The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  Her father frowned at her as if he had birthed an ostrich and had no idea what to do with it. “Well, don’t mess with him. I didn’t buy this hotel for it to become second rate. Three stars, no less.”

  “I’ll try to keep His Majesty’s happiness at the forefront of my mind. Which is a very ironic thing for you to ask me to do, but I’ll let you figure out why. ’Night, Dad.” She blew him a kiss and turned away.

  Her gaze locked with Luc’s. And all at once, everything hidden in her seemed to coalesce suddenly into a blaze of rage. All focused on him.

  Now there, he thought, as their eyes held, the power of that look pulling his body into one tight bow. There was something to work with. He could turn anything into anything, but he did like for his raw ingredients to be the purest.

  His palms itched to mold that passionate rage in his hands. Yes, I can make something out of you.

  The glimpse was gone in an instant as her rage vanished under her shimmering smile. Eyes warm, as if she had spotted her favorite puppy, she blew him his own kiss as she walked past him.

  He was still grappling with the idea of being a puppy when he realized what she had just said. Good night? She couldn’t leave yet! He had plans for her. He caught up with her at the lobby door, shifting so that she nearly ran into him. “Where are you going?”

  “To bed.” A lazy, lagoon look that left him as hot as her tropics. “Coming?”

  So that he could be her fling who didn’t get close? He would be damned if he would. She was going to want him first. “Your party’s barely started.”

  “I’ve been living in the opposite time zone.”

  If he went to bed this early, he would have hours of intense energy to burn up before he could sleep. He stared down at her, his blood beating so thick and hot at the thought of those hours that the sound of his own heart shut out every other noise around them. “I’ve got something special for you.”

  She laughed. “That’s what they all s—”

  “A dessert,” he snapped, before she could reduce him to some casual innuendo. “You have to wait for that.” Because silky Summer Corey might wrap him around her finger without even trying but he could melt her soul. And make her glad of it. Make her forget her damn father and look up at him with a radiant child’s delight.

  She did look up at him for a moment, revealing a glimpse of something wild that was instantly covered by a smile. “Why, that’s so sweet of you, monsieur.” Her gaze drifted down his body and then up, a long brush of silk that drove him helpless with arousal. “But you know”—she leaned toward him as her voice lowered, bringing them both into a secret—“I don’t eat sweets.”

  And she turned around and strolled out. As if he was nothing.

  CHAPTER 5

  The sky hung over the city like a blimp still bearing a grudge from some old war, and the Eiffel Tower dragged her point along its underbelly and drenched the city with its contents. Summer stood at the window, her arms bereft of some soft stuffed animal to hold, and watched her parents’ limousine pull away. When she was still teddy bear–clutching age, they had liked to keep her in whatever city they were in. Liz, her longest-lasting nanny, had put her foot down about working twenty-four hours a day, so in the evenings Summer either played by herself in their hotel room or was allowed to sit at a three-hour elegant dinner while her father talked business. Her father hadn’t forced her to give up the teddy bear until she was ten, and she had been thirteen before they realized they really didn’t need her that close, and she would be better off in a boarding school.

  Or somebody would be better off.

  The rain drove off all but the most dogged of the paparazzi that had gathered in incredulous hope at her dramatic return—yes, four years out of the limelight and she still had it, the world’s spoiled-brat it girl. But nothing tempted her to go out in that winter rain and revisit all the places she had tried to escape herself when she was a teenager. If she saw that damn Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre again, soaring so triumphantly over all its past, she might start beating at the thing with the nearest other chunk of marble, and she was pretty sure even her father couldn’t save her from the repercussions of that.

  Or the Mona Lisa. Summer had always wanted to take a dagger to that supercilious little smile of hers.

  No, forget that. God, was she not going there again. This was her hotel now, right? She was probably too old to go play Beauty and the Beast in its corridors, as her mom had occasionally done with her when she was in one of those thrilled-to-be-a-princess moods.

