Sun-Kissed (3 page)

“She looks like a Madonna,” Anne said, with an undertone of—something. Something dark.

When he thought of Madonnas, he thought of Renaissance paintings in museums to which he had kept dragging the girls because he was so sure their mother would have done it had she still been around. But—oh. The belly. “It’s…sweet?” He didn’t know why the hell he should have to feel so dubious about this, like maybe a beautiful, happy pregnant young woman
wasn’t
sweet to his conversational partner. Women were weird about each other sometimes.

“Yes.” Anne sounded quiet and dark, like someone who wanted to curl up alone and get some sleep. “But Kai might find that painful.”

It still took him a minute. And then—

Oh.

Oh.

That had never even occurred to him before. Women didn’t get over that kind of thing?

He looked at Kurt, the long, lean, intelligent, careful man he had once imagined might become his son-in-law, now holding his wife as if they were the only two in the world. As if he could
make
them be the only two in the world. They danced within their own precious bubble, his brown head bent to hers, his back always, always blocking Summer from Kai’s view and from his, too, Kai’s blond head resting against his tux, her face at ease, quiet, absorbed in him, as soft and dreaming as a dapple of sunlight through the leaves.

“Your son’s a good man,” Mack said suddenly, bluntly. He figured Anne would want to know.

“He is, isn’t he?” She sounded as if the awareness had snuck up on her and caught her in some painful grip of too much pride. Yeah. His pride in his daughters did that kind of thing to him, too, at the trickiest moments. “He turned out so much better than his father,” she added low.

“Well, shit, of course,” Mack said involuntarily. “With you for a mother?”

Anne looked up at him at that, startled and caught, eyes fixed on him as if he’d said something amazing. She had eyes like honey on moss, this elusive hint of green and sunlight, like catching sight of something magical deep in a forest just as it ducked away.

“No offense, Anne, but you married a fucking weakling the first time around.” Not at all the kind of guy who could face down whatever bad happened to him and tell it,
Fuck you.

“The first time?” she said quizzically, which was just one of those things she did, split hairs in an ironic way to hide her emotional reactions.

Yes, he knew she’d only been married once so far. Did she expect him to say her life was over halfway through? “Pick someone with guts the next time around,” he ordered her bluntly, mostly because he liked the way her eyes narrowed at him when he tried to boss her around like he bossed the rest of the world.

They did narrow, kicking a charge right through him, making his stupid body drag him straight back to another fantasy, this one where she gave him that
make me
look, and, because it was a
fantasy, you stupid body, not real,
he
did
. He made her do all kinds of things, in all kinds of positions. And she came in every single one of them, of course.

He took a breath, trying to squeeze his hips back away from her, but his butt was already resting on the railing. Just then the door onto the veranda opened, and the wedding circus master pushed her head out and beckoned frantically. “You’re on in just a minute! The song is almost over!”

Oh, shit. He was still aroused.

And it was the daddy-daughter dance!

Fuck.

He shoved Anne away from him, then made sure to steady her on her feet. “You stay away from me,” he told her sternly, just to be on the safe side. He knew damn well if he gave her an order she would ignore it, and he didn’t want her shutting him out for the rest of the night in overreaction to a penis or anything.

Then he strode to the other end of the veranda, nearest the closest bathroom, and snatched a glass of ice water off the tray of a waiter as he passed.

In the bathroom, he jerked his pants off, stood over the toilet, and hesitated a long second, grimacing. There were other ways to get rid of this thing, but—shit. He was not jerking off in a bathroom at his daughter’s wedding. Screwing up his eyes tight and turning his head away—he dashed the ice water over himself.

Aaaagh.

That—that—
shit.

He grabbed a towel and more or less smacked himself dry—afraid to rub—and then jerked his pants back on.

And went out to dance with his daughter on her wedding day like a normal man.

Chapter 2

“What’s wrong?” Anne’s son asked, sliding into the chair beside her. Anne had just finished straightening its sea-green bow and was automatically adjusting the flower arrangement in the middle of the table to make up for a bloom some guest had stolen to wear in his hair a little earlier. Some of their guests were beginning to get in quite the liquored-up, merry mood. “You look worried.”

