The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  Liz used to buy her cheap penny candy from bakeries on their “let’s play at Madeline” excursions. No need for her parents to know about the paper sack Summer would clutch in her hand, skipping off to combine a history lesson with a trip to the Père Lachaise Cemetery because Madeline had looked for her dog Genevieve there. Summer always ate it too fast, even though Liz never once yanked the bag back out of her hands and tossed it in the nearest trashcan because Summer skipped wrong.

  She scrubbed her hands suddenly over her face as the children fell on the candies, and started to slip out of the room. Her head turned to keep glancing back at those candies like Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom, she ran straight into a hard body and bounced away sharply, jerking her head up to see Luc.

  Golden skin, a face forged from greater forces than she could even imagine, that elegant black hair, those impossibly black eyes, that sensual mouth so firmly disciplined. He seemed perfectly controlled, so she didn’t know why she was so convinced he was pissed off.

  “Cute,” she said lightly, not quite sure where not to look, between the taunting temptation of him and the taunting temptation of those candies. Why the hell did the world get off on taunting her with things she wasn’t supposed to be good enough for? “Who made them?”

  “Me.”

  She looked back at him, and her smile slipped for a second and was almost real. That was kind of cute, too, to imagine impervious deity Luc making little-kid candies. She tilted her head, remembering what he had said about his Gypsy father, wondering if maybe penny candies had been a rare, special delight for him as a kid, too. “You made their day.”

  “Not yours?” he said. “No hot chocolate after skating? No candy while you’re playing with children? I thought you liked cheap candy.”

  That wasn’t cheap candy. Handmade in a three-star kitchen by one of the top chefs in the world. Her heart tightened, old anxiety rising up. “I really can’t.” I don’t deserve this, you know.

  Summer, stop! You do, too, deserve whatever you want.

  But she just couldn’t do it. Or maybe she just couldn’t yield him that power.

  You can’t control me with sweets anymore.

  Bad enough she had let her father control her with the offer of a satellite, but what was she supposed to do? Keep her island cut off from the world to keep it safe for her, as if its entire population were her personal toys?

  “Are you diabetic?” he asked.

  She stiffened, lifting her chin in a gesture of dismissal she had had to learn very young. A lot of people wanted a piece of her father through her. “This isn’t your business.”

  “You’re worried about your weight, aren’t you?” He flicked an incredulous, angry glance over her slender body.

  “No.” At least . . . she tried not to be. She didn’t worry about it on the island. “Excuse me.”

  He didn’t move. No qualms whatsoever about asking her invasive questions about her personal issues, about using his bigger body to control where she could go or what she could do. And all while that flick of his glance over her body, the anger and contempt in it, still burned over her.

  She smiled at him and leaned into him confidingly. Her hand came up to toy with his collar, fingers grazing his throat. “You see, I can put my mouth around—almost—anything,” she murmured into his ear and dropped back onto her heels so he could catch her own blissful savoring of her lower lip. “But that particular flavor seems better suited to children, don’t you think?” She smiled at him, and let her pat of his cheek linger as she strolled on past him and glanced back. “It’s really sweet of you, though.”

  The Aladdin’s Cave appeared right in the middle of an attempt to ask her out. Derek Martin, vice-president of the hotel chain whose luxury flagship the Luxe was one of the Leucé’s rivals, had joined her for lunch because, of course, her father’s heir had a line of men out to the other end of Paris who wanted to join her for meals, and when it came to that or trying to face her lonely hotel room or cold, lonely Paris, she had an unfortunate tendency to choose the coward’s way out. When the dessert arrived, dark, ambitious, attractive Derek had reined all of his aggression in to one gentle, possessive touch of her hand, his thumb caressing her knuckles, as if he knew how desperately she needed warmth and gentleness.

