The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  “What am I saying, of course she’s cute. To attract His Majesty’s attention? She has to be. Are you going to produce gorgeous children?”

  “Pa-trick.” The word “children” punched through his stomach and left a hole in his insides, his soul a damn American doughnut. Merde, this was bad. She had wanted him to take her against the wall of a hotel pool while she kept her eyes closed so she didn’t have to know who it was.

  But . . . she had watched him for an hour. As if she couldn’t look away. How could she pretend not to know who he was? And how had his life turned so upside down that he had had to refuse wild, kinkily semipublic sex with a beautiful blonde who was offering herself up in a pool to him? No man should ever have to do that in life.

  And then be teased by his sous-chef about the cute woman he had spent the night with.

  He probably should have leaped at his chance.

  But she had his heart stuck to her damned fingers. And she dismissed everything he made for her as easily as breathing. It made him wild with rage. It woke that child in him, who so many times had wanted to leap at the beautiful, indifferent Métro commuters and claw at her and force her to look at his pitiful dancing. And that child made him writhe.

  “She’s not a beautiful blonde by any chance?” Patrick asked innocently.

  “Patrick. Why don’t you go skiing now? Didn’t you always tell me the powder was better in January and you only sacrificed yourself for me? The guilt is killing me. Go. And stay away a long time. I’ll handle Valentine’s without you.”

  “Aww . . .” Patrick blew him a kiss. Luc nearly leaped across the counter and strangled the man. “That’s so sweet of you, chef. But I know you’re just deluding yourself about managing without me. Plus, my reservations start February 16.”

  Luc looked at the total catastrophe of the dessert he was trying to invent. He had been working on the thing off and on, in between rushes, all day. The warm suggestion of some delicious ripe fruit just out of reach was working out, but the other element he was working on, this idea of something stretching toward that fruit without ever being able to reach it—it was all just an awkward, over-forced mess. “You know, it wouldn’t be any great loss to me to upend this over your head.”

  “Seriously?” Patrick straightened as if touched by a live wire. “We can have a food fight? I’ve always wanted to do that here.”

  Just for a second, the idea was glorious. The taut, tense kitchens erupting into battle, releasing . . . all kinds of frustrations. Luc grinned despite himself. “Don’t tempt me. We’ve got a new owner. I wouldn’t want to leave the wrong impression.”

  “Too late,” Patrick said sympathetically, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. “I hear she doesn’t like sweets.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “I don’t.” Summer smiled, her heels clicking coldly against marble when she crossed her ankles. “I just . . . really don’t like them. I’ll be happy with fruit, if you have it.”

  The waiter’s face tightened. He probably had higher standards than her, too. “You owe it to yourself to try him, mademoiselle.”

  She had tried to try him. A blind taste test, even. Apparently Luc didn’t let just any amateur put her mouth around him. And that aroused her because . . . because the contempt and indifference left a hard edge to the sex that would let her enjoy herself and waltz right back out of here just as soon as her cage was sprung. That must be the reason.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Find me a nice, fresh, ripe mango, the most perfect, straight-off-the-tree juicy mango. That’s the kind of dessert I like.” And Luc couldn’t make it for her. Her friendly smile allowed no leeway at all. “Otherwise, I’m good.”

  With a look of grave disapproval, the waiter left, dragging his feet as if he was going off to face the Lord of Hell with the news that he had failed to bring back any more souls.

  Oh, come on, surely Luc didn’t care that much. He wouldn’t condemn the waiter to the seventh level of hell for his crime as messenger or anything. After all, you had to tolerate the behavior of a spoiled brat. Who owned your hotel. Even if you had higher standards.

  “You must be driving Luc right up the wall,” Jaime said, horrified.

  “Not noticeably,” Summer said shortly.

