The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  “Exactly right?” Summer shot a glance at Luc. “Ten thousand times, until they were perfect?”

  “Well. Getting them perfect wasn’t an excuse to stop,” Bernard corrected. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Clearly.” Summer transferred that smile of hers back to Luc, and the difference hit him hard in the stomach. Putain, it wasn’t the same smile at all. When had it changed? Her eyes lit for him.

  “How old was he when you started training him?” he heard Summer asking and stiffened a little.

  “Well, you can’t officially apprentice anyone until they’re fifteen,” his foster father hedged. “But he would do some things from the time he was ten.” Some things a couple of hours a day, usually at four in the morning. One of the many things he owed to his foster father was a sense of how much he could work, without faltering and without complaint.

  “After school?” Summer asked, and he remembered her discussing cocoa labor practices with her cousins, always knowing what question to ask, what little crack to push at until she got to the truth. The ability she must have learned from her father, the most successful investor in the world—now applied to his life.

  Fuck, that couldn’t be good.

  “Or before.” Bernard shrugged. “We start early in the boulangerie.”

  Summer was getting such a look in her eyes. She was going to kiss his palm to heal his wounds again any second. An itch spread from his hand all the way through his body for that kiss. Bordel, he was going to be running up to her every time he skinned his knee in the park at this rate. Something that had always tightened his throat into sullen pain when he had seen other kids do it, when he was little. No maternal instinct at all?

  That first impression he had had of her—when her sunshine fell on his world and melted it, and him, at her feet—hadn’t been wrong, after all, had it? It had always been exactly right.

  “I wanted to talk to you.” Bernard interrupted his thoughts.

  “I know,” Luc said guiltily. “I need to come see everyone.”

  Bernard slipped his hands in his pockets, a gesture Luc had learned from him. “Something else.” He indicated Luc’s office with his chin.

  Luc felt an inexplicable need to drag Summer with him, but Bernard clearly wanted privacy. “Excuse me a minute.” He tucked her hair behind her ear, rubbing his thumb along that beautiful cheekbone of hers.

  “So,” he heard Patrick say cheerfully as the office door closed behind them, “had any good kisses lately?”

  He propped himself on the edge of his desk, where he could keep an eye on Patrick, and glanced at Bernard, expecting a request to help a new foster boy having trouble.

  Bernard kept his hands firmly in his pockets, hesitating. “Your father’s been by again,” he finally said bluntly.

  It took a minute to sink in. “My—father?” Luc’s heart seized. He couldn’t even think or feel, just fall, in some long starry arc. “Wait—again?”

  “He used to come by sometimes when you were a boy. Cause trouble trying to get you back. I had to call the police on him several times. Then he finally stopped for a long time. But he showed up again last week, wanting me to tell him where you are. I wouldn’t, but he’s back again, and . . . I guess he’s right about the fact that you’re thirty now, and can make your own decisions. Of course, he thought you were twenty-eight,” Bernard added contemptuously.

  It was harder to keep track of time than Bernard realized, when you lived off what you could carry. That had been one of the many things Luc had had to learn very quickly, when Bernard took him in—the extreme importance of impossibly precise units of time, down to seconds.

  “And anyone would think he could find out where you are. It’s not as if you’ve changed your name.”

  And it was harder to think of Google or checking the three-star restaurants of Paris, when you were playing an accordion for food in the Métro. Was his father still doing that?

  “Do you want me to tell him where you are?”

  Luc’s heart began to beat very fast. Until he couldn’t breathe to keep up with it, and he pressed his hand against the calendar with Summer’s name all over it. “No,” he said. Not now, not now. He was happy. “No. No. Again? He came by a lot?”

  “Sometimes.” Bernard looked judgmental. “They put him in jail a couple of times, for threatening violence to get at you, and that slowed him down.”

  Luc put a hand over his heart to cover it, trying to hold it together. Oh, God, why had Summer shattered that iron shield of his?

  “He was a terrible father to you, Luc.”

  “I know.” His heart hurt so badly he hoped someone was ready to call 112. “I know he was, all right? I was there.” But Marko had hugged him. Not infrequently, either, even if hugs did alternate with cuffs. And he had kept him, when his own mother had abandoned him, and he had, apparently, tried and tried to get him back. And sent him forth to humiliate himself in the Métro and blamed him when he failed and . . . Luc’s insides were such a mess, he couldn’t stand this.

  He looked through the glass at Summer. Her eyebrows were knit delicately as she watched him. When his eyes caught hers, she moved abruptly to his office door.

  “Don’t tell him,” Luc said very quickly just before she opened it.

  Summer looked from Luc to Bernard, hesitated, and then very quietly slipped up beside Luc. Her gaze caught on the calendar, full of her name on his schedule, and she stilled a second, her arm halfway around his waist. Then she let it slide on home and squeezed him hard. The simple, consoling touch was like a chime on a tuning fork, vibrating through his body in perfect harmony. “Are you all right?” she whispered to Luc.

  His arm tightened too hard around her. “Yes. I am now.”

  CHAPTER 29

  On the counter sat mango juice. No Coke. Quick sugar but better for him. Next to it lay bags of sweet potato and beet chips. And she was making him a steak with Roquefort sauce.