  But then, maybe she was just transparent. Maybe that was why men always saw right through her, to her father. Not on purpose, even, but that was an awful lot of money and power to not remember when you were flirting with a woman. You would have to have a really weird brain—completely indifferent to numbers—to forget Sam Corey was in the picture. Derek Martin’s brain wouldn’t be able to shut him out. She knew that. But he did do a good job of pretending, with that focus that driven men had, right at the beginning, that ability to convince her that she could be the most important thing in his world, if only she would let herself be caught by him.

  “They would love to have you at the Abbaye perfume launch, you know,” Derek said. “And I would be proud to escort you.”

  Dread clenched in her at the thought of a luxury house affair, all the models and power and women who had to be the most beautiful in the room no matter what. She didn’t want to go back to that. Besides, Abbaye had nearly talked her into pairing her name with a perfume back in college: Spoiled Brat, they had wanted to call it. She had never forgiven them for it. It had been during the period when she had tried assuming the title defiantly, flaunting slutty clothes, wild behavior. She had gone through the negotiations right up until it was time to sign the contract—the perfume was going to be her first “real job” after she graduated. And then she had hopped off that yacht in the South Pacific and never looked back. Abbaye had found an actress who seemed to be delighted to carry on the Spoiled Brat publicity, but Summer was pretty sure the Abbaye people were still a little pissed at her. And some part of her still felt a violent hatred for them, that they had tried to stick that label on her stupid twenty-year-old self, a label that a top-selling perfume and twenty-five-million-dollar advertising campaign would have cemented to her forever.

  “Or if the Abbaye perfume launch doesn’t appeal,” Derek said quietly, stroking her knuckles, “why not something more relaxing? I know. We could fly to Nice for the day. It’s warm down there.”

  Escape Paris? That sounded enticing . . .

  Summer. Derek Martin couldn’t understand why you would teach school on that island in a million years. Don’t collapse this easily. You can make it three months.

  And then the dessert slid in front of her.

  A long, rectangular plate, crossed with a path of edible sand, glinting with specks of color and light, as if jewels had been ground to dust in it. They almost had, she realized, inspecting it. The hint of gleaming colors must come from colored sugars, but the gold was actual flecks of gold dust. Across that sand trailed serpentine footprints, made by someone’s fingertip, leading to a rugged cave of chocolate, its door sealed shut.

  A cave of wonders. It was a cave of wonders, for only the person with the magic word to explore. Were those Luc’s fingerprints?

  No, surely he didn’t make every single item that came to her from the kitchens himself. It had to be that dark-haired intern she had seen, or . . .

  “This is a new one,” Derek said. “I’ve never seen that on Luc’s menu before.”

  “It’s for Mademoiselle Corey,” the waiter said firmly, as if he was the dessert’s bodyguard and was prepared to defend it against anyone who wasn’t supposed to get near it, no matter how wealthy and powerful Derek Martin might be.

  “I asked for green tea,” she said. Her mother’s little trick for suppressing appetite and resisting desserts. Summer’s eyes snagged again on the gleaming sand. That was a tiny sesame seed, right there by the seemingly sealed door to the cave of chocolate. “I don’t—I’m not much of a dessert person—”

  “I’ll try it!” Derek said hungrily.

  The waiter shifted, bodyguard preparing to lunge. “I’m afraid Monsieur
Leroi was very particular.”

  “He always is,” Derek said dryly. “I’ve tried to hire him away from you any number of times,” he added to Summer.

  “Monsieur Leroi thought you would like to be the first to try it,” the waiter said to Summer. “He calls it Aladdin’s Cave.”

  It’s like a treasure trove. Aladdin’s Cave. The code to the door should be “open sesame.”

  Does it make you . . . hungry?

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, pushing it away. “I really don’t eat sweets.”

  “Summer, you are out of your mind!” Derek said. “He’ll quit. You can’t turn a top chef’s specially made dessert down that way.”

  “I can’t,” she said through a tight throat and looked away. Across all those other tables, filled with beautiful desserts. God, all the times she had stared at tables full of fantasies in this very same room, always withheld from her. I can’t give him that power. “Please offer my apologies to Monsieur Leroi, but as I’ve told him, I don’t eat sweets.”