  But she had never once been allowed to explore its hidden workings as a child, peek behind the mysterious doors through which all the waiters and uniformed people came and went while she was stuck at tables or in hotel rooms. The one time she had escaped, in this very hotel, her nanny had been fired, and her last memory of the woman still stuck with her, even today: tear-drenched, a security guard hustling her away so she would quit trying to grab Summer in a last hug, staring back at Summer through all those sobs that were Summer’s fault. And standing behind Summer, just waiting until nanny and security guard were gone to tell her what he thought of her, her father, looming and giant.

  She curled fists slowly by her sides and lifted her chin at the Eiffel Tower. Fuck you all. The memories and the Eiffel Tower and that old quagmire of despair and self-hatred she had thought she would never get out of. I don’t care if you think I’m nothing. I’m going exploring.

  Like a defiant, wayward child. But then she had been crappy at defiance and waywardness as an actual child, so maybe it was high time.

  Probably typical of her that she could only manage defiance when there was nobody left to defy, but . . . You weren’t going to get sucked into that low self-opinion the first day back here, remember, Summer?

  Probably best then, in her explorations, to stay well away from the kitchens of a certain Greek god who already thought she was worthless.

  Luc paused at the entrance to his kitchens, surveying his kingdom. White figures moved in an unchoreographed dance, hands full of creation, boiling, freezing, sharp-edged, fragile. Stainless steel formed the background to everything, the only bones tough enough to hold up this fomenting world. Beauty sprang up on marble everywhere, jewels formed in heat and cold and pressure, brought up out of the bowels of the hotel to delight those who could afford them.

  But what if you met someone who had so many jewels she thought they were worthless?

  I don’t eat sweets. As if he had offered her a piece of cheap candy. Had she ever even had a piece of cheap candy in her life? She would have been one of those sleekly overprecious children who came to the Hotel de Leucé, their every whim catered to, grown men serving them the world’s best pastries on silver plates every time they pouted. She would never have known what it was like to stare through a window and crave.

  Spoiled brat. It made him sick to think about it, the gorgeous golden layers in last night’s dessert, the final touch of three ovals of gold sugar, like the orbits of three stars. The way it had been cupped in a half curve of dark chocolate, melting already the first second it was set there, while the chocolate stayed so strong.

  He had had it all planned, the way her eyes would light up when she saw it. The way she would smile at him. The way she would take a bite and be his.

  The way she would be sorry that she had offered him a yacht. The way she would say, Why, yes, it’s true that you are worth much more of me than that.

  He strode into the great refrigerator and stood in its cold, staring at the walls of butter and cream and fruits and every other chilled thing a man could possibly want.

  It felt like the damned Métro again. Where he would dance and shake that damned seed-filled egg, or the tambourine, or whatever instrument his father wanted him to try that day, and walk between the seats with his hand held out, and people would just get up and leave as the doors opened without even looking at him. While his father played the accordion with a little empty smile on his face, hidin
g his emotions from the judging or indifferent crowd, frustration simmering beneath the surface, building up into a burst of blame with which he would slam Luc as soon as they were alone.

  His father had only struck out occasionally, a slap or a bruising grab of his arm, but there had been days when Luc had wanted to curl up and vomit out his day, the groveling before indifferent strangers, the begging for money, his father’s rage and rage and rage at his failure to amass more. If only you would try, if only you would smile, if only you would dance properly, like I showed you, put some heart in it.

  Then his father would get over it, usually, and give him a rough hug and say, “Don’t worry about it, we’ll manage.” And maybe take him to do something fun, like play in the park, to make up for his temper. They hadn’t typically managed. When social services had found Luc busking in the middle of a school day and picked him straight up out of the Métro, at the age of ten, it had been the first time food and lodging had been secure. Bernard Durand epitomized security, in fact: a small-time boulanger-pâtissier who taught his foster children his trade and the paramount importance of control to accomplish anything of worth.

