Sun-Kissed (12 page)

Anne’s fingers flexed again over the edge of his palm. Not quite hand-holding—although, God knew, he made his hand welcoming—but more a nurse consoling a patient. “I don’t know,” she said, low. A little twisted smile. “Kurt did the same thing, you know. Kai is my polar opposite.”

Mack didn’t quite know what to say. It stopped him, that different hurt in her. Because he didn’t think his daughters had chosen his polar opposite, actually. He and his sons-in-law were a lot alike: the drive, the intensity, the arrogance that made them positive they should be the person controlling any room, their convictions always the most important ones in any space. Fine, yes, he didn’t have their fragile, sensitive, princess-on-a-pea natures—nobody could bruise him or pierce him through to the heart just by looking at one of his chocolates askance—but underneath the different accents, they had a hell of a lot in common.

His daughters—well, they’d gone far away physically. They’d done different things with their lives. But maybe, at heart, they actually loved their father a lot and looked for men who were kind of like him.

Hey. Really? His heart warmed all through, this silly, funny, fuzzy warmth that kind of choked him all up, like he’d gotten a teddy-bear stuck in his throat. One of his daughters’. One of those teddy-bears they used to drag along with them when they ran across his office to bury themselves in his lap.

He took a deep breath, letting it out, breathing more sea air in again. Between the memories, and the warm pleasure at the realization that maybe his daughters did get something from their dad, and the loss, it was all—this parenting stuff was a shit hard joy to deal with sometimes.

“Maybe they’ll give you grandkids,” Anne said, with this strange, wistful wryness. Half humor, half something else. “And your grandkids will rebel against
their
parents and be crazy about you.”

Heh. Yeah, and he could drive Sylvain and Dom nuts by luring their children into the capitalist fold. A malicious, delighted curl of his lips at the thought. Nice idea on Anne’s part.

Anne.

He frowned. Kurt was a damn idiot, to want someone so different from his mother.

Except—Mack liked Kai. Liked her a lot, actually, this happy, generous-hearted young woman whose eyes lit whenever she looked at Kurt. Kurt and Kai had gone through a real rough spot, but nobody could say that Kurt was an idiot for choosing her.

His frown deepened. After all, if Kurt had chosen someone
exactly
like his mother—that would have been weird, right? Anyway, Anne was a unique challenge. He didn’t think most men had the guts for her.

Actually, he was pretty sure only one man in the world had that much guts. And drive. And arrogance. And strength.

He turned his wrist and took her damn hand. Held on to it firmly, too, just in case she got any ideas about using her martial arts training or something to break free.

She started and jerked at her hand.

He slid his fingers down and forced them between hers, locking her hand in tighter.

She stared down at their hands.

He stared right at her face, so that when she lifted her gaze, theirs could lock challengingly. He wouldn’t want her to get the wrong idea, after all—like that he might be capable of backing down.

She didn’t challenge him, though, when her gaze finally lifted to his. She looked away and bent her head and left her hand in his, all three things which were so unlike her that it hit his heart a little—this startled worry that he might have hurt her somehow in a vital way, or that she might be sick.

“I won’t,” she said low. “Have grandkids.”

And her throat moved, and she bit hard into her lips, and—

Holy
fuck
, were Anne’s eyes filling?

Anne
was trying not to cry?

Shit.

He just pulled her straight into his arms, wrapping her up hard, holding her close and tight. Two little girls whom he’d single-parented through their teenage years—
yeah
, he knew how hard a girl needed to be held when she was crying. And how long you had to do it sometimes, until they got it all out.

And fuck, the last time one of his girls had gotten badly hurt, he hadn’t been
able
to hold her hard. She’d had too many broken bones, and by the time she got well enough for a man to hold on hard to her, she’d already picked out Dom for the job, damn him.

Good guy, though, Dom, in his way. There was that, at least. Mack’s hand lifted to stroke Anne’s hair—only she didn’t have much hair left, of course, unlike his daughters. So he stroked her nape, rubbing it gently while he kept that other arm wrapped tight around her.