In public? With cameras to catch it? She smoothed her expression immediately.
You want to see me sweat, world? Come to the gym.

You’ll find me in the boxing ring, pretending my trainer’s headgear is your head.

“Something wrong with the wedding cake?” Kurt guessed wryly.

Her son was so aggravating sometimes. She loved him, but he just put her in the
mom
category and dismissed it at that. On the other hand, she could hardly say,
No, there was a demanding penis just pressed up against my butt and my butt still feels…odd.

Then again…she’d built an empire out of herself worth nearly a billion dollars while she was a divorced single mom. She was a convicted felon. Maybe she could say whatever the hell she wanted. “Well, if you look at the back side of that blue one, there’s a finger print where I couldn’t resist a taste of the frosting, but maybe no one will notice.”

Kurt gave her a perplexed look. The odds of Anne Winters sneaking frosting or allowing even a hair fine imperfection in anything she did were approximately 998,547,321 million to one. Her current net worth, according to Forbes, but Jesus, what did those guys have? Hackers on all her accounts?

“Lighten up, Kurt,” she said, and took a sip of her champagne.

Kurt blinked. His eyebrows went up. “Prison had a very unexpected effect on you.”

She shrugged, wishing for a cigar she could bite the tip off of and drive him completely insane, or at least for the ability to
slouch
in her chair, but her spine just didn’t seem to work that way. “You’re a corporate lawyer.” He negotiated the hell out of her company’s contracts for her. Brilliant, her son, almost mercilessly so in certain circumstances. Those precise, contract-negotiation circumstances when he could hide his sensitive heart. “Since when are you familiar with the expected effects of prison?”

Kurt narrowed his eyes just a little. He had hazel eyes from his father, but so much more beautiful. The way they would look up at her when he was little, so sincere and determined. Brown hair from his father. But a heart and a strength nothing like his father’s. She hadn’t needed Mack to tell her that he had turned out better than Clark.

Despite her, probably, but some days she was determined to take some credit.

Kai laughed from the other side of him at the round table. The sound felt strange against Anne’s skin, like an unexpected cascade of warm water when she had thought everything frozen. When part of her wanted to insist everything was
supposed
to be frozen, wasn’t it? It had been frozen for her.

She had vomited in terror, the night before she had to surrender herself to prison. The first time she had let anything get to her like that in twenty years, but alone in her room, she hadn’t been able to stop. Still, even then she’d known that she wouldn’t have any trouble with at least one of those prison tips she had found online: never, ever show them anything you really feel, not fear, not weakness, not joy. It could all be used against you. She’d gotten that part down so very long ago, layer after frozen layer separating herself from the world’s power to hurt her, accumulated year after year as she kept doing it, as no one every broke through.

But prison had weakened something in her. She knew it had. Because now some other part of her melted under Kai’s laughter, surging up in this sudden geyser of grief for herself and hope for them:
God, if my son could have that happiness, that love, that support for his whole life. If he could get to keep it. Even when things get bad.

That laughter of Kai’s. That laughter that Anne had never really known how to give him, when he needed it, that had made his choice of wife such a cruel slap as she realized:
Oh. All those things I tried to teach him—self-control, and persistence, and calm, and being strong enough to count only on yourself—he went and found the exact opposite. As if nothing I gave him was what he needed at all.

But now—she looked across the table at Kai. Their eyes met, and something passed from Kai to her, this quiet, a gentleness in her brown eyes that was almost tender. Anne couldn’t fathom it.

Almost nobody showed Anne gentleness, or quiet, or tenderness. Her quiet came from herself, from when she sank into her work. Sometimes, during that period when he was separated from Kai, Kurt would come by, bringing with him a precious, uncommon quiet, a quiet that was shared. They would talk in a way they never could when he was a teenager, and each read a book for a while, or play chess. Sometimes he would even, with a wry look, help her with her crafts, the way he used to when he was a child before he rebelled into all those boyish sports. He would concentrate on those crafts as if they were a lifeline, and her heart would go out to him:
Oh, God, Kurt, please don’t turn out like me.

