Turning Up the Heat (3 page)

At fifteen, Maélys had been a cute enough kid, and Daniel had taken on the responsibility of two teenagers—two teenagers even younger than Léa and himself—the same way he had taken on the responsibility for everything else. Just—done it. These days, Maélys seemed like an over-glamorized, manicured version of Léa, and the need for the real thing made his stomach knot so hard it would be a wonder if his internal organs ever let him eat again.

“Léa’s
missing
?” Maélys said, on a breath of panic, which well she should feel, given that Léa was the warm hearth at which her siblings curled up. It would be so damned cold without her. He felt icy just letting the possibility ghost past his thoughts.

He fisted a hand, warring with himself.
Nobody
helped him, once they knew Léa had left a message. But... “She went on a trip,” he said reluctantly. Because,
merde
, Maélys had lost her mother when she was ten and her father when she was fifteen, and her face was going very white, her eyes getting that bleak, stunned look they used to have when he would find Léa stroking her hair, looking so helpless and sad herself he didn’t know what to do. Except work harder.

Maélys blinked a few times. And reached out to grab the doorjamb, taking a deep breath, that white pressure around her mouth easing. “A—trip? Léa? Who with? Hugo? I just saw him last night, and he didn’t say anything about a trip.”

“I don’t think it was with Hugo.” Léa taking her younger brother with her while she escaped to Tahiti was a bit of a stretch, even for her.

Maélys blinked a couple more times. “Well, then—who?” A slight edge of sulk slipped into her voice, a
why-not-me
?

“I don’t know,” he said tightly. “So you think it had to be with someone?”

“Well, I mean...” Maélys rubbed the nape of her neck. Her hair was up off it in an elegant deconstructed chignon. Léa usually just pulled her hair up into ponytails, unless they were going to a wedding or she was getting nervous about the fact that she had to meet the president. The time they had been invited to the Élysée, Léa had had the president wrapped around her finger in two minutes, which had been kind of fun to watch from the safety of an arm in firm possession of her waist.
Yes, she’s mine. My sweetheart.
I
won her.
You only won the fucking country.
“Why would she go away by herself?” Maélys asked. “Léa loves people.”

She used to like to spend time by herself a long, long time ago, in that safe, halcyon period before her father died, when she would spend hours painting and drawing. He remembered it mostly because of the way her face would light whenever he showed up to disturb her concentration.

“Do you have anyone in mind?” he asked, his voice growing so icy that Maélys stiffened the way she had when he had had to deal with that damn predatory professor when she was seventeen. Maélys had been so hungry for a father figure. The professor had been fifteen years older than Daniel himself was, too.

“No! Daniel! I mean...” Maélys bit her lip.

Daniel’s fists tightened in his pockets. “Who?”

“
Nobody.
I mean—you checked with the Rosier cousins, right?”

´
They’re all here
,” he said between his teeth. He felt white and sick. He should never have trusted those bastards. Third cousins. Third cousins was a relationship both too close and too far for comfort, when it involved aggressive, good-looking men Léa’s age. Not that he ever had trusted them, but he had trusted
Léa.

“And—and Marc?”

“Marc?” His
sous-chef
? What the hell? “
Marc?
”

“Well, I’m just trying to think of possibilities! You’re the one who thinks she must have someone with her.”

“No, you came up with that idea all by yourself,” he snapped. Just like Grégory.
Putain,
how many men got a chance to lap up her smile while he was away in places like Japan? How wide a window of opportunity had he left, that everyone found it easy to assume a lover had slipped in through it? “We’re very happy, Maélys.”

Weren’t they?

Weren’t they?

“Well, of course
you
are,” Maélys said very softly, with genuine, cautious pity, as if she was trying to break it to him as gently as possible. “You’ve got Léa.”

“She’s got me, too,” he retorted, low and hard.
Merde
, he had worked so damn much. He was one of the top chefs
in the world.
She had something special in him, too. Damn it, she did.

“Well, she’s got you some of the time,” Maélys said and shook her head, half-talking to herself. “I guess it makes sense that she imprinted on Papa, but I hope to God I have more sense than to fall for a chef.”

Daniel just looked at Maélys, his jaw hard. Léa’s younger siblings were the most ungrateful brats.
You’re welcome for making sure you were fed, clothed, and could wallow in your university studies until some little light about actually making money for yourself finally clicked in your brain.
Yes, and you’re welcome for making sure you didn’t get pregnant by any of those men twice your age you fell for instead of a chef.

Maélys’s head tilted. She was still talking to him as if she were thinking out loud, as if whatever she said, he would be strong enough to take it. They had that conviction of his invulnerability, his siblings-in-law. His heart hiccupped in panic, as if it had looked down and discovered someone had just shoved him right up to the edge of a cliff so high he couldn’t see the bottom.
Did Léa, too? Did she think he could take whatever she threw at him, too?
“Funny,” Máelys murmured. “Hugo just moved out six months ago. They say a lot of couples only hold together until they can get their kids raised, and then they lose that glue and...”

Daniel reached up to grab the doorjamb over his head, digging in to hold himself up, struggling against a wave of violent sickness. The curse of his stomach.
Not that. I can’t take that. Not Léa leaving me, oh, God.

Léa. Oh, God.
He got through the day just on the promise that sometime that night he would be able to
smell her hair.
Oh, shit, he could not go home to any empty bed that did not smell of her. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do it.