“What are you talking about?” he tried roughly, because despite all the lessons from his daughters, he still could not get over that urge to try to
fix
the problem, when the women he loved started to cry. To talk them out of it. To just batter the damn problem to smithereens and make it go away. “Kurt and Kai have plenty of time to still have kids. Lots of couples don’t start until their thirties. Hell, Cade’s twenty-eight, and no news on that front yet.”

Of course, with her living in Paris, he’d probably be the last to know
, part of him thought sulkily. She’d probably tell Sylvain, and then her sister, and her sister would tell Dom, and while Sylvain was busy telling
his
parents, she’d be telling Mack’s dad next, damn it, because his dad would be over there bouncing around causing trouble and endearing himself to his grandkids like he always did, and her own father would be the very last to know.

“They tried, a lot,” Anne told his chest. Her breathing was very funny. Anne hadn’t cried for a
prison sentence
and here…surely she was not actually crying? “I think they’ve stopped trying. The, the miscar—I told you.”

The miscarriages, right. Mack was still warily conscious of the fact that he was missing something important here. Were miscarriages
that
hard on people? Like anything you didn’t succeed the first time, didn’t you just try again?

He tried to imagine what it would have been like for Julie, early in the pregnancy, if she’d lost it, but, God, it had been so long ago. Then he imagined suddenly if Cade or Jaime had never been born and—
fuck.

Fuck.

Oh, yeah,
fuck
that was a ghastly, god-awful thing to imagine.

Fuck.

His arms tightened around Anne, like he was trying to hold onto his daughters. Or hers, for her.

God damn it, why did the world do this
shit
to the people he loved all the time? This shit he couldn’t beat.

“And I never managed to have more kids either,” she said, muffled, into his chest. It was so alien to hear Anne’s voice muffled, unclear.

Low, quiet, yes. But always clear and firm. Never hidden or protected by anyone’s chest. Never protected by anyone at all. She fought her own corners. She defended herself. It was why her walls were so high and strong.

“Shit,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say. This was clearly something horribly painful for her that he had never even understood. He petted his hand over her nape again. “Did you—?”

“Oh, yes, I tried,” she told his chest. She pulled back, turning away from him. The sudden removal of herself from the hug caught him by surprise, so that she managed to get away before he thought to tighten his arms. “That’s more or less what Clark and I broke up over,” she said over her shoulder, without really turning her head. A hand came up to dash across her face, at the level of her eyes, but her back was to him and she was already striding away.

He reached out, caught the waistband of her jeans, and yanked her back against his chest. “Sorry,” he said, as she fell against him with a startled sound, and he turned her expertly back into his arms—funny how a skill gained from dealing with small girls in a tantrum of tears could come in handy two decades later—and pressed her right back against his chest. “I don’t think we were done here.”

Broke up
, he thought. As if her ex-husband had been some high school boyfriend. Well, that pathetic weak-assed bastard probably didn’t deserve the term
divorce
, really.

Even if they had been married over ten years.

Damn, but Mack hated weak men. He couldn’t understand them, and how they wasted so many good things just because they were too pathetic to fight for them.

“He got mad at you because you couldn’t have more kids?” Clark had cared about kids? The man had moved to California and only seen Kurt during summer visits. Who did that? It wasn’t like he lacked for job opportunities closer to where his ten-year-old son lived.

“Nooo,” Anne said slowly. She couldn’t seem to quite figure out what to make of her forcibly restored position against his chest. She wasn’t fighting for freedom, but she wasn’t settling in, either. Her fingers, delicate against his chest, couldn’t figure out whether to push away or sink in. “I guess it’s closer to say I got mad at him. I just—” Her voice tightened all up again, that surreal, unfamiliar tone of Anne fighting tears. “—it was hard. On me. Not to be able to-to
make
my body carry that little girl I wanted to term. And he—well, he didn’t really care very much.” And now she pressed her forehead into his chest
hard
, as if she wanted to drive out so many things from her head.

