Sun-Kissed (7 page)

Carefully. Trying not to get anyone cut on them.

Someone always did get cut, though. Cade, in the middle of Anne’s careful work on her hair, had suddenly bowed her head into her hands and started crying. But she’d had a lead role in the performance, and she’d forced herself on anyway, that way she did. She’d started crying onstage again, in the middle of one of her solos, tears running down her cheeks as she danced determinedly through. Probably Mack, as griefstruck and lost as his girls, had encouraged her to go on, convinced it would be good for her to pursue the ballet like normal, and his encouragement had operated on Cade with the usual force expectations had on her: she always wanted to fulfill them, surpass them. So she’d felt it was her
duty
to do this next ballet performance, rather than just something her father was hoping would help get her through the grief. It had been, in the end, a bit too much for a thirteen-year-old used to having her mother there beaming at her for every performance.

“I can’t believe my dad,” Cade said now.

Anne winced and started to step back.

Sylvain laughed. “What? Your
belle-mère
is hot. Or not your mother-in-law, but whatever you call her.”

Anne’s eyebrows shot up. Sexy poet-chocolatier, media darling, and expert flirt Sylvain Marquis thought she was hot? He was younger than her own son!

Also, he thought she was in some way in the role of a mother-in-law?

“Hey,” Cade protested, but she was smiling, secure and unthreatened. “You’re married.”

“Caught,” Sylvain agreed with great mournfulness, pulling his wife more snugly into his arms and rocking her against him. “My days of flirting with hot, elegant older women are over.”

“Not so they’d notice,” Cade said dryly.

Anne bit back a laugh. It was true. Sylvain didn’t think he was flirting? What did he do to women when he ramped it up?

Sylvain leaned back against one of the tables and pulled Cade between his legs. “Are you serious that your dad has known her twenty years? And this is the first time he’s hit on her? Do you think I should give him
tips
or something?”

Cade started to chortle. Anne almost did, too. Her nostrils stung with the effort to hold back this eruption of, of
giggles
at the thought of the expression on Mack’s face as Sylvain Marquis gave him lessons in flirting.

“They’re
friends
, Sylvain.”

Sylvain gave her a look as if she’d been dropped on her head. “
Pardon,
but if I’d been fantasizing about a friend that hot for twenty years, I’d have done something about it long before this.”

“Sylvain. My mother was still alive twenty years ago.”

Sylvain squeezed his wife’s shoulder in apology, reconsidered, and waved one hand. “
Enfin
, at some point in the past ten years, at least.”

“Do you really think he’s been fantasizing about her for at least ten years?”

“Has she looked that hot for the past ten years?”

You know, Anne had always liked the French. She’d been having a few doubts about that affection ever since she had to actually deal with a horde of them in her kitchens, but maybe her original instincts had been right.
Great
culture.

“Sylvain! She’s—that’s just rude, to even think of her that way.”

Sylvain’s eyebrows went up. “
Sérieusement
?
Merde
, I’m never going to understand what counts as good manners in your country.”

“It’s just that she’s so elegant.”

“I
know
,” Sylvain said in exaggerated hungry, yummy tones.

Cade gave him a pretend hit on the shoulder. “And she’s so cool, and, and walled-off.”

“
Exactly.
How has your dad managed to hold off his attack for so long?”

Anne’s whole body was starting to tickle. She’d been hit on by younger men a
lot.
She had an exceptional degree of money and power, and there were plenty of men who found both those things attractive. Especially if they thought they could sleep their way to having that money and power for themselves. But Sylvain didn’t want her money and power. He didn’t even care about that kind of thing. If you even suggested it, he’d raise those supple eyebrows and go into fits of Gallicness:
Moi? Sylvain Marquis? Moi?
All black-haired, brown-eyed arrogance and passion.

He didn’t even want
her
, in fact. He was very happily married. And somehow that all combined together so that this casual discussion of her
hotness
, by someone that young and sexy himself, while the imprint of a hand still tingled against her butt, made her—

Tickle.
Curled her toes. Left her whole body restless.

