Sun-Kissed by Laura Florand Page A

and pushed her door open. “Leave me alone, Mack.” That was the way she had always been.
    “You know, I probably won’t do that, Anne,” was the last she heard from Mack at her back. “No matter what you say.”
    She slammed the door behind her.
    And for good measure, shot him a bird through the glass pane.
    So the last thing she saw as she glanced back was him leaning both forearms against that glass, laughter breaking out on his face, an appreciative gleam in his eye, as she turned and hurried up her stairs.
    Was it just her, or did he watch her ass through the glass the whole climb? Because her butt twitched and burned as if he did.
     

Chapter 7
    Mack rolled his shoulders, easing out the stiffness, and threw the worn stick for the dog again. In addition to last night’s chocolate wrestling match, he had taken his sons-in-law and Summer’s husband to play tennis the morning before the wedding, to try to dissipate their energy before they drove Anne crazy, and also because it was kind of sad seeing a big, bad guy like Dom struggling not to just collapse on the ground and put his head between his knees, hyperventilating. Kid came on all tough when he was facing down a girl’s father with his sins in life, the bastard, but he needed to learn how to handle his nerves.
    And since he was going to be Mack’s son-in-law, Mack figured it was his job to give him a little of the mentoring the man clearly hadn’t had from his own asshole of a dad, so…tennis.
    As anyone could have predicted, even though Sylvain had played maybe three times in his life and Dom and Luc were barely even aware of what the game was about , they still managed to turn it into an intensely rivalrous morning.
    Mack, too, of course. Well, shit, he wasn’t about to get beaten by his own sons-in-law, when they could barely figure out which end of the racquet to hit the ball with. As usual with rampant beginners, they ran him all the hell ragged chasing their wild balls, until they got into the groove of it, at which point the competition got brutal. Those guys did not tire. He wasn’t even sure they understood that most human beings sat down and relaxed occasionally.
    And hell but Dom did not want to lose to Sylvain.
    So that had been fun.
    His kind of fun, anyway. Everyone had survived it, nobody had literally killed anybody, they’d laughed a lot, and they’d managed to vent a few hours of intense competitiveness. Unfortunately, it had barely taken the edge off the chefs’ energy, and they’d still managed to compete all afternoon as to who could make Dom and Jaime the best wedding piece, right in the middle of Anne’s professional kitchen next door. Mack, on the other hand, was still sore.
    His mouth twisted wryly. Rueful older men had been warning him for decades: When you’re thirty, you’re sore for two days. When you’re forty, three. When you’re fifty...hell, a week, at least.
    He kind of liked it, though. He’d always liked that hint of soreness in his muscles that lingered after he’d really pushed himself. Made him feel alive. Pushing himself was what a man was supposed to do.
    The same way that developing Corey Chocolate into the biggest producer of chocolate on the planet made him feel as if he’d pushed himself, or at least flexed his muscles a bit. White knighting for the Firenze brothers and snatching their company out from under Total Foods’ nose while Anne was in prison, for example—that had been fun. Total Foods didn’t know it yet, but they were not getting Europe. Beat my daughter, did you? Let’s see you take on her dad.
    Lex came back panting with the stick, brown ears floppy, shaking water all over him, and he gave the stick another long, hard throw.
    And a quiet came onto the beach. A wry, understanding strength. A sense of not being alone. A relief from that solitude he often felt in a crowd, that he often felt even with his own daughters. The dad. The person who was supposed to know what to do.
    Well,