The Chocolate Heart

by Laura Florand

  The warm, happy female voices glittered over his skin. The only consistent female in his youth had been his foster mother, Pascale Durand, her rigid, unsmiling, relentless efforts to shape his savage childhood into something acceptable to her had pushed her to the margins of his life while Bernard Durand had quickly formed the center. She had been a dry well where the love Luc had so desperately sought was concerned, while from Bernard Durand he could, when he was merciless enough with himself and perfect enough, at least milk pride. After he left his foster home, starred kitchens were a brutal and often sexist world very few women survived in. Until his colleagues started establishing their family lives and inviting people over for dinner, he hadn’t really witnessed, close up, the way men and women could unwind and relax with each other, the warmth and love that could buoy up a whole room.

  Had Summer? he wondered suddenly. With her father who spoke to her as if a beautiful smiling daughter was some ghastly disappointment, with parents who after four years of rare contact had only paused at the hotel for a few hours before dashing off again to more important things?

  Under that smile, was she as clumsy and terrified and tempted by all this as he was?

  It would rain forever, shutting them in a car, in a room, under a comforter, buried in each other’s warmth . . .

  Summer pressed her head against the glass, focusing on the empty streets as the car slipped away from Sylvain’s apartment. Stupid. You could have asked for another car to carry Luc straight home.

  “So you were a sweetheart as a child?” Luc’s voice was gentle and warm, washing over her like the dark rain. It made her want to slip off all her clothes and bathe in it. But then, she had always wanted to bathe in him. He just hadn’t thought she had enough to offer in return.

  “So they say,” she said to the dark streets.

  “ ‘They’?”

  “My nanny, and apparently Julie Corey. My mother, too, I guess.”

  In the reflection in the glass, she saw Luc turn his hands palms up, studying them. “I wonder if you were sensitive. And fragile. And easily hurt.” His dark-lullaby voice had an odd note. As if he was trying, with great care, to wrap his mind around a beautiful alien species.

  Even the Eiffel Tower was extinguished by the rain at this hour, an almost invisible shadow. She fought not to look at him as they crossed the Pont Alexandre III. “I’m quite strong, actually.”

  “You must be incredibly strong,” he agreed, stunning her into glancing at him. One finger traced around the bright blue bandage she had put on his hand. “But it’s a different strength than mine, and I may have . . . misunderstood you. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you, Summer.”

  Her heart began to beat very fast. She waggled her fingers at him, staring back out the window, vague and dismissive: Who, you? Hurt me?

  The touch of his hands shocked through her, closing around her hips. Lifting her, he brought her astride him, manipulating her body as easily as if it was . . . nothing. “You have no idea how poorly I respond to dismissal,” he said, slipping his hands under her coat, stroking them up her ribs to cup her breasts. She gasped on a wave of eroticism. They were in the back of a car, and he had just taken her body as if he had the right. And she wanted to whimper and rub herself against him, beg him to use her however he wanted.

  How she hated herself.

  “You probably had a lot of toys growing up, didn’t you?” He cupped her breasts completely, caressing them, supple, clever fingers learning from every expression that shocked across her face. Her body sighed forward and those same hands braced her off him. “I didn’t.” His fierce voice closed around her like handcuffs on her wrists. “I had almost no toys, and I’ve kept every single one I ever had.” His thumbs pressed in a deep circle into her nipples, sending her arching in complete submission. “Forever.”

  He set her back in her seat. She stared at him, uncomprehending. Something savage washed across his face, and then his hands flicked out, lightning fast, and buttoned her coat just before her door opened.

  Summer looked up at the doorman holding an umbrella for her and then back at Luc, blind. He was already sliding out of his side of the car. She fumbled to her feet, shaking, as she darted a glance at Luc across the car roof.

  He braced one forearm on it as the rain pounded him. “Think you can handle that?” he asked evenly.

  Summer’s heart tightened until she thought something would snap. She lifted her chin. “In exactly seventy-seven days, I will have earned my father’s investment in Pacific Island communications and will be going home to my island and my kids. My job. So you tell me how that works out with being your forever toy, to you.”

  His face tightened under a wash of cold rain.

  A wave of impotent rage pushed her forward, past the edge of the umbrella, rain streaming down her own face. “And I, too, have a heart that can be broken. I’m sorry, I must have thought you knew.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I, too, have a heart . . . Luc shoved his hands through his hair, staring at the Eiffel Tower through his apartment window. Did she really think he did not know that? Or had so many people forgotten her heart that every single thing he did with her had been seen through that fear? How badly did your heart get hurt before you would prefer to be fucked and left on the floor rather than risk it again?

  How could anyone live with her heart so unprotected, nothing between it and the people who would eat it for dinner but a shimmering smile?

  He finally left his apartment well after midnight and walked Paris, crossing luminous bridges over the Seine, glistening with the recent rain, strolling past the Tuileries as far as the Louvre, then crossing the Pont des Arts. He loved walking this city, each step a reaffirmation of his victory over it. He had started out as the lowliest and most despised and forgotten of children in it, and now he owned Paris. Everyone flocked to him.

