It felt so disconcertingly as if having arms as strong as his, a body as strong as his, just embrace him with warmth and affection had reached deep inside him and given him something he needed.
Gabriel grabbed his shoulders and pushed him back to look into his face. “Trying to compete with your old chef, are you? We’ll see about that.”
Luc started to smile. “Worried?”
Gabriel snorted. “No, kid. I taught you everything you know.”
Luc’s smile grew. “I might have taught myself a few things since then.”
“Pfff.” Gabriel waved a grandiosely dismissive hand. “I’m not worried about that.”
Luc laughed, a sound that rang all through him, as if something important had been released. He was not good at laughing. Summer occasionally could get him to laugh from pure happiness, and Patrick with his wicked, twitting humor, prying laughs out of him mercilessly. But even after twelve years of Patrick and six months of Summer, it still wasn’t something he did every day. He’d once thought that if Gabriel hadn’t gotten fired when Luc was his nineteen-year-old sous-chef, if he’d had a few more years training in the glow of that man’s expansive heart, he might have turned out halfway sane.
“Damn, it’s good to see you.” Gabriel pulled him back in for another spontaneous hug. “I heard you grew up to be all famous and everything.” He grinned, since he was at least as famous himself. “Had good training, did you, kid?”
The last time he had seen Gabriel had been a year ago, when Gabe had asked to use Luc’s kitchen at the Leucé when he wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Jolie. That man never shrank, did he? All that size, all that heart, all out there. If anything, he was even bigger these days, with a happiness and energy that expanded to fill everything and everyone around him. Luc found himself allowing something close to a grin back. “Well, I might have had a chef once who taught me a thing or two.”
“A thing or two? Ha! Ungrateful brat. And what are you doing here?” Gabriel turned to Dom. Dom had worked alongside Luc as sous under Gabriel just before Pierre Manon, Jolie’s jealous and difficult top chef father, fired Gabe.
Braced, Dom extended his hand, and since Gabriel couldn’t yank him off his feet when the man was forewarned, Gabe just surged forward instead and still wrapped Dom up in another big hug, as if rough, big, I-am-the-baddest-man-in-the-room Dom was his personal, cute teddy-bear.
Dom came out of it blinking, entirely befuddled, and…hell, was that a hint of a flush rising on Dom’s cheeks? Luc cherished a private glee.
“Sylvain, too? What’s the matter?” Gabe demanded of Luc. “Did you have to call on all your Paris friends for help to have a chance at competing with me?” He grinned and then shoved Luc lightly in the shoulder as if he just couldn’t contain his energy or happiness. “Shit, kid, I can’t believe you waited so long before coming to see me. You know, I could have helped you get set up.”
It was why Luc hadn’t gone to see him when he first opened the restaurant. He didn’t know how to be the person who needed help.
“He sulked,” Gabriel’s wife Jolie informed them, standing up on tiptoe to reach the men’s cheeks. Belatedly, Luc bent to exchange kisses with the much smaller, golden-haired woman he’d last seen when Gabe proposed to her in Luc’s kitchens. “He brooded and acted all temperamental and swore he was not going to go see you first and he stomped around every week and complained you still hadn’t come see him and…I was seriously about to come hit you over the head to make you behave right.”
Luc’s eyebrows went up. Jolie thought she could hit him over the head to change his behavior?
How the hell had he gotten so approachable? Being hit over the head by a woman was almost like some weird, affection-starved man’s idea of a hug. Like when Summer pretended to smack him on the arm, although she always turned it into a caress instead. He glanced toward Summer, who was looking their way curiously. She and the Corey sisters headed back toward them.
Gabriel had folded his arms and was scowling just at the memory of Luc’s behavior, but then he remembered he hadn’t properly greeted Sylvain yet and turned to give the chocolatier’s hand a firm, friendly shake. “You should have told me you all were in town, we would have had you over for dinner.”
By his side, Jolie gave a resigned sigh at the idea of having three of the most famous chocolatiers-pâtissiers in the world over for dinner, but presumably by now she was getting used to it. Hell, her father was Pierre Manon, and she’d been living with Gabriel for a year now. They’d gotten married last winter, just before Luc met Summer. She had to be used to quite a lot, when it came to dealing with top chefs.
