The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  “Don’t stop practicing,” he murmured. “Bernard used to have us do things ten thousand times if we needed to, until we got them right. If we flinched away from something, like peeling the hot paraffin off hot pans, he would grab our hands and force them full-palm down onto the heat, to teach us to be tougher. Am I burning your hands? Because I feel that hot, right now. Like melting wax.”

  Hot paraffin off hot pans? One hand slipped down his arm, to make slow circles in his loosely upturned palm. Her eyes stung, crybaby that she was. She wanted to kiss his palms, far too late to heal those wounds. “Bernard, your foster father?” He had mentioned, also, a mother who had disappeared. Little pieces of him, here and there, that came together.

  “Mmm.” His voice burred. “Don’t stop. Practice on me ten thousand times.”

  Her nails pressed a tiny threat into his muscles. “Until I’m perfect?”

  “Summer, your every single touch is perfect.” He moved the pillow just enough to show her that secret smile of his. “When I do something perfect, I don’t get to stop. In fact, it’s almost a guarantee I’ll have to do it ten thousand more times, sometimes in one weekend.”

  She leaned her weight into him, trying to make an impact on those muscles. He was so taut. “Do you like that?”

  He shuddered, lashes heavy on his cheeks. Dark, straight lashes, growing heavier as the massage continued, as he stopped wincing and arching to every pressure and his muscles unwound, until he was all yielding, and her hands could skate gently over his back. He seemed asleep, not what she had had in mind when she started, but maybe it was another way of losing control.

  Happiness grew in her. She stroked that smooth back a long time, enjoying the ease she had brought to it, until she finally slid off him with a peek at his face. Yes, asleep, his body heavy. She slipped down to press a little kiss into his lax palm.

  There. Her secret wish to make those old wounds better. She slid back up to tuck herself beside him.

  His arm wrapped around her and pulled her under him. He threw a leg over her, holding her in place as he braced himself above her in the dark room. “It was to teach us we could handle things that hot,” he told her softly. “The paraffin felt like it burned us, but it didn’t really. That was his point.”

  Her own fingers curled instinctively to protect her palms against such a lesson.

  “You have a very powerful maternal instinct, don’t you?” he murmured.

  She did? Summer Corey? That was the first time any man had ever popped that one out at her. “I wasn’t really planning to lull you to sleep,” she denied.

  “I’m not asleep.” His mouth closed over hers, kissing with everything in him, his eyes closing in pleasure, as if she was a symphony of flavors. And his chef’s palate couldn’t get enough of them. “I’m lost.”

  She lost herself in the kiss, cradled under his body. She forgot that she had wanted to be in control. She only wanted to be lost in him.

  He was lost?

  His hands threaded her hair back from her face, so gently he could have been handling spiderwebs he didn’t want to break. “I could kiss you until there’s nothing left of you,” he whispered.

  Where the words should have woken that visceral fear of being reduced to nothing in someone else’s life, instead an image grew of herself: golden, strong, glowing in his arms like a precious star. “No, you can’t.”

  His thumb traced over her lips. “Don’t underestimate how long I can kiss you.”

  A soft smile, almost as contained as one of his, full of an astonishing amount of confidence. “Don’t underestimate how long I can last.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Summer came awake to a sense of tension. Luc stood with a remote control in hand, watching her island photos scroll across the screen. Deep green cliffs falling into brilliant seas, close-ups of old hands weaving tiare flowers, Summer coming up out of the sea with a small group of islanders after rising to the challenge of a swim around the entire island. Summer laughing. Other people laughing. He watched all of them, a tautness growing in his shoulders that made her hands itch to massage them again.

  He turned it off as the photos began to repeat and went into the next room, rummaging in the suite’s little kitchen before coming back to the picture window. He looked utterly beautiful and stark and poetic, framed against the extinguished Eiffel Tower. His city.

  Her muscles ached, from running and from other activities her body had grown unaccustomed to. She pulled a pillow to fill the empty space he had left in her arms and he looked back at her.