  He had beaten his own life, beyond recognition. And he didn’t know why, in reaction to Summer, the very person he had to be so perfect to reach, that old life had come back out of its coma, ready for another round.

  From the Pont des Arts he strolled back along the Left Bank as far as the Eiffel Tower, walking down the long Champ de Mars. In the playgrounds there the hand-cranked carousel was closed, night stealing the colors from all its pretty ponies. He had never once ridden on that carousel as a child—no money—and now he was too big.

  Summer Corey would have ridden it as many times as she wanted, a happy little girl, trying to catch rings on her wand as the carousel went round and round and her pink pony went up and down. He hoped she had laughed and laughed, in pealing delight.

  If he ever had his own child, he was going to be the worst father ever. Unwilling to deny her one single thing. But so driven to be in control. Putain, what if she didn’t like sweets, like her mother, and left him no way to express anything for her?

  What the hell had he just thought? He pushed the idea from his mind before he got vertigo, gazing at the night-shadowed playground.

  Once, when he was nine or so—young enough to still be with his father—he had played for much of a morning with a little blond girl here. He still remembered it. In fact, he still had the little jeweled flower bracelet she had given him in a cardboard box of similarly rare precious toys in his closet. He hadn’t been lying about keeping his toys forever.

  But he let everything else go. Just like his mother, really, who had let him go, the person who—surely? Her own child?—should have been most precious to her. Even his father had let him go, although not before he had tried to keep a ten-year, desperate clutch on his son that had taught a harsh lesson to both of them. It was a clutch that had left Luc nothing to hold onto but a little girl’s flower bracelet and that had left his father, in the end, with nothing.

  For the twenty years since Luc had been torn from his father’s grasp, Luc had taken raw ingredients, shaped them into something incredibly beautiful, tiny magical drops of his heart, and let them be taken from his hands and carried aw
ay to be eaten.

  He never even tried to hold on to his sous-chefs, into whom he poured so much training. When they were ready he loaned them the money to get started and sent them off to soar.

  He hadn’t been able to keep that little girl, either. Only the two of them in the playground, on that winter day when everyone else their age was in school. Two more disparate creatures could hardly exist, she a magic princess child, five or six, all golden, her features almost ethereal, such a pretty little girl, so untouched by time that she could have stepped out of fairyland into the tense world of Paris.

  She had looked at him as if he had hung the moon. In his worn, poor clothes, with his tense, rough manners, and his sullen knowledge that everyone looked down at him. Or didn’t see him at all.

  The little magic princess, who was so tiny and charming and beautiful she made all those elegant snobs on the Métro look like peasants, had followed him all over the play equipment while he showed off for her, and she tried to do what he did, and he jumped down from the bars to stand under her and tell her to be careful.

  He had wanted her to be his little sister so he could keep her and her utter adoration all for himself, so he had made up a fairy tale where he was her dark knight, and she was his princess, and he used to play it sometimes in his head, long after his father had come to get him and her nanny had taken her away. In fact, when Bernard fostered him, he used to think of that little girl as he added this little touch or that little flourish to a pastry that would make her clap her hands in delight and look at him as if he was her world.

  Even at the age of ten, he had known that the only way that little girl would need his protection was if he dragged her out of her bright, happy life into his own dark world. Even at the age of ten, a part of him had not cared, as long as he had that adoration for his very own. As long as she looked at him as if he hung the stars.

  “You’re not quitting?” Patrick asked the next morning, after multiple attempts to tease Luc resulted in no response at all, nor movement, Luc standing deep in thought, hands pressed on marble. “For real this time? You seem . . . very quiet.”

  “I’m thinking,” Luc said. In the mirrored surface of a glossy, heart-shaped chocolate tarte his face looked honed, determined—born out of chaos, ready for a war of the gods. “And no. I’m not quitting.” He trailed four rose petals across the tarte and changed his voice to carry through the kitchen. “Everyone listen up. We’re doing a new menu tonight.”

  Summer was going to ask Patrick about the fight—after all, he was always nice to her—but as soon as she saw him in the hall, half the question was answered. “Wait.” She stopped dead in front of him. “It was with you?”

  Patrick tried to grin, but his mouth had taken several punches. The corners of his eyes crinkled, though. “Don’t blame yourself. I’ve been trying to provoke him into a fight for years.”

  “Blame myself?”

  “Oops. I’ve said too much.” Patrick covered his mouth with one extravagant hand, its knuckles swollen.

  “Wait. Now can I fire him? He can’t fight with his employees. ” And it would save her from—she wasn’t sure anymore what it would save her from. Her heart tangled so badly when she thought of him that it was all she could do not to throw herself at him and ask him to save her from the mass of dark vines.

  Except she had thrown herself at him and asked him to save her before.