  The waiter flinched visibly. Derek pulled out his phone. “Do you mind if I call him about two minutes after the waiter delivers that message? I’ve been wanting to find someone who can land us a third star at the Luxe for years.”

  Summer’s gaze was drawn back, irresistibly, to that dark chocolate cave. What would be inside it? What wonders would a man like Luc Leroi hide in there for her to be the first to discover? The magic of it tempted her so desperately. That excruciating longing to just once be good enough to taste one of those things.

  And that was exactly what she wasn’t going to play into. Desserts had no power over her anymore.

  She turned her head away again. “Do as you like,” she told Derek.

  At least if Luc left the Leucé in a temper, she would be safe from him.

  With any luck, her father might get so pissed off he would let her go back to the island.

  CHAPTER 7

  Luc was in such a bad temper he couldn’t even recognize his own insides. They fought with him like a feral child wrenched out of the Métro and away from his father into a place where love was some distant, pale light that would fall into his darkness only if he was absolutely perfect.

  And Derek Martin, with his offers to double his salary if Luc came to the Luxe, could go fuck himself. Anyway, Alain had given Luc a raise three times already since Summer got here. It wasn’t that Luc didn’t care about money, because he had gone hungry quite a lot until he was ten, but now that he had more than enough to cover lodging, very nice clothes, and the world’s best food, all the extra just funneled straight to his broker. Since he had more than enough in his accounts to open his own place if he ever wanted and still finance sous-chefs like Patrick when they finally set out on their own, salary increases were more like a polite compliment than anything else at this point.

  And every single time Alain sent a note giving him another raise, he added a P.S. mentioning how many days remained until Summer Corey’s departure. Don’t worry, she’s not planning to stay. Eighty-three days left now. Luc had ripped the last one into pieces and dropped it on the nearest open burner.

  Putain. Aladdin’s Cave? She had managed to ignore Aladdin’s Cave? The little sesame seed, even? That hadn’t charmed her? She, who had been so thrilled at the hotel’s Économat, hadn’t been completely taken with the desire to see what was hiding under the fragile shell of chocolate?

  Go ahead, you like to crack a man just by toying with his collar and breathing into his ear. Here’s something you can crack. While I crack you. The sesame seed was his little symbol for the moment when her mouth opened to his taking.

  Unable to contain his temper within the kitchen, he stepped into the Coudrerie, the hotel’s sewing room.

  And discovered a butt sticking out from under one of the long sewing tables, in erotically patterned leggings, a flirty tunic top leaving little covered at that angle. Laughter came from under the table. “Here’s another one! It’s the little puppy! Genevieve!”

  Laughter—real laughter—and Summer’s upthrust, barely clad butt. Some great hand picked him up and shook him, back and forth, up and down, watching the way his insides fell out for its own amusement.

  Jeannine, who had been a seamstress at the hotel for longer than Luc had been alive, was in the Coudrerie laughing too, more buttons spilled in front of her on the table beside her sewing machine. Because after twenty years of focusing on details he had lost the ability to miss anything—either that or, merde, because the first ten years of his life had been spent scrabbling for coins fallen among crowds of feet—Luc spotted half a dozen more buttons scattered across the floor.

  “Do you remember the little dog button, the little Genevieve?” Summer’s bottom wiggled out from under the table and bumped into his legs. Summer sat back on her heels. “Oops.” For one second her laughter vanished, so radically erased that he wanted to hit himself in punishment. And he hadn’t even done anything to her. Not one damn thing of all the things he wanted to do. Then her blue gaze crawled up his body, lingering thoughtfully at his crotch, just above her face. His whole body tightened, and he fought with everything in him not to let that body give her a visible reaction.

