Sun-Kissed (9 page)

Mack grinned. “It’s Jaime’s old car from college, really. Cade said at their wedding in France that the French didn’t get into this whole car-sabotage tradition.”

“Yes, well, now that someone has explained it to them, they’re taking to it.”

They were, too. The chefs were laughing their heads off as they coated the car in chocolate, drawing elaborate messages and designs as they attempted to one-up each other. The photographers were having a field day. That blonde one who was married to one of the older chocolatiers hadn’t let her camera stop clicking once.

“Well,” Sylvain told Cade with a wink, glancing over and making sure his voice was loud enough for Mack to hear. “You can’t
eat
Corey Chocolate. You might as well do something with it.”

Cade, as deep in the buckets of the melted chocolate as the chefs, promptly smeared a handful of it on Sylvain’s face.

“Seriously,” Mack growled, “how I stand him…”

Sylvain grabbed Cade and kissed the chocolate onto
her
face.

Mack groaned and tilted his head back to gaze at the sky.

Anne forgot she was avoiding him and patted his arm in pseudo-consolation, struggling not to laugh.

“You call this decoration?” Jack Corey asked, gleefully signing COREY + RICHARD over the bumper. “I expected some of your fancy curlicues at the least.”

“To get blown off on the road?” Sylvain asked, with great offense. “
My
chocolate?”

Philippe Lyonnais flicked a big melted blob of the Corey chocolate at him from the other side of the car.

It hit Sylvain square on one of those arrogant eyebrows. Mack gave a delighted grunt. Both Sylvain’s eyebrows went up. He turned, grinned—and then the chocolate battle broke out.

“Uh-oh.” Anne ducked behind Mack as within seconds nearly every chef around the car was involved. Roars capable of dominating the noisiest kitchens filled the air as great handfuls of melted chocolate flew and spattered.

“Hey!” Mack protested, wincing as a stray spray of chocolate caught him on the face. “You’re blocking my ability to maneuver!” Visibly so, as he started to duck instinctively and caught himself so that she didn’t take the chocolate instead of him. That blob hit him square in the shoulder, right where her face would have been had he ducked.

She darted out to the shelter of a bush, as Sylvain grinned and started aiming straight for Mack on purpose. Mack grinned like a devil as soon as Anne freed him for movement and launched straight into the volley, going for Sylvain’s bucket of melted chocolate.

While the volley went on all around them—even Luc Leroi getting drawn into it, after that blond Patrick went after him until he cracked—Mack and Sylvain rolled on the ground, fighting for the bucket and managing to get themselves thoroughly drenched in its contents.

Anne was laughing so hard her ribs hurt. She couldn’t remember laughing that hard in nearly
ever
, before prison. In prison itself, she and some of the other inmates had managed to drive themselves into some surprising bouts of giddy female laughter over the craziest things sometimes. It would be strange if locked up in prison was where she had learned how to release herself.

“Guys! Stop,
stop
!” the wedding organizer called from the steps of the house. “They’re coming!”

Nobody listened to her, of course.

If you wanted something done right…Anne sighed and came out from the bush, lifting her arms in a dramatic cut gesture.

The place was a chocolate battlefield. The guys were the worst, but their female partners clearly hadn’t been able to resist the temptation, and even the photographer one, clicking away, had caught some in her hair. Laughing, sneaking in final vengeances against their nearest enemies, they slowly subsided in response to Anne’s gestures.

She advanced. The battle froze with her every step, as the chefs dropped their hands and took their enemy’s last glob of chocolate without vengeance, rather than risk messing
her
up. They diverted their energy into grabbing girlfriend or wife and wrapping her laughing protests up against a chocolate-covered body.

Anne stepped through the mess immaculate, even down to her shoes, until she was standing beside Mack Corey by the car. “I thought we agreed on bubbles and fireworks to escort the bridal couple out,” she said very mildly.

Mack, on the ground beside Sylvain, both of them so doused in chocolate they could have been mud-wrestling, yielded the bucket to Sylvain with great reluctance as both men flopped onto their backs and grinned up at her.

There. Peace had been established. Order would be restored. In the entire area around the car, she was the only person without a speck of chocolate on her. No one, of course, dared touch
her.

