The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  “Walk out on Summer Corey. She’s exactly your type.” Dark-haired poet Sylvain, media darling, regularly named the best chocolatier in the world, had a gift for sounding as if he couldn’t possibly be wrong, no matter what subject he talked about. He was at the gala because of his wife, Cade, presumably. Billionaires always stuck together.

  “No, she is not.” How would Sylvain know? Luc rarely gave himself enough time to date. It didn’t work out for him. His dates declared him too controlled, too careful, not affectionate or attentive enough. And the couple of times he had let himself go as a teenager had been disastrous, reducing him to a clinging, desperate, love-starved person he could not stand to be again and whom the girl in question hadn’t been able to stand, either. It boggled his mind, the degree of touching and warmth and relaxation between someone like Sylvain and Cade. How did they do that? And, having attained it, how did they manage to go out in public, and not lock themselves in an apartment for the rest of their lives, wallowing in it?

  “Luc, please. She’s exactly any man’s type.”

  That set Luc’s teeth again. “Aren’t you married?”

  “No, she is not,” Dominique Richard interrupted, sounding annoyed as he joined the conversation. “She’s the kind of woman who thinks she’s any man’s type, which isn’t the same thing.” He sounded as if he held a long-standing grudge against that kind of woman. But then, Dominique often sounded as if he held a grudge. Big, dark, aggressive, the bad boy of Paris’s chocolate scene had only recently been caught by a girl-next-door type who left him so softened and fragile whenever she was around that Luc had to look away. It wasn’t good for men like him and Dominique to have their raw-egg insides pouring out.

  Damn Patrick for that image.

  “I’m married, but you’re not married,” Sylvain pointed out. “We were talking about you.”

  “Then let’s stop. I’m sure talking about you would be much more interesting.”

  Which proved how knocked off-balance he was, to swell Sylvain’s head even further. “Inherently,” Sylvain agreed, with a gleam in his eye. “But I haven’t kidnapped a stranger and carried her off to her hotel room to ravage her recently.” He managed to look both pious and regretful.

  “It’s not my fault your marriage is boring,” Luc retorted. Dominique laughed. He and Dom had worked for a while in the same kitchen on their way up, and Luc had always been one of the few people who could get along with Dominique. Possibly because each man had a fundamental hole in him from his childhood that the other sensed. “What do you do, gossip nonstop?”

  “There’s a viral YouTube video of it, Luc. Some guest caught it, or some hotel employee, but I think you had better go with guest if you don’t want someone fired. According to Cade, Summer used to trail paparazzi like a comet before she disappeared for years.”

  Luc glanced at Summer, currently smiling up at yet another dark-haired man. Had half the men at this party dyed their hair black to play to her type, or what? In that glittering room, she shouldn’t have stood out as the most golden thing in it, but she did. The only gold that was real.

  Merde, really? Had he been working all his fucking life not to reign over this gold and marble palace around him, but to have her?

  “Are they related? She and Cade and Jaime?” Cade Corey, the elder of two heirs to the multinational conglomerate of Corey Chocolate, had married Sylvain Marquis in a surreal turn of events the winter before. One of the best chocolatiers in the world and some producer of mass-market milk chocolate. Even Luc’s lip had curled in involuntary revulsion at the mésalliance. Sylvain had been accused of selling out more than once.

  Younger sister Jaime had taken a break from reforming cacao labor practices long enough to get engaged to chocolatier rebel Dominique Richard about six months later, forcing the two archrivals into much closer contact than they could stand. And that had really pissed the Paris gourmets off. They had accused Corey Chocolate of trying to breed the quality out of them. So far the two men had managed to avoid killing each other, a restraint that was indubitably to Sylvain’s credit. Nobody ever credited Dom with avoiding violence.

  “Third cousins,” Sylvain said. “I guess they still invite each other to weddings because they don’t have that many other cousins and the common last name gives some sense of attachment.”