  “Well, of course not noticeably. The guy would appear to be in elegant control if he was at the bottom of an eight-story building that had collapsed on him in an earthquake. He’s going to get an ulcer from that kind of thing. He needs to throw pots at people’s heads once in a while.” A quick grin flitted across Jaime’s face. “Or have a mad love affair or something.”

  “I’m not really interested in finding ways to relieve His Majesty’s stress.”

  Damn it, Summer, she thought furiously, at a sudden desire to stroke the stress off those shoulders, to take him away on a yacht, to push him back in a hammock and set it swinging. You need therapy.

  Jaime, meanwhile, lifted a hand to catch a laugh back, blue eyes sparkling.

  “What?” Summer asked, irritated.

  Jaime fought her giggles, waving a hand. “No, no, I just—you and Luc’s stress—you—” She burst out laughing. “Well . . . who knows, in the end you might be good for it.”

  Why the hell had Jaime wanted to have lunch with her? Why had Summer agreed? Other than the fact that she had been desperate for most of her life to find a woman who actually liked her, of course. Still—had she thought this was going to help in some way, sitting across from the freckled heroine-next-door who took her spoiled childhood and went out and saved the world with it?

  Why did Summer have to be on a remote Pacific island to blossom into happiness?

  “Do you know him so well?” she asked, despite herself.

  “Well.” Jaime looked doubtful. “Dominique actually likes him, and even more unusual, he seems to like Dominique. I’m not saying you could tell they like each other if you saw them together, but they have a certain rapport, let’s say.”

  Summer raised her eyebrows, remembering Dominique Richard’s obstreperousness at the gala. The fact that Luc could put up with him said a lot about Luc.

  It also said a lot about Summer. A man who could stand Dominique Richard thought she was beneath his standards. “It doesn’t worry you to be engaged to a man who fights with everybody?”

  “Only his rivals,” Jaime said, amused. “We have a good therapist.”

  Summer managed to restrain herself from pouncing on the therapist’s name and number like a starved cat. “You seem pretty happy.”

  Jaime just smiled. Discreetly. No reason at all for Summer’s own heart to curdle with jealousy.

  “So Luc likes Dominique.”

  “I think so,” Jaime said. “You know, for someone who’s so photogenic, he’s very hard to read. I mean, the media just eats him up, with all that intense, restrained passion he shows for the camera. But other than the fact that he believes utterly and passionately in his work, it’s very hard to tell what he’s thinking. Kind of like you, in fact.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, come on, Summer. It’s not humanly possible that you like everyone as much as you seem to.”

  “Why not?” Summer asked, offended. She was nice to everybody, almost all the time, and the only things people ever remembered were her slipups, her moments of tiredness or frustration or accidental arrogance, as proof that the rest of the time couldn’t have been sincere.

  “You smile at everyone as if we’re God’s gift to you, but you hide on tiny Pacific islands as far away as you can for four years?”

  Summer twisted her glass. “You know, there’s not really any big secret. No one criticizes me on the island. They all think I’m God’s gift to them. Exactly what I live for, to be surrounded by adoration.”

  Jaime looked at her for a long moment and then shook her head. Abruptly she dug into the worn, hand-woven purse that was so out of place in this elegant room. “Here.” On the back of her card, she wrote a name, number, and the word “self-
esteem” underlined twice, and slid it across to Summer. “He’s a really good therapist.”

  It was one thing to be trying to figure out a way to ask for the man’s name, and another to have it volunteered. “You know, there’s really nothing wrong with me that being back in the tropics won’t cure.”

  “Speaking of the tropics, I wanted to pick your brain about something.”

  Summer went blank. Jaime was just not the type to ask for fashion tips, which was about all people turned to her for here. And she had plenty of her own money, and her own powerful father. Not to mention power in her own right, something Summer had never quite managed to want for herself, like she was supposed to.

  “You know how I’ve been working to reform cacao farm labor practices?”