Even in prison, she’d had the power to make sure people left her entirely alone. No one tried to reach across her plate, or step into her space, or do any of those other things those internet guides to surviving prison said she wasn’t supposed to let them do. Not once she lifted her chin and looked at them.

She gave the wedding organizer one of those little looks now.
Presence, woman. Get some.

Then she looked back down at Mack, smugly. Queen to muddy peasant at her feet. This was a nice position for them. She let her look tell him that, almost tempted to ruin one of her shoes by nudging him delicately with her toe like some messy captive at her feet, just to emphasize the point.

Mack’s gaze ran up and down her once. He shook his chocolate-smeared head. “Anne, sweetheart. That’s such a pretty dress, I really hate to do this to you, but—” His hand shot up to lock around her wrist and yank her down on top of him before she could even blink. She landed with a thud and a great smearing of chocolate. Mack grinned. “Not really,” he admitted. “Really that was a lot of fun.” He smeared a handful all over her hair for good measure.

Almost, almost he got a squeal out of her. A squeal! Anne bit it back just in time so it might have come out, maximum, as the tiniest noise strangled in her throat and pushed herself up from his chest to stare down at him. “You are trying to die young.”

He just grinned. “Aww. You and my dad are probably the only people here who think I can still do that.”

His grin kicked through her, making her want to grin, too, making that laughter want to just bubble out of her again. And right then the doors opened, the wedding organizer making noises of despair, and Jaime and Dom stepped out.

Anne pushed out of Mack’s slippery hold to her feet, while Sylvain and Mack scrambled up, too, reaching hands to help each other in an instinctive and unnoticed gesture of mutual support that made Anne bite back another grin.

Dom stopped stock still, staring at them.

Jaime brought her hands to her mouth, gazing from the decorated car to the utter mess they had made of each other and starting to laugh.

“He started it,” Sylvain claimed, pointing at Philippe.

Philippe pressed an innocent, chocolate hand to his chest and pointed a finger right at the next nearest chef, big, roaring Gabriel. Gabriel grinned and pointed at Patrick. Patrick pointed at Luc.

Luc raised his eyebrow at him, but since that eyebrow had chocolate on it, the look was hilarious. Even
Luc
was grinning, all that brilliant passion and emotion he usually packed into a small smile breaking completely free. And, whoa, talk about hot. Anne needed to get Luc Leroi on her show, too. Actually, maybe she needed to go ahead and book all of these guys while she had them in her vicinity. She could fly to Paris and rent a studio there for the shoots.

Patrick changed his accusing finger and pointed it at little, usually serious Sarah. Sarah laughed, and Patrick kissed her when she did, entirely delighted with her and with himself.

Damn, all this easy, happy kissing going on around her made her feel so…lonely. So untouchable. Except…she looked down at her thoroughly chocolate-smeared dress. Was that Mack Corey’s chocolate handprint on her arm?

Dom and Jaime made their careful way toward the car, Jaime lifting her skirts high.

“Um…I think maybe we’ll come back and hug everyone tomorrow?” Jaime said.

“We’re more a kissing kind of culture,” Sylvain told her, presenting her with one of his chocolate-streaked cheeks.

Jaime laughed and pulled back into Dom, who wrapped an arm instantly around her. “We’ll say it’s the thought that counts tonight.”

Dom was looking at the decorated car, which had survived surprisingly well, as the chefs were more intent on attacking other people than their work. It was covered with well-wishes and
Just Married
in two languages and even a beautiful caricature of Dom and Jaime and their…seven predicted children, the whole surrounded by dozens of little hearts.

Mack raised a hand high and snapped his fingers.

“Oh, fireworks!” the wedding organizer exclaimed. Seriously, that woman.

But within seconds of the organizer speaking into her tiny headset, the fireworks started going off. Dom looked up at them as the colors burst across the night sky. Then he looked back at the car and all the chefs who had decorated it for him, staring a long moment before he flushed deeply suddenly, shoving his hands across his face. Jaime slipped her arm around his waist to give him a squeeze. That relaxed him, but it was still a visibly choked-up Big Bad Dangerous Rebel who got behind the wheel of the car and drove away.