Or maybe just beat down the damn world with her head, and his chest was the closest substitute.

Well, shit. He could be stronger than the world if she needed it. He’d gotten in the habit. It still sometimes managed to win some rounds against him, mostly through sucker-punches, but damned if he would let
it
get in the habit of that.

“I guess they might adopt,” Anne said. “I don’t know. It’s their decision.” She shrugged against him, like he was going to believe
that
gesture, and tried to pull back. He let her, a little bit, just so he could see her face. “But if they don’t…” She shrugged again, and lifted her chin, and tried that wry smile with which she’d eyed him across the table at the damn courthouse after her sentence came down and they knew she was going to have to do those six months. He’d loved her so much then, for the courage of that wry smile, that it had about killed him. “Well, no grandkids for me.”

She stepped away, setting off on the walk again.

He fell into step beside her and looped her back for a hug against his side. “Well, fuck, then, Anne, I guess we’ll just have to share mine.”

Chapter 8

What the hell did that even mean? Share grandkids? Share them how? The way she was Sylvain’s “mother-in-law or whatever you call it”? Anne fought the absurd urge to break one of these stupid craft sticks. She usually found it calming, to experiment on her own with crafts for her magazine and show while at the beach, before she got her staff involved in testing the projects. It was why she had this nineteenth-century farmhouse table out on her porch. But today she felt like throwing things.

She couldn’t believe how close she’d come to crying in Mack’s arms on the beach. What the hell was wrong with her? She didn’t cry. What good would it do to show a weakness like that? No one had ever been there to hold her if she did.

Stupid, stupid craft sticks.

She’d only ever started including the children-friendly crafts in her magazine because of Kurt, anyway. She’d liked finding things that made his eyes light up when he was a kid, that combined her life and ambitions with the play and attention he loved, as if they, you know, fit together. As if she was a good mom. Even if she’d screwed up there for a couple of years, when the miscarriages and inability to get pregnant again had hit her so hard, even if she’d divorced his dad and ruined his life, she was still a good mom.

And then it had turned out later that he resented all those hours together crafting and thought she had been forcing him to be her “model crafting child”.

Although maybe, still later, he’d come around a bit. As an adult, going through his own devastation, sometimes he would sit and do crafts with her, with a wry, wistful smile.

She sighed.

And then did break one of the craft sticks. Just—snap. It was so satisfying that she broke another, and another, and then as big a fistful of them as she could manage to break at once, frustrated when the resistance wasn’t enough.

She threw the damn things on the floor, shoved the rest so that they scattered all over the table, and strode away to her window.

Not her usual view-over-the-beach window. The side one that faced Mack’s house.

Red-headed Jaime and her big new husband Dom were in the yard, having come back from their hotel for an extra day after the wedding to be with all the people Mack had flown across the ocean to celebrate with them. Cade and Sylvain were there, too, and a few of those chef couples.

They were getting things ready for a barbecue. Probably there was a text on Anne’s phone inviting her over.

She lifted her hands to press against the glass, and there was a rap against the door.

She jumped, turning to find Mack Corey at the top of the outside stairs, with his big hand making a print on her glass porch doors, gazing at her through them.

That was just—she wanted to grab a handful of those broken craft sticks and
throw
them at him. In such a stupid, impotent gesture. All frustration and no will to hurt.

And maybe it wasn’t even frustration.

It was—confusion. Restlessness.
Something.
Edgy and tense.

She walked over to the door, so close to growling at him as she opened it that she was surprised her hands didn’t form claws.

He gave her that sharp grin of his, the one he usually reserved for opponents, the one that made it look as if he was about to close his teeth around her throat.

The one that made her want to bend her head and offer him the back of her neck to rub his teeth over instead.

Maybe he would soften and just rub with his jaw. And her palm itched to lift and test how long it had been since he had shaved, how much it would prickle.

God, she didn’t even know how she remembered that a man’s jaw
could
prickle. It wasn’t as if she had felt a jaw against her nape in…over twenty years.