  Patrick laughed. “Mademoiselle Corey, I understand the desire to strangle Luc, but you probably shouldn’t keep sublimating it into an urge to fire him. I mean, you could take me as your head chef pâtissier, but I think I would rather strike out on my own. Get my own stars. I’m not that interested in stealing someone else’s. Besides, I like the bastard.”

  “Why?” Summer asked incredulously.

  “His perfectionism, his passion for his work, his imagination, his patience—even though it makes me want to hit him sometimes—his self-control (which makes me want to hit him all the time), his discipline, his sense of humor, and his joie de vivre. Also, you know, there aren’t many chefs who are willing to let you learn every damn thing you can from them and then back you when you go off to become their rival. Or take a screwed-up fifteen-year-old under their wing and become a lodestone he can still rely on twelve years later. Don’t tell him I said any of this, will you?”

  “We’re not on friendly gossip terms,” Summer said very dryly.

  “Well, no, clearly, but there’s always pillow talk.”

  Summer gaped at him, as if that lazy, easygoing surfer had reached out and wrapped a fist around one of her internal organs. And then squeezed.

  All while hanging out waiting for the next wave.

  “His joie de vivre?” She ignored the pillow talk reference as best she could. “Are we talking about the same man?”

  “No, but that’s because he hasn’t been himself since you showed up. Oops, there you go, I said too much again.” Patrick pretended to bow and headed on. Almost at the corner, he paused and turned back. “He looks just as bad as me, by the way, he’s just hiding most of it. I went for the ribs. I don’t know how you might compare—maybe you could get his shirt off?”

  He strolled around the corner, laughing.

  CHAPTER 19

  Summer’s kids had timed a video conference when both sides of the world would be awake, 7:30, and for once they were getting enough bandwidth to make it happen. Their grins kept freezing in the slow, choppy connection. Whenever the image froze she would hear the audio of the youngest kids complaining she wasn’t moving, why not? And in the background, explaining, was her substitute, Kelly—an ambitious new graduate in her father’s employ, who had leaped at the opportunity to help Sam Corey out by spending three months in the islands.

  They were showing her presents they had made her and were going to send her on the next boat. “Since we know you must be missing us!” They had been for their annual shell-collecting trip on the nearby, unpopulated island where a certain tiny orange snail crawled rampant, and had finished the painstaking process of cleaning them and threading them, ten long strands for her. Several other batches of ten already hung in her little house on the island.

  One of the older boys had carved a dugout canoe, having learned the technique from his father, who sent them to be sold at the market on the main island a week’s boat trip away. “To travel back,” he said. His younger brother beamed proudly as he showed her the little tiki he had carved to take care of her.

  “I love it!” Summer exclaimed, and there was a knock on the door.

  God, she hated hotels, the way no space was really your own. “Come on in!” she called.

  No card key slid in the lock. Another knock.

  “Come in!” she called more loudly.

  Another knock. Oh, for crying out loud. She took advantage of another freeze in the transmission to dart to the door. “I really don’t want—” She broke off as the crack revealed the knocker.

  “It’s not housekeeping,” Luc said acerbically.

  “What do you want?” she demanded rudely.

  He gave her a long, steady look that made her throat itch. Like a premonition of hands closing around it. “You,” he said, and she started visibly, hand finding the edge of the table on which her laptop sat.

  Black eyes followed the stretch of her arm, the grip of her fingers. She flushed and released it, then remembered her schoolkids.

  The transmission seemed to be irreparably frozen. She wasn’t even getting audio on her end, and Kelly was typing in the chat window to let her know.

  “Can you still hear me?” she asked.

  Yes, but not getting through.

  “Let’s try again tomorrow. That’s so sweet. Moi, aussi, je vous aime.”

  She shut the laptop just as Luc shifted to try to glimpse the screen. His lips pressed together.

  “You love someone?” he asked blandly, as if no one could possibly have suspected her of being capable of loving.

  “Why else do yo
u think I’m in such a hurry to get back to the islands?”

  He shrugged. “Better weather, less work.”

  Probably a lot more work, actually. Her kids’ schooling was a lot less ambitious than her boarding school curriculum, but she did try to make sure they had a well-rounded education. And Alain so did not need her interference. “That, too. But I’ve got someone worth going back for.”

  “Does he know the kind of things you say to other men when you’re mad?”

  Her lips pressed hard together. “Tell me what you need and get out.”

  “Odd that you would use vous with someone you love.”

  “I talk to all three of them at once. I thought I mentioned we were very laid-back in the islands.”

  Luc smiled just a little. “Since you were actually talking to your schoolkids, that’s quite nasty, what you’re trying to make it come across as.”

  Summer flushed and curled her hand into a fist to keep from grabbing the laptop and breaking it over his head.

  “Do you talk to them often?”

  She shrugged sullenly. Usually the satellite connection wasn’t enough, and she had to get through another Paris day without the crutch of a handful of small island children.