  “Her great-grandfather was my great-grandfather’s older brother.” Heels clicking on the smooth parquet floor, Cade came up to give Luc a kiss on both cheeks. “The one whose barn my great-grandfather burned down when he was inventing a way to make milk chocolate. I guess the two of them were so intent on proving to each other they were right about the way to make a fortune that my great-grandfather managed to start a major chocolate company while her great-grandfather acquired endless acres, and each generation kept building from there. Our side was winning for a little while, until her father became one of the world’s investment geniuses and shot their wealth into the stratosphere.”

  It was hard to believe Cade could be related to Summer, even as third cousins. Although only a centimeter or two taller than Summer, Cade felt infinitely taller—as if there was nothing in the world that wouldn’t yield to her when she walked straight into it with her chin up. Cade’s hair was a straight light brown, and her blue eyes too direct for Summer’s lagoon brilliance. If you tried to swim in Cade’s blue eyes lazily, she’d strip you of all your assets, restructure you, and move in new management within the first few strokes.

  Summer, on the other hand . . . would probably disappear like a mermaid into a glint of sun on a wave, dancing away.

  “You do realize it’s a bit surreal for Luc, Dom, and me,” Sylvain told his wife, “when someone hands you a top luxury hotel as a Christmas present.” All of them had worked with relentless determination and perfectionism to climb to the pinnacle of their professions.

  Cade’s expression cooled. “I worked, Sylvain.”

  Luc and Dom flicked her incredulous looks, Luc’s so subtle that she probably missed it, Dominique’s as brusquely open as everything else about him. Cade’s lips tightened.

  “Not to climb, though.” Sylvain grinned. “Not until you had to work so hard for me, of course. That was a definite step up.”

  Cade rolled her eyes, and Sylvain laughed and stretched a hand toward her. A subtle gesture, but it was enough. Cade shifted into that curve of his hold as naturally and easily as breathing.

  Dom looked across the room instinctively toward Jaime, who had fallen into conversation with Summer. Luc followed his gaze because it gave him an excuse to look in Summer’s direction.

  Jaime’s passion fruit–caramel hair had reached a sophisticated bob length now, after the violent attack that had made headlines in the chocolate world. The bob didn’t suit her. If any adult woman should have her hair in two braids down her back, it was the extraordinarily freckled Jaime. When Luc had first met her, her wrist bones had stuck out, but six months of Dom’s chocolate had put the flesh back on her, and she and Dom both had a glow that made Luc want to hang his head and kick something as sullenly as he used to when he was a kid in the Métro. Of all of them, Dom was the last man he would have thought would find such cozy, codependent happiness.

  Instead of which, Luc was the last man. He didn’t show even an inkling of his jealousy, of course. He was Luc Leroi, damn it. These days, other people could look at his life and long for it.

  “So what’s she like?” Sylvain asked Cade. “Luc needs to know.”

  Luc sent him a dangerous look. Sylvain grinned. The chocolatier had been insufferably smug even before Cade sealed the one chink in his arrogance—women—by settling that straight gaze on him and leaving no doubt as to her choice. Now there was really no being around the man at all.

  “I’m pretty much her antithesis,” Cade said. “So I don’t really know her that well. Besides, I don’t want to comment on someone’s girlfriend in front of him.” She smirked in an exact imitation of her husband.

  “She asked me t
o show her to her room and then pretty much passed out in my arms,” Luc lied, driven. “Wouldn’t you have picked her up?” he challenged the other two men.

  “Before Cade, probably,” Sylvain said ruefully. “And gotten my heart broken.” Only an extremely observant, obsessive-compulsive person would have noticed the little squeeze he gave Cade’s waist in gratitude for the fact that his heart couldn’t get broken anymore. No reason at all for it to make a man conscious of how empty his own hands were.

  “No,” Dom said. “Either she’s well enough to stand on her own two feet and just trying to manipulate me, or I need to call an ambulance.”

  Yeah, he talked big when Jaime wasn’t around, didn’t he? Luc gave him an annoyed look.