  No more warm, rough hugs. Not ever. But no huddling under eaves in the rain, gazing longingly into bakery windows across the street, wishing he had earned more money on the last train so he could have just one éclair.

  It might have been a tough choice for a ten-year-old child, between emotions and security. But he hadn’t had the choice. His father had disappeared, leaving the false name Leroi on the papers, and had never made contact with him again. Often Luc imagined him appearing in his restaurant, demanding money, perhaps, and his stomach would grip as he wondered how he would react. Given the option, he wasn’t sure he would have chosen the security.

  Marko had been such a bad father, the adults who took Luc from him had made that clear. But he had loved Luc with intense enthusiasm at least half the time, and it was harder to say whether Bernard Durand had. Luc could only be sure of the older pâtissier’s pride in him, a wild boy turned by the boulanger-pâtissier’s perfectionist training into a wildly successful man.

  Twenty years of unrelenting mercilessness toward himself, never a moment’s compassion for his own fatigue, all to be the very best of the best, to produce things that no one could resist, that everyone had to look at, and long for, and pay a fortune for.

  Unless, of course, they didn’t eat sweets.

  And why the fuck was the kitchen out of sugar?

  “Sucre,” he told Olivier, the young man sitting at the desk in the Économat, the hotel pantry. Sugar. Of all the things for one of his commis not to put on the whiteboard list when they grabbed the last ten-kilo bag. “Just enough to get us through the next hour. I’ve sent someone out to get more.”

  Olivier smirked oddly, which Luc understood as soon as he stepped between the sliding shelves at the far end of the small, packed room’s folding-fan-like system.

  Hands clasped behind her back like a schoolgirl, Summer gazed up at the extravagant variety on the shelves with wide-eyed delight. From coconut curry potato chips to organic muesli to cucumber-flavored sodas, if some guest far from home might long for it, they had it. That delight in her face just reached a fist into his middle and yanked it over to her to be her personal little possession. God, but if he had met her as an actual schoolgirl, when he was a schoolboy, he would have crushed on her so fast and so hopelessly.

  What was he talking about—he already had crushed on her hopelessly. That pissed him off. He was supposed to be far too old and too mature and too self-controlled, damn it to fall so pathetically anymore.

  Summer glanced his way. Just for a second that young girl’s radiance was still in her face, reaching out as if it was for him, and then she saw who it was and jumped, the wide-eyed delight disappearing as if he had snuffed it out like a candle. He wanted to force it back somehow, grab her throat and make her look at him as if he was a damned box of cereal.

  The wide-eyed delight came back without need for those measures, even brighter than before. But fake now. Like he wasn’t worth showing any part of her that mattered. “Isn’t this wonderful? I never even knew hotels had these. It’s like a treasure trove. Aladdin’s Cave. The code to the door should be ‘open sesame.’ ”

  He wanted to stroke his thumb over her mouth until that smile faded and she really saw him, bend his head, say “open sesame” . . .

  “Does it make you . . . hungry?” he asked tautly.

  With a glimmering smile she swooped to pick up a package of some damned miniature Corey bars, ghastly sour-flavored milk chocolate they kept on hand because some of their idiotic American clients were so damned attached to the things. You would think if he could overcome the scars of his own childhood they could get over that one, honestly. “That’s all right, I found something,” Summer said brightly.

  His jaw set. He put a hand on the shelves to either side of them, deliberately, hot joy shooting through him as he caged her with his body. “I thought you didn’t eat sweets.”

  “Well . . . I’m very particular.” Her apologetic smile made the words a triple slap.

  His grip tightened on the shelves. He pulled them in, squeezing their space, caging her tighter. “Too particular for me?”

  She patted one of his tense hands as if it was a dying grandmother’s. “Surely you, of all people, can understand someone being particular. I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though. It was only a dessert. In your case.”

  Only a dessert. Only. “Is that why you refused?” he asked between his teeth. “Payback because I was too particular to be your gigolo?”