  “Yes,” Summer said uneasily. Saving thousands and thousands while Summer holed up on her island and gave little kids stickers when they wrote their alphabet correctly. She was two years older than Jaime, too. Giving out those stickers had felt . . . really good and important while she was doing it, though. Before she came back here.

  “Most of the kids on those farms have never even tasted chocolate. I’ve been toying with an idea to create a scholarship-apprentice program to bring teenagers to Paris for anything from a one-month exposure to a full chocolatier apprenticeship. Cade and I have enough connections between us to get things started—and you could talk Luc into it.”

  Jaime had a serious misunderstanding of Summer’s power over Luc Leroi.

  “Once we have Luc, we’ll have the whole network of chefs who have worked with him. That man just breeds top-quality chefs. People kill to get hired into his kitchens. So I think we could pull it together on our end. But is this project just one that sounds good on paper? What might the actual effect on the kids be? Does it just make people long for things they can’t have or create injustice? I mean, is this a good idea, or just well intentioned?”

  “I have some of the same concerns,” Summer said slowly, feeling as if she had slipped down the rabbit hole. A serious discussion with someone of such extensive accomplishments? As if her own experience could have value beyond that little island? “When I think about improving communications with the rest of the world, or bringing back too many wonderful things from Paris to make my kids dream of places far away. But my kids’ situation is a little different. Most of them are happy and indulged and have plenty to eat. And that might not be true for them anywhere else.”

  “And obviously, in the case of cacao farms, establishing legitimate labor practices is the first priority,” Jaime said. “But countries like Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana will never achieve economic stability until value can be added to their products in-country—gourmet chocolate bars manufactured there, for example. We’re working with Dad to open a factory in Ghana, which is a start. But since I started dating Dominique, I’ve been thinking about building local, artisan knowledge as well. Changing the world dynamic.”

  Summer smiled wryly. Jaime was always wanting to change the world dynamic. Summer, on the other hand, was trying to be brave enough to let her tiny piece of the world be washed out from under her feet. Her kids, given good communications with the outside world and opportunities, would go out into that world and not come back to stay on a tiny island. She had a vision of herself growing old and wizened and white-haired, wandering among coconut palms all alone . . .

  She got a grip on herself. “I like your idea of having different lengths for their stays. That way a child who finds Paris just too harsh wouldn’t be stuck. But I don’t know the cultures you’re dealing with, and remember that on my island, nature provides plenty of food, and when nature fails, government subsistence programs provide. In a country where people can starve, how much pressure would there be from family for the kid to succeed and change the whole family’s fortunes, no matter how much the kid might long to come home?”

  “Yes,” Jaime said thoughtfully. “Although is there really a choice between a Paris apprenticeship and going home if it means people in your family will starve? I suspect you’re being too softhearted.” She smiled at Summer, though, as if she liked that about her.

  “Or don’t have a realistic view of the world,” Summer said wryly. As her father often pointed out. “I—”

  The waiter slid Jaime’s flaming Phénix in front of her and in front of Summer—

  The rich orange-gold flesh of a mango, sliced in perfect mouth-size slivers, arranged like a flower on the center of a pale blue plate. Summer stared, feeling as if someone had reached in and closed his fist around her heart.

  Why the hell would he do that, if he didn’t even think she was worth fantasy-sex in a pool?

  “Ohh.” As her Phénix flames died, Jaime leaned across the table. “Did he make a sun for you? In case you are missing the tropics? How sweet.”

  A sun, yes, not a flower. A sun in the middle of winter.

  “No, really, Summer. If you knew how proud Luc is. That is one of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen. I mean, not sweet, because you don’t like sweets, but . . . you see what I mean?”

  It was an irresistible gift of happiness. She hated him for doing this to her so easily when he despised her so much, but she missed her island so much. Just one bite . . .

  It melted unbearably sweet and sun-filled on her tongue, wafting her to a beach whose volcanic sand scratched against her bare thighs, the salt coating her from the sea, children laughing as they hunted crayfish in the creek.