“What?” Sylvain’s laughing voice, all of him focused on teasing Cade. “When you did that to me, it was all I could think about, how to bring those walls down.”

Anne backed away. And that was not at all because she was fleeing this conversation. She didn’t flee. But she
did
exercise good manners and object to eavesdropping. Eventually. At least when that eavesdropping got uncomfortable.

Sylvain’s voice caught her one last time as she slipped away. “I’ll bet you a new Cade Marquis line of chocolate bars that it’s all he can think about, too.”

***

“Took you long enough,” Jack Corey said gleefully from the lush greenery that turned their heated pool into a tropical oasis, popping out right in the middle of Mack’s hunt for a certain fleeing prey.

Oh, good God. Mack held up a hand. “Dad. Don’t even start.” They were too near the deep end of that pool. Mack might end up pushing him in.

But of course his father’s eyes just gleamed with more delight, bluer than the chlorine-free water. Everyone swore Mack had inherited Jack’s blue eyes. “I was beginning to think you were scared.”

Mack’s teeth snapped together instantly. “I was—what?”

“
I
was going to start going after her myself. Letting a woman like that go to waste for so long. I don’t know where I went wrong raising you.” Jack Corey shook his white head mournfully. “I
tried
to teach you to go after what you want.”

Damn it, how did his father still manage to make his head explode within seconds in any conversation, after more than fifty damn years? “Good thing I went ahead and taught myself how to really do it.” Mack made his voice as patronizing as he could and gave a patting motion to the air for good measure. “Not that there’s anything wrong with making a few million, Dad. Don’t get me wrong. You did what you could.” Implication:
So did I. And guess whose “could” was bigger?

Jack Corey narrowed his eyes at him. “You’re standing on the shoulders of giants, kid.”

Well…true. His own father and grandfather. It was why Mack had had to get so damn big himself, in order to beat them.

Well, and because his dad was so damn provoking. Mack in his twenties had wanted nothing more than to say:
Oh, you think your multimillion-dollar US candy company is something? Watch me take over the world with it.

And he had, hadn’t he? Thirty percent of the cacao production in the world, and so many subsidiaries, doing so many things so smoothly, that he had to keep taking over struggling companies to restructure into something successful just to keep life interesting. The more struggling the better, really.
Nobody else can make this work? Watch me.

And his girls didn’t want any of it.

Acted as if it was some kind of goddamn
bad
thing he’d done, sometimes, capturing the world for them and laying it at their feet.

So it was easier to focus on his aggravating father. Besides, if Jack Corey could say outrageously unfounded things to provoke him, Mack didn’t know why he should have to play nicer. “You gave me a decent handful of change to get started.”

His father’s mouth opened and closed, most satisfyingly like a fish. “A decent amount of change!”

Mack shrugged. “Gave me something to work with.” You could play around with a few million, not to mention you grew up learning the business ropes and forming the initial contacts, understanding the industry and the stock market and knowing what the people who controlled it looked like when they had a bad cold, just like any other person. Anne, starting from her family of middle-class professors, had only managed to get up to a billion so far. Of course, that was also partly because there was only so far an empress could extend her empire without delegating, something Anne had a hard time doing, but still. He bit back a grin.
Only managed a billion.
He’d have to put it to her that way sometime when he wanted to get her riled up.

Shit,
yeah
, the erotic charge that went through him at the idea of getting Anne riled up.

“You’re trying to change the subject from your own inadequacies,” Jack Corey said severely, waving a hand.

From his—Mack took a deep breath that just kind of sizzled through his teeth when he let it out. “Dad. You’re pushing it.”

“With women,” his father argued,
as if he was perfectly justified
, one of his father’s most infuriating paternal traits.

“Dad. I’m warning you.”

“Well. How long have you been mooning over her?”

Mooning?
“Dad. She’s my friend! Quit being so damn…sexist.” What the hell had he just said? His father made his brain short-circuit. He was the only person in the whole damn world who could do that to Mack’s brain. Well, Anne, once in a while, but that was usually because his brain had taken a sudden trip south in the middle of a conversation and he was busy trying to hide it.