  If those little hands of hers squeezed his heart much tighter, he might break down and cry.

  Don’t leave me. It was all he could do not to clamp his hands around the far edge of her counter, press his face into the cold granite, and beg. Don’t leave me for your island and your sunshine. I need your sunshine here. I’ll do anything. I’ll take care of you. Let me take care of you. I want to be the person you can turn your face up to as if I was your hero.

  His father hadn’t just left him? His father had come back and fought for him?

  “Why do you hate Paris so much?” he asked.

  She tried to peek under the edge of the steak to see whether it was seared without disturbing the marks from the grill pan. Hugo would have a heart attack and die at the way she was handling that steak, but Luc kept his mouth shut. She was doing this for him, which meant there was nothing she could do wrong.

  “Well . . . it’s really cold.” She shrugged. “And rainy.”

  “The better to cuddle up under the covers with someone.” He slid off his stool, despite the fourteen hours on his feet that day, and circled the counter to wrap his arms around her from behind, just the way he had wanted to that second evening when he had offered her his coat instead. “Are you cold, soleil?” What a scared idiot he had been that night, to only offer his coat.

  She shivered into his heat and flipped the steak. The scent of it made his teeth itch to bite something. Her shoulder there. Kiss her all over while the glorious thing cooked.

  “I’m always cold here,” she said.

  “Except now?” He let his breath heat the nape of her neck.

  She shivered again, deliciously, and pressed still more snugly into him. “Not now.”

  “You don’t think you could acclimate?” Soft as a secret into her ear, his teeth tingling to bite into that little lobe, the slope of her bare shoulder . . .

  Her adamant headshake nearly hit his nose. “I hate it here.”

  He stroked her arms, fighting the venom in her tone. “Purely hate?” More than a place she ha
d nearly been raped? He had grown up in Paris’s streets and tunnels, and he loved the damn city, loved making it worship him. How bad could her luxury boarding school have been?

  She transferred his steak to a plate, endearingly awkward compared to the professionals he was used to, and slid it across the counter to the spot where he had been sitting. Its scent was driving his starving body mad, but he kept hold of her. She bent her head very low. “It’s so lonely.”

  He drew her around the counter to the stool beside him, pulling it so close their knees bumped. “It might not be so lonely, if you have someone to”—love you—“hold you.”

  Another quick little look. He cut his first bite of steak and proffered it to her lips, giving no indication of what it cost him not to snatch it for himself.

  As she licked the sauce off her lips, he took the next bite—a big one—and nearly writhed into the bliss of it. God, that tasted so good.

  “That’s what I used to think,” she said. “But somehow it never worked out that way. Not for long.”

  He so did not want to torture himself by thinking about her ex-boyfriends again. But he made himself ask: “What do you think went wrong?”

  Analyze the attempt to create something beautiful and impossible. See how it had failed. Don’t fail.

  A little shrug. “I think it probably just doesn’t work out when you put yourself with someone just because you’re lonely.”

  “So what about this particular someone you’ve put yourself with because you’re lonely? Are you going to give me a chance to work out?”

  Her eyes lifted to his, very wide. She didn’t answer.

  “How did it not work out? Somebody let you go when you needed him?”

  She bent her head. “I think I might be very needy.”

  He dipped his sweet potato chips into the Roquefort sauce in utter gluttony. “So what do you need?” He proffered the sauce-laden chip to her lips.

  “A crazy, incompatible thing, probably. But I’m going to get over it.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what it is, before you decide whether you need to get over it or not?”

  “I—” She shook her head. “No, it’s too crazy.”

  “You know, when I come up with ideas, I don’t admit anything is too crazy or impossible.”

  She hesitated, looking at him with so much—that was longing, wasn’t it? He was starting to understand what he needed from her—her sunlight and her vulnerability, and something much much bigger that he still could only say with desserts. But what did she need from him?

  “This is the most delicious meal anyone has ever made for me in my life,” he murmured to her, twining the compliment gently around her, watching the giddy power of his voice over her. “Your pasta yesterday is the only thing that can compete with it. Thank you.”

  She blushed with delight. For someone who should be used to compliments, it was amazingly easy to make her feel special. Was that one of the things she needed?

  “So what’s this crazy, impossible thing you need, Summer?” You don’t think things are possible, but I think everything is. And I’ll do whatever I have to, to keep this.

  “Oh, just—” She made a sudden movement to slip away, but he had his thigh on one side of her stool, blocking her in. She shook her head despairingly and stared at the black granite counter. “Apparently I want an intensely ambitious, passionate workaholic who gives life everything in him. And I want him to choose me as more important than any of that.”

  He stroked his hand over that irresistible hair and let the heat of his palm rest on the strained muscles of her neck. “How would he show you that you were more important?”

  A little silence, and then that rueful, self-deprecating shrug. “Give me all his attention.”

  “And how would you know you had that? How would you know that your ambitious, passionate workaholic always had some part of him thinking about you?”

  She snuck a glance at him.

