The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  “Tell Simon thanks for the sculptures at New Year’s,” Luc said, indulgently. He didn’t have an indulgent bone in his body. Not that he had shown to Summer, anyway. “They were superb.”

  “I know.” Ellie beamed. “He’s incredible.”

  “Yes, we did gather you thought so,” Luc said urbanely, with the tiniest suppressed twitch of his lips. “Hot, too.”

  Ellie blushed, and then her eyes went starry. “You read my blog?”

  “The posts about Simon get circulated sometimes,” Luc said apologetically. “He’s so private. You really couldn’t have happened to a person who deserved it more.”

  “You know, I can tell the world you’re hot, too,” Ellie warned, in what was apparently the best threat little Miss Bouncy could come up with.

  Summer caught the hem of her sweatshirt and pulled it straight over her head. Luc’s eyes locked on her torso. A white silk camisole just this side of transparent flowed gently around her hips, over the clinging low-cut line of aged jeans. Her bared shoulders prickled with the need for warm hands to caress them, and the line of the silk floated gently low on her breasts, slowly shivering to rest after her movement.

  Ellie Layne glanced around to follow Luc’s focus, gave Summer the friendliest, most open smile she had ever received from a woman on first glance in her life, and turned back to Luc.

  Who dropped Summer from his attention again in Ellie’s favor. “Yes, but then, just think how upset Simon would be. If you told people I’m hot.”

  Was he flirting with her? That sounded like flirting to Summer. Wasn’t that a wedding ring on her finger?

  Summer slipped her thumbs into her pockets, the aggressive V of her hands drawing the eye to her pelvis. Luc’s gaze flicked to the low waist of her jeans, then lifted to her face in a long, straight study, his expression impossible to read.

  Ellie’s phone burped in her pocket. She snuck a peek at it, grinned, blushed, and turned the sound off.

  “Simon?” Luc, amused, refocused on Ellie. He wasn’t all cool and unreadable with her. He didn’t mind her interrupting his concentration.

  It’s really all right, a voice whispered through her. Luc’s voice, after she had shattered his dessert, his hand held out to her, his eyes intent, coaxing, just before she’d fled. She stirred, confused. Had he really not minded, that she’d disturbed his concentration? You’re perfect.

  He shouldn’t say that to her. It was unfair when she wanted so badly to hear it.

  “He likes to keep in touch.” Flustered, Ellie covered the screen of her phone as she slipped it back into her pocket.

  “I bet he doesn’t keep in quite as good touch when she’s visiting the ones who are sixty,” a warm voice said in Summer’s ear, and she looked up to find that golden surfer-chef winking down at her, his eyes vivid blue. “Do you think that was a pornographic message?”

  After Ellie’s, his was the warmest look she had received since she got to this ghastly city, and Summer’s face relaxed in response, tilting up to him.

  “Patrick, would you mind walking through the steps in the baba au rhum with Sarah?” Luc’s coolest voice intervened. “I wanted her to learn how to make it.”

  Patrick grinned as if he had just won multiple victories in one casual move, winked at Summer, and in a lazy, unhurried motion somehow managed to be over at a counter helping a tense black-haired young woman before Summer could blink.

  “So what can I help you with, Ellie?” Luc asked, still indulgent, affectionate, amused. Affectionate.

  When Summer was doing her best to survive on four years of stored-up affection for the three months she had to spend in this emotional wasteland.

  “Oh, anything,” Ellie said delightedly. “Just do whatever you do! Just to be here and observe, that’s all I want. You don’t mind if I take pictures? I won’t get in the way?”

  “My kitchens are your kitchens.” Luc smiled. How many women did his damn kitchens belong to? Summer bit her lip on the rash urge to tell Ellie the Ecstatic that, in fact, they were Summer’s kitchens and she wasn’t welcome.

  She’d bet that would get Luc’s attention, all right. She imagined every light in the place going out in his sudden black rage. And then she imagined how perfectly controlled he would be as he prowled through that blackness after her, and a hungry shiver ran through her.