Jack chortled, entirely delighted at the opening. “It’s not sexist to want a hot woman. It’s human.”

“Dad. I thought we agreed that I got enough of your advice about sex when I was twelve.”

His father gave him a superior look out of a face so deeply wrinkled it was an alarming foreshadowing of what Mack was going to look like if his blood pressure let him survive another thirty years. “Clearly you need more.”

“Oh, good God.” Mack tried to turn away. Mostly because he was pretty sure if he pushed his father into the pool, Jack Corey would manage to grab his ankle or something and drag him in, too. And wouldn’t
that
photo end up circulating on his daughters’ TV screens forever. He’d go down in legend to their great-grandchildren. Not the guy who had made them multiple billions as a legacy, but the man who pushed his own father into a pool at a wedding. He’d probably be the bad guy in the story, too.
Nobody
would remember how provoking Jack Corey was.

“Anyway, last I checked, squeezing a woman’s ass was still considered sexist,” Jack Corey said regretfully. “I don’t know how that happened. You could get away with that kind of thing when I was your age.”

“No, you could not, Dad. Maybe when you were twenty, but you’re probably fantasizing the past again.” Mack re-adopted his patronizing, pat-him-on-the-head tone. “I hear old guys tend to do that.”

Jack Corey grinned.
Touché
. It was always hard to fight with his dad, because his dad tended to
like
it when his son scored one off him. “So what took you so long to make a move on her?” The elder Corey’s fighting spirit had relaxed with his grin, and now it was a genuine question.
We got our sparring out of the way. Now let’s talk about what matters.

For all the old man drove him crazy…damn, but he had a good dad.

Mack hesitated a long moment, his hands in his trouser pockets under his tux jacket. Exactly the way he always stuck his hands in his jeans pockets when he walked on the beach with Anne. So he didn’t reach for something he shouldn’t. His own voice went quiet, like it did sometimes at the oddest moments with his dad. As if he was still a kid, still glad to have a father for counsel. “Dad. I’ve never in my life had a friend as good as she is. I’ll never have another one. If she doesn’t want it, then I’m not going to do it.”

Jack Corey gave that some thought. “But you still did something. There on the dance floor.”

“I know. I just—I can’t—that prison. It still makes me want to rip everything. Rip up the whole world.”
And I hugged her. And God damn but does she feel good, nestled up against my damn dick like that. Now I can’t separate the reality anymore from all those years of fantasy. I don’t want to. I want to rip that damn sheet of plastic between us all away
. “She stands over there at the edge of things, like none of this has even touched her, like we’re still the same people we were before her trial started, and it makes me want to
get to her
.”

Jack Corey nodded and considered another long moment. Suddenly he grinned again and shook his head. “You’re a funny kid.”

“What?” Was he ever going to get through a conversation with his father without pounding his head against a wall? And yet—it was kind of disorientingly reassuring to still have one person alive in the world who was capable of seeing him as a funny kid.

“Well, you say she’s your best friend. You’ve known each other twenty years. And you still don’t realize that if you try to get to Anne Winters and she doesn’t want you to, she’ll stop you?”

Chapter 5

Oh, good God. There was happiness all over this place. Anne stopped again in the shadow of a tree, smiling a little. Still pretending to herself that she wasn’t doing this on purpose, spying on the people under her wing, but she really was. Slipping from place to place in the gardens she had designed to be a refuge for group laughter and intimate moments both, reassuring herself from the confusion of Mack’s behavior with sighting after sighting of contentment.
I made the space for them to have that.

The lighting she had designed for the wedding played beautifully over Jaime and Dom, soft and sheltering, a gentle cocoon of mellow gold against the darkness. The sound of the sea shushed steadily over the dunes, and the little waterfall in this nook trickled in sweet counterpoint.

Jaime brought her hands up over her head and twirled with joy, spinning away from her big, rough-looking new husband as if there was too much of that happiness to stand still for it, whirling back to land with a rush against his chest as if she had to hurry back to that joy’s source. Dom caught her. Anne was pretty sure that man would always catch her.