Sylvain grinned smugly in his wake, a spectacle of diabolical chocolate-ness. “How long before he realizes I drew a line of chocolate all the way around the steering wheel, do you think?”

“I warned you how much trouble you’re going to be in if he accidentally gets it all over Jaime’s wedding dress and it won’t come out, didn’t I?” Cade said.

“Look,
I
didn’t start this weird American car tradition.” Sylvain just grinned some more. “She should have changed. Anyway, think of how she’ll explain it to her daughters when she tries to pass the wedding dress on.”

Cade laughed.

Anne drew a breath and sighed it out.

Daughters.

How easily people assumed something so magical would happen. How easily they took for granted that if you wanted kids, they would come. She hoped nothing ever shattered their confidence. She hoped—she really did—that all the dreams they took for granted came true. She glanced around for Kai and Kurt, but they hadn’t even heard the comment, holding hands, laughing while Kurt wiped a smear of chocolate off Kai’s face. They clearly hadn’t engaged in battle as intensely as the competitive chefs, who were predisposed to food warfare anyway, but they had certainly gotten into the fun.

Laughing, the chocolate-covered participants all posed agreeably for the pictures the photographers begged—Anne and Mack included—and then people slowly started to dissipate to clean up their sticky selves. Most of the guests from France were staying somewhere on the premises—in the big house or the guest cottages—which was one of the reasons Jaime and Dom had escaped to an undisclosed inn for the night. Apparently, there was an old-fashioned French tradition of pestering the wedding couple in the middle of the night that Dom didn’t quite trust the others not to revive.

Anne slid a glance at Mack, over there talking to Cade, so laughing and relaxed and chocolatey and
alive
, his handprint still on her arm, and her heart started beating so hard she had to slip away.

The caterers and staff could clean up. Anne really had nothing left to do but wash chocolate off herself and tumble into her own bed right next door.

She paused at the archway into her garden, at the sight of Kurt and Kai, with their arms wrapped around each other in a casual, party-worn, chocolatey cuddle. They were staying in the guest cottage on Anne’s property, because ever since they got married they preferred having that space of their own rather than a bedroom in the main house when they visited. Even though she had bought that house to make both herself and her son a home.

Kurt was shaking his head.

“But what the hell was Mack Corey doing with his hand on my mom’s…my mom’s…her…” Kurt gave up helplessly. It was pretty clear he didn’t think that any man should be required to fit certain combinations of words together. “She’s got a chocolate handprint on her—” He broke off again.

What? Anne slipped sideways so that the rose-covered trellis fencing hid her and tentatively felt her butt, while Kai smothered giggles. Was that hardening chocolate on her butt? Were those the shapes of fingers? He’d copped another feel while he had her down there?

Kai was laughing harder and harder. Anne peered through the roses, the incredulous indignation on Kurt’s face more aggravating than comical as far as she was concerned.

Not that she was spying on her own son, of course, but…she just liked to make sure. That laughter, even if she was partly the subject of it, felt so…good. When Anne had given Kai the cabin in the mountains as her refuge, she had never expected Kai to come back out of it with laughter. She’d expected, maybe, for the mountains to eventually release back into the dangerous world a cool, careful replica of Anne herself. Distant. Walled off.

Which would, in some way, have vindicated Anne, confirmed her own choices in life.

It was surprising, still, how glad Anne was to have had, instead, her choices put to question. To see Kurt and Kai find a better path, one where sunlight seemed to spill through the green leaves and bathe them, instead of a high, remote, mercilessly illuminated mountain pass.

“Your mother seemed happy enough with what Mack was doing,” Kai pointed out.

What? She
had
? She hadn’t seemed cool and tolerant, and slightly ready to hit him?

Kurt gave his wife a perplexed look. “My mom doesn’t do that kind of thing.”

“Happiness?”

Kurt hesitated and slowly shook his head. “Not really, no. I mean…” He hesitated again, but he clearly couldn’t find it in him to say his mother did happiness.

Anne stood very still. This low fist of hurt clenched in her belly. She’d made so much happiness for people. Hadn’t she? This wedding, for example. Hadn’t that sheltered, nourished happiness? And yet people still sent her to
prison
. Just because they thought she was a cold bitch.