  “Here.” Luc patted the counter right next to him. When Summer had been standing on the other side of the room, pressed up just beside the door, for an hour. “I’m working on a new dessert,” he told Ellie.

  The woman nearly had a heart attack from pure joy. “Oh! Oh, and I get to watch? And put it on my blog before you even send it out to the restaurant? Oh my God.”

  “Don’t call him that,” Patrick slipped in irrepressibly, and Summer choked on a giggle. “He’s going to start making us kneel and pray to him every morning when we come in, if people keep this shit up.”

  “You waste enough time already without the excuse of a daily prayer,” Luc said dryly. Summer’s suppressed giggle had drawn his eyes to her again.

  Their gazes held, and darkness washed over her. Like a shelter, like a gift. Slowly her hands slipped up from the cocky sexual position at her hips to curve over her own arms, caressing that darkness to her. As if she had been floating, some tiny spark, on the winds for ages, at last to be caught in one hard palm, the other closing over to form a shell of darkness. For a moment she felt utterly protected and at peace and warm, nestled between two careful, powerful hands. Wait, how had that happened? Summer, never put yourself in the hands of a man who thinks you’re worthless. It’s a good way to get crushed.

  “For this one, I wanted to start with darkness,” Luc said.

  Yes, darkness. Sweet, strong darkness.

  “Craggy. Intense.” He pulled another of the molds of dark chocolate over to him. Oh. He wasn’t even talking to her. He was showing Her Perkiness what he had been working on. “Inside it, there’s something softer, sweeter, but still dark.” He flipped it over to show Ellie the sealed base. “Layers of ganache and a soft coulis of caramel, infused with just the right amount of elder at the top, then thyme, then cinnamon, then curry, then pure dark Venezuelan cacao, so that as you eat it, it’s as if you’re sinking deeper and deeper into the earth.”

  Summer rubbed her arms to the rhythm of his words. She felt like a child, lying alone in her bed, watching some other child be rocked to a sweet lullaby, just close enough that she could hear it, too.

  Luc gave that intense, intimate smile straight into Ellie’s camera. “I start with that,” he said as Ellie filmed, placing the craggy molded chocolate on the center of its pure-black plate, a square plate, severe, barely curved at the edges. “And then—gold falls.”

  Lips pursed as he blew a finger’s touch of gold powder over his creation. Arousal sparkled all over Summer’s skin, as if the gold fairy dust had been breathed over her and now held her in a net of desire. Longing ached deep in her.

  He glanced up from the chocolate rocklike formation, on which the gold dust glimmered like hidden treasure. His eyes flicked over her. Thoughtful, intent. He could have been a painter, eyeing his subject. He reached for something over a hot burner, pouring it out on marble, molten and glowing gold, then picking it up as it started to cool. Was that half-molten sugar he was pulling so deftly between his hands? Summer’s fingertips flinched into her arms. Didn’t that hurt?

  Could she kiss it and make it better?

  Stop it, Summer.

  He formed the sugar into a jagged ray, balanced on the chocolate abyss so that the ray penetrated into its heart, cradled by its crags.

  “I think I’ll call it First Light.”

  Ellie made a delighted sound, clicking away excitedly as she worked her way around the dessert.

  Summer had known cruelty by dessert all her childhood, had sat through endless hours of stifling dinners while all around her at other tables people exclaimed at the gorgeous delicacies that finished their meals, knowing
all the time, with every single dessert her eyes ever tracked as it passed her table en route to some other man or woman or delighted child, that always, always, she would do something that would mean that dessert was denied her.

  She had never known the true extent that cruelty could reach, until she watched Luc Leroi invent just such a dessert, pour his soul into it, and hand it to another woman with that vivid, passionate look.

  She didn’t realize she had come forward until the counter dug into her hips. And she stopped, afraid and furious with herself. She had stripped to her camisole and left herself naked amid all these jacketed people. And now she had let him see how much it mattered, the game he played with her.

  She dug into her pockets with her hands, the only things she could still hide.

  Luc slid something in front of her, but she couldn’t look away from his face. His dark eyes were almost . . . gentle. Something in them like that sound in his voice when he had said, so calmly, You’re perfect, and slipped his coat around her.