“Summer’s iffy with dinners right now.” Luc waggled a hand in the air to indicate his guess at what was happening inside her tummy. “But why don’t you join us tonight at our house?” At least that way, whatever cravings she got, he could leap to satisfy them.
Jolie’s head tilted alertly. “She’s…iffy…?”
Luc stuffed his hands in his pockets and nodded, feeling so funny. As if this great huge beam was trying to break through his self-control and bask out there in the open air.
“Really?” Jolie broke into a huge grin.
“She’s what?” Gabriel looked back and forth between his wife and Luc. “Sick?”
Jolie stood on tiptoe and whispered in Gabriel’s ear.
“You’re going to have a baby?” Gabriel roared so loudly that Summer, coming across the place with Cade and Jaime, stopped, clasping her hands to her cheeks. “Merde!” Gabe yanked Luc in for another hug and pounded him on his back. “A little Luc? Hell!”
“I keep trying to imagine what repressed, control-freak perfectionism looks like on a three-year-old, but my imagination always fails me,” Sylvain said helpfully.
Luc slanted him a dry glance.
“Something like that.” Sylvain gestured to Luc’s expression. “Only…chubbier cheeks.” He approximated a child’s round face in the air with those ever-expressive hands of his, puffing air into his own.
“Don’t worry,” a warm, sandy voice said from behind Luc. “I was planning on making sure the kid had a good role model. You know, someone who could teach him how to leave his clothes scattered all over the floor.”
Luc went still. And then he spun to see Patrick lounging against one of the pine trees that shaded the boules court. His long, lean form slouched, gold hair tousled, jaw unshaved. “Or her,” Patrick said easily. “Or, here’s an idea, twins. That way, one of each.”
“Twins?” An image of two babies depending on him instead of one exploded in Luc’s head, and his ears started ringing again.
Patrick grinned and straightened lazily away from the tree to hold out a hand. “Hello, Luc. Heard you were having a hard time living without me.”
Luc had never felt so glad to shake a hand in his whole life. He held on too long, as if Patrick was pulling him from a freezing ocean onto his surfboard. “You got here fast.”
“You sounded desperate,” Patrick said kindly, his mouth laughing while his eyes forgot to, the blue searching and keen. “Of course, I always knew it was just a matter of time before you cracked without me,” he added soulfully.
Yes. Luc tried to figure out what to say. In one of the last fights they’d had, they’d each accused the other of being over-dependent. Fights were normal, for two men who had worked twelve years together in brutal, perfectionist conditions. But this one had been pivotal. Soon afterward, they had each chosen different paths, for the first time in twelve years.
“Sylvain. Dom.” Patrick shook hands with the other men. “Hell, Gabe.” Once a fifteen-year-old apprentice under rising star pastry chef Gabriel Delange, back when Luc was his sous-chef, Patrick now seized the older man’s hand in both of his, a huge, delighted grin breaking out on his face. “Gabriel Delange, hell.”
Gabriel grinned, and, for good measure, yanked Patrick into a big bear hug, too. Patrick reciprocated with complete aplomb and emerged to kiss Jolie’s cheeks and t
urn back to grin at Luc. “What did you do, call an army?”
“Summer was lonely,” Luc protested.
“Ah.” Another blue glance from Patrick, his eyes full of wicked laughter. He flexed his shoulders and gazed out at the Alps. “Well, it’s a good thing we’re up here giving Summer company then, isn’t it?” he asked the mountains.
Damn, it felt good to be controlling the urge to strangle Patrick for his ability to skewer straight through to the truth. “She’s got her cousins with her!” That was the whole point of this visit.
Seriously. It was.
“Oh, well, that’s all right, then,” Patrick said. “Sarah is just going to love all that female bonding with a horde of billionaires.”
Sarah Lin had been their intern at the Leucé. The fact that Patrick had gotten involved with her despite his role as her supervisor had been a factor in some of Luc’s and his fights there at the end. Of course, Luc’s tumultuous relationship with Summer Corey, the owner of their hotel, had been another factor.