  What was wrong with manipulation, anyway? He didn’t mind if Summer wrapped that silky hair around his wrist to jerk his heartstrings. She could stroke her hair all over his body if she wanted. Or . . . merde. Maybe not. The key was to keep control, and twenty years of practice at perfect control might not be enough to overcome all the wildness still lurking from his childhood if she did that.

  But he could manipulate, too. He could control things that were hot and cold and fragile and hard better than perhaps any other man on the planet, and he had barely gotten started. In about fifteen more minutes he would set before her a golden heart held gently in a dark hand, and her eyes would light like a child’s, and her mouth would melt as she looked from it to him. That would be how he started, training her, until she couldn’t even hear his name without melting, without wanting.

  “I used to think she was pretty desperate for attention.” Cade shrugged. “It takes talent to have the media after her the way she did. Jamie had to be tear-gassed at G8 summits to get her picture all over the Web. But they never could get enough of Summer, and for a while she seemed to lap it up. The first year after she dropped off the face of the earth, I kept expecting to see a reality show turn up about her South Pacific life or something. But no, she stayed in the islands for four years, way past media reach. Jaime spent a week on a cargo boat getting out there once, just in case she needed someone to save her from a mad island chief or a sudden drug habit, and said she was relaxed, happy, and clearly adored by her schoolkids.”

  “Her what?”

  Cade grinned. Seriously, far too much of Sylvain was wearing off on her. “You guys didn’t even chat a little to get to know each other first? She’s been teaching school out on minimally populated islands that don’t even have regular electricity. Her dad can hardly stand it. Well, he clearly can’t stand it anymore at all. Why else would she be here?”

  Because she had gotten fed up with tropical roughing it and wanted to spend a few months being pampered in a top hotel in Paris, luxuriating in every delicacy Luc’s hands could create? Although . . . four years was a long time for a spoiled heiress to last before she got fed up. “Isn’t she old enough not to do what her father says?”

  “Oh, I’m sure Sam found some way to control the situation.” Cade looked a little amused, like someone who also usually had the power to control a situation. “Probably promised to invest in something they need out on the islands. I wouldn’t put it past him to have some kind of bonus if she marries the man he wants her to while she’s here, too. He’s clearly marketing his top choices for future Corey Holding chairs.”

  Anger stabbed through Luc. Across the room, Sam Corey stopped by his daughter and Jaime with a well-dressed man in tow. “Why? He wants her to be miserable?”

  Cade’s look was arrested. “That . . . might have a grain of truth. I know he’s always blamed himself for spoiling her. He talks about it, when he gets frustrated enough.”

  Luc remembered blame. Sometimes it flashed through him like it was yesterday, that blame. Sometimes he still believed it. “He’s a doting father, then,” he said neutrally.

  Cade looked doubtful. “I guess. In his way. If you ask me, she’s probably got abandonment issues.”

  Luc’s and Dom’s eyes met, and then both looked away, expressions unchanged. Luc didn’t even know where their awareness of each other’s shitty childhoods had come from. Neither was exactly the confiding sort.

  “Abandonment,” Luc repeated, not particularly wanting to hear the sad story of a beautiful billionaire heiress’s difficult childhood. Summer pushed his buttons enough already.

  Cade shrugged. “Well—I don’t know. If Dad had dumped me in a boarding school on the other side of the world at age thirteen, I think it would have broken my heart. Of course, my mom had just died, so I might have been a lot more fragile at that age.”

  “Fragile” wasn’t really a word Luc associated with Cade. On the other hand, Summer . . . he looked at her again, moving through the crowd, elusive as sunlight dancing over waves.

  Nothing fragile about sunlight, he reminded himself. Get close enough, and the sun will vaporize iron.

  With a warm smile, she slipped away from her father’s latest candidate and turned. Across the room her eyes met Luc’s and she stilled. Then she was gone again, her father in annoyed pursuit.

  Luc’s brow creased faintly, and then, cursing himself, he followed after her. She doesn’t need help, you idiot. Or if she does, it’s with carrying her bags.

  Summer and her father stopped near one of the great floor-to-ceiling windows. Against the white sweep of the curtain pulled back by gold tassels far above her head, she looked exquisite but caged, stolen out of her natural habitat to delight those too lazy to seek her out where she belonged.

