. His brains. His way of looking at the world and being able to get a project off the ground or turn a company around with a few savvy decisions.”

  Summer gave him a slightly stiff smile and nodded, shifting away to study her calendar. Her damn father. But it was true that she had his brilliant mind, and that she undervalued herself all the time. Thanks, of course, primarily to her damn father.

  Maybe even thanks to people like Luc himself, her own husband, who even though he knew better, still tended to look at her and think how pretty she was, how sweet, how sexy, and forget to think about how smart and capable she was, too.

  “Like you’ve helped me with the restaurant,” he said, following her to put his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  It was hard for him to say, to let her know that he really might not be able to make it without her, but the pleasure on her face was worth it. “Really?” she asked shyly.

  “Oh, God, Summer…the accounts. When I try to do them—”

  She lifted her hand to pet his hair back from his face, his misstep over her father forgiven and forgotten. “Don’t do the accounts,” she told him. “Just trust me on this. One accountant per set of account books. I’ll let you know if I start embezzling.”

  He laughed, and the laughter felt so good, as if all of the stress and panic of the past few days might just be dissolving away, and…his gaze flicked over the calendar beyond her, and a note a few weeks out just slammed into him: Manunui??

  His hand tightened so hard on her shoulder that Summer made a little sound and tried to jerk free.

  And he didn’t let her.

  “Luc!” She pried at his fingers.

  He forced them loose—only to press his hand against the calendar, walling her in. “Are you planning a trip?” He could barely hear his own voice. But it cut, coming out. Cut his throat, the edges of his too-tight lips.

  “No, I decided to make the Caltech grads come to me,” Summer said. “They’ll love the trip to Provence, who wouldn’t, in the middle of grad school, and I started thinking about how sick I might get on a plane flight…”

  His finger tapped the name of her island once, hard. “What’s this?”

  “Oh.” She looked from it to his face and back, her happiness faltering more and more. As if she knew something was wrong, but had no clue what. “I was hoping by then my stomach would be calmed down enough that I could make a trip to see everyone.”

  He couldn’t even feel his own heart beating.

  “I want to go now,” she said wistfully, completely oblivious to his frozen heart, as if she didn’t even care if she destroyed him, as if she wouldn’t even notice. “But those sea planes make me sick even when I’m not pregnant. And let’s not even talk about boat travel.”

  “You can’t go.” The words sliced through the air.

  Summer stared at him in confusion, fingering her throat as if he’d just sliced through that, too.

  He scrambled for anything to keep her here. Her fears. The thing hidden on those tabs on her computer, the thing she was most afraid of. “You need to be near a doctor! What if something goes wrong?”

  She gave a little gasp of breath and tried to step back. Her shoulders hit the calendar behind her, and he grabbed them.

  “You know how high the chances are of something going wrong the first trimester! And you’re so sick, Summer. What if that’s a bad sign? What if you had a miscarriage, Summer? You can’t go.”

  Her face went white. She stared at him, this thing rising in her eyes, as if he had just knifed her. Her hands went up to fold over her belly, as if that was where his knife had stabbed.

  Her eyes were already damp with the rise of tears when they started to blaze. The force of the look shocked through him. They’d had a hard road to understand each other, when they first met, but he had never seen her look at him with this much rage, this much betrayal. Summer was passive-aggressive. She absorbed blows and hid their hurt under a smile, until so much rage built up in her that it exploded out destructively.

  It was exploding out now.

  “Go away.” Her hands rose and slammed into his shoulders with all her force, trying to shove him back from her. “You get away from me.”

  He didn’t want to release her, oh, God, he didn’t. But he realized suddenly how very hard his hands were gripping her shoulders. Shit. He jerked them away.

  She slid fast along the wall away from him, holding his eyes as if she needed to be ready to dodge his next knife blow. “Don’t you talk to me.” The peach got in her way as she tried to reach for the sliding screen door out onto the terrace, and she threw it at him. It hit him in the shoulder. He didn’t even try to catch it or avoid it. His reflexes had abandoned him.

  She was abandoning him.

  She had just thrown something at him. Fine, it wasn’t something that could really hurt, but…the gesture hurt.

  Her eyes blazed with rage and pain. As if he’d literally struck her, as if he’d destroyed something. “You go back to your restaurant, since that’s all you care about anyway, and you stay away from me. Don’t you ever talk to me again.”

  His heart beat so fast and hard it made him sick. He had to put a hand up to his chest to try to keep it from ripping out of his body in panic. “Summer—”

  The screen stuck a little and she had
to push it hard. He had just started forward instinctively to help her when she got it wide enough to slip her slim form through. She looked back at him as she got through the crack, with another surge of that wild, bitter rage as her hand came back to cover her belly protectively again: “Fuck you.”

  “Summer—” He went after her, shoving the door wider, but she threw him another bitter look and took off on the path down the cliff to their little calenque, their sheltered beach.

  He stopped on the terrace, gripping stone wall too thick even for his hands, but he found a grip on it anyway, dragging his fingers raw. Pain and fear and betrayal squeezed down on him until he felt compressed, as agonized as the minute speck of matter that contained all the universe just before it blew up. Even his breaths came short and tight, as if he had been locked in a space too small for his lungs to fill.

  Everything struggled inside that tightness, too many things: Summer’s happiness on her island; a childhood dragged through the Métro and sleeping in the streets, imagining a mother he had never known, who had abandoned him for her island happiness; the look on Summer’s face when he had said, when he had said—

  How could he have said that to her? Even to protect himself, even to keep her trapped here, how could he have said that?

  He pulled out his phone suddenly and sent three texts. Patrick. Sylvain. Dom. I need your help.

  Chapter 18

  Summer wrote, “10 am: Maia, Skype” on Tuesday on her calendar, her whole arm heavy. It was Sunday morning, the day Luc could take off, they day they could talk.

  Except she wasn’t talking to him. He’d tried to follow her to the beach to tell her he was sorry, and she’d just dived into the water in her underthings, swimming. She could swim around an entire island when she was in the mood. In the South Pacific, she and some of the other islanders used to do that kind of thing for fun. Or just because, particularly on an island, sometimes you just needed to leave behind the world that trapped you and swim and swim.