“Have you actually
seen
anything to suggest Léa might be unhappy, or are you just making all this up?” he asked tightly, fighting the nausea.

“No!” Maélys said. “But if she told you she just went on a little trip and you believe that, what are you doing here scaring me?”

* * *

CHAPTER FOUR

Léa strained to get aloe gel on her back. The sunburn ached all along the outside of her triceps, her neck, and the whole of her back except the strip of skin protected by the band of her bikini. The backs of her knees stung so badly all she wanted to do was lie on her stomach, but of course, if she did that on the beach during daylight hours, they might have to fly her to a hospital. When she did sit, she balanced precariously on the part of her butt that had been covered by her bikini bottom.

But oddly, the sunburn pain seemed to wake a little energy in her.

So she rubbed a whole bottle of aloe gel on herself through the course of the day and bought a loose, white, long-sleeved cotton tunic from the resort’s gift shop, which clung unpleasantly to her sticky skin. Hiding from the sun, she went for a hike through the tropical forest to a waterfall a couple of kilometers back from the coast and stood in the cold water for ages, surrounded by rich green forest and glimpses of white and red flowers.

“Do you know where I might buy paints?” she asked the young manager at the hotel reception desk, who was doing double-duty as receptionist until his resort had enough guests to justify hiring more staff.

He looked blank. Then he called to a young woman passing through the airy, rattan- and palm-filled lounge and talked to her in Tahitian. The woman shook her head, too, and they both looked at Léa worriedly.

“It’s all right,” she said and bought a notebook with tropical island motifs filling its page corners: tiare flowers, waves, outrigger canoes, waterfalls.

She perched on the non-burned portion of her butt in the evening on the deck outside her overwater bungalow and tried to draw the moon on the water. A frustrating exercise—moonlight with a pencil—that turned into Daniel’s face and gray eyes and the Southern Cross framing it.

She hoped he wasn’t missing her too much and turned the page suddenly, closing his face out of her view. That made her feel so much lighter that she was surprised when a great tear splashed on the fresh page.

What
was
wrong with her?

But it felt oddly good to cry like that, perched there watching the moonlight and the soft lagoon waves, with far out the higher waves crashing against the reef. Silent tears, with no spasms, sparkling with stars and moon.

She missed her father suddenly so much, it was as if she had never cried for him, back then. Maybe she hadn’t cried enough. There had been so much to do. And Daniel had needed her. He couldn’t do it alone, all that for her.

She missed Daniel so much. But she had no sense that going back would solve that problem.

And worst of all, she thought she missed herself.

But she didn’t even know what self that was.

She was so tired again. She went into her bungalow, with all the windows open to the waves that lapped around it, and fell asleep.

Day Four. Léa’s tunic top prickled against her sunburned skin. She wondered if she could stay here forever.

Daniel might miss her.

He might.

She sighed. She didn’t know why he might, though. She must be a dead weight on him, all that energy, all that drive. He needed someone like—oh, maybe one of those elegant women who hosted him on their television shows. Someone with energy and ambition to match him.

What had happened to hers? How had she grown so ill-suited to him?

Or had he just grown so big, while she had become nothing at all?

She went for a long, long walk on the beach, all the way to the next point, stopping sometimes to draw pictures in the sand.

The effort made her feel oddly rested. The waves brought peace.

Almost back to her bungalow, she stopped at the sight of a surreal figure in that tropical world. In pants and shirt, his hands in his pockets, he stood gazing at her first sand-drawing, a rough sketch of the hills framing the Mediterranean island that could be seen from their bedroom window back home. Masculine and strong and unbreakable, black hair a little long, revealing the wave in it, a lean, beautiful body that never stopped, a steady, clean profile that filmed so well.

He looked up from the drawing to meet her eyes, and a hard breath moved through his body and sighed out of it. “Léa,” he said with profound relief. But he did not run toward her. He did not walk toward her. He did not take his hands out of his pockets. He watched her warily.

His wariness built wariness in her, slowing her steps as she came closer.

“Daniel,” she said, stopping the other side of the big drawing. They had been married for more than ten years. There was no problem at all between them. And yet she could not go closer.

His face grew somber. Funny how his face always held for her a trace of the teenager with the shaggy hair and the intense gray eyes who had first teased her into letting herself be kissed. As if she had never gotten to know any other him.

“You would rather I hadn’t come,” Daniel said quietly.

She hadn’t the slightest idea. She took another step toward him. Maybe, yes. His energy made her so...empty.

The line of his pockets shifted, a gesture she knew well, his hands clenching in them. “Is there someone here with you?”

She blinked at him a moment. “A friend?” she finally guessed.

Now his jaw hardened. He looked very bleak and dangerous suddenly. “Yes.”

“No. I wanted to be by myself.”

“Ah.” He looked down at the sand and scrubbed his toe in a small half-circle under the sketched hillside. He stared down at his foot for a long moment—he was still wearing shoes—and then without a word turned and walked back toward the bungalow.

Léa stayed on the sand, no idea what she would say or do when she followed him, no desire to enter that bungalow with him and share that space of quiet and peace. The Southern Cross was up, far away across so many miles of ocean it was like there was nothing else in the world but sea and stars.

Out of the corner of her eye, motion. Daniel had the battered duffel he favored slung over his shoulder and was heading down the wooden walkway from her bungalow.

Her heart jolted. She ran suddenly, without thought, her toes digging into the sand, splashing through water, so that she didn’t have to go around to where the walkway started near the main hotel.