  She shivered at the lusciousness of it, blinking quickly not to cry.

  Fortunately, Jaime was digging into her Phénix, making little exclamations of delight. Summer’s eyes had time to dry before she looked back up with a quick smile. “Thanks for talking it out with me. See, that’s what’s nice. When I say ‘marginalized cultures,’ you see individual people. And you’re not sitting there with an agenda, trying to say the right thing to get me to support your nonprofit.”

  Summer laughed. “No agendas on me.” The lack made her father want to beat his head against a wall.

  “You’re so real,” Jaime said affectionately.

  Summer couldn’t decide which stunned her more, the tone or the words. “Me?”

  “I’ve seen you sitting down on the ground with those kids, so patient. It’s amazing. You’ve always been a little bit that way, the patient little sweetheart to all your ambitious obsessive boyfriends, but when you settled into teaching, it was like you shrugged all the glitz and expectations off you and finally became entirely—true. Just you. No global impact required. I can barely imagine it.”

  It was the first time anyone had described Summer as “teaching” and not “escaping to a South Pacific island.” Jaime seemed to admire her.

  Shaken, she focused on her mango, but instead of helping pull her together, its essence of the tropics seemed to reach inside her and catch that golden glow she carried, catch it in someone else’s hand.

  The hand of a man who had higher standards.

  Her mouth hardened. This man had too much power over her. If she wanted to get herself back intact to her island, that place where she loved herself and, apparently, someone like Jaime could respect her, too, it was time for drastic measures.

  Time to break those three years of celibacy for a nice little bout of distraction. And not with him.

  Luc rode on it, all day, the fact that she had eaten that mango. How had that juice felt, as it burst on her tongue, as it had trickled down her throat, what had her eyes looked like as she swallowed . . . had she been happy? Had she smiled for him, a real smile, of delighted pleasure? I’m sorry I was so—abrupt—last night. But look. I can give you what you want. I can see the part of you that matters. Let me have the part of you that matters. He plotted more desserts that took off from that piece of fruit, that led her further and further into him until she was utterly caught, like gold in a cage of dark—

  “You know, it’s a good thing she doesn’t like sweets,” Patrick said thoughtfully.

  “Wh
y?” Luc asked crisply. The dinner rush was nearly over, and Summer had not even made an appearance in the restaurant to be tempted further. Did he have to be so desperately satisfied that she had eaten a piece of fruit he had peeled and cut? “Too small?” She swam a lot, but her metabolism couldn’t be anything like his.

  “Also.” Patrick nodded thoughtfully. “But mostly, I just don’t think she’ll find that many sweethearts in Grégoire’s Hell Bar. Not with what I just saw her go in there wearing.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The hotel’s sculpted, blue-tinted glass bar made the place look like the land of the dead. Its descent into hell was even scheduled. In a few minutes, at eleven, the bar turned red as electric rock started blaring.

  Luc spotted Summer instantly. Against the unworldly blue, she glowed like natural light in a zombie room, her pale gold dress blending with her golden skin: shoulders bare except for a knotted strip of silk, vaguely Grecian in its loose caressing of her body, neckline draping. A dress that begged for touch.

  Just in case he had wanted to take the night before personally.

  She leaned back against the bar, one leg swinging gently, a drink in her hand, truly beautiful, that golden beachcomber in her skin and coloring combined with the ethereal goddess structure of her bones, delicate and defined and somehow strong at the same time. Her body curved deliciously, so small you knew you could manipulate it any way you wanted if she yielded it to you.

  The man on the stool beside her leaned toward her, saying something, and Luc stepped away from the door. Her gaze flickered toward his movement, and she stilled.

  She didn’t smile.

  Well. Hate was better than indifference, right?

  He took a step toward her, and she turned her smile on the man on the stool. A man who had black hair, damn it all. Could there be anything more annoying than to be her type? He crossed the room.