  “Would he take all that passion and drive and discipline and make the very best thing his life could produce, and give it to you? And when you ignored that, would he try to do something even better? And would he keep doing that, no matter how insanely busy he was, every damn day, twice a day?”

  Her eyes widened, locked on his.

  “And when you rejected, over and over again, the best thing he could possibly be, would he change for you and try instead to make what you wanted, no matter how humble he had to be to do it?”

  She had the bluest damn eyes. They clung to his; her lips were parted.

  He sat back. “I’m just asking, Summer. How would you know?”

  “I—I was just thinking he would give me hugs and like to have me around.”

  He hadn’t had a hug since he was fostered. Maybe what felt like an incredible glory of physical affection to him wasn’t nearly enough for her. He stroked his hand from the nape of her neck to her far shoulder and let his arm wrap around her. Carefully. Not at all sure he was doing this thing called “affection” right. But liking it. Oh, yeah, he could do this one hell of a lot more, if she liked it, too. God, he would have to get used to it, though. There were moments when it made him feel like he was about to pass out.

  “And I’m not staying here,” she said very rapidly to the counter. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.”

  On the plus side, she did have to say it five times. Like maybe the trap of him was closing around her. He grimaced at the image. “What’s the hold your father has over you, to keep you here?”

  “They need another satellite out there. He said if I would give running this hotel a try for three months, he would invest. I’ve been doing my best not to really run it—it’s not like Alain needs my interference—but I have to stay here.” She darted him a glance. “I know it seems spoiled not to want a luxury hotel as a Christmas present, but . . . I really hate hotels.”

  He loved this hotel. He loved everything about it. The gold and the marble, the chandeliers, the precise perfect elegance everywhere you looked, the rich and hungry people who flocked here for him, just for him. The absolute distance from anything resembling a dirty packed Métro car full of people who ignored him as he poured his heart out.

  He squeezed her nape gently. “Well, let’s get the hell out of it, then.”

  CHAPTER 30

  They walked down the Champs-Elysées in the middle of the night. Street lamps glittered like a stairway to heaven, curving up the slope of the Champs to the lofty glowing Arc de Triomphe. The car lights sparkled off the wet pavement in jagged dances, and Luc laughed, swinging her hand like a young man out on his first date.

  His happiness fascinated Summer. She found herself relaxing into it until she was starting to laugh, too, for no reason, just because they were walking so firmly on the eggshells of her past.

  “Look at this view.” He gestured from the Arc de Triomphe all down the wide bejeweled boulevard to the Place de la Concorde with its piercing proud Obélisque. “Summer, look at it. Is this not the most beautiful city to be king of in the world?”

  He was like her mother, of all people. Mai’s joy in this city was so triumphant that she could not conceive of any other way to feel about it. Where had her mother come from, she wondered suddenly, that she was so thrilled to play at princess? That she thought her daughter would rather be a princess than have a family life? Mai had never talked much about her childhood.

  “It’s freezing,” Summer murmured, ruefully.

  He pulled her into the panels of his coat and kissed her until she was warm again, laughing triumphantly when he lifted his head. He seemed ten years younger, but in a surprised and delighted way, as if he did not recognize from his own youth how young he felt now.

  He led her to the Trocadéro, where they stood on the esplanade above the great fountain, turned off for the winter. Across the river, the Eiffel Tower glowed her heart out, and Luc leaned against the esplanade and stared at it, exhilarated.

  “Sorry,” he said a little
sheepishly when he realized Summer was watching him. “I don’t get out much. I love this city.”

  She wanted to beat her head against something. “Of course you would,” she muttered. That damn smug Eiffel Tower. Look, here’s another person I can make love me better than he loves you.

  Not that he had ever said he loved her, of course.

  Unless you counted an entire restaurant full of desserts, designed for her, as a declaration.

  She looked up at the exuberance in the normally taut profile, with the Eiffel Tower as his backdrop. Her head tilted. “You know, it does almost look beautiful this way.”

  “Almost?” He sent a wry glance from the Eiffel Tower to her, then turned his back on the tower completely, sitting against the wall of the esplanade and pulling her between his legs. “I have less than three months to show you how beautiful this city is, don’t I?”

  He didn’t seem to find it an overwhelming challenge. With Paris in his pocket, what man wouldn’t be cocky? He didn’t understand. No one ever did understand how she could hate Paris.

  He didn’t seem to be paying that much attention to Paris itself anymore, though, his thumbs tracing over her cheekbones and his fingers drawing through wings of her hair, in that musing absorption into which he sometimes fell, looking at her.

  “I love you,” Summer said quietly. Yeah, take that to the belly, Eiffel. You thought I would be afraid to say it so close to you, didn’t you?

  Luc’s hands jerked in her hair, stinging, his face blanking as if he had been hit by a shock wave.

  “No one has ever told you that, have they?” she realized, her hands rising to find his. He called his foster father monsieur, after all. And his mother had abandoned him.

  His fingers moved uneasily in hers, as if he might be thinking of wrenching his hands away. “Twice,” he admitted. “Girls in high school.” His mouth curved reluctantly, an uncomfortable wryness. “It didn’t work out for them. They had no idea how desperate and clingy it would make me.”