“You brought Sarah?”
Patrick shrugged. “Can’t live without her, really,” he said idly, as if it was a joke. Which meant it was profoundly true.
Just then, the women reached them, Sarah slipping up beside Patrick, whose arm immediately looped her into his side, Summer and Cade and Jaime all greeting Patrick and then Gabriel and Jolie with cheek kisses and curious glances. Patrick ruffled Summer’s hair and winked at her. Sarah didn’t look jealous or threatened in the slightest.
“So.” Patrick rubbed his hands together and clapped them. “I know this great place to get drinks around here.” He pointed at Luc. “Or it will be a great place after I get done stocking it up.” He turned, clearly expecting that one movement to be enough to get everyone to follow him. But he paused just a second gazing at the mountains. “Damn, it’s beautiful here. And you never invited me to join you? That hurts my feelings.”
Chapter 20
“Diaper changing!” Cade exclaimed. “Bingo. I knew YouTube wouldn’t let us down.”
The women sat by the infinity pool, its edge seeming to flow right over into the starry yachts floating in the Mediterranean below. It wasn’t the Southern Cross, but with friendly female voices floating around Summer—it was a pretty nice view. Because after all, it wasn’t the stars that made the Southern Cross so beautiful. It was the people.
“Cade, while you and Sarah are over there making five-year plans, Jolie and I are going to figure out how to get Summer through the first trimester. Have you tried eating crackers before you get out of bed?” Jaime asked Summer. “That’s one of the tips here. Pretzels, for example.”
“These ice pops are pretty good.” Cade waved one of the ones Summer had shared. “Luc’s onto something here.”
Summer sucked on her own lime ice pop, riding one of those evening waves of nausea again. Leaning back in one of the great canvas chairs, she put her feet up while the other women clicked through web pages. Which made her feel like a fool, of course, the incapable, weak one surrounded by capable women, but every time she tried to lean over to look at the computer screens with them, nausea started winning the battle.
“I don’t know if we can trust these lists, though,” Cade said. “This one says chocolate is a top craving, and remember what it did to Mom?”
Chocolate. Ugh. Summer tightened her hold on her tummy.
“Exactly,” Cade said. “But we’d better not tell Sylvain.”
“What about ginger?” Jaime asked. “Ginger ale? I’m sure Luc could make you some with real ginger.”
“If you ask Luc Leroi to make ginger ale, he’ll do a reverse spherification of it or something like that,” Sarah Lin said with a quiet thread of amusement. As one of Luc’s former interns, she knew a lot more about what Luc was capable of than even Summer herself did, although Summer was learning as fast as she could.
Summer smiled at Sarah. It was good not to have to be wary of the other woman. Maybe it was the discussions over the phone as Summer tracked down engineering students who could help her, or maybe it was some security Sarah had about Patrick, but Sarah didn’t seem to hold that time Patrick had kissed Summer against Summer at all. As if it was just…in the past or something. No threat to her present.
If Summer’s tummy wasn’t feeling so queasy, she might have hugged her knees with how happy that made her. Just to have…almost friends.
“How do you think you do it?” she asked out loud suddenly. “Get a baby right? Not mess it up?” Not make it turn out lonely and vulnerable, like me. Make sure she knows how to have friends.
The Corey sisters stopped talking, caught by that question. “You just love it, I guess?” Jaime suggested tentatively.
“Really?” Summer asked, startled with hope. “That’s all it takes?” I can do that!
Although her parents had always insisted they loved her. This beautiful, delicious forbidden dessert of love that was supposed to be hers, if she behaved well enough, and yet somehow, she could never quite taste it.
“I’m pretty sure they have books that expand on the details.” Cade tapped into her computer. “Look! How to Talk So Your Kid Will Listen. Too bad Dad didn’t find that one when you were a kid,” she told her sister dryly. “Oh, and here’s a whole series about What to Expect at every single month of their lives.” She opened the sample of one of the books and raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Week by week even. Well, that’s helpful. This is great stuff.”