  Her eyes flared at the word, just a second when he thought he had wounded her or at least gotten something past her smile. She brought one finger up to worry sexily at her lower lip. “Well . . . you’re not the only one who can turn offers down thoughtlessly, you know,” she said, all silk and sugar and a tiny, rough grain of sand.

  The shelves started to cut into his palms. “Oh, were your offer and mine supposed to be even?” He leaned in on her, took all her space. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize having sex with strangers was your life’s work.”

  The smile went entirely out. And then shimmered back into place, like the silk on her body the night before. “Oh, I beg your pardon.” She pressed that lower lip down. And then suddenly—he didn’t even know how she managed it—she was on the other side of him, free of his cage, waving her bag of chocolates like she had just won a game of capture the flag. “I suppose I should have dedicated my life to making things out of sugar instead?”

  It slapped him white. While he was still rigid from the shock she slipped away.

  So His Majesty had thought she would be that easy? Summer thought as she swam and swam and swam around the hotel pool. That he could reject her out of hand and still expect to yank her back and make her beg for him any time he cared to pull her strings? She frowned as she showered and dried off and discovered the hotel director was waiting to talk to her. He thought he could control her with desserts, that bastard? Oh, had he underestimated her. Nobody, nobody controlled her that way anymore.

  Summer gave Alain Roussel a tight, pinched smile, then realized it was pinched. She took one long deep breath and let the smile relax into something glimmering, easy. Her hair still clung wet to the nape of her neck, and she realized she had not swum far enough. She was still, after all, stuck in this damn hotel. With two more months and twenty-nine days before she could earn her freedom and get back home, bringing a satellite with her like one of those heroic animals in legends who brought back the sun. Which always left the animal burned to a crisp or blind, didn’t it?

  “They don’t really make good . . . toys,” the geeky, elegant director was saying carefully, watching her as if she was a child with a bad temper made emperor of Rome. Seated across from her at the table in his office, he was ostensibly going over some basic figures of the hotel’s operations. But that hadn’t really been what he wanted to talk about. Th
e newspaper photo that had been lying on top of those figures—her, being swept away in Luc’s arms—was now discreetly folded in four, a little matter they all needed to forget. “These top chefs.”

  Summer nodded understandingly. “Not like me, for example.”

  That threw him a little. He obviously halfway thought that she did make a good toy, by her own choice, and therefore didn’t know how to respond. He pushed on. “They’re very . . . emotional.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “He seems pretty in control of his emotions to me.” They were all packed in him until she didn’t know how he kept the dam from bursting. She sighed a little, wistful at the thought of that dam bursting on her. Yeah, wouldn’t that be a way to screw her life up so fast she might not get it back together again. She really did have crappy instincts about men.

  “Luc is controlled,” Alain agreed. “Exceptionally.”

  “Except when he hauls strange women off into elevators, of course,” Summer mentioned thoughtfully.

  Alain’s lips tightened. Clearly he blamed her for that elevator. “But I’ve had to handle top chefs all my career, and underneath that control, there’s no way he can be so different from the others. He lives on his emotions. And his emotions are . . . bigger than ours. More passionate. More powerful.”

  Hunger curled in her, deep and improper. “Of course.” She smiled easily. “It’s the mark of a great man, isn’t it?”

  Of course his emotions would be bigger than hers. Who was she but a great man’s daughter?

  “It would be really disastrous for this hotel if he were to quit,” Alain mentioned.

  Summer curled her fingertips into the tear in her jeans. “I’m sorry. Are you telling me that I should apologize to him for offering him”—me, offering him me—“a yacht? Just so I don’t hurt his tender feelings?”

  “A yacht?”

  Luc hadn’t gossiped?

  “Mademoiselle Corey—a yacht? We need him in Paris! He’s not only one of the world’s greatest pastry chefs, but he has showmanship. The cameras just eat him up, with all that restrained, clean passion of his. He’s invaluable to this place. What are you trying to do, steal him away from your own hotel?”