  “You’re leaving tonight,” she was saying flatly when Luc got within earshot. “Even though you said you dragged me back here from my island so you could see me more.”

  “Well, I will see you more.” Her father sounded exasperated. “Your Manunui isn’t exactly an easy place to stop by between meetings. Paris is central. I’ll be back through after I finish up in Poland.”

  Summer’s eyes were brilliant. “I’ll get Alain to give me a secretary, so yours can call him and set up a time.”

  “Not a him. I don’t trust you with a male secretary. I’ll be paying off lawsuits in no time. You’d better get a woman.”

  For a second Luc was convinced that shimmering glow of hers came from incandescent rage. But she only smiled. “I’ll do what I want with my own hotel, Dad. That’s one of the points, right? By the way, if you want to know a worse gift to give someone than a puppy, try a luxury hotel. Fortunately, my sense of responsibility is almost nonexistent.”

  “Your sense of responsibility is misdirected. That’s how I got you here, your overdeveloped sense of responsibility for a dozen schoolkids. You need perspective. More people’s lives are going to depend on your decisions in this hotel than there.”

  “That’s why it’s a shitty gift. You can have it back anytime you want.”

  Her father’s lips pressed together in temper. “You’re such a spoiled brat. You’ve never been able to appreciate all the things you’ve been given.”

  Summer closed her eyes briefly. “I appreciate myself,” she said, in an odd, steady tone, like a mantra.

  Her father flicked an impatient hand. “At least I’ve gotten you off that island. That’s a step.”

  The light in Summer grew stronger, as if she was drawing on it. “Until April. I told the substitute I would be back by April 15, at the latest. You did say I could use the plane.”

  April. All the air was sucked out of Luc’s space. It was mid-January. That was only three months.

  Her father’s mouth hardened. “Why the hell did you even major in economics at Harvard? They don’t need a summa cum laude in economics on that island.”

  Luc struggled to imagine her analyzing the ins and outs of money and its movement. How sad. But it wouldn’t be the first time a child had tried to change his or her essence in order to please a parent. He had had two radically opposite fathers himself and knew all about that.

  “You knew I got summa cum?” Summer raised her eyebrows.

  “Not that again!�
�� her father exploded. “Five thousand jobs were on the line. That’s five thousand lives, Summer, out there in the world you’re so protected from. And you wanted me to put a stupid ceremony ahead of them? You are so spoiled.”

  Summer gazed out at the street. “Yes, so you’ve said. But you have to stop beating yourself up about it. I hear I’m not the only kid whose parents ever spoiled her. You did what you could.”

  Sam Corey looked tempted to beat his head against the glass. But after a second he relaxed with a sudden huff and shook his head. “Now that we’ve got you back in the real world, do you think you can start dating someone with a brain in his head? I suppose it’s up to me to pass your phone number out to the best candidates. Knowing you, you’ll fall for the first man who looks at you twice.” His voice was filled with affectionate, amused contempt.

  Summer’s hand curled at her side. “I believe everyone I’ve dated has succeeded enormously, Dad. Didn’t you read the Penthouse article?” Her breaths were even and deep, as if she was practicing yoga. “These days, I’ve given up on dating men who succeed. I insist on being looked at more than twice.”

  “You would,” her father said with such scorn that Luc took a sudden step forward.

  Summer turned abruptly. “Actually, Dad, there’s not a single person in this city I would allow near me, so it doesn’t really matter what you do.”

  “Oh, so what’s that?” her father snapped, gesturing at Luc’s coat. “Someone you’re not allowing near you?”

  Against the white backdrop, his black coat seemed the only thing that protected her from disappearing into the ether. One small hand slipped up to hold its panels around her. “My flings aren’t your business, Dad.”

  Luc’s teeth set. Oh, I’m not going to be your fling, Summer Corey. I’m going to hold you in my hand. And you’ll look at me.

  It relaxed muscles he didn’t even know he had, the thought of that warm smile all for him.