  Summer, back off now. He’ll catch you. And he hasn’t even tried. You’ll twist in hell the whole rest of your life and never make it back out into the sun.

  “Soleil,” he said, “sun, sunlight,” probably toying with other names for his new dessert. The forged, elegant lines of his face held a hint of softness. She struggled not to touch those lines. Not to beg him to hold her carefully in strong hands. I’m really lonely. Would you mind, just for a minute?

  “It’s for you.” He nudged something closer to her.

  Summer glanced down at last and nearly jumped out of her skin. The beautiful chocolate-and-gold First Light sat only inches from her. “No!” She fell back a step, flinging up her hands. “Oh, no. Don’t you dare—you made it for her, you made it right in front of her, don’t you dare pull it away from her and give it to me.”

  All the tempered beauty of Luc’s face turned severe. “I beg your pardon?” he breathed. The whole kitchen had stilled. Beyond him, even the nice surfer-chef looked appalled.

  “How could you be so cruel? She’s . . .” God, if ever there was anyone more vibrant, more enthusiastic, more heart laid out open in love for something, it was that bouncy Ellie Layne. Summer took a deep breath and caught herself, too much already revealed. Lightly, quite firmly, she shook her head at him and lifted a playful but arrogant finger. His eyes glittered so black they cut. “No. No toying with our guests, Monsieur. In fact—” she turned and gave Ellie a warm smile, holding out her hand. “I’m Summer Corey. It’s such a pleasure to have you here in our kitchens.” She winked. “I insist that they spoil you rotten. Anything you want to taste on our menus, you have only to ask.”

  Ellie bounced on her toes. Summer gave them all a blinding smile and swept out.

  CHAPTER 9

  Petrified silence filled the kitchens. “Putain de merde,”

  Patrick said finally, the only one who had the nerve to draw a breath. “Luc—”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Luc said precisely to Ellie. “Just one moment.”

  He strode through the door by which Summer had disappeared.

  “Oh my God,” Alain Roussel muttered. “She’s only been here ten days, and already he’s going to quit.”

  When Summer stepped out of the elevator, Luc leaned negligently against the opposite wall. As if he had risen straight out of the depths by an act of magic, not beaten her via the stairs. He wasn’t even out of breath. In his styled white shirt he could have been a man who had been waiting half an hour for his date.

  Except that when his eyes met hers all the light went out of the hall, and she wanted to press herself against him and see if that would dissipate his anger. I’m sorry, what did I do? I didn’t mean to . . . Revulsion swelled up in her, pure hatred of him. She was never excusing herself against unreasoning anger again. He could take his fucking desserts and stuff them up his ass. He was not holding those over her.

  “Summer Corey,” he said, so easily, so coolly, that her own name flicked across her body and raised a welt. “Might I have a word?”

  Sullenness stirred harder, just at the tone. She tilted her head and smiled at him, up and under. “I prefer actions.”

  “Doubtless.” His contempt burned all over her skin—nothing in her worth anything to anyone. “But I believe I’ll confine myself to conversation.”

  He took her card out of her hand and opened her hotel room door. One of those elegant powerful hands of his flicked out, as if he couldn’t soil his hand by taking her elbow.

  Summer grew more and more mutinous as his anger and his control over it reduced her to nothing. “That’s what you say now,” she murmured provocatively as she passed him.

  He snapped the door closed. In the entryway of the suite, the Eiffel Tower reached her already. At least the winter daylight subdued her, Summer thought hostilely. Made La Tour looks like an old, gray woman, past anything but her own delusions.

  “Don’t you ever”—the whip of Luc’s tone yanked her around to face him—“come into my kitchens again and tell me to feed someone.”

  She caught herself backing up a step and braced her feet apart, thumbs at the waist of her jeans. “You were cruel to her. Making that in front of her and then offering it to some other woman.”

  “I offered it to you.” His eyes glittered as he looked at her, building pressure on her to say something.