It had been a strange mix of good and bad, that time. Her son with her again, needing her, the two of them understanding each other perhaps more than they ever had. But only because he was so profoundly unhappy.

Kai had saved Kurt from that unhappiness in the end, not Anne. Or Kurt had saved Kai. Or maybe both together, maybe that was the secret, that they had somehow managed that meshing of souls and hearts, that strange word
together
which had shattered for her so long ago and hurt so much in its breaking that she’d kept all her walls up ever since to protect herself from accidentally letting her heart mesh with someone else’s again.

She frowned suddenly and turned her head to look at Mack. Even without his daughter’s bridal gown to draw the eye, he was easy to spot. He always carried himself as if he owned every room he was in or would own that room in two minutes if he decided it was worth his effort. Which was a very accurate self-assessment on his part.

Both his sons-in-law were taller than he was, but he had a heft to his shoulders and a lean, athletic way of moving that made him seem like a mastiff, or an alpha wolf. Someone ready to take out the jugular of anyone who threatened his hold on the world, definitely. Or of anyone who threatened his family, because to him it was the same thing. His hold on the world was
for
his family, just Mack’s way of giving his all to keep them strong and safe.

The perfectly tailored tux gave him a civilized coating—Mack knew entirely how to be civilized—but it was just a coating. The gray hair and the lines at the corners of his eyes added to his presence, made him far more compelling even than he had been as the smoother thirty-three year old she had first met. Those lines just proved how experienced he was in wielding power, in fighting off all attackers, taking them out, and then expanding his hold where once those attackers had been.

Right now he had one arm around his freckled, red-haired daughter, the other holding her hand, as they danced in some loose approximation of the waltz. Mack was an excellent dancer, but at the moment he seemed to be seeking more a very long hug. In her slim, simple white silk, Jaime looked innocent and young against her father’s bigger body and black tux, her face tilted up to him, beaming with happiness and hope, and Anne’s heart relaxed a little.

She liked knowing she had helped give Jaime and Mack this moment. Every perfect line of wedding decorations that framed father and daughter and the bridal couple, every element capturing that moment and holding it as exquisitely as Anne could. Because Anne knew what the definition of
moment
was.

And she wanted something longer for Mack’s children, as she did for her own son and daughter-in-law.

Homes that lasted, that held their perfect happy lives forever.

And when those lives couldn’t be perfect, she still wanted those homes to hold them, to shelter them as best a home could, until they could reach peace and maybe even happiness again. She glanced back at her son and Kai.

And her heart relaxed a little more. Yes. There was peace and happiness in her son’s strong hand curving gently over his wife’s, in that little sigh of trust that ran through Kai as her body relaxed so close to his.

A ghost of envy touched Anne again, this cool, supercilious finger of it that liked to sneak its way into her life and stroke her possessively even while she told it to fuck off. Envy was a sexual harasser, the bastard, and Anne had never been the type to put up with that shit. But envy kept trying anyway.

I’m not envious, I’m curious
, she told the wormy little pervert coolly.
How do women manage that? That’s all I want to know.
All those women, so relaxed and trusting, all around her: Jaime with her father and with her new husband, Kai with Kurt, Cade with Sylvain, Summer with Luc Leroi, all those other chef-friend-couples of theirs. Even the ones busy sparring and laughing while they danced, like Philippe and Magalie over there, seemed to be doing it from a position of complete trust.

How? How do you trust that way? How do you relax?

And oddly, despite the ocean’s distance across the dune, the sound of waves filled her, the scent of sea, the yield of sand under her feet, and the cool breeze off the ocean as the light eased its shimmer over the horizon, stretching across the water to her. With that scent of sea came a solid body walking beside her. No scent to him, because the sea wind stripped away all scents but its own. Often no real shape, because some mornings they walked and walked without her ever turning her head, both their gazes on the waves and the sand. A strong, deep male voice, using her as a sounding board as he worked his way through decisions that made most other men prefer to be anything, anyone rather than the person with whom the buck stopped.