  “Why it’s Gorgeous himself!” Summer exclaimed happily. “What perfect timing. I was just wondering whether I should brave the rain to go over to the Louvre and look at all those beautiful Greek gods with hearts of stone. But why bother, when I’ve got you, right here?” Luc’s eyes were still narrowing over all the different ways she had just managed to needle him in one sentence, when she turned back on her hands and knees, in a long, slow arch of her tantalizing fesses right in front of him. “Jeannine, do you still have the little princess button?”

  Still?

  “Oh, pucette! The maid was supposed to slip it to you before you left. You were such a sweetie, and it just broke my heart the way those tears ran down your face without a sound. You mean you never got it?”

  Tears without a sound? It kind of broke his heart to even hear about it. It made him mad. Who had made her cry, and why hadn’t he been there to stop it?

  Oh, for God’s sake. He was getting heartily fed up with his sixteen-year-old reactions to her. Oh, did you break a nail? Let me kill myself so that you don’t cry about it. Sixteen had not been a good age for him.

  The wiggling butt paused. Summer lifted herself off her knees enough to look over the table at Jeannine. “No,” she said quietly. “But thank you.” For a moment, her face was entirely naked and sincere.

  She caught Luc’s eyes on her, dropped back onto her heels out of Jeannine’s sight—and the sweetie brought her thumb up to her mouth to nibble on the tip, her eyes resting vaguely on his crotch as if she had no idea where she was looking. Arousal washed him helplessly. She flipped back onto her hands and knees, her butt wiggling as that tunic top flared up and showed pretty much everything and then fell back again.

  She just hid from me behind her own worse-than-naked butt, he realized suddenly. And it was working. Visions were taking over any possibility of understanding her, leaving only thoughts of grabbing, pulling, stretching her out before him and stripping all her shields away, making her come and come and come for him until she couldn’t think of anything else when she looked at him but . . .

  “Summer got lost down here once when she was about five,” Jeannine explained to him comfortably, and Luc blinked with the shock of her grandmotherly normalcy in the midst of his fantasies. “She ended up playing with my box of buttons until I could get someone to track down her parents. They had the whole hotel shut down in fear of kidnappers by then.”

  “Got my first nanny fired,” came Summer’s flippant voice from under the table. “I’m hell on people, really.”

  It was only Jeannine’s odd, compassionate gaze that made Luc wonder how much he was missing that Jeannine saw behind that flippant manner. And now he had a picture in his head of five-year-old Summer with tears streaming down her cheeks. Why silent? Some of his little f
oster brothers would cry silently like that—as if their pasts had taught them that being discovered in tears might make their troubles worse—but didn’t your average, healthy, normal five-year-old girl make noise when she cried? Because, you know, she believed someone would pay attention and try to fix her grief if she made them aware of it?

  “What about the beast?” Summer called. “Do you still have that one? That’s my favorite button. There’s something about it that makes me think of you, your majesty.”

  If crying hadn’t gotten her the attention she needed, she certainly had learned some other techniques as she grew up, hadn’t she?

  “What can I do for you, Luc?” Jeannine asked, and he looked up to find her amused eyes on him. He had often wished that Jeannine was his grandmother. How strange to think that Summer might have wished for the same thing.

  The butt just below his gaze flexed as Summer stretched to reach a button, moving into a position a woman would only otherwise take if . . . if . . .

  He dragged his hand over his face and forced himself to meet those shrewd eyes again. “I wanted to talk to you about my buttons.”

  “Why?” Blue eyes glinted. “You’re not getting enough of yours pushed already?”

  Merde, what had he just said? “Cloths.” He dropped his sketch on top of the damned buttons. “I want to talk to you about doing a linen square for this.” A heart-shaped coeur au fromage blanc, soft delicate sweetness nestled in its own little box, wrapped in a linen square, like the artisan work of a small farmer. If that farmer could afford hand-embroidered linen cheesecloths. It would be one of the dessert’s three artfully presented elements, pulling in red themes of passion and romance, using the early strawberries that might just be starting to come in from the Garrigue if spring arrived soon enough.