  A half smile, his face a little strained, as he shifted restlessly, pacing the room with his hands in his pockets. A caged tiger, long used to its confines. “I don’t suppose you have any food here, do you?”

  She blinked. The tiger wasn’t seeking freedom, just hungry? “I could order room service.” The hotel offered it twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes she thought if she saw one more excessively perfect, complex dish, she would throw it against the wall.

  He made a face. “I guess that will have to do. Unless you want to go out and see if we can find un Grec or un McDo still open.”

  “A McDonald’s?” Him?

  “Fries.” Craving filled his face. “With lots of salt.”

  “I’m sure the hotel bistro does something with fries—”

  An impatient movement cut her off. “I don’t want hand-cut, perfectly cooked fries. I don’t want something so special you have to pay attention to every bite of it. Potato chips. Potato chips would be good. Do you have any Coke?”

  She gaped at him.

  His eyes gleamed, as his tongue touched his upper lip. “You know what would be good? Du lait concent résucré. I could eat a whole can about now.”

  A slow delight grew in her face. “You’re kidding me.” The haughty three-starred finest pastry chef in the world liked junk food? Mass-produced, chemical-stuffed, schoolboy treats? McDonald’s?

  He shifted, flushing a little. “I don’t eat the whole day, all right? Nobody does. There’s too much adrenaline; we’re working too fast. Sometimes we have a tasting session when we’re developing a new concept. Or a quick lunch at the hotel cafeteria. But a lot of times, people can’t calm down enough even then to eat properly.”

  “So you come home and start stuffing yourself with junk food as soon as you relax enough,” Summer realized. “Because you’ve burned through thousands of calories.”

  His flush deepened even as he tried to look as if this was perfectly acceptable behavior.

  The man who created the most beautiful, magical culinary treasures in the world . . . ate crap.

  “Why don’t you bring home some of your ice cream, which you insist on throwing away when you don’t use it the same day? Or the macarons or cakes that don’t get eaten?” Something of quality, for God’s sake. It was like he was some abused animal, spending its life eating refuse while it gave its body up to the rest of the world for nice, juicy steaks.

  “I don’t want it. I spend all day working with that stuff. I want something I don’t have to think about. Salt, fat, sugar.” His eyes glittered at each word. The man was literally starving, she realized. Right this minute. If he spent all day working at the speeds she had seen without eating, he was burning up his own muscle mass at this point. “I just want to eat. I’m too tired for a transcendental experience.” He laughed, his face softening. “Besides you, of course, soleil.”

  She was so crazily in love with him. And he would probably gag her if she tried to say so. Her heart plunged at the realization of exactly how much he mattered to her. Nothing good—for her—could come of this.

  “I’ll tell you what.” She ignored that plunging sensation, helpless before the urge to take better care of him than he was taking of himself. “You stay here. I’ll handle this.”

  There was definitely something Ali Baba about being in the darkened Économat alone in the middle of the night, shifting its great rolling shelves like clothes on a rack, revealing sodas,
chips, Vegemite, pickled herring. Limping on stiffening calves, she grabbed cereal and dried pasta, then raided the kitchens.

  Luc was lying on the art deco couch when she got back, one arm over his eyes, appearing asleep except for the fact that he was gnawing on one of his own knuckles.

  He shifted his arm enough to look at her, eyes glittering with the reflected copper light.

  She went into her little kitchen area, and he unfolded his lean form from the couch with as much grace as if he hadn’t been using his body at top speed for twenty hours and followed her. “Sit down,” she told him firmly.

  He took a bar stool, leaning on the black granite counter, gazing at her as if she was a unicorn come out of the woods.

  “Here.” She showed him the selection of sugarcoated cereals and one healthy whole-grain variety, which he ignored, eyes brightening at one studded with marshmallows. She laughed and poured it. “Want some extra sugar on top of that?”

  “Yes,” he said defensively, trying to pretend he wasn’t embarrassed.