“Why do you want to get it right?” Sarah Lin asked suddenly.
“I, well—because it’s my baby?” Summer said.
Sarah reached into a little leather backpack purse at the wall by her feet and pulled out a small leather notebook, its cover embossed with a silver heart signed with the initial P. “Could I show you something?”
She opened it and held it out to Summer. The other women leaned in, and they all looked in some puzzlement at notes about sugar sculpting, written so carefully the letters looked like print.
“My mother wanted to get my sister and me right.” Sarah traced the letters with her finger. “That’s why I write like this. She didn’t know. She was illiterate herself back then, training herself at the same time as us. But she looked at books and thought if we could write exactly like the letters in books, we would be writing perfectly. She wanted the world to love us.” Sarah flipped a few pages to a sprawling signature, the only legible part of which was a big P that matched the silver-embossed P on the journal’s cover and there, possibly, a capital C. “That’s how Patrick writes. And really, of the two of us, who do you find easier to love?”
Patrick. He swept everyone into his charm, while Sarah Lin kept in this contained, quiet space of hers, into which no one could step very easily.
“I’m not trying to criticize my mother,” Sarah said. “She loves us with everything in her, and she would do anything for us. But I don’t know. Kids aren’t bonsai. Maybe instead of trying to make them beautiful to the rest of the world, you should just love them and let them grow.”
Summer was positive she could love her child and let the child grow. But…grow how?
“But you have to teach them a work ethic,” Cade pointed out.
“And to look out for those less fortunate than they are,” Jaime said.
“And a certain degree of manners is probably a good idea, to get along with the world,” Summer added uneasily. Although deep down what she really wanted to teach her daughter was how to tell the world Fuck you. And mean it. Really not care. That thing Cade and Jaime’s dad and her own did, that let both Mack and Sam Corey stomp right after what they wanted and not give a crap who hated them for it. “Oh, God.” She pressed her hand into her belly. “This is so complicated.”
“We all turned out all right,” Cade pointed out, gesturing to include everyone in the group. “Although our parents didn’t get everything perfect. Trust me, that time Jaime stowed away in my car to sneak into a rock concert she was too young for and I was the one who lost drivin
g privileges was completely unfair. Plus, I mentioned about the heels, right?”
Plus, Cade and Jaime’s mother had died when they were still young, a brutal abandonment beyond her control but also beyond appeal. Julie Corey’s death had made Summer feel as if she’d lost her last hope, so she couldn’t even imagine how hard it had hit Julie’s own daughters.
“Speak for yourselves,” Summer muttered, sinking more deeply into her chair. Her nausea stirred, not liking the way her slump folded her belly. She did not feel “all right” at all.
“You turned out just fine, too, Summer,” Jaime said wryly. “We all feel that way sometimes.”
“You do?” Really? They were so confident.
“People don’t tend to go on crusades to save the world because they feel just fine with who they are sitting on the couch watching TV,” Sarah pointed out.
Oh. “But you’re amazing,” Summer told crusader Jaime incredulously.
“You know, you’re a pretty cool person yourself,” Jaime said gently. “A lot of kids certainly think so, which is a pretty positive sign, don’t you think, about how well you’ll do with your own?”
Summer gazed out over the sea, trying to digest that. The praise wanted to dissolve through her, wanted to nurture her belief in herself, but there was this dark, bitter doubt that came out to attack it, nastily. “Anyway, I’ve got back-up,” she said wryly, letting it leak out.
“Exactly,” Jaime said. “I mean, if you think Cade would let you get away with doing something she thought was wrong without telling you, boy, do you not know her. I’ll be more discreet, of course.”
Summer stared at the sisters. Warmth flooded her, out of nowhere, so much warmth she didn’t even know what to do with it. It wanted to come out as tears. “I meant—I meant, ah—” She swallowed. “My mother is interviewing nannies for me. It wasn’t my idea,” she added hastily, as all the other women looked taken aback. “She thought I would need one. She promised to find one good enough that I couldn’t screw up the baby.” Because that worked out so well with me. Here I am, not screwed up at all.
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