  “And I appreciated that. But you know I don’t really eat sweets, and you made it right in front of her. And she clearly loves these things.”

  Whatever he had wanted her to say, it wasn’t that. Dark anger surged, held in some iron grip she couldn’t begin to fathom. He took one step forward and placed a hand over her head, backing her against the wall. She felt the tautness in his muscles all through her body until she hardly dared breathe for the way each breath grew shakier, more full of wanting. She was so screwed up. “Trust me, in my kitchens, Ellie is not going to starve.”

  Why, because he liked her?

  She slid her body against the wall to escape before she plastered herself against him, which was how screwed up she was. His other arm came up to block her. “But you pulled it right out from in front of her—”

  “I’m going to make her another one. Do you think I need you to tell me how to treat someone in my kitchens?”

  What was wrong with her? Her hands fisted slowly by her sides.

  “To insist that I spoil her? That’s all I ever do, is spoil people beyond their wildest dreams, every waking moment of my day.”

  She rubbed the wall with her fists, utterly confused by this description of himself. And terrified by her crazy leap of hope. He wanted people to be spoiled?

  “She’s here all day. Simon asked me to let her come, because that’s what he lives for, to fill her little bucket up with joy, and I’m doing it, because I love how happy it makes her. She knows how lucky she is.”

  Why was Ellie Layne “enough” for him, damn it? Why did he love making her happy?

  “Well,” Summer tried, flippantly. “With you attentive to her every wish? Who wouldn’t?”

  God, his look cut her to pieces. She wanted to bury herself against his chest to hide from it. Get close enough that he couldn’t cut her without cutting himself. “You. You know, your father’s right about you. You really are a clueless, spoiled brat. Stay the hell out of my kitchens, Summer Corey.”

  He walked out.

  It was a long time before Summer peeled herself off the wall and walked to the cold window, looking out at the Tower. Even worn and waned by the gray day, that tower didn’t yield. Not ever.

  She was crying. Shaking with it. Her forehead pressed against the glass, as the tears streamed hopelessly.

  Where’s her nanny? Mai, you get her. She’s acting like a clueless, spoiled brat. Can’t she understand that I’m busy with something important? Some fit she had pitched to try to get attention. You’re acting like a spoiled brat. Quit fidgeting at the table and let us talk.

  You’re nothing b
ut a spoiled brat. All the things we give you, and you can’t stand it that I can’t give you more attention. Don’t you understand that children somewhere else in the world might starve based on what decision I make? She had probably been five, but they blurred together after a while, the claims of her spoiled brat-ness. She might have been four or six or seven.

  Spoiled bitch. I’m sure her daddy gets her anything she wants. Boarding school, a thirteen-year-old who had barely ever socialized with anyone her own age, who had only ever been trained to impress adults with her smile and clothes and manners, thrown in at the deep end with a horde of other exiled teenagers, most of whom were older, none of whom could ever be as rich as she.

  She scrubbed her face very hard, scrubbed every last tear away. The bastard. Shoulders straightening, she drew one of those deep breaths that let everyone and everything float away from her, left her light as silk in the wind.

  Two more tears welled up in her eyes. She made no attempt to fight them, just stood there as they rolled down her cheeks. Slowly they dried, leaving nothing behind.

  She grabbed her phone. “I hate you!” she hissed fiercely to her father. “I. Hate. You.”

  “Summer, did you call me out of a meeting to tell me that?” Sam Corey asked, exasperated. “I thought it was something important about the hotel. And you can’t talk to me that way,” he added as an afterthought. “I’m your father. I swear, your nanny spoiled you rotten.”

  “I was happy! I’m your daughter.”

  “Yes, I know you’re my daughter. And believe me, it’s not every girl whose father can buy her favorite hotel when he’s trying to drag her out of her dumps. Four years on some godforsaken island. Your mother nearly had a fit at how much you had let yourself go.”

  “When I told you about the problems when they lost communications for days, couldn’t you have just invested? Just because I’m your daughter, and you could afford it, and it was a good thing to do? Did you have to force me away from there to pay some kind of price for it? Does everything have to be a bargain with you?”