  “We’re going to have to work on your eating habits.” But she added a spoonful of sugar and slid the bowl across to him. His hand seized hers before it could withdraw.

  She glanced at him. He was looking down, and under her gaze actually brought his other hand up to shield his face. The hand that held hers squeezed very hard, before he released it to take his spoon.

  “Start on that.” She pulled out a pot and filled it with water.

  His gaze flew up from his cereal. The spoon froze in his mouth.

  She set the pot on the stove and added some salt. He slowly swallowed his first mouthful, his spoon hovering in the air.

  She pulled out a skillet and diced a thick slice of pancetta into little lardons. Luc placed both hands flat on the granite, still as a statue. Once his chest moved hard, as if he had finally remembered to breathe.

  She started to flush. “It’s pretty basic. I had a friend in college who thought I needed to at least master how to boil pasta and toss cheese on it. And a neighbor on the island started teaching me when she realized I was mostly living off yogurt, mangoes, and crackers.”

  Yep, here she was boiling pasta for a man who could create the seven wonders of the world if you handed him some sugar. But what was she supposed to do? Let him keep surviving off chips and candy?

  “You’re cooking for me,” Luc breathed, as if he was afraid he would shatter the moment, if he spoke too loudly.

  Her flush deepened. “I’m not sure it qualifies as what you consider cooking.”

  “My God, Summer.” He dragged his hands roughly over his face and then slid them up to knot them in his hair. His knuckles slowly whitened.

  She pushed at the sizzling lardons with a wooden spoon, not taking her eyes off his hidden face.

  “Putain, you’re going to break me,” he whispered harshly. “Like a raw egg.”

  He pushed away from the bar, crossing the suite to stand at the Eiffel Tower window, forearm pressed against its glass as he stared out.

  She lowered the heat under the lardons and followed him. “Are you all right?”

  His face was scarily bleak. “You have no idea what’s going to be left of me when you leave.”

  She flinched back, hitting the cold glass. What a horrible subject to bring up.

  “It’s been fourteen years since anyone has cooked for me. I mean, they have. Top chefs in restaurants trying to impress me or convince me I should come be their chef-pâtissier . But to feed me . . . just . . . for me, not to feed their own ego . . . just—to whip me up some pasta because I’m hungry and you think I would like it.” He closed his hand around her upper arm, too hard.

  She blushed crimson. “I’m just going to stir some crème fraîche into it.” Maybe he was assuming something of a much higher quality than he was going to get. “It’s nothing.”

  “I know what you’re going to do. I’m salivating just thinking about it. It’s not nothing, soleil. It’s . . . you have no idea.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Snow. Polynesian vanilla snow. Ebony. Great dark chocolate standing stones fallen into each other over the ages, a gate to lure her into another world. Blood. Four pomegranate seeds, trailing to the ebony gate. Adrenaline punched through Luc as he placed the last one. He had to get what he felt for her out, through this one controlled outlet, he had to—

  A can slid in front of him. He looked up in shock. Summer. His concentration on her had been so deep, he hadn’t even realized she was there.

  She was already slipping away from him. Panic surged, the need to catch her, all those emotions that he had to control. “Summer.” He kept his voice firm, and it caught her as if he had thrown a net over her, an ability that made him hot all over.

  “Drink it.” She nodded at the can.

  He looked down at it. A sports drink. The kind of thing marathon runners drank to replenish their electrolytes. Oh, God. Emotion swelled through him until it threatened to explode him again. The atoms of him that she had already shattered all over the universe swirled giddily, not unhappy, but entirely unnerved to find themselves still so loose and free and glowing.

  “I was thinking of you,” he said, and she flushed a little with pleasure and took a step back toward him, but shook her head at the same time.

  “You didn’t even know I was here.”

  His heart began to thump so hard it hurt itself against his iron shell. “This is for you.” He turned the newly invented Blanche-Neige toward her. Don’t refuse it. Eat those pomegranate seeds. Don’t smile, don’t smile, don’t smile.

  She looked down at it. Just for a second she was braced—and then her face softened suddenly. Wondering. She slipped back to him, one of her fingers creeping toward the snow. “You were concentrating on me?”

  He slid a spoon into her hand. “Do you want to see what you taste like? In my—” It wasn’t his head and he couldn’t say “heart.” It was as if his foster parents reached a great fist inside him and strangled the ability to speak. Just look at it. Eat it. Eat what I can’t say. It’s all there. Everything. You already ate my heart.

  “This is—me?” Her fingers closed slowly around the spoon, her face so full of disbelieving delight that he couldn’t clarify for her, tell her that no, it was him. The cold, and the dark gates of hell, and the flaring desperate red pomegranate seeds to trap her.

  “Taste it,” he whispered. “Then you’ll see.” His hand guided her spoon so that it dug through the vanilla snow and scooped up a pomegranate seed at the same time. “Taste it,” he said again, and guided the chilled spoon to her mouth. “It’s not very sweet.”

  Get addicted. Until she didn’t know how she had ever spent her life without the sweet taste of him on her tongue. Until she wouldn’t be able to go a day without him.

  An intense joy shot through him when she parted her lips and let him slide the spoon into her mouth. He watched the flakes of cold hit her tongue, the tiny tart touch of pomegranate, the whisper of sweetness, sugar queen snow. She made a soft, wondering sound. “You made it for me?”

  Why did this always surprise her? “Entirely for you.”

  Something flushed across her face, like the brink of tears. “Thank you.”

  She ate it all up, pomegranate seeds and all. His body grew hungrier with her every bite, until he finally took a sip of the sports drink and nearly gagged. He didn’t because—well, she was watching him as if he had hung the moon, and he had exceptional self-control.

  “It tastes like crap,” he muttered to Patrick in the refrigerator, because he had to complain about something to suppress himself. He was almost ready to dance a jig. And he never danced; he hadn’t danced a step since the social service system had pulled him from the Métro.

  “Fuck you,” Patrick said jealously. “No one’s bringing me sports drinks.”

  Luc shrugged, trying not to pick up bottles of cream and start juggling them. Something his father had just realized he would be good at when Luc had been taken from h
im. Luc had been pretty excited about it—juggling took up room, and you couldn’t do it down in the depths of the Métro, and while you were doing it, someone else had to hold out the hat—but they had never really gotten a chance to take that particular show to the quays of the Seine.

  “And you are such a narcissist,” Patrick told him. “Are you going to make her watch you all day?”

  “She seems to like it,” Luc said defensively. When he had patted a spot right by him at the counter, she had looked so happy. And now he got to feed her little tidbits of things, and she seemed to grow even happier with each one she ate. So did he.

  “That’s because I keep making sure she can get a good view of me,” Patrick said pityingly, but Luc only laughed out loud. Sarah Lin, coming into the refrigerator, stopped dead.

  Still grinning, he breezed back to Summer . . . and stopped, shoulders stiffening. One hand slipped into his pocket, his grin vanishing. With the other, he gripped Bernard Durand’s hand briefly. “Monsieur.”

  Summer, who had just been saying something to his foster father with a smile, glanced up at him searchingly, then slipped her hand down into his pocket with his. It was the oddest sensation he had ever felt in his life. It threw him completely, that warmth tucking into his self-control.

  After an instinctual jerk that almost flung it out, he suddenly twisted his hand and linked his fingers too tightly with hers. “Summer, my foster father, Bernard Durand. Monsieur, this is—my—Summer Corey.”

  “So Luc learned under you?” Summer said to Bernard, with a friendly ease that made it clear how much more training in the social graces she had had than either of the two men. “You trained him how to do these amazing things?”

  Bernard’s chest puffed subtly. Amazing. Summer could affect even him. “Just the basics, with me,” he admitted. “Just how to do everything exactly right. He was the one who went on to get hired by the top Paris kitchens, and then—” The older man gestured to their surroundings, that pride pressing against his containment in the way that was a balm to Luc’s soul.